Harold Wilson: rogues I have known (cont**)

Well, sat next to him several times.  He wasn’t very communicative.  The crazy affair of Biden’s Brain, plus a random news story brought him to mind this week.

For me as a lad reaching some kind of juvenile political awareness in the late 1960′s, Harold Wilson was omnipresent in current affairs, a masterful politician in difficult circumstances, atop a restless and quarrelsome Labour Party.  By the time I was at the university he was PM (for the second time) and a veritable legend for his ‘congratulatory First’ as an undergraduate, his adroit SCR politicking as a don, smart analytic capabilities as a wartime civil servant, and, above all, his astonishing memory[1].

Then, abruptly at the age of 60, in 1976 he stepped down as PM and almost directly into obscurity.  WTF?  There were all manner of conspiracy theories but the truth was, the previous year he realised he was fast losing his marbles; and full dementia set in shortly thereafter.  Without his memory he was nothing, and he knew it – not for him the pathetic Biden conceit.

Wilson off duty:  ciggies for him

A bit later I often found myself in the Victoria district, SW1, where Wilson had a flat overlooking Westminster Cathedral.  One could lunch handsomely at eye-poppingly low prices in a number of modest eateries outside Victoria Station – cheap, but totally respectable (in case you were thinking of Kings Cross in the same era), and heavily populated by office workers brandishing Luncheon Vouchers – remember them?[2].  Ultra-cheap + guaranteed high turnover was the formula.  Two of the favourites were known as the Old Maple, a tiny dive, 100% formica everywhere; and – no relation – the New Maple, on two floors, the upper of which even ran to some imitation wood panelling.[3]

Anyhow, if you weren’t in so much of a hurry you could join Harold Wilson and his detective, who frequently lunched there too in the upstairs section.  You knew immediately something was very badly wrong: he wasn’t any kind of physical wreck, but what in Heaven’s name was a man who only a couple of years beforehand was PM, doing there silently nursing a plate of steak and kidney and his habitual ciggy?  (Occasionally a cigar – but the pipe was only ever for show.)

All very sad.  And it now turns out he quickly ran out of money as his care requirements escalated.  Thatcher’s people arranged for the Bodleian to buy his personal papers, rather than have them go abroad, for a decent sum to keep him going.  He lasted until 1995.

ND

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** see also Jeff Skilling and Keith Best

[1] A really tremendous memory can cover for a range of what otherwise would be mediocrity in other intellectual attributes.  Whenever you meet someone highly regarded for intellectual attainment, it’s worth considering whether memory is their actual superpower. 

[2] LVs, that is – though I could have meant office workers …

[3] ‘Known as’ because IIRC those had been their historical names and that by the 1970s they were actually trading as something completely different.