Harold Wilson Articles

Forty years ago, the nation’s political waters were particularly turbulent. In response to western support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, Opec had introduced an oil embargo, which was led to the quadrupling in the price of a barrel of oil. This in...

In the second general election of 1974 Harold Wilson won an overall majority of three. This was the last time a Labour leader who was not called Tony Blair won a majority in the House of Commons. Forty years … it is a long time. But it’s true that in the eight general...

Enoch at 100 is not really, as its subtitle claims, ‘a re-evaluation of the life, politics and philosophy of Enoch Powell’, more a rather belated Festschrift. It is an overwhelmingly friendly assessment of its subject. While Tom Bower in his chapter on immigration...

Barbara Castle could have been Britain’s first female prime minister. Born Barbara Betts in 1910 in Pontefract, her mother was a Labour councillor, her father a tax inspector. She later moved to Bradford, where she attended the girls’ grammar school, before attending...