Childe Harold

When Julia from Hampshire visited the great and glorious NYC last year, and again when we met at my sister Christine's wedding in Southampton this August, we spent some time ruminating and reminiscing fondly about former Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson. With his fondness for his pipe and Gannex raincoats, he cut a grey figure in a grey British landscape, and history's verdict on his time in office has been neutral at best. In his farewell television interview for the BBC, I remember him stating that his greatest achievement was the foundation of the Open University -important and worthy, yes; exciting and world-changing, no.

Fast-forward to Tony Blair and Cool Britannia. Tony brought the nation The Third Way, an ill-defined, but possibly fruitful attempt to steer a course between US unfettered capitalism and Western European welfarismo. With the extremely competent Gordon Brown steady at the helm of the Treasury, Britain has enjoyed a unrivalled and prolonged period of growth -the only First World country not to go into recession the last time around. Record amounts have been spent on education and healthcare, and the baying of the redtop tabloids aside, the fruits of this investment are starting to be apparent.

Childe Harolde achieved nothing remotely comparable to this success, and instead presided over the seemingly relentless decline of Britain from Carnaby Street cool into industrial strife and industrial mediocrity, a decline which reached its peak in the 1979 Winter of Discontent under his successor, Jim Callaghan.

So why the dewy-eyed fondness for Harold Wilson? Not for what he did, but for what he didn't do. He didn't send the British Army into Viet Nam. He resisted the considerable persuasive talents and arm-twisting abilities of Lyndon Baines Johnson, successfully avoiding the entanglements of an unwinnable US imperialist war (the Australians were not so lucky or so prescient). There are middle-aged Englishmen and middle-aged Scotsmen alive today living lives of achievement or perfect mediocrity, whose end may have been very different had Childe Harolde been made of weaker stuff. And who would not swap widows grieving at the wailing wall in Washington for couples worrying about the minutiae of every-day living?

Thanks, Harold.