Harold Wilson’s affair and how we misread leaders
Rock & Roll Politics with Steve Richards
Podmasters
4.7 • 909 Ratings
🗓️ 16 April 2024
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In his last term as Prime Minister, Harold Wilson was seen as old, paranoid and ineffective… yet now we discover he was lively enough to be having an affair. This suggests the caricature might be wrong. What if Wilson was livelier politically too? And what if we choose to see other leaders as stereotypes which do not present anything like the full picture?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to rock and roll politics, the podcast with me, Steve Richards. |
| 0:12.8 | Thank you as ever for tuning in, whatever you're doing. |
| 0:15.9 | I know you're all very busy. |
| 0:17.9 | If you're running, cooking or whatever, anyway, thank you for listening. We've got a heck |
| 0:22.5 | of a lot to cram in in our time together. If it's okay with all of you, what I'm going to |
| 0:27.6 | do is reflect briefly on the current, even more fragile international situation and segue in a way that is utterly parochial into what we can learn |
| 0:44.0 | from the revelation that Harold Wilson was having an affair during his final term in office |
| 0:52.8 | between 1974 and 76 because I think it tells us a lot about the way we |
| 1:00.8 | choose to see public figures or are told to perceive them in a certain way. And then something emerges |
| 1:09.7 | that makes us think, well, hold on a second. If that was |
| 1:14.7 | happening, did we see this person in the right light in a wider way? And there are kind of wider |
| 1:24.3 | lessons too, I think, about this revelation, which surprised me. |
| 1:29.8 | It surprised his brilliant biographer, the shadow cabinet member, Nick Thomas Simmons, who wrote a great piece in the Sunday Times about the revelation. |
| 1:40.7 | And congratulations to Patrick McGuire of the Times for breaking a story, which, you know, some people when he tweeted it said, oh, yeah, I thought it was going to be about the current prime minister and all the rest of it. |
| 1:50.4 | It's still interesting. |
| 1:53.2 | And it's existential as well because can you reveal these things when all the relevant people are dead and have no right of reply? |
| 2:07.4 | Is it okay, therefore, because they are dead and can't be upset in the case of Harold Wilson's wife and indeed perhaps Wilson himself, |
| 2:16.6 | or indeed Wilson's lover who never revealed |
| 2:20.5 | this affair during her lifetime. All kinds of weird things arise. Anyway, that's to come. |
| 2:26.5 | We've got some wonderful questions, including some of your responses to the interview with Will Hutton, |
| 2:32.0 | which was in the last podcast. Yeah, and just a single |
| 2:37.4 | assembly notice for the cooperative, which is please sign up to Patreon, keeps the show on the |
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