Harold Wilson

him.

The prime minister traveled around in Baldwin or Attlee or even Harold Wilson.

They traveled around in a kind of little Morris Minor.

with their wife driving.

Equidistant be- between Oxford and Cambridge.

But that's, it was a perfectly useful railway line for many reasons, and it was, as I say, closed despite the fact that Marples didn't want it closed, by Harold Wilson.

I would say I think almost certainly this is because one of the underlying reasons for the closures of trains and, uh, of railway lines in 1963 and onwards- Was actually because of pressure from the freight, the rail, the road freight companies which wanted to get rid of as much rail freight as they possibly could, and the Oxford to Cambridge line was the absolute spine of almost all the east-west freight traffic in southern England.

There was a particular junction north of Oxford at Yarnton, which was very heavily used by freight, which was closed.

Mm.

But the reason Harold Wilson was willing to provide time and procedural support was that he was worried that this was an issue that was just gonna keep coming up, uh-

Yeah

... again and again.

There were several attempts to legalize abortion.

So there are a whole load of people constantly trying to do these things.

And as you say, eventually maybe governments decided it was just too divisive to keep having the same old debate again, and Harold Wilson's government moved to allow a lot of these things to happen.

Yeah.

Before the Profumo affair, Macmillan was known as Supermac in the British press, and his party had easily won the previous election and gained 20 seats in Parliament.

The 1964 general election, however, revealed the Tories' giant drop in popularity as they lost 61 seats, and the Labour Party, under Harold Wilson, assumed control of the government.

As for the people directly involved in the scandal, they all suffered to some degree, but none more so than Stephen Ward, the osteopath who was branded by the government as somehow being the one responsible for the whole affair in an act described retroactively as political revenge and a blatant miscarriage of justice.

With his life in ruins, Ward took an overdose of barbiturates and fell into a coma.

He was an ambitious individual, and I, I think he was a thoughtful liberal social democrat who was inspired by good works and, and, and leadership around the world.

Uh, I think JFK in the United States was an inspiration, uh, as were some of the British Labor leaders, including Harold Wilson.

Uh, they were people that he admired and thought highly of.

And certainly, I think he believed he could do better than anyone.

Of course, we should make the point there's absolutely no vacancy whatsoever there.

But I'm going to risk being made to look foolish and not for the first time that I do think that John Swinney will do a Harold Wilson.

And I do think that in an appropriate juncture in this parliament, he will get out probably before all of the heavy lifting has to be done on public service reform.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, what he lived through.

And then his successor, the guy who started work the day he stopped working in 1940, of course had to deal with the Pacific War, the emergence of nuclear weapons, the collapse of the European empires in Asia, the emergence of a whole new Asia of post-colonial states, Australia's turn to America and the establishment of the ANZUS Treaty, the Cold War in Asia, wars in Korea, in Malaya, in confrontation with Indonesia and in Vietnam, then the collapse of British power in Asia reflected in Harold Wilson's decision to withdraw from East of Sewers, the American disaster in Vietnam leading to America's Guam Doctrine, the sort of decision to really scale back its role in Asia, Gough Whitlam's opening to China, Nixon going to China, the emergence of self-reliant defence policy.

I mean, it was a lot.

I thought, well, what happened in my 40 years? Well, not much.