I regard Harold Wilson as one of the greatest of our peace-time prime ministers: monstrously vilified at the time from the political Right – paranoiacs in MI5 even had him marked as a Soviet spy – but a good and highly intelligent man, an effective unifier of his fissiparous party, a great enabler of social and educational reform, the man who kept us out of the Vietnam war, and a great Yorkshire ‘character’, if you weren’t an upper-class snob. He retired as PM unexpectedly, and relatively young: some said as a result of the constant right-wing plotting against him, but more likely because of the incipient Alzheimers that first surfaced when he once lost his way in a Labour conference speech. It was very sad: for him personally of course, but also for the country; and the personal tragedy is underlined by this report in today’s Guardian – https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jul/23/former-pm-harold-wilson-sold-private-papers-fund-care-alzheimers – where it is revealed that he fell into such bad times in retirement that he contemplated selling his private and governmental papers to cover the cost of his social and medical care.

Of course today no retiring PM would be – or has been – left in such a predicament. The Tory ones of course have usually had considerable private funds in any case, which they could supplement with generous gifts from those they had ‘helped’ as prime minister. Then there are memoirs to be written (or ghost-written); well-paid journalism in right-wing newspapers; lectures to wealthy ‘think-tanks’, especially in America; and highly-paid directorships or consultancies for friendly companies and agencies. On the (relative) Left, Tony Blair seems presently to be making a mint in most of these ways, as an enterprising and bankable ‘Ex’. And Gordon Brown is doing OK.

But these options appear not to have been open to Wilson. I don’t suppose either of his autobiographies made him rich. He had few wealthy patrons (Lord Kagan, the raincoat man?). And the celebrity lecture tour was less of a feature then, even if he could have been trusted to overcome his dementia to speak intelligently.

But then ‘high’ politics then was less seen as a road to riches than it seems to be today. Most of our MPs and Ministers give the impression of being in it for themselves, financially and reputation-wise: ‘career choices’; as you would expect in a capitalist society, where individual ‘betterment’ is a bigger desideratum than any idea of ‘service’. Look at Boris. This may be an essential difference between Wilson’s time and ours. I’m hoping – rather optimistically – that Starmer and his team might turn the clock back in this regard.