Harold Wilson, the statistics-loving economist who won four elections for Labour
Before Harold Wilson ever sat in Parliament, he was counting coal. A wartime statistician at the Ministry of Fuel and Power, he later wrote the law that still governs most British economic figures, and he remains the only Labour leader to form a government after four separate general elections.
Wilson was born on 11 March 1916 in Cowlersley, on the western edge of the Yorkshire mill town of Huddersfield. His father, a works chemist, had once served as Winston Churchill's deputy election agent while still a Liberal, before switching to Labour. When the father lost his job in December 1930, the family eventually moved to the Wirral, where Harold became head boy at the local grammar school. At Jesus College, Oxford, from 1934, he took a first in philosophy, politics and economics with alphas on every paper, and his tutor R. B. McCallum called him the best student he ever taught.
War diverted him into the civil service rather than uniform. He assisted William Beveridge on unemployment and the trade cycle, then became the fuel ministry's director of economics and statistics for 1943–44, earning an OBE. He joined the Royal Statistical Society that same year and would serve as its president in 1972–73.
Elected for Ormskirk in the 1945 landslide, he was put straight into Clement Attlee's government. On 29 September 1947, aged 31, he became President of the Board of Trade, the youngest Cabinet member of the twentieth century. There he pushed through the Statistics of Trade Act 1947 and staged what he called a bonfire of controls: in November 1948 alone his department scrapped the need for over 200,000 licences and permits. From 1950 he sat for Huyton near Liverpool for 33 years.
As prime minister from 1964 to 1970 and again from 1974 to 1976, he devalued the pound in 1967, while his government abolished capital punishment and theatre censorship and partially decriminalised male homosexuality in England and Wales. His second spell brought the referendum confirming Britain's place in the European Communities. He died on 23 May 1995 as Baron Wilson of Rievaulx.
Source: Harold Wilson
