At the height of one of the many leadership crises in the Labour Party during the Fifties or early Sixties, the Crossbencher column of Lord Beaverbrook's Sunday Express described the young Harold Wilson lying in his sleeper on the night train from Liverpool and listening to the wheels beating out the rhythm: 'It could be me, it could be me, it could be me.' It was a delightful conceit, wholly in tune with Beaverbrook's injunction to his journalists to tell the story, whatever it might be, through the people involved. It suffered, however, from one defect. As Mr Wilson pointed out next morning, he hadn't travelled to London by train. He'd made the journey by car.

LRB 15 August 1991 | PDF Download