Since it can be properly said that nothing in Harold Wilson's political career became him like the leaving of it, there is some justice in the fact that he is now best-remembered for one photograph and for one action. The photograph shows him next to the Duke of Grafton while assuming his stall at Windsor as a Knight of the Garter, and the action was the compiling (would that be the word?) of a resignation honours list that rewarded those who - oh, dash it, I don't know - shall we say made money rather than earned it? Anyway, in the photograph Wilson looks like nothing so much as a grinning monkey on a stick, and in the matter of the honours list he achieved the near-impossible feat of discrediting the discredited and making a laughing-stock out of something already rather disagreeably risible. So I suppose that one can spare about ten milliseconds of sympathy for those, suggestively calling themselves 'revisionist', who have attempted to sweeten Harold Wilson's memory. (I mean our memory of him; not his memory of us, which has notoriously faded.)

LRB 2 December 1993 | PDF Download