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There’s a streak of Harold Wilson in Corbyn – and that’s a good thing | Anne Perkins

Harold Wilson smoking a pipe
‘Corbyn was nearly 13 when Wilson became party leader, the candidate of the left who governed from the centre.’ Photograph: Imagno/Getty Images

Harold Wilson has sometimes looked like Labour’s forgotten prime minister. No more. In power from 1964-1970 and again from 1974-1976, last week he was unexpectedly relaunched into the frontline of politics. Wilson was namechecked three times in Jeremy Corbyn’s speech launching the Labour manifesto, and only once was it because he had been chancellor of Bradford University, where the launch took place. Yet, at least until Tony Blair stood down, Wilson was probably the most unpopular Labour leader since Ramsay MacDonald.

Labour leaders rarely speak warmly of their predecessors. The party doesn’t do the recent past

To the left he was the arch-betrayer of the party’s core values, the prime minister who fought inflation with a wage freeze and sought to bring in curbs to trade union power. To the right he was an unscrupulous trimmer, a devious fixer who put party unity ahead of principle. Tentative attempts at rehabilitation by historians such as Ben Pimlott, who wrote the definitive biography of Wilson, have never quite taken off. The man who presided over the most equal decade in British history, who founded the Open University and stood up to US entreaties to fight in the Vietnam war, is condemned to be remembered with, at most, indifference.

Jeremy Corbyn campaigning at the International Convention Centre in Birmingham, England.
Jeremy Corbyn campaigning at the International Convention Centre in Birmingham, England. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images

Obviously, Corbyn was never going to commemorate some great figures from Labour history like Denis Healey in his manifesto speech, even though Healey’s 100th birthday would have fallen in August this year, and he was educated in Bradford. But he might have given a mention to, say, one of the eternal heroes of the left, Barbara Castle, who was brought up in the city, and who served in all of Wilson’s cabinets. Or he could have plugged straight into Labour’s radical past and referenced Fred Jowett, elected the city’s first Socialist MP in 1906 and later chairman of the Independent Labour party.

But Wilson has the best electoral record of any Labour leader. He emerged on top – if not always the clear winner – of four general elections. He served as prime minister for a total of eight years, a 20th-century record until Margaret Thatcher. Maybe even more tellingly, he was a figure of the left who had resigned from Clement Attlee’s government over the 1951 budget, putting himself alongside Aneurin Bevan on the same side of what became a dividing line between the two halves of the party: spending on the NHS or spending on defence.

Corbyn was nearly 13 when Wilson became party leader, the candidate of the left who governed from the centre. By the time Wilson resigned in 1976, Corbyn had spent two years as a radical young London borough councillor. It seems a safe bet that it has taken most of the past four decades for him to appreciate Wilson’s successes. But at last week’s manifesto launch he acknowledged the Open University – which Wilson always claimed as the achievement of which he was most proud – and the rather less-remembered nuclear non-proliferation treaty as monuments to Labour in government. He may also have remembered that, until Blair, Wilson was the Labour leader who was remembered for capturing the public imagination, the moderniser who wanted a technological government above both right and left.

Labour leaders rarely speak warmly of their predecessors. The party doesn’t do the recent past. It may be a caricature to suggest that most activists find the experience of power at the least a disappointment, and often a downright betrayal. But a party that aims to marry idealism and pragmatism teeters uncertainly along a narrow ledge. No prime minister, not even Attlee, has ever been garlanded with honours in retirement. It is their lot to be reviled for what they failed to do rather than applauded for what they did.

It is a very long shot to imagine Jeremy Corbyn as a Harold Wilson for the 21st century. All the same, it is becoming clear that, not unlike Theresa May, his politics of non-personality is cutting through, as is the strength of his conviction that there is a radical alternative. Voters are hungry for something different, and something better.

Wilson too tapped into an enthusiasm to do things differently; he genuinely believed in the power of technology to deliver transformation. But in the end he lacked the nerve to challenge received economic wisdom, and for all his years in power, he could never escape the constraints imposed by the state of sterling.

Yet it didn’t stop the transformation of Britain, from abolishing the death penalty to legalising homosexuality. And nor did it stop his critics bitterly condemning his record and playing their part in the rise of Thatcher and the erosion of the welfare state, Labour’s greatest achievement.