We were given a key to the joint entrance to rooms 100 and 101
in Liverpool’s most iconic hotel,
. Four years earlier I had only managed to get
as far as the plaque outside that very modestly marks the fact that Harold Wilson -
the 20
Century’s most electorally successful party leader - had
used the suite as his Constituency Room.
The dark wooden doors led you into two
rooms that are virtually unchanged since the Labour leader had used the hotel
to conduct constituency business for his Liverpool seat of Huyton, located
close to the city centre where the hotel stands. Opening the door to the
sitting room, we were struck by the large dark marble fire place, replete with
electric fire that looked vintage 1960s, an original looking dining table and
even a fold-out green beige card table. The sofa was decidedly of a different
vintage. However the huge windows, subtly painted mock Georgian wall panels,
and phenomenal ceiling plaster moulding that would in Harold’s time have
sported a chandelier not an electric mock candelabra, made it easy to imagine
yourself in a time when the PM needed somewhere very comfortable to, perhaps
once a month, conduct meetings with local party officials and trade unionists or to simply be based for a night in advance of a Saturday
morning constituency surgery in Huyton.
 |
| Harold's sitting room (Room 100) |
Harold’s bedroom was equally
original, minus the bed with its mock leather headboard. The huge, fitted wood
and marble washstand cum chest of drawers, replete with deco-looking chrome
towel rack, and the large marble fire place were not only in place when Wilson
used these rooms but when this incarnation of the famous hotel opened in 1914.
The bathroom separated the two main rooms; its tasteful frosted glass
lattice work door opened to a porcelain furniture set that may not have been
1914 but was probably at least 1950s. Valerie mused on the
idea that Sir Harold had used the very same bath as her. From the bathtub you
can look out via an enormous window to the rather grand building opposite that
in Wilson’s time housed Lewis’ department store. Above the entrance to Lewis’
(now no doubt housing offices or flats) is a slightly odd but no less iconic stone sculpture of a naked male, which was referenced in a famous local tune popularised by a mostly local act,
The Spinners. The sculpture almost matches the campness of a much smaller, metallic one depicting a naked young soldier sporting what looks like a Teutonic hard hat, which is located in the Adelphi Hotel
ballroom.
When I booked the Sir Harold Wilson suite, I discovered the
rather odd fact that it is actually known as Room 101. In fact it isn’t really known as
the Sir Harold Wilson suite at all. The scouse-sounding and very helpful guy
who took my phone reservation confirmed that he had typed into the booking that the
‘Sir Harry Wilson suite’ i.e. Room 101 had been requested. After successfully checking in to the suite we heard an older
person’s voice outside the door informing her husband that Harold Wilson had
stayed here, and evincing a disinterested response.
Wilson is mentioned
on the
Adelphi Hotel’s website, as is his ‘preferred suite’ where we stayed.
However the Huddersfield-born man, part schooled in Liverpool, who represented
a Liverpool constituency for 33 years, 13 of which as Labour leader and eight of which as prime minister, remains almost an incidental figure in
the catalogue of famous people who’ve either made Liverpool their home or who
were born and raised there.
If that’s true of Liverpool, it’s much more so
nationally. In 2006, a decade after his death, a metal sculpture of Wilson was unveiled in Huyton by the then
Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair (the only Labour leader to serve more years as PM than Wilson). Blair is
reported as saying that his fondness for Wilson
was because he was the first ‘modern British prime minister’, more or
less code for the fact that he was (more or less) working class. Wilson was a
‘modern prime minister’ because unlike every predecessor save Lloyd George, and
patently unlike Blair (or his successor but one, Cameron), he wasn’t
privileged. Wilson’s immediate predecessor as Labour leader, Hugh Gaitskell, was, according to
Wilson's biographer Ben Pimlott, superiorly conscious of the huge class gulf between them, while some of the upmarket
press mocked Wilson for being a philistine. Yet he had a first class brain, got
a first class degree from Oxford, and founded the Open University – the only Wilson
policy legacy that Blair noted. Only a year before Blair unveiled the sculpture, he gave
a speech to the Labour conference in which he
attacked the Wilson-led Labour governments of the 1960s for being responsible
for Thatcherism by failing to understand the depth of economic and social change.
Ironically, just prior to entering No 10 for the first time Wilson urged change
on both sides of industry in his famous ‘White Heat of Technology’ speech. As prime minister Harold Wilson would be weakened by often senseless industrial action; his successor and close colleague Callaghan was destroyed by it.
However Mr Blair’s simplistic attack on, in effect, Wilson’s legacy was rich
coming from the man ultimately responsible for fiscal mistakes that subsequently
helped undermine the Brown Government amidst global economic meltdown. In supposedly praising Wilson, Blair failed to mention the neo-colonial American war
that he kept British troops out of (Vietnam), in marked contrast to the one Blair sent British troops to fight in (Iraq). If, as the comment attributed to Churchill has it, ‘to govern is to decide’, then Wilson’s decision to in effect
break with Washington (and for which the UK economy was punished by the US) was
very much about governing - and doing so in the national interest.
Perhaps you don’t get remembered or properly respected as a British prime minister for the wisdom of
what you didn’t do – as opposed to the damage caused by much of what you did (Margaret
Thatcher). However Wilson did much in general to expand higher education and
its availability to people of his background. A
BBC story written in 2009 about long abandoned car production in the Merseyside town of Speke begins with a
reference to what it calls ‘the dark days of the 1970s’. While there was much industrial
action, there was also much less inequality pre-1979, and, for all the faults of Wilson’s
public housing and welfare programmes, far less homelessness. As we walked
around the centre of Liverpool the number of very visible homeless people on
the streets was shocking. No doubt they congregated in the centre to try to tap
visitors coming out of pubs, but their plight in the middle of winter was, and
is, very real.
