In his second term, Harold started going to the Liberal Club instead, and found it more congenial. ‘I went to the Liberal Club dinner: it was really fine – Herbert Samuel,’ Wilson wrote home in March, adding ‘I’m getting a few new members.’ He also began to attend meetings of a Liberal discussion group.40 Liberal activity, however, never absorbed a great deal of his time or attention, and always took third place to work and athletics. ‘Involvement in politics was somewhat peripheral in those days,’ recalls Sharpe.41 The Liberal Club is barely mentioned in Harold’s letters home after the Hilary Term of 1935, and seems to have ranked no higher than other societies in which he took a sporadic interest, like the League of Nations Union. Steel remembers only that Harold ‘went out and about and went to political meetings’ if there was an interesting speaker.42 Study was his preoccupation: none of his Oxford friends saw him as a politician, or even a potential one. Nevertheless, Harold’s participation in Oxford Liberal politics – limited as it undoubtedly was – contains a small mystery. It does not fit into a picture of a single-minded determination to succeed.
In a brilliantly argued polemic against Wilson, published in 1968 just as Marxism was once again in vogue, partly in response to the Labour Government headed by Wilson, the writer and journalist Paul Foot drew attention to early Liberal influences on the future Prime Minister that were supposedly formative. Foot also contrasted what he saw as the idealism of his own uncle, Michael Foot, who abandoned the Liberal Party to join Labour because he wanted to abolish capitalism, with the alleged complacency of Wilson, whose failure to make such a switch indicated that he had no such mission.43 A more obvious difference between the two politicians, however, is that Michael Foot’s party had some chance of eventually coming back to power, whereas Wilson’s had none. In the mid-1930s the Labour Party looked a pretty dismal prospect, but the Liberals – despite the continued prominence of one or two individuals, like Lloyd George and Herbert Samuel – seemed to be set on a path to extinction.
When Wilson joined the Oxford Club, it was at the nadir of its fortunes. What was happening to the Liberals nationally had been replicated, on a small scale, in the university. The Oxford Club’s membership was low, and it was in debt. If Harold still wanted to be an MP, let alone a minister, joining the Liberals was scarcely a stepping-stone. The puzzle about his choice is that he should have decided, for the time being at least, to place himself on the margin.
Even if he was intending to put his political plans on ice until he was professionally established – this is Mary’s suggestion44 – it was surprising, on the face of it, that he should have joined the one political party which offered the smallest future opportunity. Rather than a declaration of faith, or the first move in a political chess game, Harold’s decision looks like the casual act of an eighteen-year-old whose mind was principally on other things. However, few of Wilson’s other decisions were ever casual; and it is possible that this one was made, not in spite of the Liberals’ weakness, but partly because of it. What the fading Liberals offered Harold was a chance to show his mettle. There was little opportunity for him in the raucous Labour Club. The Liberals, on the other hand, gave him a leadership position almost at once. He had scarcely paid his subscription as a new member before anxious Liberal Executive members were asking him to become Treasurer. He accepted the office, took it seriously, and immediately began, with some success, to eliminate the Club’s deficit.
For the whole of his undergraduate career, Harold continued to take a benign and intermittently active interest in the Liberals. In his first year, he was even co-opted by a national Liberal Party group called the Eighty Club, which – somewhat pretentiously – regarded itself as having an ‘élite’ membership. Paul Foot regards this as evidence of a deep Liberal commitment. It may, however, have indicated nothing more than that an atrophying London dining and discussion society was seeking, by recruiting Oxford’s current officers, to replenish its ageing stock.
Wilson was a reasonably energetic participant in his first two years. During vacations he twice attended national conferences of the Union of University Liberal Students when these were held in the North-West. The first was in Liverpool after his second term, the second in Manchester after his fourth. At the latter, he spoke in support of the League of Nations, and his remarks were reported in the Manchester Guardian.45 His interest in that great newspaper, then based in Manchester and proudly Liberal in persuasion, may provide a partial explanation for his interest in Liberalism. Robert Steel recalls several occasions when he met Harold in the main quad at Jesus after dinner, and strolled with him to the Post Office in St Aldate’s in time to catch the midnight post: Harold was sending off his reports of Liberal Club meetings to the Manchester Guardian, effectively acting as a stringer.46 Later, as we shall see, Harold toyed with the idea of a career in journalism with the same paper. Liberal Party activity may have seemed a relevant qualification.
In Oxford Wilson’s main contribution was bureaucratic rather than political. Honor Balfour, a Liberal Club President and contemporary, recalled that Wilson ‘never took any initiatives or decisions’, but was good at recruiting members and collecting subscriptions. Frank Byers (later a Liberal MP and peer) remembered him for his efficiency as Treasurer, but not for any strong political line. This negative recollection was shared by another Club President, Raymond Walton: ‘I don’t remember ever hearing him propose anything political of any kind.’ Quizzed by Paul Foot, R. B. MacCallum, Wilson’s politics tutor, recalled only that he ‘could have told that he was not a Tory. That is all.’47 Such political blandness does not, indeed, support Foot’s own assertion of a Liberal indoctrination, or that Wilson was acquiring a stock of ineradicably Liberal ideas. We may take with a pinch of salt Wilson’s subsequent claim that in joining the Liberals he hoped ‘to convert them to my ideas of radical socialism’.48 But the lack of a socialist commitment is not proof of an incurably Liberal one.
Wilson’s involvement petered out after his second year, and he never took any part on the wider University stage. He knew none of the Union luminaries of his day. Denis Healey, who claims to have known all the leading Liberals in 1936–7, never met Wilson. He had ‘no role’ in Oxford politics, Healey concludes.49 Christopher Mayhew did not hear Wilson’s name mentioned until the beginning of their third year, and then it was for academic, not political reasons.50 Surprisingly, in view of his journalistic interest, Wilson did not write for the Liberal Club’s magazine, Oxford Guardian, started in 1936. Mayhew, Crossman, Heath, Dingle Foot, Jo Grimond, Richard Shackleton, Niall MacDermot – members of different parties – all crop up in the gossip column of this journal. Wilson’s name never appears in the magazine at all, except on lists of committee members and college reps.51 By the time he took Finals, he was still technically a Liberal, but his affiliation had become a merely token one.
In December 1934 Wilson reported that he was ‘swotting hard’:52 his efforts were rewarded and he passed the end-of-term exam without difficulty. Before doing so, he raised with the college the possibility of switching degrees from history to the newly established ‘Modern Greats’ course, which G. D. H. Cole had pioneered and which was composed of papers in politics, philosophy and economics. Given his interest in politics and recent political history, it was a logical step. His imagination had also been engaged by problems in economics: in a pre-exam college test in the subject he had come top, with the maximum possible marks. Permission to change was therefore granted, but with the proviso that he had to offer an extra language. He therefore learnt enough German in the Christmas vacation to satisfy his tutor, and embarked on the cocktail of disciplines which was to provide the basis for his academic and political career.
He also began to study in earnest. His first term of concentrated hard work had been a dress rehearsal for a period of eighteen months’ intensive application which transformed him from a promising, but not exceptional, eighteen-year-old into the outstanding student of his generation. How and why this happened is a second mystery. There was a happy coincidence of events: his parents were now well settled in Bromborough, and taking a keen interest in his progress; he himself was adapting to Oxford, delighting in its rituals