Harold was due to be thirty in March 1946. The length of the war remained uncertain, but an election could not be postponed indefinitely and was likely at about that time, or possibly a little sooner. To wait might mean a delay until he was thirty-five. As a member of the civil service, his ability to involve himself in party politics was circumscribed, something he had not built into his calculations before 1939. Nevertheless, Wilson was a man of precise timetables, and it is possible that from quite early in the war, he had it in mind to stand for Parliament as soon as he could.
Identifying his wartime political activity is not easy, probably because there was very little of it. Given, indeed, the pressures of work and the need to commute, at various times, to his family in Oxford, Cornwall or Duxford, it is remarkable that he had time for any at all. Nevertheless, he seems to have begun quite early in the war, to involve himself politically in those fields which interested him. Having left Oxford for the duration, and having no permanent home in London, he joined the local Labour Party at Liskeard. In London, he attended meetings of the Fabian Society, where better known socialist intellectuals began to notice him. Douglas Jay remembers hearing him talk in favour of steel nationalization at the Fabian headquarters in Dartmouth Street. After the meeting, Wilson mounted his bicycle and said that he was riding to Cambridgeshire – presumably to Duxford, to see his family. (Jay has no recollection of Wilson in Whitehall, although they were briefly together at the Board of Trade: ‘He was not in the mainstream of the war effort,’ says Jay dismissively.)18
From Wilson’s point of view, the Fabian Society office had the advantage of being close to where he worked. Its nuts-and-bolts approach to policy-formulation also fitted in well with his own outlook. During 1943, he started to take a keen interest in recent Fabian reports, acquiring a stack of the Society’s pamphlets, and sending some to Herbert. He also made himself sufficiently well known, and useful, to leading Fabians to secure his own co-option onto the Society’s Executive. ‘Fabian affairs have moved quickly,’ he wrote to his parents at the end of October, after his American trip. ‘I yesterday had a platform ticket for the [Herbert] Morrison lecture, which 1 attended. There were twelve of us on the platform, including Morrison, John Parker, Ellen Wilkinson, M.[argaret] Cole etc. I met H.M., before and after the lecture.’19 He stayed on the Fabian Executive until 1945 – and was later remembered as having been a ‘most stimulating and useful’ member.20
There were other symptoms of a developing political objective. In his letter about ‘Fabian affairs’, Harold also drew his parents’ attention to a prominent item that had just appeared in the Birkenhead News, a Cheshire paper, about some of his recent exploits. This predicted a bright future for the young civil servant, possibly in politics. ‘It’s a good puff, Harold observed, ‘… as there’s nothing like a legend, a prophecy & a belief in inevitability for getting votes.’21 A few weeks later, in December 1943, he revealed his plan to enter politics to Sir William Beveridge.22 Most other people he knew remained unaware of it. Sir Alec Cairncross, however, recalls Wilson saying sometime in 1944 that he had recently visited the North of England on a number of occasions, ‘to see the miners’, and had spoken at meetings and public gatherings.23 The implication was that the visits had been political, rather than official – though the distinction may have been blurred.
In the same year, Labour’s National Executive authorized constituency parties to adopt prospective candidates, in anticipation of the break-up of the Coalition and an election, and began to build up its own lists of approved aspirants for this purpose. Hitherto selections had been blocked because of the electoral truce; new candidatures arose only when a Labour MP died or resigned, causing a by-election. The opening up of the lists created an unprecedented number of opportunities, for there had been no election since 1935. Many members of the elderly Parliamentary Labour Party were due to retire. Labour, though not expected to win an overall majority, hoped to gain a fair number of seats. From the point of view of the would-be candidate, therefore, there was a cornucopia, but also a lottery.
Despite a large number of vacancies, the process was haphazard. Because of the war, party membership had fallen and many branches failed to meet. Selections took place hurriedly, and some service candidates were even chosen on vague recommendations, in absentia. ‘There was a tremendous element of luck in the 1945 election. Some extraordinary people ran and got in,’ says Denis Healey, who was chosen (for a seat which he narrowly failed to win) after a friend of his father’s had spoken on his behalf at a selection conference, which he could not attend because of the war.24 Choices were particularly casual where there was little chance of winning: yet, because an election had not been held for so long, it was often hard to decide what was winnable and what was not. In the event, the unexpected Labour landslide brought victory in many seats regarded as hopeless at the time of selection.
Wilson was put forward for the Labour Party’s ‘B’ List of potential candidates (those not sponsored by trade unions) by Tom Smith, junior minister at Fuel and Power and a former miner, and by John Parker, General Secretary of the Fabian Society. It may have helped that Wilson had, for some time, made himself invaluable to Smith in the office, frequently helping with tricky parliamentary questions.25 He was considered with a batch of others at a meeting of the National Executive Elections Sub-Committee on 9 February 1944. The minutes contain the name of Wilson, J. H., of 19 Fitzwilliam House, Little Green, Richmond, Surrey, a member of the Liskeard and Oxford University Labour Parties, as one of those accepted. At twenty-seven, Wilson was one of the younger hopefuls, but not the youngest. Another name approved on the same day was that of a twenty-two-year-old serving officer called C. A. R. Crosland.26
The list was circulated to constituencies. At post-war elections, an aspirant who merely appeared on the list, and took no further step, would almost certainly be ignored in the competitive scramble for nominations. In the peculiar conditions of 1944–5, however, the number of constituency parties seeking candidates exceeded the supply of plausible contestants, so would-be MPs found themselves in a sellers’ market. It is not surprising, therefore, that Wilson – with his academic qualifications, government experience and Northern background – was approached during the spring of 1944 by several local parties, despite his lack of Labour Movement pedigree.
At his first selection conference, in Peterborough, he was runner-up. His second attempt was in the Lancashire constituency of Ormskirk, quite close to the Wirral: here he could claim to be a local boy. Ormskirk stretched from Liverpool, where 37,000 of its constituents were within the city boundary, to the coast south of Southport and almost as far as Preston. A large, sprawling territory, it included agricultural land, much of it potato fields, as well as estates of former slum-dwellers, moved out of Liverpool. At Skelmersdale and Upholland, there were mining communities, which had experienced high unemployment because of pit closures. Yet there were also owner-occupiers, with traditions of Liberal and Tory voting.
Facing the selection committee, Wilson must have seemed a good, if politically shaky, prospect. He knew nothing of Labour rituals or ethos. But he was energetic, knowledgeable, sharp and friendly, and could talk impressively about the mining industry. The selection conference was held in September 1944 in the Congregational Schoolroom in Ormskirk, a propitious venue. About fifty delegates attended, and listened to four candidates, ‘the proceedings being of a most amicable character’, according to the local newspaper. The content of his speech was not reported at the time: after he became MP, however, he reminded local supporters that in 1945 he had promised them ‘a new deal in regard to the basic industry of coal, and the miners of Skelmersdale now knew that they and their sons could look forward to an industry of which they could be proud under national ownership’.27
At the selection meeting he faced strong competition from a local farmer from Rossendale, Alderman C. Kenyon, who later became MP for Chorley.28 The other contestants were a General Workers’ Union organizer, and a railway