Harold Wilson. Peter Hennessy

while also alleviating the British need for grain therefore appealed both on economic and on political grounds, as a means of keeping lines to Moscow open. ‘The Government was ready and anxious to reopen trade negotiations with Russia and had sent repeated messages to Moscow to that effect,’ the new President of the Board of Trade told a meeting in Liverpool within days of his appointment.¹⁶

      Against this background, Wilson flew to Moscow for the third time – exuberant and happy at his promotion, and greeting Mikoyan, whom he had contacted before setting out, like an old friend. Everything in Russia excited him. ‘As soon as the door opened’, reported a fellow negotiator, ‘it was like showing the ideal pond to a very vigorous duck.’¹⁷ Moscow in the late 1940s was an impoverished, drab and oppressive place: but Wilson thoroughly enjoyed it. In his new mood of limitless possibility, he threw himself into the negotiations, taking pleasure in the fortress-like atmosphere of Stalin’s Kremlin, where soldiers with fixed bayonets paced the corridors. Faced with the cautious Russians, Wilson believed himself to be master – swapping jokes with Mikoyan and cajoling (as he saw it) the Soviet negotiators towards a settlement. A favourite Wilson story, repeated in many a later speech, described how – while he was bargaining with Mikoyan over the price of coarse grain – he instructed the British aircrew to go to Vnukovo Airport and run up the engines of the plane for the return journey, to show that the British delegation meant business. ‘Wilson was fascinated by the dealings with the Russians,’ recalls Brown, who went with him. ‘He liked the art of trade negotiating, dealing with state buying and selling, and he also felt he was establishing a preserve of his own.’ There were several all-night sessions, which added to the sense of drama. So did the belief, probably accurate, that the British were under secret surveillance. In his hotel bedroom between meetings, the young minister would make loud provocative remarks, on the assumption that hidden microphones would pick them up.¹⁸

      A settlement was finally reached at the end of a gruelling session that continued until 5 a.m. This provided for the exchange of 750 tons of Russian grain during 1948 in return for British machinery and equipment, and was intended to leave the door open for a longer-term treaty.¹⁹ The British press reported that Mikoyan and Wilson remained fresh and collected at the end of this marathon, ‘but several of their followers were stretched out on the chairs and sofas, and the agreement was initialled to a chorus of approving whistles and snores.’²⁰

      Wilson often boasted of his own role in these negotiations. Cairn-cross, however, is not the only person to have doubted their importance. There was a difference of opinion at the time. Wilson himself argued publicly that the settlement meant ‘the resumption, after the long interference with Anglo-Soviet trade due to the war, of trading between the two countries, which have almost completely complementary economies’.²¹ Britain needed grain and raw materials, East Europe needed industrial products: Wilson believed that the short-term agreement could pave the way to a wider one in May 1948. ‘I have often been asked why we don’t do more to develop trade with Eastern Europe’, he told his own constituents in Ormskirk, ‘and I say that no man could have done more than I.’²² The Observer was prepared to back this self-praise, enthusing about Wilson’s negotiating technique and his refusal to cable home for instructions at a critical stage. ‘Courage and strength of character’, it concluded, ‘must be added to his proven gift of a quick and brilliant mind.’²³ The Financial Times was more sceptical. ‘Few politicians have made it so plain as Mr Wilson has that he considers himself one of Britain’s best negotiators,’ it laconically observed. The benefits, however, were far from obvious. ‘No perceptible advantage to Britain has yet resulted from Mr Wilson’s wassailling with the Commissars.’²⁴

      Such criticisms did little to deflate Wilson’s rapidly expanding ego. At an age when, under slightly different circumstances, he might have been a junior lecturer, publishing articles which nobody read, he was bestriding the globe, talking on equal terms to national leaders who had been household names when he was in the Scouts. At home or abroad, he had ceased to be overawed by any occasion. When the Russians tried to bribe him to stay longer, by offering dinner with Comrade Stalin at the Kremlin, Harold declined, with regret, on the grounds of a pressing engagement the same evening at Buckingham Palace, to meet HRH Princess Elizabeth and her fiancé.²⁵ (A few months later he met the heir to the throne and Prince Philip again, at a small prime ministerial dinner party. While waiting with fellow ministers to be presented, he enlivened the occasion, as Gaitskell records, by archly reminding colleagues ‘that it was still a capital offence to rape a Royal Princess’.²⁶)

      All this was, of course, a very long way from Wirral Grammar School and Brotherton’s tennis club. In the thirteen years since he first met Gladys Baldwin, he had done everything he planned, and much more. It would have been surprising if public life at such a pace had not entailed a private cost. Gladys thought she had married a don; she had adjusted to the role of wife of a peripatetic wartime civil servant; then to the wife of a streamlined professional politician. At first, it felt like a temporary, fragile, change. Harold kept some of his University College pupils, tutoring them at weekends in Oxford where Gladys and Robin continued to live, and maintained a triangular existence between the Richmond flat, Oxford and Ormskirk. Gladys accepted it as part of the uncertainty and dislocation of a topsy-turvy decade. ‘When the war started, you just took things as they came,’ she says. ‘You did not think of your lives or whatever happened as being extraordinary. For years and years you felt shaken up in a bag. Things just happened – you had nothing to compare it with.’²⁷ But the stress was undeniable.

      One advantage of continuing to teach was that it enabled Harold to retain his rooms in College, and to postpone the arduous task of finding somewhere else for Gladys and Robin to live. There was an irony here, for the minister responsible for the public building programme. Harold used it to make a political point. ‘I know something of the housing position in London,’ he told a reporter a fortnight after he had been appointed Parliamentary Secretary at Works. ‘My wife and I and Robin the baby are still living in college in Oxford because we cannot get a place down here.’²⁸ The Richmond flat, which had been occupied by Harold’s parents since Herbert had taken a temporary wartime job at the Ministry of Supply, provided a week-time base, but not a family home.²⁹ At first, no very strenuous efforts were made to find one. Gladys was content to stay at University College, and then – when they had to move out – in a flat in the Banbury Road. She remembers Oxford at this time affectionately, as ‘very much like Beverley Nichols’s description of Oxford after the First World War’, with the junior common room full of undergraduates of eighteen alongside hardened warriors who had come back from active service.³⁰ Since, however, she seldom accompanied Harold to Ormskirk, or on his trips abroad, they were often apart.

      The separations took their toll, and the Wilsons’ marriage came under serious strain during Harold’s three-month visit to Washington from October 1946, as their worlds increasingly diverged. A break seemed close; but did not happen.³¹ When Harold went back to the United States in 1947, he took Gladys with him, leaving Robin with his parents. In the summer Gladys became pregnant, just before the announcement of Harold’s appointment as Chairman of the Export Targets Committee. In the circumstances, the news of Harold’s added responsibility was not entirely welcome. ‘That means I shall see less of him than ever,’ Gladys unguardedly told a reporter. ‘He works a sixteen-hour day already. I saw him for two weekends only during the summer.’³²

      At the end of the university year, Harold finally cut the academic umbilical, and ceased to be the only member of the Government who was both a minister and a tutor. ‘He had been keeping too many balls in the air,’ says Mary.³³ It was a hectic, difficult time. The life of semi-lodging with his parents in Richmond, and quick dashes to see his wife and son, could no longer be sustained. There was now no reason, other than Gladys’s preference, to stay in Oxford. When Harold became President of the Board of Trade that autumn, with a ministerial salary increased to £5,000, they decided to buy a house in London. With the help of an £800 loan from Herbert (who had just sold their old house in Milnsbridge, rented out ever since they moved to Bromborough)³⁴ the Wilsons put down the deposit for a mortgage, paying £5,100 for a long lease on a three-bedroomed house in a tree-lined road called Southway, in Hampstead