I was very surprised when I stumbled across this. C’mon: The Prime Minister was a KGB agent? There was a nascent military coup planned against him? MI5 conspired against him? It all seems pretty far-fetched to me. Does anyone give these rumors any credence?
Nothing significant to say but I would add it was a different time, one where the choices weren’t as binary as now. It wasn’t a simple with us/against us, good vs. evil world, and socialism was seen by a huge swathe of the electorate as a sensible path between the ideological extremes of communism and capitalism. It was a period where the UK vacillated between those two magnets
Of course MI5 itself was not unconnected with extremes either, the communist spies and capitalist sympathisers. There was a very big game afoot - for the future direction of the country - and the truth got lost early on. Always will be lost, imo.
Are you asking about the idea he was a KGB agent or the idea he was the victim of a right wing plot? Because either he was a commie and the rightists were right or he was victim of a plot to falsely accuse him of being a commie.
The answers are no and yes. He himself believed there were plots against him and he was right. At least one right-wing former jumped up mechanic from MI5 claimed photos had been faked to implicate him as a Soviet sleeper agent. MI5 also smeared his personal morality and showed their faked evidence to their friends in the press. Call it “rogue agents”, if you prefer.
He was quite lucky, actually, if they’d killed him he wouldn’t have been the only NATO head of government bumped off by his own intelligence services (Greece, Italy, leader of the opposition in Belgium, deputy PM in Belgium, and so on).
Refs:
The Wilson Plot, David Leigh (Journalist)
Smear!, Robin Ramsay (Political Journalist) and Stephen Dorril (historian and journalist specialising in post-war intelligence).
NATO’s Secret Armies, Daniele Ganser.
The Rise of New Labour, Robin Ramsay.
Spycatcher, Peter Wright
People who believe in these sorts of conspiracy theories will find them the sort of conspiracy theories they can believe in.
If you actually wade through all the “someone alleges that someone else told them” smears and hearsays, the only thing on that page that’s close to substantiated is that a KGB defector implicated Wilson to M15 and the CIA. Further investigation revealed nothing, and the allegation is now regarded as guesswork, fantasy or disinformation.
In terms of credence, there are various overlapping issues. And it’s most useful to ask who believed what when.
Thus, was it worth MI5 keeping an eye on Wilson in the Fifties? Undoubtedly. In Opposition, he was making business trips to the Eastern Bloc and there had to be the question at the time whether he was opening himself to blackmail by the KGB. That a file existed on him isn’t really that surprising.
Were there rumours through the Cold War suggesting that he was compromised? Of course. After the revealing of the Cambridge spy ring, the likes of Angleton regarded that any British figure was potentially suspect. Wilson then emerged as the dominant left-wing figure of the period in the country. Under the circumstances, it’s hardly surprising that Angleton harboured doubts about him.
Couple that with Christopher Andrews’s argument in his official history of MI5 that the organisation hired people hardly sympathetic to the Labour Party and you have an unstable combination. Even given Andrews’s signal about the restrictions on what he can say about the Wilson matter, it’s very clear from his book that he thinks that the organisation’s recruitment policy through the 20th century was absurdly narrow and hence such as to introduce a bias. Basically, the default institutional assumption was that the Labour Party was riddled with Soviet agents. And Andrews hardly really endorses this position. He however controversially went so far as to finger some of the names in the frame - notably the allegation that Jack Jones was one.
What’s however very striking about the evidence is that the post-1989 revelations from the Soviet Union haven’t implicated Wilson at all. If he was an agent, one would have expected that wave of new material to have at least sort of indentified him. It hasn’t. Does anybody now think he was a Russian spy?
Which isn’t to say that there was possibly a grouping within MI5 during his premiership who thought otherwise. Indeed there probably was - and this is what Andrews may have been prevented from publishing. Is this shocking? In context, no. We know from Wright that there were mutterings. Some paranoid lunatics thought Wilson might be working for the Russians? So what? They were spending their time chasing shadows from the start.
Did such thinking lead to plots to overthrow Wilson? Probably. Some in MI5 seem to have muttered amongst themselves. The 1968 affair initiated by Cecil King seems well sourced as a story, but goes precisely nowhere. And that’s about the level. People talk, but that’s it. David Stirling and the Mayfair set on the right may have planned a coup, but they got nowhere either.
Still Wilson did worry about such a move against him. His paranoia in the late stages of office and afterwards thus seem to have had at least some basis.
What then appears clear is that both the Left and Right in Britain then developed “comforting” stories around the matter in the Eighties. On the Left it was the whole A Very British Coup version, on the Right the view that the Labour Party could be dismissed as Communist stoges, as in the likes of The Fourth Protocol.
Thank you, all. About what I thought.
Well, I have always heard that Wilson wanted to send the troops in to run the Northern Irish power stations in 1974 to break the Unionist strike, and was informed by the Army they would refuse the order.
That’s not as sexy as the coup talked about here, but it is pretty far out there.
It’s quite probable that the Labour Party had communist (or communist sympathizer) members from 1960 to 1990. It’s highly improbable that Wilson was one of them. He wasn’t even in favor of state ownership of industry.
Given the past 14 years of firstly Blair’s bogus invasions, then Brown’s endless lies and personality disorder, and the pair of them the kowtowing to the banks and their endless assault on civil liberties, frankly I’d guess most of the population would take Wilson’s old skool socialism in a heartbeat.
As someone who grew up in the era of Labours old school socialism I can assure you most of the population most probably wouldn’t.
The ordinary working man had to put up with seeing the taxes from his quite low wage going to pay absurdly high wages for other workers, but workers who by dint of disruption and political influence had ensured that the nationalised industries that they "worked "for had a monopoly.
Having the power cut off for so many hours a day, seemingly at random and with no warning at the instigation of union leaders seeking yet another pay rise in 1970 most certainly didn’t endear socialism to the great British public.
Corrupt Union elections involving intimidation and dirty tricks happened in my and many other peoples personal experience.
I seem to recall that Wilson gave a ship building order to Poland (At that time a member of the Warsaw Pact and as such a Cold War enemy) and lent them the money to carry out the project at such easy terms that they in effect didn’t have to in real terms pay it back.
This at a time when British Shipyards were begging for orders.
Why did Labour get voted in ?
Because at the time society was much more rigidly divided by the class system in a way that would be unthinkable today.
But try asking the people of today to live under the regime that you view through rose coloured glasses just wouldn’t happen.
Agreed. Say what you will about Blair, but there was always bread for sale in the fucking supermarket.
Ditto. Revising for exams by candlelight was so much fun.
Weren’t the worst of the power cuts, and such treats as the three day week, under Tory rule?
Yes, under Heath, but the root cause was excessive union power created/allowed by Labour under Wilson.
Labour was itself brought down after battling with the unions in the Winter of Discontent in 1978/9.
I think it is a little mistaken to ignore the effect of the spectacularly misconceived Industrial Relations Act of 1971 here, but you might know more than me on that.
Bottom line is that what is being blamed on Harold Wilson occured during the Grocer’s regime.
Indeed. And again it would be somewhat mistaken to place the blame for the Winter of Discontent at the door of Harold Wilson, who hadn’t been Prime Minister for quite a while then.
And it was so much better, of course, once Thatcher politicized the police and unleashed them on people who had the temerity to want to preserve their own jobs rather than see the country’s wealth stuffed into the pockets of the parasitical bankers.
We’ve each had a say - how about at this point we leave the thread to its original subject?