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Out of the Wilderness. The delegates were even more relieved by Wilson's performance. Over the years, Harold Wilson, 47, has earned the reputation of a vain, slippery opportunist. Less than a year ago, one longtime colleague said: "I have never known such a brilliant or such an unloved man." After Hugh Gaitskell's death last January, Gaitskellites prayed that the party leadership would not go to "Little Harold," as they then called him. Most of the leading Laborites who are now in Wilson's "Shadow" Cabinet found it hard to vote for him in the party election last February. "Can you trust him?" they asked. "Gaitskell didn't." He won anyway. And under Wilson's firm control, the Labor Party is more confident of victory and more solidly united than at any other time during its twelve years in the wilderness. Wilson himself is the first Opposition leader in British history to win general acceptance as the nation's next Prime Minister even before the general election.
The British may be underestimating their other Harold, Prime Minister Macmillan, who is every bit as wily as Wilson—and in office. If Macmillan holds off the election until next June, Tories say wistfully, Wilson's luster may have dimmed and their own limp fortunes revived. But even allowing for Labor's proved capacity for plucking defeat from the jaws of victory, most Conservatives last week agreed that their prospects have seldom been gloomier.
Brilliant Maneuvers. Harold Wilson's triumph went deep into the complex machinery of the Labor Party, and it was complete. Only a month earlier, Britain's Big Six unions indignantly rejected Wilson's plea for the "wage restraint," that he considers essential to successful economic expansion. But on the conference floor last week, bull-headed Ted Hill, the Boilermakers' union leader who headed the resistance, meekly announced that, in view of Wilson's plans to boost national production, the unions had decided to cooperate after all.
The most dramatic moment in the entire conference came in the midst of a speech by Deputy Leader George Brown, one of Wilson's most outspoken foes. Since his defeat for the leadership eight months ago, Brown and his sizable following had remained the last threat to Wilson's dominance. Turning abruptly to Wilson in mid-speech, he blurted: "As one who was not exactly happy about the outcome, I want to say now I am happy . . ." The rest of the sentence was drowned in a mighty roar of applause that only subsided a minute later when Wilson stood up and raised Brown's left arm in the champion's salute. Later, standing glowing in the wings, Wilson exclaimed: "That was the act of a big man."