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Long-Distance Runner. Wilson's grey, cold, hard traits are a legacy from a long line of North Countrymen whose radical beliefs were shaped in grim Baptist churches, where the rich and the godless were smitten in their pride. Even today, it is said Wilson's favorite hymn is the oldtime God Gave the Land to the People. Reared in Yorkshire's dark, satanic Colne Valley, which has never yet sent a Tory to Westminster, he recalls that "half the children in my class went barefoot." As a child, he became aware of social and economic issues during the Depression, when his father was laid off for months at a time. Young Wilson developed a lifelong love of boy-scouting, sees its emphasis on brotherhood as another formative political influence. (Unlike Deputy Leader Brown, however, Wilson does not address acquaintances as "Brother.")
He was head boy at his grammar school and won a scholarship to Oxford, a passionately political environment in the '30s. Wilson, for once, ignored politics to concentrate on his books, with occasional time out for long-distance running. He won a brilliant degree in philosophy, politics and economics, captured the coveted Gladstone Memorial Prize with a tome entitled State and Railways in Great Britain, 1823-1863, which is still relevant to Britain's rail problems 100 years later. In 1937 Wilson became an economics don at the unusually young age of 21. Another young don at Wilson's college remembers him as "a fox terrier —full of energy, brilliant, and every now and then he'd give a sharp bark." Wilson worked as a research assistant for the late Lord ("womb-to-tomb") Beveridge, the architect of the welfare state and a notorious slave driver, who credited Wilson with being the "best economist I ever had."
Moscow Trader. In World War II, Wilson shifted from don's gown to the sober suit of a civil servant, and at 27 became chief economist for the Ministry of Fuel & Power. Elected to Parliament from a Lancashire farming constituency at war's end, he rose swiftly in the Attlee government, at 31 became the youngest Cabinet Minister in 95 years. At the Board of Trade, he grew a mustache to look older, habitually worked 16 hours a day, and made his first trip to Moscow to negotiate an Anglo-Soviet trade pact. After some flinty bargaining with Wilson, Anastas Mikoyan exclaimed: "Ah, you see, it takes a Yorkshireman to deal with an Armenian!" Wilson, who now brags that he was "negotiating with the Russians before Macmillan was even in the Cabinet," still speaks glowingly of "the millions of pounds" to be made from exporting to Russia.
In 1951 Wilson resigned from the Cabinet to protest Britain's increased defense spending for the Korean war. Health Minister Aneurin Bevan quit at the same time, objecting to charges for health services. Nye Bevan, who respected his economic expertise, once told Wilson that he was "all facts and no bloody vision." If any Laborites still held to that view last week, Wilson finally disproved it.