I want to hear the most unhinged stories you know about your favorite historical figures
That time the British Prime Minister nearly dropped Oliver Cromwell's sword on the future King of England (1934)
Reblogging this so others can join in :)
@solisequium @kenmagazine @reg1ment @tolaboury @frankidacre @absurdlyvintage @threeroyalcousinsfan1914 @reinekes-fox @pestilenceboy @archdyke-von-hoehenberg @historicallolitics @thebrownsugars @wiliband @majorism @g1pper @yonderghostshistories @undeadp0et @dr-cav1ar
There are two tales I'd like to share about Harold Wilson, one which speaks to the sort of Yorkshire Walter Mitty aspect of his personality that Denis Healey famously ridiculed, and the other about a small but admittedly rather silly aspect of the No. 10 kitchen cabinet from the '60s (not the '70s as most Wilson stories err) First, in May 1953, Harold visited the Soviet Union (he was billed as the first British socialist to visit Russia since the Death of Stalin [good film]). He also treated himself, and journalists as well, as a sort of revival of Marco Polo but with a red tinge. In Moscow, he was put in Room 101 of the National Hotel (may Allah forgive me for making this joke but.. literally 1984?) which - as was later discovered - was wired for sound and vision! The Soviets apparently thought Wilson had visual potential. Wilson did not know this, and just carried on in his usual, eccentric way. He then met Anastas Mikoyan and Vycheslav Molotov for an hour-long personal audience, which upstaged the Foreign Office and Anthony Eden actually, who had been trying to start talks with the new Soviet leadership to little avail. When he returned to London, he, in Walter Mitty fashion, bigged himself up as a kind of super shuttle diplomat, highly capable and discreet (not really here), and indicated Molotov was amenable to a Four Powers Conference as Churchill pursued, but said anything else he might say would have to be addressed to Churchill.
He regaled parliamentary colleagues with a dbriefing of his trip, where he expanded his own role massively but was something of a spellbinding man-of-the-world. He also claimed that he managed to get Molotov to be amenable to Wilson's own proposals for a rather ambitious International Development Authority (which predated his later focus and interest in overseas development), that he got Mr Molotov and Mr Mikoyan to join in the “total”, rather than phony, “war on want”. All in all, as Pimlott noted, he capitalised rather brilliantly on a short and unproductive visit, behaving like he had opened a personal channel to the Kremlin. I always thought the Walter Mitty label was unfair, but maybe there was something to it...
Then in, 1964, When Wilson became PM, he brought in political advisers on a scale Whitehall found shocking and dangerous to the civil service's influence. Thomas Balogh, his economic guru, was not as political or forceful as Marcia Williams, who had managed to secure a number of concessions from the civil service. He was made a temporary civil servant, and failed to stop Whitehall mandarins from putting his office in the Cabinet Office, ending up physically placed on the wrong side of a locked connecting door to No. 10. To reach Wilson he needed a special key, which he would jangle on a big key-ring as he came through - Pimlott calls it a “melancholy symbol of his exile”. Very Carry On Gosplan. There are many more little bits, nothing on the scale of Ramsay MacDonald nearly dropping a sword on George VI, but his career contains bugged hotel rooms, CIA gossip about adultery, a locked-door economic adviser with a special key, a press baron flirting with a Mountbatten “emergency government”, and a former Prime Minister telling journalists he is a spider who may communicate via kicked blind men. History does not get much more Wilsonian than that.
