Some reflections on two interviews with Harold Wilson (1970 and 1974)

I watched these two interviews on YouTube recently. They were facinating. In the first, a very youthful David Dimbleby was interviewing Wilson just after Labour had (unexpectedly) lost the 1970 general election. The second interview took place just before the February 1974 election. By the second interview, he appears to have aged markedly, a sign of the terrible toll which political life can exact, and which it particularly exacted from Wilson.

The following features were quite striking.

First, neither of the interviewers interrupted Wilson.

Second, Wilson answered all the questions directly, eloquently, and often with understated humour.

Third, both the interviewer and Wilson assumed that the audience was intelligent and had a reasonable attention span. Wilson avoided 'sound bites.'

Fourth, Wilson dominated the interviews, not through aggressiveness, but as a consequence of quiet assurance.

Fifth, three remarks about the substance of the policies which Wilson was discussing:

First, in the 1970 interview, he specifically cited the continuing abolition of education selection at the age of 11 as a very important policy goal, which he feared that the Tories would discontinue. (In the event, they did not, and pursued it, during the Heath years, with as much enthusiasm as Labour). Second, in the 1974 interview, Wilson advocated land nationalisation as a solution for speculation in land leading to unaffordable rises in housing costs, a policy which has not been discussed for years, but for which the social need is greater than ever. Third, in both interviews, Britain's balance of payments is discussed as a problem. For a long time, it has been completely absent from the political agenda, not because it has been solved, but because it seems to have been tacitly accepted that it will never be solved.

Although the structure and dynamics of political interviews have changed, they have definitely not improved. Information is not elicited ; knowlwdge is not enhanced. Instead, interviewers and politicians are locked in a zero-sum game, where politicians seek to evade questions, and interviewers seek to interrupt or 'derail' politicians. Interviewers assume that politicians will not answer directly and are not candid participants ; politicians then fulfil these expectations. The governing assumption is that audiences cannot follow a calm and reasoned argument, but are preoccupied with viewing a 'bloodbath.' From the audience's perspective, cynicism and despair, not enlightenment, are the rather grim consequences.