Harold Wilson was one of the men who ruined post-war Britain. He was a small, posturing, visionless politician, personally pleasant to his friends and even to his enemies, amusing and irreverent and apparently kind. But his public work was a long, strung-out disaster, overlaid at the time by the widespread impression that at least it was most dextrously accomplished.
That's what Wilson was about: the triumph of means over ends. It was the opposite of the reason why he was elected. In 1964, Labour came to power because the party seemed to embody the values of the new Britain. More than any post-war prime minister, Wilson was blessed with concerted goodwill and great expectations. Margaret Thatcher, by comparison, was a divisive ingenue, of whom half the country was apprehensive and the other half terrified.
Wilson seemed so promising. He was clever, fast, thoroughly modern. Talking about technology in what was then not known as a soundbite, he seemed in charge of the future. He did not need matchsticks to help him with economics, and he had the intelligentsia, as well as the working-class, eating out of his hands.
Very quickly he showed the first of his true qualities, sentimental unrealism, by refusing to devalue the pound. Wilson wanted to prove that a Labour pound was a pound in anybody's money, and when he was forced to devalue, far too late, continued to pretend that it was. This set the tone for much that happened in the four governments he led.
What is happening now in the Labour Party is an attempt to recover from the ruin Wilson bequeathed. Having been elected as the acme of modernity, he failed to take a single step towards modernising the instrument that was his curse and his delight. He took exquisite pleasure, and others with him, in his mastery of the party's antique machinery and historic quarrels.
But if it ever occurred to him that these might be better confronted and overriden, he never allowed the thought to cross even the uttermost horizon of his public mind. He therefore has no relevance, other than that of an alien spirit, to Blair's attempts to make Labour a party of government at the centre of British life.
If Wilson did have a vision, it was precisely that: of a party of government whose time had come. In a retirement book, he prated about the art of what he called governance. But his legacy was a party that came within a hair's breadth of never governing again.