The laws concerning abortion, homosexuality and divorce were reformed Capital punishment was abolished. Most significant of all, the Open University – its very name a glorious manifestation of the open society – proved that in Wilson’s Britain, everybody had the chance to succeed.Unfortunately, in matters of major policy, Harold Wilson was neither an innovator nor a revolutionary. He believed in Pax Britannica and although he was far too clever to doubt that his country’s future lay in the Common Market, his heart was in the Commonwealth. His crucial mistake – which prejudiced his first six years in office – was not to devalue sterling before a change in the exchange rate was thrust upon him.

That was, in part, the product of his fiscal conservatism as well as his fear of Labour becoming characterised as “the devaluation party”. But he was also concerned about its effect on the Commonwealth. “Do you”, he asked a group of dissident back benchers “expect me to tell India that we’ve knocked ten per cent off their sterling balances?” His concern was not counterfeit. Intellectually he was a radical, but emotionally he remained part of old England. His natural habitat was the Fabian seminar.At the time of his ascendancy – ten years in which, in government and opposition, he dominated the House of Commons – he seemed to embody the beginnings of a classless society. It was more than the election of Edward Heath, another party leader from a very similar background, which made Harold Wilson seem less like the solitary pathfinder for a modern Britain. During the years of his supremacy, political ideas changed more quickly than during any time since the War.

The old notion of consensus died and was replaced by a belief in competition and confrontation. Harold Wilson was left as the prime minister who gave tea and sandwiches to trade unionists in Downing Street and believed that he could plan Britain’s way out of economic stagnation.In fact, he was a crucial bridging passage between two periods of British history – a technocrat at the dawn of technology and a Fabian at the time when Fabianism was going out of fashion. History will eventually mark him out as a good prime minister. One of his greatest pleasures (and proudest achievements) was “keeping several balls in the air at the same time” In his inimitable way, he juggled with the past and future.

It was all part of the fascinating complexity of the man who made the Gannex raincoat famous.James Harold Wilson, politician. Born Huddersfield, 11 March 1916; died London, 24 May Kingsley Amis by Blake MorrisonThese are polite times for writers. The days of Dylan Thomas – reading your work aloud to audiences while drunk, stealing money from your friends or sleeping with their partners – have long gone. Nowadays, writers are expected to smile sweetly from their dust jackets and to be bad only surrogately, through their characters.Kingsley Amis, who hated Dylan Thomas, would have approved of this. His novels and Memoirs are as relentless as any book of etiquette in their suggestions of How (and How Not) to Behave. Good chaps pay for their rounds, enjoy jazz, aren’t “pissy” or pretentious. Nice women are large-breasted, supportive and above all quiet.