Harold Wilson Harold Wilson James Harold Wilson, Baron Wilson of Rievaulx, (11 March 1916– 24 May 1995) was a British Labour politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1964 to 1970 and 1974 to 1976. Entering Parliament in 1945, Wilson was appointed a parliamentary secretary in the Attlee ministry and rose quickly through the ministerial ranks; he became Secretary for Overseas Trade in 1947 and was elevated to Cabinet shortly thereafter as President of the Board of Trade. In opposition to the next Conservative government, he served as Shadow Chancellor (19551961) and Shadow Foreign Secretary (19611963). Hugh Gaitskell,
Harold Wilson excision as a result of these [Cabinet Office] requirements (in the chapter on The Wilson Plot) is, I believe, hard to justify" giving credence to these new allegations. As a result of his concerns about the danger to British Parliamentary democracy from these activities, Wilson issued instructions that no agency should ever bug the telephones of any members of Parliament, a policy (still in place) which came to be known as the Wilson Doctrine. A portrait of Harold Wilson, painted by the Scottish portrait artist Cowan Dobson, hangs today at University College, Oxford. Two statues of Harold Wilson stand in