Ealing Book Festival

‘The finest prose stylist in the House of Commons since Roy Jenkins’ – Mark Lawson 

 

Former Labour cabinet minister and bestselling author Alan Johnson portrays Harold Wilson as a truly twentieth-century man, who was as much a part of the sixties as the Beatles and the Profumo scandal. Harold Wilson was one of the most successful politicians of the twentieth century. Prime Minister from 1964-70, and again from 1974-76, he won four elections as well as a referendum on UK membership of the European Community. The achievements of the Wilson Era – from legalising homosexuality to protecting ethnic minorities, from women’s rights to the Open University – radically improved ordinary people’s lives for the better, while his ‘white heat’ speech proclaimed a scientific and technological revolution.

 

Alan Johnson was a Labour MP for 20 years. He served in five cabinet positions in the Governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown including Education Secretary, Health Secretary and Home Secretary. He is the author of award-winning childhood memoir This Boy and the sequels Please Mister Postman and The Long and Winding Road, as well as a memoir about music and three highly acclaimed novels.

 

 In conversation with John Sergeant.