On  Sunday  afternoon I was in Harold Wilson’s birthplace to talk at the Huddersfield Literary Festival about my biography of the great man. 
Despite the many years he lived in London, Harold was always more Huddersfield than  Hampstead. As I say in the book, it was Nye Bevan who convinced a young Wilson to drop the clipped tones you can hear on his Pathe News interviews in the days when he was trade secretary in Attlee’s ‘45 to ‘51  government.

His transformation was not a case of Harold adopting a persona, rather it was one of him discarding one to be himself – and it worked. Plain old Mr Wilson was a politician who resonated with the voting public as few politicians have done before or since.

The man with me in the photograph is Hugh Goulbourne, my interviewer at a packed event.