What about Harold Wilson, the Infant Phenomenon himself? Although every single policy he has ever embarked on has gone down in ruin, nobody was silly enough to believe that he would give up his seals of office. Nevertheless, his authority has been ruined nearly as completely as his policies and the former maestro who had hypnotized his party and more than half the country has made so many blunders and caused such rank offense that many a Labor MP now regards him with a mixture of contempt and venomous dislike. This may well be rather unfair, but he has brought it on himself. Some of his senior colleagues, George Brown and Denis Healey to name only two, make hardly a pretense of concealing their personal hostility.
His first great error of judgment was in his handling of the issue of selling arms to South Africa. This was a bit of very bad business, for the South African government had not only wanted to buy arms worth some hundreds of millions of pounds, but a large part of the order was for equipment that was surplus to British requirements, and the money for these items would have been pure gain. However, the Labor Party and Wilson himself were pledged to ban traffic in arms with South Africa to show their detestation of apartheid. However, there were some coarse-minded Labor men who were acutely aware that the naval facilities we enjoy at Simonstown would become of paramount importance once we abandoned our presence in the Indian Ocean and the Gulf and also that it would be very helpful to get our hands on all that lovely South African money. Also they did not quite see the role that submarine chasers could play in enforcing racial segregation in Johannesburg.
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