Harold Wilson was a Labour Party politician who became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 1964 after his party won that year's general election. (AUDIO: State of Emergency) His predecessor was Sir Alec Douglas-Home of the Conservative Party. (AUDIO: The Pelage Project)
Wilson appointed James Callaghan as the Chancellor of the Exchequer following Labour's victory. (AUDIO: State of Emergency) Callaghan later served as Prime Minister himself from 1976 to 1979. (AUDIO: The Oseidon Adventure)
He was very much in favour of science and technology. In October 1963, he made a speech to that effect at a Scarborough conference of his party. (PROSE: Who Killed Kennedy)
Soon after the general election, General Peters attempted a coup: something Wilson had suspected, as many people (including MI5 itself) felt he was a "Trotskyite". Taken hostage, Wilson refused to resign and allow Peters to claim a legal change of government. After the Intrusion Countermeasures Group saved his life and ended the coup, Wilson arranged for them to be fully funded until 1969. (AUDIO: State of Emergency)
In 1965, his government negotiated with the 456: a dozen children in exchange for a needed vaccine. (Children of Earth: Day Three)
In later years, Wilson's position seemed untenable after the failures of the Wenley Moor nuclear research facility in October 1969 (TV: Doctor Who and the Silurians) and the Inferno Project in February 1970 (TV: Inferno) were publicised by James Stevens in his "Bad Science" series of articles.
Wilson called a general election for June 1970. The Labour Party lost and the Conservative leader Edward Heath took over as Prime Minister. Political observers speculated that the publication of the book version of "Bad Science" had coincided not-so-incidentally with the election. (PROSE: Who Killed Kennedy)
Behind the scenes
- PROSE: Who Killed Kennedy reinterpreted Wilson's real world political failure in the light of events in the Doctor Who universe.
- Justin Richards debated whether to use Wilson or a fictional stand-in for Counter-Measures, deciding to go with Wilson as "you had to believe this" - (the plot was based on a real life plot - "may have really happened". (DWM: DWM 448) In the Behind the Scenes feature in Counter-Measures Series 1, Richards said he'd moved the coup to 1964 for dramatic purposes.
