The timing of Harold Wilson’s resignation on March 16 1976 is an enduring mystery, and conspiracy theories abound. Had the onset of Alzheimer’s unnerved him? Was he about to be denounced as a Soviet spy? There’s even a preposterous suggestion that Lord Mountbatten had given up his regular lunches with Barbara Cartland to plan a military coup against Wilson. The eminent lawye...

Ed Miliband’s lack of backing for trade unions on strike on 30th June disappointed some, but in fact no Labour leader has ever backed strikes. It is worth looking at how Harold Wilson handled the miners’ strike of 1974, where Labour won a general election against all expectations. Wilson was a politician with extraordinary talent, who won three

A suitably 1960s title as I think one of the analogies from Labour history - definitely not an exact one - for Ed Miliband is Harold Wilson, a figure who used media perceptions that he was from the party's left to skillfully bind the party together and win four General Elections on a platform of modernising Britain. Like Wilson Ed will find that a lot of the potential talent for his frontbench tea...

Government blog warning: The author is not a student of political history and doesn't care too much about it, other than when it repeats itself. Reading this blog can cause disorientation and bad breath. When Harold Wilson was Prime Monster, I was only a little Leg-iron and so I don't remember too much about him apart from the dirty mac and the pipe. Reading up on him, using non-sanitise...

Former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson may have been suffering the early effects of Alzheimer's disease when he resigned research has suggested.

Harold Wilson considered scrapping the licence fee in retaliation for "overlavish" expenditure by the BBC while putting pressure on the corporation's chairman to do something about the "hippies" within its ranks.

The Security Service MI5 kept a secret file on Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson throughout his time in office because of his friendships with eastern European businessmen and contacts with the KGB.

If you want to get away from the squalid business of the return to government of Mandelson, turn on the BBC Parliament channel. The Beeb is rerunning, in full, its 1964 election night coverage. Relive the Harold Wilson days on the Parliament channel tonight Robin Day has just interviewed Harold Wilson on the phone (or "by radio telephone, quite a business" as Richard Dimbleby put it) as he travels...

This site provides free access to the full text of a conference paper by Victoria Honeyman which was delivered at the Political Studies Association (PSA - UK) 2008 annual conference. It compares and contrasts the work of British prime ministers Tony Blair and Harold Wilson, focusing in particular on four specific issues: ideology, personality, war, constitutional reform and clause 4.

Radio Four's Document programme on Radio 4 unearths evidence that Harold Wilson considered "abandoning" Northern Ireland. He considered making it a dominion, not part of the UK or the Commonwealth: May 1974 was the height of the Troubles in the province but, for once, the daily story of bombings and shootings wasn’t centre stage. All eyes were on a new power-sharing executive; the first