On March 19, 1964, the Beatles visited the Dorchester Hotel, in London, to accept an award from the Variety Club of Great Britain. The Beatles had been named the club’s Show Business Personalities of 1963 and were joined at the luncheon ceremony by an array of other honorees, including actress Julie Christie, James Bond star Sean Connery, and Patrick Macnee and Honor Blackman from the spy TV series “The Avengers.” But it was a celebrity of a different sort who presented the Beatles with their awards: Labour Party leader Harold Wilson.
This arrangement was the result of some shrewd political maneuvering on Wilson’s part: In addition to leading his party, he was a Liverpool-area Member of Parliament and saw this as an opportunity to exploit his fellow Northerners to his own ends. After all, 1964 was an election year, and with Labour desperate to unseat Parliament’s Conservative majority, surely having his photo taken alongside the Fab Four wouldn’t hurt his party’s standing among younger voters.
There was an element of political one-upmanship involved in all this, too, as Wilson’s opposition had recently tried using the Beatles to its own political advantage. Conservative Cabinet Minister William Deedes, in a speech to the City of London Young Conservatives, had portrayed the hard-working, high-aspiring Beatles as exemplars of his party’s ideals.
“[The Beatles] herald a cultural movement among the young which may become part of the history of our time,” Deedes said. “Something important and heartening is happening here. The young are rejecting some of the sloppy standards of their elders, by which far too much of our output has been governed in recent years…they have discerned dimly that in a world of automation, declining craftsmanship and increased leisure, something of this kind is essential to restore the human instinct to excel at something.”
Even more prominently, Prime Minister Sir Alec Home, noting the Beatles’ immense commercial impact, had recently pronounced the band Britain’s “greatest export” and “a useful contribution to the balance of payments.”
Such pandering got under the skin of left-wing writer Paul Johnson, who was disgusted by the Tories’ cynical attempts to co-opt Beatlemania. He was also pretty disgusted by the Beatles, themselves.
In a Feb. 28 New Statesman article titled “The Menace of Beatlism,” Johnson wrote that Beatles had become “an electorally valuable property.” He claimed that “Conservative candidates have been officially advised to mention them whenever possible in their speeches.” And he went on to savagely decry the commercialism and inanity of the Beatles and their audience, as well.
Discussing the Beatles’ concerts and TV appearances, Johnson wrote “the teenager comes not to hear but to participate in a ritual, a collective groveling to gods who are themselves blind and empty.”
The Beatles’ fans, Johnson observed, “are the least fortunate of their generation, the dull, the idle, the failures.” Still, he held out hope that intelligent teenagers might see beyond this silliness and depravity and seek out the best in culture. Recalling his own youth, he said: “Almost every week one found a fresh idol—Milton, Wagner, Debussy, Matisse, El Greco, Proust…At 16, I and my friends heard our first performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony; I can remember the excitement even today. We would not have wasted 30 seconds of our precious time on the Beatles and their ilk.”
Harold Wilson, on the other hand, had no such qualms about the Fab Four. As with most of the British public – conservative or liberal – he saw the band as amusing and harmless (long hair and noisy music aside) and admirable for its success. The Beatles weren’t Shakespeare or Admiral Nelson, but they’d put Britain back on the map.
The Variety Club ceremony saw Wilson happily mugging it up with the band and touting the Beatles-Labour summit to the media, simultaneously poking fun at the Tories for trying to co-opt the Beatles and at himself for doing the same thing, only better.
“This is a non-political occasion so I’ll stay non-political. Unless I’m tempted,” Wilson joked at a press conference. “There were attempts recently by a certain leader in a certain party — wild horses wouldn’t drag his name from me — to involve our friends the Beatles in politics. And all I could say with great sadness, as a Merseyside member of Parliament, which I am, was that whatever arguments there might be, I must ask is nothing sacred when this sort of thing can happen?”
The Beatles, for their part, enjoyed the attention while claiming no interest in politics whatsoever. And, despite the political theater, they also managed to land the best quotes out of the whole event, which was covered widely in the newspapers and broadcast on television.
Presented by Wilson with their silver heart-shaped awards, George Harrison feigned confusion and referred to Wilson as “Mr. Dobson,” a reference to the well-known British sweets manufacturer Barker & Dobson. When it was his turn to talk, John Lennon leaned into the microphone and straight-facedly thanked the Variety Club for the “purple hearts,” slang for a popular amphetamine. Corrected by Ringo — “Silver! Silver hearts!” — John did a comic double take and said, “Sorry about that, Harold,” to much audience laughter and applause. It was a bit of playful subversion that made the older generation think twice about who was using whom.
Though the result likely had more to do with damage inflicted to the Conservatives by the Profumo Scandal than any boost provided by the Beatles, Labour won by a razor thin majority in Parliament in the October General Election and Wilson was named prime minister. The Beatles couldn’t have cared less. Asked by a TV reporter whether they’d had time to vote, Paul confessed they’d “missed it.” “We were having dinner at the time,” said John.
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