Harold Wilson

James Harold Wilson, Baron Wilson of Rievaulx, KG, OBE, PC, FRS, FSS (11 March 1916 – 24 May 1995) was a British Labour Party politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1964 to 1970 and from 1974 to 1976. First entering Parliament in 1945, Wilson was immediately appointed the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Works and rose quickly through the ministerial ranks, becoming the Secretary for Overseas Trade in 1947 and being appointed to the Cabinet just months later as the President of the Board of Trade. Later, in the Labour Shadow Cabinet, he served first as Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1955 to 1961 and then as the Shadow Foreign Secretary from 1961 to 1963, when he was elected Leader of the Labour Party after the sudden death of Hugh Gaitskell. Wilson narrowly won the 1964 election, going on to win a much increased majority in a snap 1966 election. (...read more on wikipedia)

Links To Peel
In August 1967, Harold Wilson's Labour government passed the Marines Offences Act, which effectively made pirate radio stations like Radio London, where Peel worked illegal. Overnight, John and all the other DJ's and back staff were made redundant without the benefit of redundancy pay. Fortunately for Peel, BBC Radio One was opening their new station a month later and looking for DJ's, which he managed to get a role at lasting for over 30 years.

Peel himself got in trouble with Harold Wilson when in November 1968 satirist John Wells guested on the Night Ride programme and criticised the then Prime Minister, accusing him of indifference to the suffering caused by the civil war in that country (pictures of starving children in the rebel province of Biafra were at the time unavoidable, both in newspapers and on TV). Wilson, notoriously sensitive to media criticism, demanded an apology from the BBC, which Peel was obliged to read out on the following programme.