April 1963: Harold Wilson, as Labour Party leader, meets president John F Kennedy in the West Wing

SIR Keir Starmer recently referred to the various post-war turning points for the Labour Party including, of course, 1945 and then 1964 and 1997.

And he has spoken of his admiration for Harold Wilson.

Too young to reminisce about 1945 (though its legacy set the sound-track for my early years) I do have a clear memory of the 1964 general election when Wilson – a middle-class grammar school boy from Huddersfield – took over the prime ministerial reins of power from Sir Alec Douglas-Home, an old Etonian aristocrat.

That was 60 years ago come October and placed a stark spotlight on the United Kingdom’s class system before it became blurred by the relentless pressure for greater equality.

Public schoolboys were not uncommon in the Labour Party of those years.

Indeed Wilson’s predecessor as leader Hugh Gaitskell, who lived in Frognal Gardens, Hampstead, was a Wykehamist, an old boy of one of the other poshest English public schools Winchester College.

However Wilson, with his Yorkshire accent and blunt delivery, was almost the polar opposite of Douglas-Home who looked and spoke like the sort of chap you’d meet on a grouse moor.

And that contrast was an accurate reflection of the class relations of the early 1960s as so-called Swinging London began to come into its own.

Until that time, for example, the relationship of the press with politicians tended towards a deference, often to the point of obsequiousness.

That was slowly but surely dismantled thanks to a change in the cultural landscape wrought by satirists – notably Hampstead’s Peter Cook, Camden Town’s Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller who held the pompous great and the good up to a healthy ridicule in our clubs and on our televisions.

Douglas-Home and his predecessor Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan were ideal targets as they became ever more mired in sex and sleaze scandals.

The press, emboldened by the general loosening of the tight moral corsets which the existing ruling class had imposed, had a field day in the coverage of events that would not be out of place in one of Armando Iannucci’s marvellous outrageous 21st-century romps.

The Secretary of State for War sharing a sex worker with an attaché at the Soviet embassy? You couldn’t make it up!

Wilson’s pitch for power was a refreshing break from the old buffers of the Tory party who seemed to be clinging on to the illusion that they were still running the world.

Wilson had spoken of the “white heat” of the “scientific revolution” that would transform Britain into a modern powerhouse. Science would replace the grouse moors.

He told Labour’s 1963 Scarborough conference: “For the commanding heights of British industry to be controlled today by men whose only claim is their aristocratic connections or the power of inherited wealth or speculative finance is as irrelevant to the 20th century as would be the continued purchase of commissions in the armed forces by lordly amateurs.

“At the very time that even the MCC has abolished the distinction between amateurs and professionals, in science and industry we are content to remain a nation of Gentlemen in a world of Players.”

This technological vision of a modern Britain had done much to unite a Labour Party which, as so often in its history, had been riven with bitter internal feuding between left and right.

However the government that Wilson went on to construct did include significant numbers of both the left and the right of the party.

His victory in the October 1964 election was by the narrowest of margins.

But the sense of a new dawn as he entered Downing Street was palpable.

The British rock bands’ invasion of America including the Beatles and the Rolling Stones had begun, and ahead was the 1966 World Cup.

Yet Wilson never really managed to fulfil the promise of the scientific revolution.

His ability to bind together the disparate wings of his party in what was a sometimes very uncomfortable partnership was seen by some as a great skill and others as a great flaw.

It saw him serve two terms, winning four of five elections with a break for the Edward Heath premiership from 1970 to 1974.

Some critics accused him of compromising his beliefs in the cause of pragmatism.

“The trouble with Harold is that he’s trying to ride two horses at once”, they would say.

To which his response would probably have echoed that old quip: “If you can’t ride two horses at the same time, you shouldn’t be in the circus.”

In the 21st century I reckon we’ve seen more than enough tumbles in the big tent already.