Editing Harold Wilson (section)

===Resignation===
When Wilson entered office for the second time, he had privately admitted that he had lost his enthusiasm for the role, telling a close adviser in 1974 that "I have been around this racetrack so often that I cannot generate any more enthusiasm for jumping any more hurdles."<ref name="Davies"/> On 16 March 1976, Wilson announced his resignation as prime minister, taking effect on 5 April. He claimed that he had always planned on resigning at the age of 60 and that he was physically and mentally exhausted. As early as the late 1960s he had been telling intimates, like his doctor Sir Joseph Stone (later [[Lord Stone of Hendon]]), that he did not intend to serve more than eight or nine years as prime minister.

[[Roy Jenkins]] has suggested that Wilson may have been motivated partly by the distaste for politics felt by his loyal and long-suffering wife, Mary.<ref name=autogenerated1/> His doctor had detected problems which would later be diagnosed as [[colon cancer]], and Wilson had begun drinking brandy during the day to cope with stress.<ref name="guardian-19950525"/> By 1976 he might already have been aware of the first stages of early-onset [[Alzheimer's disease]], which was to cause his formerly excellent memory and his powers of concentration to fail dramatically.<ref name="Morris 2008">{{cite news |last=Morris |first=Nigel |title=Wilson 'may have had Alzheimer's when he resigned' |url=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/wilson-may-have-had-alzheimers-when-he-resigned-1009829.html |access-date=28 August 2019 |work=The Independent |date=11 November 2008 |archive-date=8 March 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180308232939/http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/wilson-may-have-had-alzheimers-when-he-resigned-1009829.html |url-status=live }}</ref>

Wilson's [[1976 Prime Minister's Resignation Honours|Resignation Honours]] included many businessmen and celebrities, along with his political supporters. His choice of appointments caused lasting damage to his reputation, worsened by the suggestion that the first draft of the list had been written by his political secretary [[Marcia Williams]] on lavender notepaper (it became known as the "Lavender List"). [[Roy Jenkins]] noted that Wilson's retirement "was disfigured by his, at best, eccentric resignation honours list, which gave peerages or knighthoods to some adventurous business gentlemen, several of whom were close neither to him nor to the Labour Party."<ref name=autogenerated1/> Some of those whom Wilson honoured included [[Lord Kagan]], the inventor of [[Gannex]] (Wilson's preferred raincoat), who was eventually imprisoned for fraud, and Sir [[Eric Miller (businessman)|Eric Miller]], who later committed suicide while under police investigation for corruption.

The Labour Party held an [[1976 Labour Party leadership election|election]] to replace Wilson as leader of the Party, and thus prime minister. Six candidates stood in the first ballot; in order of votes they were: [[Michael Foot]], [[James Callaghan]], [[Roy Jenkins]], [[Tony Benn]], [[Denis Healey]] and [[Anthony Crosland]]. In the third ballot, on 5 April, Callaghan defeated Foot in a parliamentary vote of 176 to 137, and served as prime minister until May 1979.

As Wilson wished to remain an MP after leaving office, he was not immediately given the [[peerage]] customarily offered to retired prime ministers, but instead was created a [[Order of the Garter|Knight Companion of the Garter]]. He fought one last election in [[1979 United Kingdom general election|1979]] in which he was returned as a backbench MP for Huyton. Following his departure from the [[House of Commons of the United Kingdom|House of Commons]] before the [[1983 United Kingdom general election|1983 general election]], after 38 years of service, he was granted a [[life peerage]] as '''Baron Wilson of Rievaulx''', of ''[[Kirklees]] in the County of West Yorkshire'', after [[Rievaulx Abbey]], in the north of his native Yorkshire; the [[Kirklees]] refers to his home address of Huddersfield, and is not part of his title.<ref>{{London Gazette |issue=49485 |date=21 September 1983 |page=12361}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/1983-11-15/debates/1ee97dc9-ec07-4444-8291-b72414768b74/LordWilsonOfRievaulx|title=Lord Wilson of Rievaulx – Tuesday 15 November 1983 – Hansard – UK Parliament|access-date=13 October 2021|archive-date=26 October 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211026232043/https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/1983-11-15/debates/1ee97dc9-ec07-4444-8291-b72414768b74/LordWilsonOfRievaulx|url-status=live}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.univ.ox.ac.uk/news/harold-wilson-proclamation/ |title=Harold Wilson proclamation |accessdate=4 May 2024 |publisher=University College, Oxford}}</ref>