General de Gaulle’s advice to the young Queen Elizabeth

There were so many ear-catching moments in Peter Hennessy’s series for Radio 4, Winds of Change, adapted from his new book by Libby Spurrier and produced by Simon Elmes. Harold Wilson answering a journalist’s question after a sleepless night while awaiting the results of the 1964 election, quizzical, cheeky and so quick off the mark. When asked if he felt like a prime minister, he replied: ‘Quite honestly, I feel like a drink.’ Later he was waylaid at Euston station having just got off the morning train from Liverpool and was still unsure of the result. (Labour won by just four seats after 13 years of Conservative rule.) At 3.50 that afternoon, Wilson, sitting by the phone in Transport House, at last received a message from the Palace. ‘Would it be convenient for you to come round and see Her Majesty?’

Earlier, in 1962, in the build-up to the Cuban missile crisis, Nikita Khrushchev was away from Moscow at his summer residence on the Black Sea coast. ‘What do you see?’ he bellowed at his advisers. ‘I see US missiles in Turkey, and aimed at my dacha.’

Hennessy’s most timely series takes us back to the 1960s following Harold Macmillan’s speech in South Africa predicting the transition of Britain’s colonies to independence. It’s stuffed full of characters — General de Gaulle’s advice to the young Queen Elizabeth on what her role should be: ‘In that station to which God has called you, be who you are, Madam.’ The young President Kennedy speaking on primetime TV not long before the East Germans began building the wall across Berlin and declaring that ‘our rights there are clear and deep-rooted’. Macmillan, then PM, leaving London to spend the day shooting on the grouse moors of Yorkshire as the wall was going up through those anxious August days in 1961.