Lady Falkender
Harold Wilson’s controversial secretary and powerful member of his inner circle or ‘kitchen cabinet’
LADY FALKENDER, the former Marcia Williams, who has died aged 86, was Private and Political Secretary to Harold Wilson from 1956 to 1983 and a member of that influential group of intimates and advisers surrounding the Labour Prime Minister that became known as the “kitchen cabinet”.
She was a highly controversial figure and one who inspired strong feelings, frequently hostile. George Wigg, the Labour Whip, had such hard things to say about her in his memoirs that Lord Goodman, when shown a draft, felt bound to advise Wigg against publication.
But all who worked with Marcia Falkender were agreed upon her keen intelligence, political good sense and loyalty to Wilson. Trevor Lloydhughes, Wilson’s press secretary until 1969, often had rows with her but always found her “honest, bright and loyal”. Even her greatest detractors acknowledged her abilities: Joe Haines, Bernard Donoughue and Albert Murray, fellow members of the kitchen cabinet with whom she collaborated in writing Wilson’s campaign speeches in 1974, found her occasional insights invaluable.
Joe Haines, Wilson’s press secretary from 1969 to 1976, and the only member of the kitchen cabinet to spend more time with Wilson than Marcia Falkender, revealed in his memoir, The Politics of Power (1977), that relations between Wilson and Marcia Falkender were sometimes tempestuous. In Haines’s opinion, she wielded over the Prime Minister an influence that was not merely powerful, but “all-pervasive”.
He recalled that she dictated Cabinet reshuffles, dealt with the Prime Minister’s post from home during periods of nervous collapse, and even proposed to negotiate personally with the IRA.
His account of life at No 10 is full of stories about Lady Falkender’s tears and tantrums, of her demands for sackings, and of her endless warnings of leaks and disloyalties – all this against a background of Wilson’s paramount anxiety at all costs to placate her and to keep the peace.
Most celebrated was Haines’s description of her role in drawing up the resignation honours list on her distinctive lavender-coloured writing paper. The list contained more of her friends than Wilson’s.
Marcia Falkender was quick to dismiss these claims as “malicious tittle-tattle”. Wilson spoke of “twisted facts” and of Haines’s “fevered imagination”. In a television interview Wilson insisted – some thought strangely – that his secretary had “no responsibility for Government policy”.
Public interest inevitably focused principally on the question of whether there was more to their relationship than politics. At times it became the subject of feverish speculation in political circles and the tabloid press.
Incensed at a heckler’s reference to the Profumo scandal during the run-up to the 1964 General Election, Quintin Hogg (later Lord Hailsham) made the widely reported retort: “If you can tell me there are no adulterers on the front bench of the Labour Party you can talk to me about Profumo.”
Haines was inclined to dismiss all such suggestions as malicious gossip until 2003 when, in his revised book of memoirs, Glimmers of Twilight, he claimed that Marcia Williams had once told Wilson’s wife, Mary: “I have only one thing to say to you – I went to bed with your husband six times in 1956 and it wasn’t satisfactory.”
Though Lady Falkender never sued over the book, in 2006 she did successfully sue the BBC for libel over a dramatisation by Francis Wheen that made the same allegation and relied on Haines as its source. Meanwhile, even those who thought the story credible felt that some of Haines’s other claims – such as that Wilson’s doctor planned to murder Marcia Falkender after she attempted to blackmail Wilson over their alleged affair – were extravagant.
After the libel case was settled Lady Wilson herself gave a rare newspaper interview to her husband’s old colleague, Roy Hattersley, to make the point that she and Lady Falkender had been and still were close friends.
But despite the rebuttals, the abiding impression left by Haines’s memoirs was of a weak, almost masochistic Prime Minister who allowed himself to be dominated in all things by his jealous, hysterical secretary, to whom he seemed bonded by a kind of shared paranoia, and the turbulent nature of their relationship seemed to be borne out by others close to No 10.
When Lord Goodman, in response to Wilson’s own criticisms of his secretary, ventured to suggest that he might “find some way of dispensing with her services”, Wilson replied that she was “difficult enough in a friendly association and matters might be worse if he took any action to remove her from the political scene”.
Goodman concluded that Wilson “proceeded in considerable apprehension in his dealings with the lady; in fact he was plainly frightened of her because of her quick temper, and also because he had for a number of reasons formed a most favourable view of her judgment”.
Her suggestion that on General Election day in 1964 Granada Television should shift the time of
Coronation Street so as not to keep Labour voters away from the polls was repeatedly cited by Wilson as the reason for the Labour Party’s electoral success.
She was born Marcia Matilda Field on March 10 1932, the daughter of a Northamptonshire builder. She won a place at Northampton High, the local direct grant school, and although – or perhaps because – her parents were Conservatives, she formed the ambition in the sixth form to become an assistant to a Labour MP.
From school she went on to read History at Queen Mary’s College, London, where she ran the college Labour club. There she met, and later married, Ed Williams, the chairman of the Conservative club. Although they divorced in 1961, she continued to be known as Marcia Williams until she was unexpectedly created a life peer in 1974. Her chosen title, Falkender (Private Eye often referred to her as “Forkbender”), was said to reflect a belief in her descent from some intimate of King Edward VII.
On leaving university she set about obtaining the secretarial skills required to fulfil her ambition of working for a Labour MP. She then secured a typing job at Transport House, working in the office of Morgan Phillips, General Secretary of the Labour Party. She also had a short spell as James Callaghan’s secretary.
At that time the Labour Party was divided between the centre-right supporters of Hugh Gaitskell and the Left-wing admirers of Aneurin Bevan. Harold Wilson was a Bevanite, and Marcia Williams, once at Transport House, became one too.
Her growing admiration for Wilson was such that when Morgan Phillips, a confirmed Gaitskellite, laid a plan to prevent Wilson’s appointment as chairman of the influential NEC Policy Committee, Marcia Williams tipped off Wilson anonymously.
Not long afterwards, in 1956, she learned that Wilson was looking for a secretary and applied for the job. Within a short time of starting, she was so in tune with Wilson’s way of thinking that she was not only typing all his letters but composing some of them too.
In 1957, when her husband moved to Seattle on a two-year contract with Boeing, Marcia Williams remained in London to continue with her work. She ran Wilson’s private office until the Labour Party general election victory of 1964 made him Prime Minister, when she went with him to Downing Street.
Wilson always reciprocated his secretary’s loyalty, and memorably stood by her during the “lands deal” or “Wigan Alps” affair of 1974, when she and her brother were attacked in the press for financial speculation in North Country slag heaps.
From Marcia Falkender’s own books, Inside Number 10 (1972) and Downing Street Perspective (1983), she emerges as one who was not only passionately interested in politics, but who was also exhilarated by the fast pace of political life and who thrived on the crises and intrigues at the centre of it.
Although Lady Falkender regularly attended sittings in the House of Lords, becoming its longest-serving Labour member, she never made a maiden speech. After retiring from Downing Street she worked as a columnist for The Mail on Sunday from 1983 to 1988. She continued to work for Wilson, handling his private business until his death in 1995.
She was appointed CBE in 1970. From a liaison in the 1960s with Walter Terry, the Daily Mail’s then political editor, she had two sons, who survive her.
Lady Falkender, born March 10 1932, died February 6 2019