Truth, lies AND THE Lavender List
Here it is, proof at last that Harold Wilson’s feared fixer Marcia Falkender DID write – on ‘lilac’ paper in her own hand – the toxic names that destroyed his reputation . . . . . . but defiantly she tells MoS: I did NOT use our ‘affair’ to blackmail PM
HIDDEN well away from public gaze in the darkness of a Central London vault sits a scruffy padded envelope labelled: ‘Lady Marcia Falkender… various documents of no intrinsic value.’
It is an unremarkable package. Yet, for all the modesty of the label, it contains the most notorious resignation honours list in this country’s history.
Today, The Mail on Sunday publishes the original handwritten draft of Harold Wilson’s 1976 ‘Lavender List’ for the first time – along with an excoriating interview with Baroness Falkender, the woman who for decades has been accused of scandalously hijacking the honours system and using the list to reward her friends in return for political favours.
These included a peerage for crooked industrialist Joseph Kagan; a knighthood for property developer and fraudster Sir Eric Miller, who later committed suicide; and a knighthood for Right-wing financier James Goldsmith.
For all Lady Falkender’s vehement denials, the Lavender List – so called because of the colour of the paper on which it was supposedly written – triggered a scandal that permanently tarnished Wilson’s reputation and helped bring the post-war era to a shuddering close.
Marcia Williams, or Lady Falkender as she became in 1974, was Wilson’s political secretary, the most powerful woman in the Government. Now, after a silence of more than 20 years, she is speaking out, determined, she says, to rescue her legacy and that of Wilson from years of smear and innuendo. In an exclusive interview, she: Admits she wrote the list in shambolic circumstances from pieces of paper in Wilson’s pocket;
Reveals it is written on ‘ lilac’ Downing Street stock paper, not private purple notepaper, as had been alleged;
Says Wilson alone was responsible for the names put forward;
Denies sleeping with the Prime Minister or, as had been claimed, blackmailing him to increase her influence;
Blames a sexist smear campaign by Wilson’s associates for destroying her reputation;
Claims the Labour Party has abandoned her, treating her as no more than ‘a bit of dirt in the road’.
Lady Falkender says the document, which she has kept since 1976, is the final draft of a list which was completed on Wilson’s final day in office. The result of months of Downing Street discussion, it comprises eight sheets of A5 paper. Scrawled casually in blue ballpoint pen, the names appear under the headings ‘ Peerages’, ‘ Ks’ ( for Knights Bachelor), ‘CBE’, ‘OBE’, ‘BEM’ (British Empire Medal), ‘CH’ (Companions of Honour) and ‘Privy Councillors’. Wilson’s amendments are scribbled in red ink.
When it was formally approved by the honours scrutiny committee, the finished list contained 41 names – matching many of those on the list we reveal today, including tele- vision impresario Sir Lew Grade and Wilson’s publisher, Sir George Weidenfeld, who were both ennobled. The only notable omission is that of Sir James Goldsmith. His name, which was to become one of the most controversial when the final version was made public, does not appear in this list.
There were several amendments before the list went to the honours committee.
The list symbolises not only the abrupt, scandal-tainted end of the premiership of Wilson, the man who dominated the political landscape of the 1960s and 70s by winning four General Elections, but also the death throes of the liberal consensus. By the 1970s, the commitment to nationalisation and government regulation was crumbling, with strikes, rising inflation and economic turmoil blighting the governments of Sir Edward Heath, Wilson and his successor, James Callaghan.
Wilson’s sudden decision to resign in 1976, just two years after winning his fourth Election, provoked intense speculation, with rumoured motives ranging from impending scandal to suggestions of incipient Alzheimer’s. The Lavender List appeared to be confirm there was something shabby and disreputable about the Government. For Lady Falkender, F lk d h however, ih it has cast a long personal shadow.
Wilson’s former press secretary Joe Haines, the man who came up with the Lavender List soubriquet, has long stated that she was its true author, claiming she had used it to reward those who had performed personal favours.
Haines has also claimed that the reason Wilson allowed her to draft the list – and to exert a fearsome hold over him during his time in office – was that the two had conducted an affair and she had threatened to go public.
Meanwhile, the diaries of Lord Donoughue, Wilson’s policy adviser,
recorded the then Prime Minister saying he had been arguing with Lady Falkender, who was demanding ‘peerages for friends’.
Now 85 and increasingly frail since suffering a stroke in 1998, Lady Falkender has always declined to give her account of that period because she says: ‘I didn’t feel able to. Everything coming out was so one-sided and people believed it, because nobody came forward to defend me.’
Now she has decided to share the original list and speak about the circumstances surrounding it to offer a different perspective, while she still can. Above all, she wants to make clear the list was Wilson’s and not hers. ‘The names on that at list were not my idea,’ she says.
‘It was Harold’s list. Of course it was. He was Prime Minister. Most of them had long histories with Harold.
‘There were a couple of anomalies and those were blown up. The idea that the list is mine, or that I manipulated it to benefit my friends, is completely false.’
Of the suggestions that she had an affair with Wilson, she says: ‘I I did not sleep with the Prime Min- - ister. It is a ludicrous idea and an insulting one, which is why I successfully sued the BBC [when they broadcast The Lavender List drama in 2006 – more of which later].
‘If you knew him, you wouldn’t think that. You couldn’t think that, and nobody did. It’s only a tiny core of people who wanted to get that idea out into the world.’
Lady Falkender believes the stories about her, which i nclude accounts of screaming and swearing at Wilson, amount to a smear by Haines and Donoughue – not just against her, but also Wilson, who emerges looking weak and foolish. She insists that the reason the list became so notorious is that Haines deliberately set out to make it so. His memoir The Politics Of Power, published in 1977, was a devastating account of the impotence of Wilson’s government and t he impact of what he alleged were Lady Falkender’s mercurial moods. Its claim that it was Lady Falkender who drew up Wilson’s resignation honours on lavender notepaper caused a sensation.
Haines’s 2003 follow- up, Glimmers Of Twilight, was even more explosive. As revealed in the MoS, he claimed Wilson’s doctor Joe Stone suggested kil l i ng Lady Falkender because she kept threatening to destroy his premiership. Haines said Wilson told him that, after he had taken his wife Mary to lunch without informing Marcia, c she flew into a rage, summoned Mary to her London home and told her: ‘I have only one thing to say to you. I went to bed w with your husband six times in 1956 and it wasn’t satisfactory.’ Haines also claimed Lady Falkender would tap her handbag as if to imply it contained evidence that could bring down the Government.
He said Wilson denied sleeping with her, but had also said: ‘Well, she has dropped her atomic bomb at last. She can’t hurt me any more.’
Lady Falkender got her chance to reply to these claims when, in 2006, BBC Four showed The Lavender List, a docu-drama written by Francis Wheen about the compilation of the list. Gina McKee played Lady Falkender as a manipulative harpy, who had slept with Wilson and schemed to benefit financially from the honours. She won £75,000 in damages in a libel action and the BBC promised never to rebroadcast the programme.
Today we are speaking at her cosy cottage in the Oxfordshire
countryside. Lying in a day bed, it’s hard to picture her as the woman who inspired fear in the Cabinet, although there are flashes of steel.
Next to her is a photograph of her at No 10, looking as she did when she arrived in Downing Street alongside Wilson on the night of the 1964 Election: her blonde hair piled up in an immaculate bouffant. On a cabinet sits a flattering photograph of Wilson, alongside a framed letter addressed ‘to Marcia’ from Paul McCartney, with a hand-drawn smiley face. The Beatles song Taxman famously scorns Wilson’s extremely high taxes, and at the bottom of the letter McCartney has scribbled: ‘PS, Please lower the taxes!’
Her rise to become a key member of Wilson’s famous ‘kitchen Cabinet’ was an extraordinary one.
After graduating from London University, she was employed as a typist by Morgan Phillips, general secretary of the Labour Party.
She is believed to have met Wilson at a Transport House official lunch in 1956 where she was taking notes and he was a brilliant rising star. She went to work for him and, with shrewd political instincts of her own, swiftly gained a formidable reputation.
The first Prime Minister to be watched widely on television, Wilson had a gift for translating policies into ideas the public could understand. Yet, says Lady Falkender, he was not so adept at reading the complex characters surrounding him in the party – men including Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins and Tony Benn, who were often ideologically opposed.
‘ The reason our partnership worked so well was because I told him the truth,’ she says. ‘He wanted everyone around him to do the same, but they didn’t. Harold trusted me with everything, right to the end of his life.’
Her forthright nature made her enemies, though, and – in her view at least – they used the Lavender List to discredit her.
The list has been in Lady Falkender’s possession since 1976, but despite the controversy, she refused to reveal it out of loyalty to Wilson, with whom she shared an exceptionally close working relationship until his death in 1995. For the past 18 years, it has been in a vault at Coutts bank. She says this final compilation was put together on Wilson’s last day in office. ‘We were in a little alcove which backs on to the Cabinet Office and he had all these names written on bits of paper, which he pulled out of his pockets and gave to me,’ she recalled. ‘ He was always pulling out bits of paper – he’d say, “Here’s the economic policy”. ‘ This was his way of working. He was basically an academic who became Prime Minister. He was often quite chaotic about personal organisation. He put a pad in front of me of the pink paper that was stock paper back then and asked me to write out the names. My typewriter had been packed away so I wrote them down by hand. It really didn’t feel momentous at the time.’
There are several names on this list which did not make it into the published version, such as Labour activist Ron Hayward and Professor John Plumb, the historian later knighted in 1982. Wilson wrote ‘Query K’ alongside his name. Other amendments he made include the affirmation ‘Good’ next to Labour politician Elwyn Jones’s name.
The colour of the paper itself is of significance to Lady Falkender. Suggestions that it had been written on personal purple notepaper are completely wrong, she says.
When the resignation honours list was published on May 27, it was deemed eccentric at best, and at worst, a celebration of the most disreputable form of capitalism. More than 100 Labour MPs publicly distanced themselves from it.
Most notorious of all was the peerage for Kagan, a Lithuanian-born industrialist and maker of Gannex raincoats, popularised by Wilson. The PM’s hometown, Huddersfield, was the site of Kagan’s factory. Haines says Kagan, who helped fund Wilson’s private office, had also helped Lady Falkender (which she denies), and that his name was included despite warnings he was a crook. Kagan was convicted of false accounting in 1980.
However, Lady Falkender says Kagan was viewed as a respectable figure at the time. ‘Kagan was not controversial as a choice – he was knighted in Harold’s 1970 honours list and they had a long-standing relationship,’ she says.
The names also included property tycoon and socialist politician Eric Miller to whom – according to Haines – Lady Falkender was viol ently attracted. The two had become close friends, although Miller was married. Miller was already under suspicion for siphoning off funds from his firm, Peachey Properties, at the time of Wilson’s resignation and committed suicide while under investigation for fraud.
Today, Lady Falkender replies that Miller, a Labour donor, was on the list simply because of his role with t he worldwide Left- wing group Socialist International. It is only in retrospect, she says, that
‘Harold trusted me, right to the end of his life’
the two men have been seen as controversial. Particular attention focused on Goldsmith’s knighthood. According to Haines, Wilson told him that the financier was intending to offer Lady Falkender a directorship of a company connected to his company, Cavenham Foods – a claim she dismisses as nonsense.
‘ It was said that Harold didn’t know James Goldsmith, but he did – there are records of them dining together at George Weidenfeld’s,’ she says, adding that his name was not on the original list, but was added by Wilson in the last stages before it was submitted to the scrutiny committee. She agrees Goldsmith was ‘an anomaly’ but believes the real explanation for his inclusion is that he had helped Wilson during the Slater-Walker property and banking disaster in the City. Intriguingly, she says she acted as an adviser to Goldsmith while he was leading the Eurosceptic Referendum Party in the 1990s.
Another controversial name was that of boxing promoter Jarvis Astaire, who appears on the version of the list published today but was removed because, according to Haines, of Home Office concerns about the reputation of figures from the professional boxing world.
Puzzling as it might seem, Lady Falkender says Haines was deliberately trying to discredit Wilson, his boss, beginning when he was still his press secretary. ‘Information was leaking from Downing Street to the press, and it is now obvious that Haines was the source of those leaks and smears.’
She says she has never been sure why, but points to former MI5 agent Peter Wright’s claims there was an MI5 plot to discredit Wilson’s government in the 1970s because the agency allegedly believed it had been infiltrated by the KGB.
Lord Donoughue also made his dislike of Lady Falkender clear in his diaries, published in 2005, writing of Wilson: ‘I get the feeling everything he does in politics is to please her.’ He detailed a series of extraordinary rows between the pair and says she had demanded a peerage from Wilson.
Today she insists the stories about her ferocious temper and foulmouthed rages are unfair. ‘I did not have tantrums,’ she says firmly. ‘If someone was talking nonsense, I would say so, but I didn’t scream.
‘I took the BBC drama seriously because it was absurd, pure fable, but most people can’t tell the diff erence between hi s t ory and drama. Joe Haines has a lot to answer for and I wanted to nail the lie once and for all.’
She believes the way she has been portrayed bears distinct traces of sexism. ‘There weren’t any other women doing what I was doing.
‘ Harold l i ked working wit h women because he told me, “Women listen to what you want to say, they don’t forget anything and they get things done.” He wasn’t a practical man. Haines and Donoughue were envious of my working relationship with Harold and they created a caricature of me.’
Wilson made various attempts during his lifetime to defend her. The bag in which the list is kept also contains his handwritten resignation letter, which begins: ‘The list was mine and mine from the beginning.’ Even so, the perception it was Lady Falkender’s has stuck.
She says that contrary to the rumours swirling around Wilson’s resignation, his reason was straightforward – he had simply had enough. ‘He first told me of his intention to resign in 1969. Then Labour lost in 1970, when Harold expected to win, and so he felt he had more to do.’
She denies he was unwell when he eventually quit in 1976, shortly after his 60th birthday. ‘That story was made up by people who didn’t like him,’ Lady Falkender says.
Following his resignation, she continued working for Wilson and took her place in the Lords. She says she told Wilson she did not want a peerage, but he had insisted. She now admits that from a public relations perspective, ‘it was the wrong thing, and he knew it’.
A lifelong Eurosceptic, she was delighted about Brexit, but says: ‘It depends what it’s for. If it meant reindustrialisation that would be positive, but it looks like it won’t.’
She says Wilson ‘had to’ vote to remain in the EU in 1974, while she and Mary voted to leave.
She is also mystified by Jeremy Corbyn: ‘ I never saw him as a leader,’ she comments. ‘When he stood for the job it was awful. He’ll never make a great leader. He has a good brain, I’ll give him that, but you see him reacting very slowly and oddly to every issue that comes before him.’
Lady Falkender’s ailing health means she is no longer able to go to the Lords. She says she has little money, contrary to the grand lady of the manor image many have of her. She is still close to Mary Wilson, who is now 101. ‘There was a long period when we had lunch together every week, and until recently we used to speak to one another every week,’ she says.
She is deeply disappointed by her treatment by the Labour Party, which she claims has airbrushed out of history her contribution as the most senior woman in any government at that stage.
Lady Falkender believes she became persona non grata during Tony Blair’s time, when the party was keen to distance itself from the Wilson era. ‘Harold had flaws but at that time Labour was concerned with human dignity,’ she says. ‘New Labour was completely in bed with the City and the economy it created treats people like disposable cogs.
‘They have treated me very, very badly. I’m horrified to have to say this about Labour, but I will go on saying it. They don’t give me the time of day.
‘I don’t need them to be complimentary but they could just notice I existed and I’m still in the Labour Party now.
‘Instead, they treat me like a bit of dirt in the road.
‘All I wanted Labour to say was, “You fought a good fight, well done, thank you”. But they never did.’
‘I wanted to nail the lie once and for all’ ‘Corbyn has a good brain but he’s not a leader’