I never told PM’s wife I slept with him. It’s a smear

40 YEARS AFTER THE WILSON RESIGNATION HONOURS SCANDAL... AND THE VICIOUS WAR OF WORDS RAGES ON

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 No10, 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

‘Harold trusted me, right to the end of his life’

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 violently 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 the worldwide Left-wing group Socialist International. It is only in retrospect, she says, that

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 difference between history 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 liked working with 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

‘I wanted to nail the lie once and for all’ ‘Corbyn has a good brain but he’s not a leader’

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.’