Harold Wilson WAS enjoying an affair... just not with the woman branded his mistress!
Nearly half a century on, the last surviving confidant of the Labour PM has blown the whistle on his fling with a junior official. Columnist Leo McKinstry and Wilson’s biographer Nick Thomas-Symonds examine the implications of the shock disclosure
THROUGHOUT his career, Harold Wilson had a reputation for slipperiness. To many critics and colleagues, he was the master of duplicity, whose image was built on illusions. Nothing about him seemed entirely authentic, from his claims about the poverty of his Yorkshire upbringing to his early pose as a man of the Left.
In the same vein, he presented himself in public as the avuncular, reassuring family man who liked nothing better than a pipe and a pint, whereas in private he preferred cigars and brandy. And his domestic circumstances, it has now emerged, were more complex than even the gossipmongers imagined.
In fact, the sensational truth about Wilson’s private life has just been revealed by his former press secretary Joe Haines – and the remarkable tale is another indicator of how deceitful Wilson could be. Now aged 96, Haines, an experienced tabloid journalist, was a crucial member of Wilson’s team from 1969, developing a reputation for toughness and coolness under fire during a fraught period in British politics.
Justifying his decision to shine a spotlight on the dark recesses of Wilson’s romantic side, Haines said yesterday that he wanted to set the record straight about the former Labour prime minister’s time in office, particularly by contradicting the conventional view that Wilson was a miserable, broken figure in the last two years of his premiership, dragged down by the first signs of the Alzheimer’s that would ultimately destroy him.
In fact, as Haines revealed in The Times, Wilson was buoyed up by his secret relationship with his long-serving deputy press secretary, Janet Hewlett-Davies. She only died last October at the age of 85 and she took her secret to her grave, never giving any indication of the affair.
She could have become rich by selling her story, according to Haines, but remained loyal to her former lover. Indeed, even in a workplace as notoriously leaky as Downing Street, the affair remained hidden.
Apart from Wilson and Hewlett-Davies, the only other people who knew about it were Haines – who had first discerned what was happening when he saw Janet going up to the prime minister’s room late one night – and Bernard Donoughue, the head of the Downing Street Policy Unit, in whom Haines confined.
All the players remained discreet over the subsequent decades, never breathing a hint of any scandal. There is no mention of the affair in any of the many biographies of Wilson, while his fellow Labour politicians knew nothing.
“He enjoyed – and sought out – the company of women, but he was no philanderer,” wrote Barbara Castle, who was probably Wilson’s closest friend in politics.
The histories of this period will now have to be re-written, not least because a new, more upbeat picture now emerges of Wilson in his twilight years on the national stage.
“She has given me a new lease of life,” Wilson confessed to Haines.
DONOUGHUE perceived the same change in the premier’s mood, recalling that Wilson’s romance “was making him happier than he had ever been”.
Part of the reason for Janet’s discretion was that she too was married, so any exposure would have ended her career, as well as bringing down the prime minister.
Wilson always liked to portray himself as a modest man of unsophisticated tastes who was happiest in the company of his family. In the late 1930s, he had fallen for Mary Baldwin, the daughter of a congregationalist minister from Diss in Norfolk, after meeting her at a tennis club. They had married in 1940 when he was an Oxford don, carrying out research for the Government. Sensitive, artistic and a fine poet, Mary wished he had remained in academia, for she never liked the pressures of political life. Nevertheless, on the surface, their union seemed contented enough, especially when they had two children. Wilson added to the perception of his fidelity by his emphasis on his attachment to Christians ethics, claiming that the Labour party represented “my highest political and religious ideals”.
In fact, in his early years at Westminster, he was seen as slightly priggish and self-righteous. When a fellow MP joked about Wilson having an affair, Hugh Gaitskell, the rising star of the Labour Right, joked: “If only it were true! It would be one human attribute in the man.”
But Gaitskell’s judgment was faulty. Wilson was a much more passionate, turbulent figure than Gaitskell, his predecessor as Labour leader, recognised. Those qualities were reflected in his explosive relationship with his chief press aide, Marcia Williams. She first went to work with him in 1964 and, through sheer force of personality, became the dominant figure in his entourage,
much to the regret of several other Wilson staffers. They found her impossible because of her egocentricity, outbursts of fiery temper and jealous possessiveness towards the prime minister.
A charismatic blonde with striking blue eyes, Williams – who had become involved with the Daily Mail journalist Walter Terry after the breakdown of her marriage to an aeronautical engineer – was widely thought to have a hold over the prime minister because of a past affair. Though she fiercely denied in public that there had been any intimacy between them, she reportedly once confronted Mary, telling her that she had sex with Harold six times and “it wasn’t satisfactory”.
By the time ofWilson’s second premiership from 1974 to 1976,Williams was more tempestuous than ever, her erratic behaviour laced with a hint of blackmail. Wilson seemed to be frightened of her.The Downing Street machine were exasperated. According to an account made by Haines in 2004, this mood of despair gave rise to an extraordinary episode, where Wilson’s doctor, Joe Stone, contemplated doing away with her.
“He told me he could make it look like natural causes and sign the death certificate. As Agatha Christie might have put it, it was an invitation to murder,” wrote Haines, who quashed the idea.
But Stone also put the proposal to Bernard Donoughue, who recalled: “Joe said to me, ‘It may be desirable to dispose of her. It could be done. We’ve got to get this woman off his back.’ Life was so bizarre at that time in No 10 that we treated almost anything as normal.”
Nothing was done about this sinister plan and when she departed from Downing Street, Williams was elevated to the peerage as Lady Falkender. She lived until 2019.
But like other aspects of the Wilson saga, her story will have to be re-written in the light of Joe Haines’ revelations.
SHE was always seen asWilson’s most serious love interest. Now it seems another woman had that role. There will also have to be some rewriting about Wilson’s character, for he now comes across as more devious, complicated and unrestrained than previously thought.
His keenness on female company is often seen as an early form of feminism but perhaps it was driven by deeper impulses, as
Barbara Castle once hinted. “Certainly Harold never tried to seduce me. In the nearly 40 years I worked with him all I can remember is one rather fumbling kiss,” she said. “He liked a little flirtation but it was verbal rather than physical.”
She concluded that there was “a kind of innocence” about him, words that now look somewhat ironic.
Wilson, who won four general elections and was prime minister in two spells for eight years altogether, was not one of British history’s great leaders.
When he ran for the leadership in 1963 against his bitter rival George Brown, whose formidable gifts were undermined by his chronic alcoholism, the Labour MP Tony Crosland said he refused to choose “between a crook and a drunk”.
An opportunist and cynical tactician, Wilson brought few convictions to the job and left no inspiring legacy. But despite all this, he now turns out to have been a much more colourful figure than contemporaries thought.