How a pop at Harold Wilson cost £250,000

Harold Wilson’s former private secretary, lady Falkender ( aka Marcia Williams) died earlier this month. after I’d heard the news, the song Flowers In The rain lodged in my head for the rest of the day.

The connection may not be immediately apparent, so let me explain.

Flowers In The rain by The Move was the first song played on radio 1. It reached number 2 in the charts in 1967, and is still an evocative reminder of Flower Power and the Summer of love.

over 50-plus years, it has earned royalties of an estimated £250,000. But neither the composer, roy Wood, nor his group, The Move, have ever received a penny.

of course, most Sixties pop groups were diddled out of some of their earnings. Many signed disastrous contracts when they were too young to know better. Many others were simply defrauded by their own managers or their record companies.

This is why y quite a few famous stars from that era are now living in penury. Not long ago, a friend of mine who had a top-ten hit in 1968 saw three or four Sixties stars locked in doleful conversation. He wondered what they were talking about, so went closer to find out. ‘Their conversation was all about the winter fuel allowance,’ he reported back.

But Flowers In The rain is a special case, as The Move (pictured in 1967) lost their money not because of a dodgy manager or record company, but because of the Prime Minister of the day.

There had long been rumours that the labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, had had an affair with his forceful secretary, Marcia Williams.

To help promote Flowers In The rain, The Move’s brash manager, Tony Secunda, sent 500 copies of a cartoon of the pair in bed together to fans and pop journalists.

at a total cost of about £10, he considered it money well spent. He never even bothered to mention this silly stunt to the band, who were on tour at the time.

The first The Move knew of it was when they heard that the Prime Minister had accused them of a ‘violent and malicious personal attack’. Harold Wilson hired the then Shadow Home Secretary, Quintin Hogg, QC, to fight his corner, even though Hogg had himself made veiled references to an affair between Harold and Marcia during the general election three years earlier.

The case went against The Move. Under the settlement, all royalties from Flowers In The rain were to go in perpetuity to the Harold Wilson Charitable Trust.

That was in 1967: more than 50 years later, The Move have not seen a penny. They had another hit, Fire Brigade (by chance, the first single I ever bought), and the talented composer, roy Wood, went on to lead Wizzard, whose hit I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday must surely keep him in winter fuel, now that he is 72.

But was Harold Wilson telling the truth about the ‘false and malicious rumours’? In his memoirs, Joe Haines, Wilson’s press secretary, maintained that Wilson had once told him that, in a fit of pique, Marcia had said to Wilson’s wife wi Mary: ‘I have only one thing to t say to you. y I went to bed with your y husband b six ti times in 1956 an and it wasn’t sa satisfactory.’ a according to Haines, Wilson W then ad added, ruefully: ful ‘Marcia ha has dropped her atomic bomb at last.’

BERNARD donoughue, a senior policy adviser to Wilson, suggests in his diaries that Marcia, ‘eyes like a hawk and teeth like a hare’, had some sort of weird hold over Harold. The Prime Minister ‘often indulged her wildest whims almost like a daughter... and equally feared her like a fierce mother... she was adept at mobilising his demons, stimulating nightmares and evoking his alleged enemies’.

Might it have been Marcia who put Harold up to suing The Move, even though they both knew the cartoon to be true?

donoughue suggests a day-today portrait of Marcia as singularly vindictive and paranoid. over lunch, ‘ she gets upset that the whitebait on her plate are looking at her’.

She was also convinced that her mother was the illegitimate daughter of Edward VII, and thus she was his granddaughter. This, she thought, was why the Queen never invited her to Buckingham Palace.

More than 50 years on, perhaps the time has come to recompense roy Wood and The Move.