Life at No 10 was ruled by Marcia’s tantrums – and, yes, she DID tell PM’s wife she’d slept with him
As Wilson’s ‘Lavender List’ aide dies at 86, a VERY personal verdict by the ally who became a bitter foe
BARONESS Falkender, whose death at the age of 86 has been announced, was one of the most powerful women in the country when she worked as Harold Wilson’s private and political secretary from 1956 to 1983. But her closeness to the two-time Labour Prime Minister led to controversy with one of the main scandals surrounding the notorious Lavender List of resignation honours. Here, Wilson’s Press Secretary Joe Haines, at war with Falkender during his time at No 10, writes a trenchant account of the woman he knew...
FIFTY years ago, Marcia Williams was perhaps the most powerful unelected figure in British politics, with more i nfluence than any Cabinet Minister.
To call her Harold Wilson’s secretary was to grossly underestimate her. She was, for a while, his driving force. But, ultimately, she damaged his life, his political career and his reputation.
She had a brilliant political mind in her early days. But she would later have her head turned by power, celebrities and money. Such was her influence that she successfully forced Wilson to make her a peer in 1974, becoming Baroness Falkender, a move greeted as much with incredulity as respect. At least that was how I viewed it.
Employed on a salary of £5,000 a year, Marcia Williams was indeed Wilson’s secretary – though a lousy one. Operating from the sidelines, she was rarely seen in the office. Appointed to Wilson from Jim Callaghan’s private office in 1956, she insisted that all the mail be delivered to her home each day.
She would dictate answers to each letter and send them back to Downing Street to be typed, before they had to be couriered back to her for a signature and then returned. It took up to nine days to answer a letter.
I f basic administration was beneath her, manipulation was not. Her hostility to any Cabinet Minister was a Black Spot foretelling their political demise.
When George Wigg, the Minister in charge of Britain’s intelligence services, once called on Wilson in his study and asked that Marcia should leave because he wasn’t going to discuss secret matters ‘in front of a secretary’ he was writing his own death warrant. Shortly afterwards, he was despatched to become chairman of the Horserace Betting Levy Board, with a placatory seat in the House of Lords.
She was undoubtedly responsible for my own appointment as Press Secretary to Wilson and the sacking of my predecessor. But my time in her favour was also short-lived.
After nine months, she demanded that I, too, should be sacked for attending a tea party given by another secretary and to which Marcia had not been invited. For once, Wilson resisted, but it was not the last time she sought my removal.
She terrified junior civil servants and would alter table plans for official dinners at No 10 if she was not sitting next to someone famous. She was obsessed with theatrical celebrities. That’s why Lew Grade and his brother, Bernard Delfont, were awarded peerages. She left another official dinner without excuse or apology to fetch Frank Sinatra and his wife and bring them to the after-dinner reception.
Daily life was a constant struggle against her tantrums and tirades. She mocked Wilson and called him ‘Walter Mitty’ and ‘a little man’.
Appallingly, she told his wife, Mary, that she had been to bed with him half a dozen times in 1956 ‘and it wasn’t satisfactory’. Wilson told me that story himself, minutes after he had left Mary in distress. Many years later in 2007, when the BBC aired a docudrama based on my book which included these allegations, she successfully sued them for £70,000 for repeating the ‘insulting’ suggestion.
The truth was that BBC lawyers had been willing to fight the case but were ordered ‘from on high’ to concede. She certainly never sued me – simply because she knew I would fight the case.
The great mystery was why she had such a hold over Wilson. She regularly threatened to ‘destroy’ him, the threats spat out while tapping her handbag. What was in it? Now, perhaps, we shall never know.
The greatest humiliation inflicted upon him was undoubtedly the Resignation Honours List of 1976 – the notorious Lavender List – after he retired as Prime Minister when a number of puzzling, dubious or even crooked figures were rewarded. By then, he was tired and ill and Marcia imposed her wishes, despite what she told this newspaper when it published the handwritten notes for the first time last year. She maintained she had only written down the names Wilson told her to include, but I dispute that.
After her elevation to the peerage she became a devoted member, sitting in the House of Lords for 40 years and regularly drawing her £300-a-day attendance allowance despite never making a speech.
Although she accepted the Labour Whip, she secretly approached Margaret Thatcher offering her help to defeat Jim Callaghan in the 1979 General Election – a monumental treachery. Only her connection with Wilson saved her from being expelled from the party.
In the end, her influence had waned spectacularly. But whatever did pass between Wilson and his secretary, its effects lasted a lifetime.