Harold Wilson had won a third election victory for the Labour Party, hitherto an unheard-of achievement in British politics. He had not expected to win. In the event of his defeat, he planned to go into hiding at the Golden Cross Hotel, Kirby, and to resign as party leader at once.1 He had already signalled to colleagues that, in the event of a victory, he would not serve a full term. With his keenness for statistics and breaking records, he had some desire to break Asquith’s record for length of office, and he was therefore prepared, once he became Prime Minister in March 1974, to stay on for another two years.2 But, already at fifty-eight years old, he was feeling exhausted by the workload. He told Barbara Castle that the stress involved stomach pains.3 which cannot have been helped by persistent pipe-smoking and by an ever-increasing intake of alcohol. ‘Are we to be led by a neurotic drunk?’ Anthony Wedgwood Benn had asked when George Brown stood against Wilson in the leadership election of 1963.4 No, was the answer on this occasion; but by the time of his third administration, with the glass of brandy forever at his side, Wilson had turned into just that. He had lost his zest for infighting and intrigue, and his capacity for hard work. The first quarter of 1975, for example, involved eleven Cabinets, twenty-eight meetings with industrialists, twenty ministerial speeches, two visits abroad, one to Northern Ireland, where the situation was deteriorating, thirteen other public engagements at home. He did not find time for a single private or social engagement in the entire period.
The economic situation was bleak indeed. Ted Heath had asked the electorate the question ‘Who Governs Britain?’ Heath had maintained that miners’ pay was 8 percent above the average for industrial workers. During the election it emerged that he had made a mistake and that the pay was in fact 8 percent below.5 No wonder, when Heath had been humiliated, and ousted from leadership of his party, the first person whose name Margaret Thatcher recommended for a peerage should have been Joe Gormley, the leader of the National Union of Mineworkers. But for Wilson, as Prime Minister, the insoluble problem of the balance of payments was waiting for him as soon as he took office. Oil prices had quadrupled since the end of 1973; there was a record trade deficit in Britain; inflation stood at 15 percent; there was decline in industrial production and a slump in living standards.6
Inevitably, given the discontent in the country at large, and the appalling state of industrial relations, the left weighed in to support the workers, and in so doing eventually to wreck the Labour Party. Wilson realised that, although he had won the election, his opponent Ted Heath had been right. The country could not afford to pay out money which it did not have, without the prospect of eventual ruin. It is out of such pain that successful political careers can be born. Anthony Wedgwood Benn, the former Gaitskellite Viscount Stansgate.7 had come to realise that he was never going to impress Harold Wilson, but as Tony Benn the People’s chum he stood a good chance of becoming the next best thing, a man who was perceived by the public as a conviction politician. He could become a rallying point for the disaffected left, the more so, since Michael Foot, the obvious guardian of the left’s flame, had pledged loyalty to the leadership and become the Secretary of State for Employment. Wilson had thereby made the poacher into a gamekeeper, and turned the most eloquent possible advocate for the miners’ and other workers’ cause into the boss who would have to refuse them pay rises. It left the field for nuisance-making open to Benn. After the 1970 election, when Labour had expected to win, Tony Benn and Caroline, his very rich American wife, had been buoyant in mood. ‘We’ve never been happier,’ they told Susan Crosland. Benn now saw himself ‘as the left-wing answer to Enoch Powell’ calling in the wilderness. ‘Enoch has more effect on the country than either Party,’ said Wedgwood Benn, adding that he intended to make ‘a major speech every three months’.8 Wilson noted, as Wedgwood Benn embarked on this successful new piece of self-invention, that he immatured with age. The relentlessness with which Wedgwood Benn created this role for himself helped the party descend into the feuding which would all but destroy it.
Wilson, therefore, had formidable problems on his return as Prime Minister in 1974. But the warring of the left, both with itself and with the right of the party and the near-collapse of the economy, paled beside the everlasting problem of Marcia. In order to appease Mary, he had made the decision that they would no longer reside at Downing Street, but continue to live in their house in Lord North Street. But on the very day of the election, when he went to Number 10 to resume his office, Marcia went with him, and the front door had no sooner shut than she was shouting at him. ‘Now you are back…you don’t need me any more!’9 From the Marcia angle, it had been a tense election. Things had been going well for Labour. J. Enoch Powell, as popular for his denunciations of Europe as for his hostility to Pakistani immigrants, had urged his supporters to vote Labour, to give them a chance to vote in a referendum to get Britain out of the Common Market. There had been the 8 percent muddle over miners’ pay, revealing that Heath had called the whole election on a false premise. So far, so good. And then the newspapers began to break the story of Marcia Williams’s brother Tony Field, some slag heaps which had been bought on spec near Wigan, and sold to a dodgy property developer called Ronald Millhench. The Daily Mail had attempted to print a story before the election, which suggested that Wilson himself had been involved in the land speculation. The faithful Arnold Goodman issued writs and both the Mail and the Express were silenced. But by the time Wilson was Prime Minister the story was out.
Tony Field had indeed bought slag heaps at Ince-in-Makerfield, near Wigan, and a stone quarry. At a time when the Labour Party was formally committed to taking land into public ownership, Marcia’s brother was responding to the property boom of 1971 and selling on his slag heaps, with planning permission attached, first to a group of companies run by one Victor Harper of Birmingham, who in turn sold on to Ronald Millhench, who also bought a larger neighbouring site without planning permission. It turned out that Tony Field sometimes used Harold Wilson’s office, and that Millhench had stolen some of Wilson’s personal writing paper. For this, and more serious offences, he was eventually to be gaoled in November 1974.
It was clear that the wisest course of action for Wilson would be to answer questions about the whole matter as lightly as possible in the House of Commons, and otherwise ignore it, and wait for it to blow away. This was the advice given to him by Joe Haines, and by his new policy adviser from the London School of Economics, Bernard Donoughue. Their advice was ignored, and Wilson ponderously rose in the Commons on 4 April to insist that Marcia’s brother Field was engaged not in ‘speculation’ but ‘land reclamation’. Thousands of column inches were now given to the matter in the press–over 6,000 inches between 3 and 11 April alone. Wilson and Marcia had unwisely declared war on Fleet Street, and the journalists were preparing their counterblasts. Only when Walter Terry, the father of her two children, threatened to take legal action were the papers prevented from splashing the (hitherto secret) existence of her illegitimate offspring all over the Daily Express. In the midst of the furore, Wilson played one of his boldest cards. Far from severing relations with Marcia, or putting a distance between the Prime Minister’s office and her at the time of the press’s obsession with slag heaps and reclamation, Harold Wilson recommended Marcia’s name to the Queen, and she was created a Life Peer. Harvey Smith was a show jumper who had caused a stir when he stuck two fingers up to show his disapproval of some onlookers. Wilson, in recommending Marcia’s name to the Queen, informed the monarch that he intended to ‘do a Harvey Smith’ at the press. Astonishingly, the Queen appears to have accepted this as a good enough reason for making Marcia into Baroness Falkender on 23 July 1974. It was often said during our times that the Queen ‘never put a foot wrong’. Yet a conspicuous feature of her life as Head of State was the way in which she accepted recommendations for peerages, and eventually the complete rearrangement of the Upper House, without any apparent question. In this, she differed markedly from George V, who prevented Asquith from acting upon the threat to create five hundred Liberal peers to force through Lloyd George’s Budget. There was no reason at all, constitutional or otherwise, why the monarch could not have questioned Marcia’s right to become a pensioned legislator for the rest of her natural life; just as common sense and common decency should surely have prevented the Queen from ennobling Jeffrey Archer (perjurer, liar, cheat) or Conrad Black (shady businessman, asset stripper and eventually imprisoned fraudster) or the extraordinary gang of unworthies elevated by Tony Blair, having offered loans or gifts to the New Labour project. The Queen had many virtues but political courage was not one of them, and in allowing Parliament thus to fall further into disrepute she must be said to have ‘put a foot wrong’.
Harold Wilson’s final administration was marked–or marred–by appointments which seemed like bad jokes. Having done ‘a Harvey Smith’ to the press by allowing Marcia a peerage, he then did ‘the same’ to the Church. The time came for Michael Ramsey to retire as Archbishop of Canterbury. The idea was mooted that one of the great Chadwick brothers should immediately be appointed to Canterbury, even though neither of them was a Bishop. Henry Chadwick, a patristic scholar of brilliance, was Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, and his brother Owen was Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. Both would have brought distinction to the role of Archbishop; Ramsey had a low view of the Archbishop of York, Donald Coggan–the Cog–and allowed Wilson to know it. The Cog was the most senior evangelical churchman of his day, becoming Bishop of Bradford in 1956 and Archbishop of York in 1961. He had ‘peaked’ when becoming Principal of the London College of Divinity in 1944, and was quite unsuited for high ecclesiastical office. Nevertheless, the Prime Minister did not heed Ramsey’s advice, and appointed the Cog.10 or Donald Duck as Private Eye immediately christened him. Coggan was not without excellent personal qualities. He had a beautiful voice, and he was one of those strange individuals who could pick up a language almost immediately. He had only to attend a liturgy in Africa to grasp, by the end of an hour, the basic morphology of Hausa or Swahili. But he was not up to the task of public office. And by appointing him, Wilson then left the Archbishopric of York vacant. Three bishops in a row refused the offer to replace him. ‘I am puzzled and concerned by the difficulties which have arisen. I fear that at least some of the story must be known to some of the Bishops and others. I therefore think that the person next approached will have to be told quite frankly that there have been these difficulties. I hope that you and the Archbishop of Canterbury will then be prepared to apply all decent pressure on that person to see a call to York as, among other things, a duty to be undertaken for the good of the church. Our next attempt must succeed.’11 Astonishingly, all they could come up with was another dud–Stuart Blanch, an agoraphobic, who suffered a nervous breakdown in 1981,12 having been the most undistinguished Archbishop of York in the 1,300 years or so of the province’s history. But if the elevation of Donald Duck, Stuart Blanch and Baroness Falkender represented new ‘lows’ in the history of the Church and state, Wilson, the lover of Gilbert and Sullivan, had one final flourish up his sleeve before he left the stage.
Many of the G and S operettas contain jokes about the House of Lords. Perhaps these sank more deeply into Wilson’s subconscious than the more earnest request, from the left of the Labour Party since its inception, to uproot or abolish the legislative rights of the peers. At every State Opening of Parliament, the peerage of England would be assembled in their robes of ermine and scarlet. As Wilson trudged from the Commons to the Lords, for his final State Opening, it is probably safe to guess that the merry airs of Sir Arthur Sullivan and the frivolous words of W. S. Gilbert were singing inside his tired head. The dingy wife Mary continued to be the ‘martyr’, regarding his return to office as Labour Prime Minister, not as a personal triumph for him, but as an inconvenience to herself. ‘Of course I hate it. But then I always have. But I do my job.’13 Marcia continued to supply strident ‘noises off’. Week in, week out, Wilson had to be an embarrassed witness to such scenes as when, during the State Visit of the Prime Minister of Fiji, the food was not served the second everyone sat at table. Marcia strode out in front of everyone and yelled at Patrick Wright, the private secretary for foreign affairs, ‘Don’t you dare ever again allow people to sit down if their food is not ready to be served immediately.’14 Her tirades and harangues against poor Harold never let up. He had never had any close friends. He was what Goodman called a philistine. It was hard to imagine into what comforting retreat he could crawl, without the help of alcohol and the semi-merciful humiliations of early dementia.
As upon its lordly way
This unique procession passes,
Tarantara! Tzing! Boom!
Bow, bow, ye lower middle classes!
Bow, bow, ye tradesmen, bow ye masses!
Blow the trumpets, bang the brasses!
Tarantara! Tzing! Boom!
We are peers of highest station
Paragons of legislation,
Pillars of the British nation!15
We do not know when exactly he decided to resign, but he must have known that he was to do so, as he led the Commoners into the House of Peers for the last time. Was there anarchic playfulness in his mind? When a man is gripped with hatred for the women who are making his life a misery, he often realises that the worst punishment he could inflict upon them would be to give them precisely what they asked for. To poor Mary, he gave the quiet domestic life for which she had always begged: only now he was suffering from incipient Alzheimer’s and was condemning her to be the nurse of a mental defective. He punished Marcia by making her friends into peers and knights, thereby alerting the world to their deplorable defects of character. Bernard Donoughue wrote of Marcia: ‘He often indulged her wildest whims almost like a daughter…and equally, seemed to fear her like a fierce mother (as when he physically hid from her intimidating telephone calls)… Somehow over the previous twenty or so years, she had frightened Harold Wilson and reduced him to a dependence which was sometimes pathetic to observe.’16
Resignation honours lists were traditionally reserved for personal service to the Prime Minister. So it was that Harold Wilson, when he knew that he was going to lay down his office, made his first list, containing the names of the driver, Bill Housden, the cook Mrs Pollard, three of Marcia’s long-suffering secretaries and some Number 10 civil servants. But there was another list, written on lavender writing paper, and it was this list with which Harold Wilson’s name would be forever associated. If it was intended as some kind of anarchic joke, it could certainly be seen as effective, since after the ennoblement and glorification of the names upon it, it was impossible for anyone in Britain to take seriously either the honours system or the House of Lords.
Among the names on the list was Jacob Kagan, a textile manufacturer responsible for Wilson’s awful ‘signature’ Gannex macs. He was a thug, known to offer physical violence to anyone, including women, who stood in his way. He approached the journalist Peter Jenkins asking him if he could procure women for him. He was eventually gaoled in December 1978 for serious currency offences.17 Together with other Wilson peers, such as Lords Plurenden, Kissin and Schon, Kagan had trade interests in the Soviet bloc. Then there were the showbiz names. David Frost was written down for a peerage, though Arnold Goodman eventually persuaded Wilson to cross his name off the Lavender List.18 Lew Grade and Bernard Delfont were there, and George Weidenfeld, implausible publisher, bon vivant, wheeler and dealer, all soon to be summoned into the Second Chamber and described in Her Majesty’s words as her trusty and well-beloved friends.
Then there were knighthoods–for James Hanson and James Goldsmith, both of whom had given large sums to the Conservative Party. Goldsmith was apparently knighted for ‘services to exports’ even though his company, Cavenham Foods, had only 0.4 percent of its sales overseas.19 Then there was Eric Miller, the boss of the Peachey Property Company, a close friend of Marcia. Some people expected them to marry, especially when he offered to take her on a private visit to Israel–though this trip eventually fell through.20 When Miller’s wife protested against the relationship with Lady Falkender, Marcia went to bed, telephoning the Prime Minister in the middle of an important conference in Brussels to tell him that he must get in touch with Eric Miller at once and persuade Miller not to give her up, whatever his wife insisted. Miller was eventually offered only a knighthood. He shot himself in 1977, before a censorious DTI report was published which revealed his dodgy business dealings at Peachey Property.
On 27 May The Times described the list as ‘a bizarre one for a socialist ex-Prime Minister’. The majority of honorands were ‘capitalists of a tough risk-taking type’–i.e., Jews. ‘Are they really his friends for whom he feels the warmth of personal gratitude?’ Donoughue answered that with the information that Wilson himself said, on the day he left office, that he barely knew half of them. One of his Cabinet colleagues was quoted in the Sunday Times of 30 May 1976: ‘A pity about Harold. Such a graceful exit–and then he had to do this on the doorstep.’21