Imagine a story of sex, drugs and secrets inside Downing Street. A story about a political wife accused of meddling, and a resignation honours list mired in scandal. And no, it’s not the one you’re thinking of. This is the irresistible tale of Marcia Williams, political secretary and “office wife” to the Labour prime minister Harold Wilson, and if it were the plot of a thriller it would seem too wild to be true.
In an era when a woman’s role in Downing Street was limited largely to typing and filing, Williams had to fight to be taken seriously, while simultaneously keeping a jaw-dropping personal secret. During her time in No 10 she had two sons by the then Daily Mail chief political correspondent Walter Terry, managing to conceal two pregnancies and the children’s existence for years with the help of a rich party donor and a compliant Fleet Street. Hers is one of the most fascinating yet overlooked stories in 20th-century politics, perfect for revisiting through a more sympathetic modern lens, which is exactly what Linda McDougall’s millennial-friendly new biography offers.
Though Wilson himself said he could not have become prime minister without her, in her lifetime Williams was portrayed as a hysterical tyrant who held him back. McDougall makes a compelling case for seeing her instead as the complex product of an era where being “bloody difficult” – as Ken Clarke famously said of Theresa May – but nonetheless respected was rarely an option for women, and where the idea of a man relying on a woman’s political insights seemed far less plausible than the idea of her having some dark hold over him. “The assumption was that she was some historical Monica Lewinsky figure who turned a botched sexual encounter or two into a way of blackmailing the most powerful man in the land. It wasn’t true of Lewinsky and it wasn’t what happened between Harold and Marcia,” writes McDougall.
Yet she acknowledges that Williams, in her role as office wife, jockeying for position with Wilson’s actual wife, Mary, at best blurred the lines and at worst invited accusations of corruption. If McDougall’s Marcia is not the villain previously suggested, she is no heroine either.
Williams, or Baroness Falkender as she latterly became, died in 2019 and has been posthumously lucky in her biographer. During her long career as a documentary maker, McDougall turned her camera on everyone from a young Margaret Thatcher – who cannily greeted the film crew washing up at the kitchen sink – to the Labour women elected in 1997, who talked candidly about sexism in parliament. She never met Williams but her late husband, the former Labour MP Austin Mitchell, did; and she evidently remembers enough of what life was like for working women in the 1960s to instinctively distrust the “patronising, misogynistic and dismissive verdict” delivered by Williams’s male contemporaries.
When she met rising star Wilson in 1956, Marcia Williams was a married 24-year-old secretary working at Labour party headquarters. Clever and ambitious, she started sending him helpful anonymous notes describing various party machinations; only after he’d hired her did she admit to being the author.
Though there remain gaps in her story given that the chief protagonists are now dead, McDougall suggests it’s around this time they are most likely to have slept together – though Wilson and Williams always denied it. But by 1964, when Wilson was elected prime minister, she thinks “their sexual relationship, and it is difficult to believe it never happened, was long over”. In its place came a political partnership that to Williams seemed one of equals, even if the men around her saw a jumped-up secretary with no business shouting at the prime minister.
Carving out a role with no precedent in No 10 required sharp elbows, and she swiftly gained a reputation for aggression. But it wasn’t until the late 60s, McDougall writes, that Williams began to be described as “unhinged”, creating melodramatic scenes obliging the prime minister to rush to her side. In 1972, seemingly angry that Wilson had taken his wife out for her birthday, Williams allegedly told Mary Wilson that “I went to bed with your husband six times in 1956 and it wasn’t satisfactory”.
McDougall doesn’t gloss over her unreasonableness nor the strain it put on No 10. But she does point out that between 1968 and 1969, Williams (by now divorced) had two children less than a year apart by a married lover, who left her struggling to raise them as a single mother in constant fear of this career-ending scandal being discovered. (She only managed to rush straight back to work after the births because the millionaire Labour donor Joe Kagan, later jailed for tax evasion, supplied a nanny and a flat where her mother and sister secretly helped raise the children; both Kagan and the businessman James Goldsmith, who paid the children’s school fees, would later controversially get peerages.) To cope with her long working days, she relied on purple hearts – amphetamines sold under the counter in 60s pubs and cafes – and then calmed herself down with Valium prescribed by Wilson’s doctor. As an overstressed working mother herself at the time, McDougall writes that she too was prescribed Valium, with alarming side effects. Could Williams’s erratic behaviour be put down with hindsight to the drugs, plus never-ending anxiety about being exposed?
The great mystery is how the Wilson regime kept all this quiet. Rumours had long circled of an affair between Marcia and Harold – he successfully sued over a cartoon of the two of them in bed together – and McDougall writes that other journalists knew she was sleeping with Terry. But even after Private Eye broke the story, Wilson’s lawyers persuaded newspaper editors not to follow up what was deemed to be vulgar gossip. More puzzling is the way nobody in No 10 seemed to notice her pregnancies. Joe Haines, Wilson’s press secretary, explained that she “always kept her coat on” but as McDougall writes, it’s hard to believe a woman would be so easily fooled. Did some simply decline to see?
Williams’s final years in No 10 were tainted by scandals over her brother’s business interests and the infamous “lavender list” of resignation honours she scribbled on lilac paper, ostensibly at Wilson’s behest, though her critics suspected her of pushing him to include people she owed favours. In her later years, she relied on old political contacts to help pay her medical bills.
Given its efforts to see her through a feminist lens, this biography offers surprisingly little about Williams’s direct political legacy: the reshuffle decisions she is said to have made, or policies she helped shape. We are told how crucial her judgment was to Wilson but rarely shown why, in what seems more an analysis of a partnership than of Williams in her own right. But like many clever women of her generation, it was only through her relationship with a man that she was able to exercise such power. This is as much a history of sexual politics as of the Westminster kind; a reminder of how much has changed since the 60s and how much remains depressingly familiar.
• Marcia Williams: The Life and Times of Baroness Falkender by Linda McDougall is published by Biteback (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. From Friday 8 December 2023 to Wednesday 10 January 2024, 20p from every Guardian Bookshop order will support the Guardian and Observer’s charity appeal 2023.
