Private Eye magazine used to run a feature called Mrs Wilson’s Diary. It was a satire on the madhouse that was 10 Downing Street, viewed through the eyes of a homely, comfortably middle-class wife who only wanted to live a quiet life.
That was how a generation of university students was introduced to Mary Wilson, wife of the last Labour leader before Tony Blair to win a general election.
She was a clever, self-disciplined woman, from the wartime generation brought up never to complain.
Her poems were collected into two published volumes in the 1970s that sold well, although their audience was never as big as that reached by the satirists who created the fictional Mrs Wilson.
Given that it was 20 years ago that her husband died, many may be surprised to learn that the real Mrs Wilson, now Lady Wilson of Rievaulx, still lives in Victoria Street, near the Houses of Parliament, in a flat that has been her London home for decades.
Her family say she is in good health for someone of 99.
One of Harold Wilson’s well-known foibles, when he was Prime Minister, was to take his holidays on the Scilly Isles rather than at any of the world’s more luxurious holiday spots. His widow still owns their little house on Scilly, and took a holiday there only last year.
On 12 January, she will celebrate her 100th birthday. But curiously, there is another elderly lady still around who saw 10 Downing Street and Chequers from the inside, even before Mary Wilson first set foot there. She is Clarissa Eden, Winston Churchill’s niece and the widow of his successor, Sir Anthony Eden.
Lady Eden, who is 95, was moving in high-ranking Conservative circles almost from birth, but nothing in Mary Wilson’s childhood suggested a life destined to be out of the ordinary.
Her father, the Rev Daniel Baldwin, was a Congregationalist minister in Diss, Norfolk, who insisted that his children observe Sundays by attending church twice and reading no novels.
Mary missed out on university, and was working as a shorthand typist in a soap factory on the Wirral in 1934 when she met Harold Wilson, just before he went up to Oxford University.
When they married, on New Year’s Day 1940, she had every reason to expect a quiet, secure future as the wife of a precocious Oxford don. But in 1945 he was swept into Parliament in a seat not held by Labour since 1929. In 1947, aged 31, he was a Cabinet minister. By 1964, he was Prime Minister.
Mary Wilson could never bring herself to think of 10 Downing Street as home.
When her husband resumed the premiership after the February 1974 election, she persuaded him to not move back there. She must have been hurt by the rumours about Wilson’s mercurial relationship with his strong-willed political secretary, Marcia Williams (later Lady Falkender).
The rumours resurfaced in 2003, when Wilson’s former press secretary, Joe Haines, published a book giving an exact date on which he alleged the relationship had gone beyond the purely professional. The journalist Francis Wheen turned this whirlwind story into a BBC4 drama in 2006. That play had two unforeseen effects. Lady Falkender sued and the BBC settled out of court for £75,000 damages, and Lady Wilson, then 91, gave a rare newspaper interview to her husband’s old colleague, Roy Hattersley.
She cannot be said to have given her side of the story, because it would have been out of character for her to talk about anything so personal. But Hattersley reported that Lady Falkender and Lady Wilson were fast friends who lunched together every Wednesday at the House of Lords. That was in 2007. Lady Wilson no longer visits the Lords.
The other great distressing experience of her life came after her husband’s resignation in 1976, when she had to witness his brilliant mind going to pieces under the influence of Alzheimer’s disease. She marked his funeral on Scilly by writing a 10-line poem (see left).
A spell in No 10 is no guarantee of a healthy old age. Many of its occupants have died early or unhappy. None has yet lived to be 100. This week, the much underestimated Mary Wilson will be the first.
Mary Wilson’s poem on Harold’s death
My love you have stumbled slowly
On the quiet way to death
And you lie where the wind blows strongly
With a salty spray on its breath.
For this men of the island bore you
Down paths where the branches meet
And the only sounds were the crunching grind
Of the gravel beneath their feet
And the sighing slide of the ebbing tide
On the beach where the breakers meet.
