![Harold Wilson flanked by his wife Mary Wilson, right, and his lover Marcia Williams](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/politics/2023/10/29/TELEMMGLPICT000188638273_16985970859610_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq1UEfOBrhlcXMt83YVMQJhSeYKp6HuoapgvpfsGYAhho.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Harold Wilson did have affair with his secretary, book claims
The Labour PM’s illicit affair was over by the time he became prime minister
![Harold Wilson flanked by his wife Mary Wilson, right, and his lover Marcia Williams](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/politics/2023/10/29/TELEMMGLPICT000188638273_16985970859610_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq1UEfOBrhlcXMt83YVMQJhSeYKp6HuoapgvpfsGYAhho.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Harold Wilson did have an affair with his long-serving secretary Marcia Williams but it was over by the time he became prime minister, a new biography claims.
Williams, who died in 2019, was by Wilson’s side for 27 years and exerted such influence over him that colleagues assumed they were – or had been – lovers.
They were inseparable as a political force and Williams, later ennobled as Baroness Falkender, hand wrote the infamous Lavender List of resignation honours when Wilson stepped down in 1976.
Wilson, who was married to his wife Mary from 1940 until his death in 1995, always denied an affair, and Williams, who was 16 years his junior, dismissed it as a smear.
But Linda McDougall, whose late husband Austin Mitchell MP was a friend of Williams, has unearthed new evidence of an affair in her book Marcia Williams: The Life and Times of Baroness Falkender.
George Caunt, Wilson’s election agent, wrote an unpublished memoir discovered by McDougall in which he said Wilson and Williams first met on April 23, 1956, which they always remembered because the date translated to 23456.
Wilson, who was then shadow chancellor, sat near Williams, who was taking shorthand notes of a dinner attended by the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at Labour’s Transport House HQ.
In his unpublished memoir Caunt wrote that after the dinner finished at around midnight Wilson introduced himself to the young secretary, then: “Wilson offered Marcia Williams a lift in his car, and that night began an affair which was to last 5-6 years.”
Caunt claimed that Williams was worried that her husband Ed Williams would be waiting up for her when she returned home and might be suspicious, so she arranged a secret sign with Wilson after realising she would see him the next day at an executive committee meeting.
![Marcia Williams, who died in 2019, was by Harold Wilson’s side for 27 years](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/politics/2023/10/29/TELEMMGLPICT000354844723_16985981028310_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqcM9meNCQ49OFRwZswq42fTMJmW0FJeFW2jcG3l-KIjo.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Williams would put “sugar in the saucer if Mr Williams had been awake and asked questions”, Caunt claimed.
Ms McDougall reports that Wilson’s driver, Bill Housden, would often take Wilson to Williams’s home and then pick him up much later, and when she asked Williams’s sister-in-law Margarete Field whether they had an affair she laughed and said: “Well, what do you think?”
Both Wilson and Williams – who divorced in 1961 and never remarried – always denied having an affair, even though Williams is known to have confronted Wilson’s wife Mary in an agitated state and told her: “I went to bed with your husband six times in 1956 and it wasn’t satisfactory.”
According to Joe Haines, Wilson’s former press secretary, he managed to convince his wife that Williams, by then his political secretary, was making it up out of spite, but Wilson appeared to admit it was true by telling Haines: “Well, she has dropped her atomic bomb at last. She can’t hurt me any more.”
McDougall writes that by the time Wilson entered Downing Street in 1964 “their sexual relationship, and it is difficult to believe it never happened, was long over”.
Williams unquestionably did have an affair with another married man, Walter Terry, chief political correspondent of the Daily Mail, which produced two sons she managed to keep secret for five years.
Incredibly, Williams managed to conceal her two pregnancies by keeping her coat on at work when her bump started to become obvious, and Wilson sent his own doctor, Joe Stone, to attend the births in 1968 and 1969. Wilson also arranged for the nanny of a friend to look after Williams when she went home from hospital so that Williams would not be seen carrying a baby or buying baby goods.
Her second son Daniel was born just 10 months after her first son Timothy, and the secrecy surrounding the birth was so extreme that Timothy was delivered to the nanny’s home in a cardboard box.
Stone did not get on with Williams, according to the book, and even offered to “dispose” of her to free Wilson from the hold she had over him.
He also prescribed Valium to Williams, who was also taking a stimulant called Drinamyl, known at the time as “purple hearts” and containing amphetamine, which she took to get her through her long and hectic working days.
McDougall suggests that the mania that Williams’s enemies often referred to was a result of the dangerous mixture of addictive drugs she was consuming at the time.
She also suggests that Williams was the most important woman in politics before Margaret Thatcher, and blames misogyny for the negativity that dogged her throughout her career.