[A-List] UK state: Wilson plot

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

Here's the Guardian's take on this, and note the informed objectivity of
the stance adopted by its political editor...


Wilson and Falkender claims resurface

Michael White, political editor
Monday September 30, 2002
The Guardian

As John Major's four-year fling with Edwina Currie became public
knowledge, another alleged Downing Street liaison surfaced, potentially
far more serious in its implications: renewed claims that Harold Wilson
and his powerful political secretary, Marcia Falkender, were briefly
lovers years before he became prime minister.

Both Lord Wilson and Lady Falkender, who was ennobled in the notorious
"lavender list" resignation honours in 1976, have often denied the
rumour which persisted through Westminster for many years.

The source of the story, Joe Haines, is hard to dismiss. He was Wilson's
loyal press secretary for many years, a south London-born political
in-fighter who went on to become a loyal lieutenant of Robert Maxwell in
his years as owner of the Daily Mirror, and is now retired in Kent.

As an old enemy of Lady Falkender, who has often written about the
trouble which her brilliant but mercurial temperament caused in No 10,
Mr Haines claims that during one particularly silly bust-up Lady
Falkender told Mary Wilson, the prime minister's wife: "I went to bed
with your husband six times in 1956 and it wasn't satisfactory."

Mr Haines' source, he says, was a distraught Wilson who returned from
seeing his wife to confide in Haines.

Paradoxically, Wilson denied the affair. Yet later that same night he
appeared to confirm the claim by saying: "She has dropped her atomic
bomb at last. She can't hurt me any more".

The contrast between Mr Haines' claims and Ms Currie's - the timing is
coincidental - is striking. Mr Major offered his ex-lover a middling job
as prisons minister. Lord Wilson kept Lady Falkender at the power centre
during four premierships.

Yesterday's claims about Lady Falkender's disruptive influence included
one extraordinary story that when she refused to hand over papers to
Wilson when he was opposition leader, he and her brother, Tony Field,
"broke into her garage over the weekend" and found them. In effect, Mr
Haines notes, a former prime minister was guilty of burglary.

But the Wilson regime was famous for paranoia and its Walter Mitty
moments. So it is unsurprising that Mr Haines reports Lord Stone, Mr
Wilson's doctor, suggesting ways of "disposing of her" without anyone
suspecting murder.

Most of the main players are now dead, though Lady Falkender, 86,
yesterday denied the claims as "beyond belief" in the Mail on Sunday.