‘I went to bed with Harold Wilson six times – it wasn’t satisfactory’: why Lady Falkender terrified Westminster
The life of Marcia Williams, Political Secretary, Downing Street dominatrix and general Svengali to Harold Wilson, might be the plot of a Victorian sensation novel. Marcia’s reign of terror, when Number 10 became a den of paranoia, treachery, blackmail and drug use, came to a head in 1974 with a scandal over secret pregnancies, slag heaps, and a sheet of lavender-coloured note paper.
Not many people now remember Marcia, who as Lady Forkbender was a Private Eye mainstay in the 1970s. The role of unelected political advisor was then so unusual that no one, including Marcia or her boss, understood quite what it involved. Marcia was essentially Wilson’s work wife while Mary, who disliked politics, was his home wife. He needed both but Marcia – tall, blonde, and 16 years his junior – grabbed all the attention.
Her appearance in the third series of The Crown, where she is portrayed, as ever, whipping Wilson into submission, sums up what remains of her legacy: “You’re pathetic! You disgust me!” Marcia-the-witch tells Harold-the-drip. “If you ever want to be a real leader, a real man, a real socialist, you’re going to have to grow some balls.”
The two previous chroniclers of Lady Falkender, as she became in 1974, are Joe Haines (Wilson’s press secretary, who blamed what he called Marcia’s “tantrums, tirades and tyranny” for the prime minister’s early demise), and Bernard Donoughue, Wilson’s policy adviser, who recorded in his diaries the couple’s strange dynamic. “I get the feeling that everything [Wilson] does in politics is to please her,” Donoughue reflected after another trying day. “It is amazing to watch.”
Donoughue and Haines were both fascinated by Marcia but neither, Linda McDougall points out in her spirited defence, liked or understood her. “There was never any one else like Marcia,” Haines, now 95, tells McDougall in an interview towards the end of this book. “I never met anyone else who approached her on a scale of evil, and I believe in evil… She was wicked, and I am being precise.” McDougall, whose late husband, Austin Michell, was Labour MP for Grimsby, brings a more reasoned perspective. She did not know Marcia personally but she knows misogny when she sees it and McDougall’s aim is to restore her subject’s reputation as the most significant woman in politics besides Margaret Thatcher (whom Marcia admired and physically resembled). Why, McDougall asks, was Marcia – who called Wilson, in public, “a c--t” – so unpredictable, temperamental, and absolutely bloody terrifying? What one earth was going on with her?
Marcia Field, nicknamed “Napoleon” as a child, was born in 1932. Her father, a Conservative voter, was a Northamptonshire builder and her mother, so the family believed, an illegitimate child of King Edward VII. Despite being anti-monarchist, Marcia took pride in her royal blood. This was one of many contradictions. She went from a grammar school, where her teacher introduced her to socialism, to read history at Queen Mary College, where she met her husband, Ed Williams, chair of the student Conservative Society (her attraction to Tory men was another contradiction).
After secretarial training she got a job, aged 24, at Labour Party HQ, where her boss, Morgan Phillips, on the Right of the party, was sidelining Wilson, then shadow chancellor, who was on the Left. Marcia, putting her money on Wilson, sent him a series of anonymous letters warning him of “certain things that were happening” which might affect his political progress.
She and Wilson first met on April 23 1956 – a date they immortalised as 23456 – at the House of Commons dinner where Nikita Khrushchev, Communist Party First Secretary, had a shouting match with the Labour MP George Brown. Wilson offered Marcia a lift home, after which one thing led to another. Marcia’s marriage ended the following year, with Wilson helping to arrange the divorce. “It is difficult to believe,” says McDougall, that a sexual relationship between them “never happened”, but how long did it last? One commentator has suggested “5/6 years”, but Marcia herself told Mary Wilson during an attack of jealousy, “I went to bed with your husband six times in 1956 and it wasn’t satisfactory.” According to Joe Haines, who believed Marcia was blackmailing Wilson, his response to her outburst was relief: “Well, she has dropped her atomic bomb at last. She can’t hurt me any more.”
It was Private Eye who exposed, in 1974, Marcia’s relationship with Walter Terry, political correspondent of the Daily Mail, who fathered her two secret sons, born 10 months apart in 1968 and 1969. While Terry eventually returned to his wife, Marcia’s hatred of Private Eye led to an unlikely alliance with the financier James Goldsmith, who paid the boys’ school fees.
When Marcia was struggling, on very little money, to raise her children, protect their privacy and run the country, she became, McDougall suggests, like many other women in the 1970s including McDougall herself, addicted to prescription drugs. She was given amphetamines to keep her awake and Valium, prescribed by Wilson’s own doctor, to “soothe away her influence over the prime minister”. The combination, plus the quantity she was taking, led to her increasingly hysterical behaviour.
This is entirely plausible, but it doesn’t account for Marcia’s involvement in her brother’s dodgy slag heaps, or her insistence on having James Goldsmith on the 1976 resignation honours list (drafted in her handwriting, on coloured notepaper). It was the “Lavender list”, as it was known, that besmirched Wilson’s political legacy.
Marcia Williams is not a faultless book. The structure is muddled, McDougall repeats herself umpteen times, not enough is said about Wilson’s need for Marcia, whose last 40 years are skimmed over, but none of this matters. It was a mesmerising moment in British political history and McDougall is absolutely right to revise Marcia’s reputation.
The most touching of the book’s many interviews is with Ade Adenuga, the owner of the nursing home in which Marcia died, broken and penniless, in 2019. Lady Falkender, Mr Adenuga tells McDougall, was a popular resident who always had a story to tell. I’ll bet she did.
Frances Wilson’s latest book is Burning Man: The Ascent of DH Lawrence. Marcia Williams: The Life and Times of Baroness Falkender is published by Biteback at ￡25. To order your copy for ￡19.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books