Bernard Donoughue
London: Jonathan Cape, £25, h/b
Political diaries are among my favourite reading. In that genre this is an absolute belter; but not for the minutiae of policy formation, with which Donoughue was primarily preoccupied, or the account of the government’s handling of various incidents, interesting though they are; but for the picture it contains of the people of No. 10 Downing St. in the Wilson administrations of the 1970s and the light it throws on some of the central themes in the smear campaigns run against Wilson. We are talking about The Marcia Problem.
In his disparaging review (1) Roy Hattersley commented that it contained ‘minor sensations’, mostly to do with ‘the alleged excesses of the Prime Minister’s private secretary, Marcia Williams, now Lady Falkender’. It depends what you consider minor. Marcia Falkender had been Wilson’s right-hand for nearly twenty years and was, by any measure, a most significant political figure at a time when the Wilson governments were having a difficult time on almost any front you care to mention: Northern Ireland, inflation, unions, rising unemployment, the EEC referendum – not to mention the smear campaigns and various psy-ops running against them. As the closest person to Wilson, what she did mattered. If Donoughue has a single theme here it is that the Wilson governments of 1974-76, of which he was a part, were undermined by the presence of Falkender who took up Wilson’s time and declining energy with her neuroses, paranoia, hysteria, delusions and demands.
She also was responsible for some of the dodgy businessmen who floated in and out of No 10. On Donoughue’s account, they were hanging round Falkender because they thought she could get to Wilson for them. And they were right: but there was a price. Wilson needed money to fund his private office. The late Eric Miller is escorting Falkender in these pages – at one stage she was trying to get him to leave his wife for her – and he ended up on the notorious ‘lavender list’, Wilson’s resignation honours list, compiled partly by Falkender. Miller was knighted for giving money to Wilson’s private office – which was Falkender, essentially. Miller committed suicide – or ‘committed suicide’; which isn’t clear – soon after this when his business went under.
Falkender’s ability to raise this money from businessmen suitors of the prime minister was made possible by her acquisition of the patronage office in 1966 which, hitherto, had been run with the Chief Whip.
Much of this money for Wilson’s private office, came from Jewish businessmen. Wilson (and Falkender and Donoughue) were very pro-Israeli and there are many reports here of Israeli diplomats visiting No. 10. When Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party in 1994, his private office was funded by Jewish businessmen, led by Lord Levy. (2) Is it really of no political interest that the Israeli lobby in Britain has been funding one of its major parties? Apparently so.
There have been previous accounts of this ménage, but they have come either from people like Chapman Pincher or from Joe Haines, Wilson’s press secretary who, like almost everyone else, detested Falkender. These sources didn’t look terribly credible to me when I began examining them in the mid 1980s but it turns out that most of the stories were true; and the reality was even stranger than the left-hating newspapers were being told.
Neither Roy Hattersley, nor Anthony Howard, who reviewed this in the Daily Telegraph, noticed (or thought worth mentioning) a major feature of Falkender’s behaviour: she was doing drugs, speed (purple hearts, named by Donoughue), sleepers and tranquillisers. Donoughue shows that Wilson’s doctor, Joseph Stone, certainly gave her some of them. These days we know what such heavy duty psychoactive substances can do to your mental state; I guess back in the mid 1970s the utterly straight people around Wilson simply didn’t know. Donoughue doesn’t express surprise or shock at the discovery.
Towards the end of the period Wilson began trying to distance himself from her; but he couldn’t ditch her, even though he wanted to. Falkender had some kind of grip on Wilson, some secret which she held over him. Picking up fragments of gossip, Donoughue ventures, tentatively, that Wilson had made some dodgy money somewhere which Falkender could reveal. Donoughue also believes that Wilson did it for her, to pay her salary as his secretary; perhaps an early step in setting Falkender up in the manner to which she became accustomed. In 1975 she had three houses and three personal servants – on a salary of £4,000 a year? ‘Where did Falkender’s money come from?’ is one of the big unanswered question in this book.
Falkender’s behaviour as witnessed by Donoughue and as reported to him by other members of Wilson’s inner circle, was so bizarre and so consuming of the prime minister’s time that it is not difficult to believe, as Joe Haines has reported in his most recent account of these events, that Dr Stone offered to kill her. (3)
The book is full of fascinating fragments. One worth telling here concerns Lord Wigg, the former George Wigg MP, who, for the first couple of years of the Labour government of 1964/5, had been Wilson’s advisor on MI5 and MI6. This relationship came to grief when Wilson followed Wigg’s advice in the D-Notice Affair and came off worst in a pissing contest with MI5. After which, Wigg’s role at No 10 diminished and by the 1974 government he was positively hostile to Wilson – probably, but not certainly, because he had become infected with MI5’s conspiracy theory about Wilson and the KGB. Wilson believed that Wigg was the source of some of the leaks to the press and hired a private detective to research Wigg. The detective struck pay-dirt: Wigg had ‘a second family’. Wilson let Wigg know that he knew of his secret and would give it to the press unless the leaks stopped.
Notes
1 Roy Hattersley, ‘No one likes a sneak’, The Observer 10 July 2005. But as Tony Frewin said, ‘Oh yes they do!’
2 Or by the Israeli government laundering money through businessmen…….
3 Cahal Milmo, ‘Stone doctor who offered to kill Falkender’, The Independent, 30 September 2002.