The two girls stood face to face on the doorstep of a London home simply north of Oxford Street.
One of them was Mary, spouse of the then-leader of the Opposition and former prime minister Harold Wilson. The different was his highly effective political and non-public secretary, Marcia Williams, proprietor of the property.
Marcia spoke first. ‘I have only one thing to say to you,’ she told Mary. ‘I went to bed with your husband six times in 1956 — and it wasn’t passable.’
History doesn’t relate what Mary mentioned in response to this astounding assertion.
But later that night, in January 1972, Wilson summoned his press spokesman, Joe Haines, to his Commons workplace. Wilson was, recalled Haines later, considerably tense and embarrassed.
It emerged that Marcia had flown right into a jealous rage when she heard that Wilson had taken his spouse out for a birthday lunch to an upmarket Soho restaurant.
When Mary received house after the meal, Marcia had telephoned and introduced that she wished to see her instantly.
Perhaps surprisingly, Mary had complied, setting out immediately for Marcia’s mews house, solely to obtain the shattering revelation about her husband’s supposed infidelity.
Haines would later describe the occasion as ‘almost too dreadful to comprehend’. But he recalled that at the finish of their dialog Wilson had told him: ‘Well, she has dropped her atomic bombshell at last. She can’t damage me any extra.’
Despite the episode, Marcia would stay at Wilson’s aspect for the relaxation of his life, together with his second time period as prime minister from 1974 to 1976, in what stays one of British historical past’s most enduring but puzzling political partnerships.
What was the actual nature of their relationship? What was her maintain over him, her critics puzzled? Why, regardless of her typically erratic, prima donna-like behaviour and the reality that the majority his aides and civil servants loathed her, did he stay steadfastly loyal to her?
Few have heard of Marcia right this moment. Although she lived till 2019, she was out of the public eye lengthy earlier than Wilson died in 1995. But this, I consider, is to do her a grave disservice.
As a journalist and the spouse of a former politician, the late Austin Mitchell, I have identified many inside the Westminster bubble. But Marcia was in a league of her personal, an astute and good tactician whose true contribution to British life has by no means been totally acknowledged.
Indeed, I consider it is true to say that she was, after Margaret Thatcher, the most important feminine politician of the 20th century.
By any measure she was a exceptional lady whose non-public life was typically as intriguing as her public one.
This was a lady who, in the days when illegitimacy was a supply of disgrace and scandal, not solely had two sons by a married political journalist throughout her time at No 10, however managed to preserve her pregnancies and the youngsters’s existence secret from even her closest colleagues, all whereas remaining Wilson’s right-hand lady. As the topic of nearly fixed media scrutiny, this was a fairly extraordinary achievement.
Among those that knew her, she stays a divisive determine. Joe Haines, now 95, didn’t mince his phrases when I interviewed him at his house earlier this yr. ‘I never met anyone else who approached her on a scale of evil, and I believe in evil,’ he told me, including that Marcia was a foul-mouthed bully who referred to as Wilson a ‘c***’ in entrance of him.
The BBC’s late political editor John Cole had a unique expertise. ‘She had a sharp political brain and was often helpful to me in giving a well-balanced judgment of how the Labour Party would react to some policy,’ he recalled. ‘Although nominally an adviser, she was among the shrewdest Labour politicians of her period.’
So who was proper? Her admirers or her detractors? Or each?
The first lady to wield actual energy in 10 Downing Street, she has been unjustly forgotten by the historic narrative. It is my goal, whereas recognising her faults and failures, to assist put that proper.
Tall, slim and blonde with piercing blue eyes, newly-married Marcia Williams was a 24-year-old secretary at Transport House, the Labour Party’s HQ, when she met the man she had already talent-spotted as a rising star, former Oxford don Harold Wilson.
Their particular relationship started on April 23, 1956 — a date immortalised by them as ‘23456’ — throughout a reception for the two most necessary males in the Soviet Union, Communist Party First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev and his sidekick, Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin.
Accounts of what occurred that night range, with some saying Marcia left the Commons to look forward to the evening bus to her then house in Golders Green, and that Wilson, 16 years her senior and married, noticed her in the queue and stopped to give her a carry on his manner house to Hampstead Garden Suburb.
Election agent George Caunt had a unique story to inform. According to him, Harold had watched Marcia diligently taking shorthand notes of the night’s speeches, earlier than introducing himself and providing the carry.
‘Marcia Williams returned [home] late, and they were both worried about Mr Williams waiting up for her,’ Caunt claimed. ‘They agreed on a secret sign at the executive committee meeting the next morning [sugar in the saucer] if Mr Williams had been awake and asked questions.’
Whatever the reality of the matter, in October 1956 Wilson appointed Marcia as his private secretary. Over the subsequent six years she would deftly information his speedy rise from chairman of the public accounts committee and shadow chancellor to prime minister.
The pair shortly slipped right into a routine. Wilson would choose her up on the manner to Westminster after he had dropped his sons at college. There they might work collectively in his Commons workplace, or in different places round the House, till late into the night.
‘She met for a great many years a deep craving within him: for someone else to whom politics was meat and drink and the very air that was breathed,’ remembered Haines. ‘Someone who, at her best, had a political mind capable of testing and matching his; someone who possessed a deadly ability to slash her way through the woolliness and verbiage of a political argument to get to the heart of an issue. Someone who was prepared to devote all her time to Harold Wilson’s service.’
After the dying of the earlier Labour chief, Hugh Gaitskell, in January 1963, Wilson grew to become chief of the Opposition. A bit of over a yr later, the nation was getting ready for a common election.
Marcia and Harold’s marketing campaign was as profitable a double act as that of their musical contemporaries Lennon and McCartney. Together, they plotted and deliberate, speaking endlessly lengthy after all people else had gone house. Former Labour minister and peer Bernard Donoughue, whose Downing Street Diary is a vital supply of details about Marcia’s day-to-day behaviour, told me that Bill Housden, Wilson’s loyal driver over the years, mentioned that he had typically delivered Harold to Marcia’s house and picked him up a lot later.
When I requested Margarete Field, Marcia’s sister-in-law, whether or not she thought Harold and Marcia had had an affair in the early days of their relationship, she laughed and mentioned, ‘Well, what do you think?’
But no matter it had amounted to, the affair was historical past. Now, there was a hard-fought and bitterly contested election to be gained. Was it a stroke of genius from Marcia that lastly received Labour over the line?
John Cole remembered: ‘Just before the 1964 election campaign she was leafing through the Radio Times to check if anything appearing on television on the eve of polling day might reduce the turnout of voters. To her horror she discovered that Steptoe And Son, one of the most popular programmes of the period, which at its peak could draw 28 million viewers, was scheduled an hour before the polls closed, the time when the largest number of Labour supporters traditionally came out to vote.’
Marcia knowledgeable Harold, who referred to as the BBC director-general Hugh Carleton Greene to argue that this temptation may scale back the turnout of Conservative in addition to Labour voters. Sir Hugh dryly requested the chief of the Opposition to recommend an acceptable different programme.
‘Greek drama, preferably in the original,’ joked Harold.
The BBC agreed to transfer Steptoe. Labour gained 317 seats, the Tories 304 and the Liberals 9, a majority of simply 4 seats. Later, Wilson mentioned that however for Marcia and her ingenuity, he would by no means have turn out to be prime minister.
IT IS a practice that when a brand new PM and his or her entourage arrive at No 10, the employees line up to clap. No such factor occurred in the autumn of 1964. Nobody was there. It was the begin of an extended battle between Marcia and the ‘Sir Humphreys’ of the civil service.
One hundred per cent male, and typically Eton and Oxbridge-educated, that they had little time for a builder’s daughter from Northampton. Yes, she had a historical past diploma from London’s Queen Mary University and a secretarial qualification. But she didn’t match the mould.
Sir Timothy Bligh, Downing Street’s most senior civil servant, made it clear, in accordance to Marcia, that there was no place for her at No 10. And when an official journey to the U.S. was deliberate, his successor Derek Mitchell told Marcia she may journey on the prime minister’s airplane solely as Mary Wilson’s maid.
It was at this level that Marcia started to acquire a repute for being ‘difficult’. She was chief adviser to the prime minister, however she was going to have to combat for recognition. Mitchell and his employees had been misogynistic and patronising, however she refused to be cowed. He tried to dismiss her as a constituency secretary-type with not rather more to provide.
But Harold Wilson started as he meant to go on and supported Marcia’s calls for for a correct workplace inside No 10 and an official function at his aspect. ‘It was an unpleasant atmosphere. No one will convince me other than the way I remember it,’ Marcia later recalled. ‘It was cold, unfriendly and not very helpful.’
As the spouse of a backbench MP in the 1970s, I can recognise solely too effectively the key function Marcia performed in Downing Street. Dozens of letters got here in every week, every one requiring analysis and a reply. She did it all meticulously and typically with humour or sympathy, constructing Harold Wilson’s repute as a dependable and reliable constituency MP and a major minister who was personally serving to individuals to resolve their issues.
She continued to run his diary, attend conferences and act as his sounding board and gatekeeper, performing a novel solo function that has by no means been matched. But in her non-public life she was paying a excessive worth for her — and Wilson’s — immense success.
Her transient marriage had led to divorce in 1961 and, though she and Harold had been collectively all day and daily, he had his spouse Mary and their two sons to go house to — a compartmentalised household life of which Marcia was no half. Early in her time in Downing Street, she had begun an affair with a co-worker, John Schofield Allen. Joe Haines describes him as the most unlikely of lovers: ‘sweaty, overweight and married’.
Wisely, and inspired by the prime minister and funded by Joe Kagan, a rich Yorkshire mill proprietor who incessantly helped Harold out financially, Schofield Allen went away to Africa for 3 months and the affair petered out.
Two years after their first victory at the polls, Labour gained the 1966 election with an enormous majority of 98. Marcia, who was by then 34, should have allowed herself the luxurious of a while to contemplate her future and take inventory. Family was actually necessary to her and biology — one thing she couldn’t management — could effectively have influenced a dramatic change in her behaviour from this level onwards.
After a number of brief and failed relationships, she started a detailed friendship which become a passionate love affair with Walter Terry, who at the time was the chief political correspondent of the Daily Mail (later political editor of the Express). He was nonetheless residing with his spouse Mavis and their younger son and daughter.
Gossip started to unfold round Westminster when a journalist arrived one night to see the prime minister and observed Walter Terry’s automotive parked in the avenue exterior with somebody inside.
He knocked on the window and was shocked and horrified when Walter and Marcia unwrapped themselves from a passionate embrace.
Their love affair would go on to final a number of years and resulted in the delivery of her two sons, born throughout the 1966 Wilson authorities — Timothy in 1968 and Daniel simply ten months later in 1969.
The youngsters arrived unannounced and unacknowledged and for his or her first 5 years lived in whole secrecy with their mom, their widowed grandmother and aunt Peggy in Central London, by which period Walter Terry had left all of them and returned to his spouse.
Marcia gave delivery to her first son simply earlier than journalist Joe Haines’s arrival at No 10.
She had labored steadily all through her being pregnant in her workplace proper subsequent to the Cabinet Room, dealing with MPs, commerce unionists, civil servants and workplace employees, and it appears unthinkable now that no one ever observed her altering determine. But then she all the time turned up early for conferences, so was seated when everybody else arrived, and she saved her coat on.
Timothy Joseph Henry Williams Terry was born in a personal hospital in Hendon, North London. There was a clean area on his delivery certificates the place it requested for the identify of the father.
His mom was recorded as Marcia Matilda Williams Terry, a personal secretary of 20 Albany Court, Westminster. The informant was J. Ellis Stone, Harold Wilson’s physician and good friend, who’s recorded on the certificates as having been current at the supply.
Just two months after the delivery of Timothy, Marcia went with Harold to Gibraltar for talks on board the warship HMS Fearless about the future of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe and Zambia), the southern African nation run by Ian Smith’s apartheid authorities. Both Marcia and Walter Terry had been current (Walter was reporting on the talks) and she was pregnant once more.
Daniel Walter Alexander Terry was born on June 24, 1969, at 27 Welbeck Street, nonetheless a personal hospital. Both of Daniel’s dad and mom signed the delivery certificates at Marylebone Register Office.
As with the arrival of his brother, Daniel had visits from Dr Stone, however it was his father who noticed him daily, not his mom. Walter got here for an hour and sat with the child whereas their nanny Pauline did her purchasing. Marcia had gone straight again to work.
The arrival of two boys, solely ten months aside, to an single lady at the very coronary heart of authorities was an unbelievable occasion for Britain of the time. If the story of Marcia’s infants leaked, mentioned these few in the know, who would the world suppose had fathered them? The apparent alternative was Wilson himself.
It was an unimaginable state of affairs and it was Marcia who paid the worth for the intense want for secrecy. She typically felt scared and alone.
Maybe it was not shocking, then, that as the refrain of disapproval from civil servants and colleagues grew, and the overwhelming want to preserve her non-public life a secret grew to become a digital obsession, she started a terrifying descent into the drug dependency which might dominate her life for years to come.
Marcia Williams by Linda McDougall (Biteback Publishing, £25) to be printed on November 7. © Linda McDougall 2023. To order a replica for £22.50 (provide legitimate till November 13, 2023; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or name 020 3176 2937.