In 1974, US President Richard Nixon visited London. At the time, Harold Wilson’s Labour government was struggling to ride out a media storm over a dodgy land deal involving the brother of the prime minister’s formidable political secretary Marcia Williams. As he went up the stairs in No 10, Nixon passed a young woman from the press office. “Say,” he asked his host, “is that the one we’ve been reading about?”
It was not. The woman on the stairs was not Williams but Janet Hewlett-Davies, whose true significance to the Wilson government of that time has only been hinted at until now. Ben Pimlott’s 1992 biography identifies her as a “special favourite” of the four-time prime minister, whose wife, Mary, became irritated by “what at times appeared almost like a schoolboy crush”. Now, though, two veteran Wilson aides, his press secretary Joe Haines and his policy unit chief Bernard Donoughue, have revealed a well-kept secret. They claim that Mr Wilson and Ms Hewlett-Davies, both married, were having an affair during his second period as prime minister from 1974-76.
It is likely, after nearly half a century, that this revelation will illuminate a part of Mr Wilson’s story rather than rewriting it altogether. A skilled politician with a formidable intellect and great public appeal, he kept his governments in power and held his party together while imperial and industrial Britain drained away. It is not news that he had a relationship with Williams in the 1950s. Nor that his wife was unhappy in Downing Street. But it was generally accepted until now that Mr Wilson’s last years in power were ones of waning engagement, and that his 1976 retirement was hastened by political disillusion and declining powers.
Not so, according to Mr Haines, who recounts Mr Wilson saying that Ms Hewlett-Davies “has given me a new lease of life”. Nor according to Lord Donoughue, to whom Mr Wilson confided that he had “never been happier”. He characterised the affair on Thursday as “a little sunshine at the sunset” of a leader whose sad later decline due to dementia robbed him – and the country – of an elder statesman phase. But it may lend extra poignancy to the sadness in what Mrs Wilson told Tony Benn as her husband prepared to move out of No 10 in March 1976: “I have done my best, but I now just want to slip back into obscurity again.”
Mr Wilson’s reputation has gone through many phases since he became the youngest cabinet minister of the 20th century at 31. He has aroused admiration, mistrust, devotion, frustration and puzzlement, often all at the same time. His stock has enjoyed something of a renaissance in recent years, and Keir Starmer’s references to him have been warm. Rightly so. He was an important prime minister. His record deserves respect. We have had worse ones and more reprehensible ones than him, especially in recent years.