Marcia Falkender, Baroness Falkender

Born Marcia Field, there is an unconfirmed rumour that her mother was an illegitimate daughter of King Edward VII.[3] Lady Falkender was educated at the independent selective Northampton High School and read for a BA in History at Queen Mary College, University of London. After graduating she became secretary to the General Secretary of the Labour Party in 1955.

In 1956, Marcia Williams, as she was then known, became private secretary to Harold Wilson, Member of Parliament for Huyton, a position she retained until 1964, when she rose to be his political secretary and head of the political office in his position as leader of the Labour Party and as prime minister from 1964 until 1970 and again from 1974 to 1976. Falkender claims that she first met Wilson when he offered her a lift when she was standing at a bus stop.[4] Wilson's press secretary Joe Haines claims that the pair first met at a dinner with the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, at which Khrushchev and the Labour MP George Brown had a drunken argument, which Williams took down in shorthand. Wilson reportedly drove her home after dinner.[4] In 1970 she was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).[5]

Questions were repeatedly raised in the press at the time about the propriety of her many commercial dealings; however, both Wilson and Williams successfully sued many London newspapers for libel.[6] Later Harold Wilson publicly called for a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the press because of the defamation in the media, and that there had been a concerted smear campaign to de-stabilise his administration by MI5. Later these claims were partially corroborated by Peter Wright, former assistant director of MI5, in his book Spycatcher. Spycatcher was banned in the UK by Margaret Thatcher's administration until a 1988 court case overturned the position.[7][8]

Until 1966, the award of peerages was the prerogative of the chief whip, and not the prime minister. Wilson took that power to award peerages for himself, and later told his policy adviser Bernard Donoughue that he did it because "that gal Marcia insisted on it".[4] Donoughue's diary recorded Wilson telling one of his staff that he had just quarrelled with Falkender, who was demanding "peerages for friends".[4] Donoughue's diary actually credits the "that gal Marcia insisted on it" comment to Freddie Warren who ran the Chief Whip's office in No. 12 Downing Street from the mid-fifties and was still in situ when Wilson resigned as prime minister in March 1976.[9]

When Wilson resigned, Haines accused Falkender of writing the first draft of his Resignation Honours List on lavender paper, which Haines styled as the "Lavender List". Haines was never asked to produce any evidence for this claim, and to date none has been provided. Certainly Wilson's honours list included many businessmen and celebrities, along with Labour supporters. In a BBC Panorama programme aired on 14 February 1977 called to clarify his book, Haines explicitly and unequivocally denied any financial impropriety in the compilation of the list.

Wilson's choice of appointments caused lasting damage to his reputation; former home secretary Roy Jenkins noted that Wilson's retirement "was disfigured by his, at best, eccentric resignation honours list, which gave peerages or knighthoods to some adventurous business gentlemen, several of whom were close neither to him nor to the Labour Party."[10] In the 1990s two large academic biographies of Wilson were published by Philip Ziegler and Ben Pimlott. Both authors asserted that there was no financial impropriety in the compilation of the list. Pimlott observed in his biography of Wilson that political secretaries often write down lists at the instructions of their employers, and that in this case the fact that the list was pink does not itself prove anything. Both Falkender and Wilson maintained that the list was Wilson's. Falkender said it was compiled on Wilson's last day in Downing Street: “He put a pad in front of me of the pink paper that was stock paper back then and asked me to write out the names. My typewriter had been packed away so I wrote them down by hand. It really didn’t feel momentous."[11]

She was elevated to the peerage as Baroness Falkender, of West Haddon in the County of Northamptonshire, on 11 July 1974.[12] Falkender had been her mother's maiden name.

Marcia Field married George Edmund Charles Williams in 1955, but they divorced in 1961; she continued to be known as Marcia Williams in her professional life. Falkender had two sons in the late 1960s by the former political editor of the Daily Mail, Walter Terry.[4][3] When Wilson lost office in 1970, Falkender seized his papers, and her brother, Tony Field, helped Wilson break into her garage to recover them.[4] On her brother's wedding day, in 1973, his passport, airline tickets and money disappeared. Field called the police, who were told by Falkender that she had put them away for "safe keeping".[4]

In 1967, Wilson sued the pop group The Move for libel after the band's manager Tony Secunda published a promotional postcard for the single "Flowers in the Rain", featuring a caricature depicting Wilson in bed with Falkender. Wilson won the case, and all royalties from the song were assigned in perpetuity to a charity of Wilson's choosing.

Lady Falkender died on 6 February 2019, although news of her death was not reported until 16 February.[2][1]

• Peer of the Week, Unlock Democracy website, 11 October 2012, accessed 18 October 2012