- Marcia Falkender, Baroness Falkender
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Marcia Matilda Falkender, Baroness Falkender CBE (born 10 March 1932), formerly Marcia Williams (née Field), is a British Labour politician, being first the private secretary for, and then the political secretary and head of political office to, Harold Wilson.
Contents
Background and early career
Born Marcia Field, Falkender was educated at the independent selective Northampton High School for Girls 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 the service of Harold Wilson
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.[1] 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.[1]
Questions were raised in the press at the time about her commercial dealings, however both Wilson and Williams successfully sued many London newspapers for libel.[2] 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 corroborated by Peter Wright, former assistant director of MI5, in Spycatcher. Spycatcher was banned in the UK by Margaret Thatcher's administration.
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".[1] Donoughue's diary recorded Wilson telling one of his staff that he had been rowing with Falkender, who was demanding "peerages for friends".[1]
When Wilson resigned, Joe Haines, Wilson's press secretary, accused Lady Falkender of writing the first draft of his Prime Minister's Resignation Honours 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 produced. Wilson's honours list included many businessmen and celebrities, along with his political supporters. In a BBC Panorama programme aired on 14 February 1977 called to clarify his book Joe 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, 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."[3] Some of those whom Wilson honoured included Lord Kagan, the inventor of Gannex, who was eventually imprisoned for fraud, and Sir Eric Miller, who later committed suicide while under police investigation for corruption. A subsequent full Department of Industry inquiry into Miller's company completely exonerated Wilson, and no evidence of any kind has been produced of financial impropriety. Wilson initially ascribed opposition from the media to the list as "anti semitism" because of the extraordinary number of Jews who received honours: Delfont, Grade, Weidenfeld, Astaire, Miller, Kagan and the Prime Minister's doctor Joe Stone who received a peerage were all Jews and Wilson was a well known philo-semite. The media denied this claim.
In 1990s the two large academic biographies of Wilson were published by Philip Ziegler and Professor Ben Pimlott, both restating that there was no financial impropriety in the compilation of the list. Professor Ben Pimlott observed in his biography of Wilson, political secretaries often write down lists at the instructions of their employer and that the list was pink does not itself prove anything. Both Lady Falkender and Harold Wilson maintained that the list was Wilson's.
In 2001 Joe Haines re-wrote his original book, "The Politics of Power", containing the claims and republished it as "Glimmers of Twilight" This time claiming financial impropriety and that Falkender had sexually blackmailed Wilson into selling honours for her own personal benefit such as a house and various other emoluments. Falkender took legal action which caused the BBC to shelve a docudrama based on Joe Haines' second version of events rather than the original version. [4] After the programme was eventually aired in March 2007, despite being 74 years old and suffering from the after-effects of a stroke, Falkender successfully sued the BBC for libel, winning a settlement of £75,000.[5] . The BBC promised never to rebroadcast the programme again.
Peerage
She was elevated to the Peerage as Baroness Falkender, of West Haddon in the County of Northamptonshire on 11 July 1974 but has never spoken in the Lords. She attends the House and votes. Falkender had been her mother's maiden name.
As a result of her peerage, Private Eye often referred to her as "Forkbender". Although she attends sittings in the House of Lords, she has not yet made a maiden speech.
Writings
She has written two books about her time in Downing Street: Inside Number 10 on the period 1964-1970 and Downing Street in Perspective on Wilson's third term as Prime Minister 1974-1976. After retiring from working in Downing Street, she worked as a columnist for the Mail on Sunday from 1983-88. She continued to work for Wilson, handling his private business from the time of his resignation in 1976 until his death in 1995.
She was also one of the founder members of The Silver Trust, a charity which sponsored British silversmiths to provide a silver service for 10 Downing Street. Prior to The Silver Trust, Downing Street had no silver of its own; it was provided on loan from other government offices.[6]
Personal life
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.[1] When Wilson lost office in 1970, Falkender seized his papers, and her brother, Tony Field, helped Wilson break into her garage to recover them.[1] 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".[1]
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. Gossip had hinted at an improper relationship, though these rumours were never substantiated. Wilson won the case, and all royalties from the song were assigned in perpetuity to a charity of Wilson's choosing.
References
- ^ a b c d e f g "Baroness Falkender: The lavender lady". The Independent. 21 May 2006. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/baroness-falkender-the-lavender-lady-479040.html.
- ^ Auberon Waugh, Four crowded years: the diaries of Auberon Waugh, 1972-1976, Private Eye, 1976. Footnote 2 under entry for Wednesday, 14 April 1974
- ^ Roy Jenkins, ‘Wilson, (James) Harold, Baron Wilson of Rievaulx (1916–1995)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, May 2006 accessed 22 Feb 2008
- ^ Adams, Guy (17 May 2006). "Falkender sees red over Wheen's 'Lavender List'". The Guardian. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/pandora/falkender-sees-red-over-wheens-lavender-list-478502.html. Retrieved 8 February 2011.
- ^ "Wilson aide wins BBC libel payout". BBC. 4 April 2007. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/6525657.stm. Retrieved 8 February 2011.
- ^ Silver Trust Website
External links
Categories:- 1932 births
- Alumni of Queen Mary, University of London
- Living people
- Female life peers
- Labour Party (UK) life peers
- Commanders of the Order of the British Empire
- People educated at Northampton High School
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