Poor Old Harold The Henpecked

It was all very tawdry and petty and spiteful, and political London last week was talking of little else. For years Labor Party insiders have clucked and gossiped about the peculiar relationship between former Prime Minister Harold Wilson and Lady Falkender, 44, his longtime and often evil-tempered private political secretary, who was just plain Marcia Williams before Wilson recommended her for a life peerage in 1974. Now Joe Haines, who served as Wilson's press secretary from 1969 until the Prime Minister's retirement from No. 10 Downing Street last April, has drafted a poison-pen portrait of Lady Falkender more lacerating than the anti-Tory blasts that he used to ghostwrite for Harold. Her ladyship, it seems, was the epic back-room bully of British politics.

Williams, the daughter of a Northamptonshire builder, came to Wilson's attention after she used information gleaned as a typist at Labor Party headquarters to warn the future P.M. that a group of intraparty enemies was trying to oust him from a key committee. Hired by her grateful beneficiary in 1956, the attractive blonde gradually acquired Wilson's unquestioned confidence--and a power over party matters that made her the terror of his "kitchen-cabinet" Labor cronies. It was hardly a secret that among those on her list of less-favored was Haines, 49, practitioner of an abrasive, workingman style of Laborism. But until the pro-Labor Daily Mirror last week began excerpting Haines' new book The Politics of Power, few realized the puritanical depth with which he despised Williams' temperamental exercise of power and love of privilege.

Supremely Jealous. Haines portrays Marcia as an ill-tempered, domineering harridan who tried and often succeeded in tyrannizing not only Wilson's staff but the Prime Minister himself. Haines describes Williams "shrewishly denouncing the Prime Minister in front of civil servants," commandeering his official car and driver as if it were her own and once punishing him for waking her up with a phone call in the middle of the night by returning it an hour later "just to see how he liked it." She bullied the No. 10 staff, Haines claims, firing girls whom she found too poised or pretty as potential threats to her rule. Supremely jealous of rivals for influence with the Prime Minister, she so disrupted kitchen-cabinet luncheons with explosive prima donna exits that Wilson gave up attending them.

While Marcia is clearly Haines' primary target, Wilson hardly escapes the fusillade. He comes across as soft, henpecked and, above all, a fellow who couldn't stand to see a woman cry and would do anything that would end one of Marcia's dreaded, tearful tantrums. Haines hastens to dismiss any suggestion that Williams' hold over Wilson was the result of romance. "I never saw the slightest sign of affection between them," he insists. Rather, he says, Wilson's acquiescence was based on his recognition of a political intelligence equal and, in Haines' view, perhaps superior to his own.

The book's juiciest tidbit was the allegation that Wilson's controversial resignation honors list--the titles and decorations with which departing Prime Ministers traditionally reward loyal political service--was drafted not by the P.M. but by Williams, on her personal "lavender note paper." The roster, says Haines, was crammed with business cronies and celebrities whom she, in many cases, knew better than Wilson. Among those honored: Williams' sister Peggy Field, who became an M.B.E. (Member of the Order of the British Empire).

Lady Falkender, who continues as Wilson's secretary, was quick to retaliate Haines' cruelties in kind. Although laid up in her fashionable West End mews house with a slipped disc, she issued a statement accusing Haines of rank disloyalty and recalling unkindly that his penchant for foul language once prompted a Cabinet member to empty a glass of whisky over him in Wilson's presence. Take that, Haines! For his part, Wilson weighed in against his former press secretary by calling the book "a farrago of twisted facts"--though many familiar with the Wilson political household doubt that they have been twisted all that far. As the mud continued to fly, former Labor Chief Whip Bob Mellish finally exclaimed, "Shut up! I am sickened at the trivia of it all!" So were others, but hardly anyone could stop from reading about it.

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