Queen of spads
QUENTIN LETTS
Marcia Williams: The Life and Times of Baroness Falkender
Linda McDougall
Biteback Publishing £25
Fifty-nine years ago, long before Dominic Cummings was even born, there was a political adviser at 10 Downing Street who effed and blinded at the Prime Minister and threatened to topple him unless she had her way.
That aide was Marcia Williams. The Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, was beholden to her in part because he and mercurial Marcia had been lovers. Say what you like about Cummings; he never did that with Boris.
Williams, best remembered for drafting the ‘Lavender List’ of Wilson's resignation honours, was a speck of stardust in the grimy Wilson years. Much of that era's politics now looks monochrome: jowly, oily-fringed men who smoked too much and seemed permanently exhausted.
Amid it all stands Marcia, sometimes in the background at campaign events, sometimes looming over Wilson at his desk, a schoolmistress with an errant pupil. With her high blonde hairdo, prune-chinned pout, angular nose and a breathy, poshed-up voice, she was part Myra Hindley, part Margaret Thatcher. Williams was a prototype Alastair Campbell, Lord Levy, Carole Caplin and Cummings rolled into one. What a piece of work!
Linda McDougall has written a slim, forgiving portrait that hails her as a pioneering politico who copped more criticism than she deserved, chiefly because she was a woman. That's fair, up to a point. She undoubtedly endured chauvinism. But gender politics works both ways, and it is unlikely Wilson would have put up with such rudeness and corruption from a male aide.
Williams was already Wilson's sidekick when the Labour leader, Hugh Gaitskell, died of lupus in 1963. At his house in Frognal Gardens, Hampstead, Gaitskell had thrown parties for a sleek set on the right of the Labour party.
Wilson, the more left-wing Shadow Foreign Secretary, was never a Frognalite. He was fat, had a voice like a frog and even at one point entertained a dreadful moustache.
But Marcia, whose initial pursuit of him had about it something of the stalker, believed in him. Marcia, a Northampton girl, whose mother claimed to have been an illegitimate child of Edward VII, propelled him to the Labour leadership. The premiership followed a year later – with the narrowest of election victories.
Wilson entered Downing Street to silence, civil servants not bothering to give him the customary ovation.
Williams feared Wilson was in danger of being overwhelmed by the system – so she had herself appointed Downing Street's first political secretary. Whitehall tried to resist this innovation.
We fret today about tensions between officials and special advisers; ‘shouty’ Marcia won prizes at it. It was always a bad sign when she started tapping her handbag. Explosions invariably followed.
She infuriated Sir Humphrey by having her desk placed directly outside the PM's study. Male grandees patronisingly praised her typing and shorthand
