FOLLOW THAT COLONEL!

Joe Haines tells what happened when Harold Wilson hired a private detective to trail George Wigg

DURING the Falklands crisis, while the British task force was laboriously making its way towards the islands, Lord (George) Wigg occasionally telephoned me at home with news of failures in the engine room of HMS Hermes which, he predicted, would delay the fleet's arrival. Though the Min- istry of Defence denied every problem he identified, he knew more than the Ministry let on.

But these mechanical defects were not the only reason he called. He always ended up by returning to his claim that he had been falsely accused — framed — on the 1976 kerb-crawling charges which ruined his reputation and ended his public career. He was an obsessive man, and this was his last obsession.

Chapman Pincher wrote in The Spectator last week that Wigg believed the framing had been done by Harold Wilson; speak- ing to me, Wigg always put the blame on Lady Falkender. I am not saying Pincher Was wrong. With Wigg, the names were often interchangeable. One evening, how- ever, I dared to tell Wigg that I didn't believe that Lady Falkender — Marcia Williams, as was — could have been guilty as he charged. It seemed to me to be too improbable. I made him angry and he never phoned me again. What I didn't disclose to him was what I knew about the covert action which had been taken against him eight years earlier. It was a case of Harold behaving badly and almost more than I could take. It wasn't that I, unlike Pincher, was a pal of Wigg's or even cared for him all that much, but I thought he was treated disgracefully. Had the truth been made public, no press sec- retary yet born could have plausibly defended it and I would not have tried. But to begin at the beginning. Wigg and Marcia hated each other. Legend in No. 10 had it that Wigg, when paymaster-general, with the security services as his special responsibility, arrived in Wilson's study one day to report on his beloved under- World of spies, conspiracy and dirty deal- ,I1.1 4s. He found Marcia there and told Wilson that he wasn't going to discuss secret matters in front of 'a typist'. Marcia then left the room and Wigg turned the key from the inside.

That was a suicide as certain as climbing • out of the trenches on day one of the bat- tle of the Somme wearing a fluorescent suit, waving a Union Jack and shouting, `Down with the Kaiser!' Wigg was then evicted from the world of MI5 and MI6 and went off to be chairman of the Horse- race Totalisator Board. (Why are the Tote and other horse-racing organisations regarded as retirement homes for failed politicians whose peerages begin with W, such as Wigg, Wyatt and Wakeham?) Pub- licly, Wigg was eased out gently; privately he simmered with resentment. But he swallowed his pride and took the salary. During the 1970 general election cam- paign, Wigg buttonholed me in New Palace Yard, waved his arms in the way that he had and shouted that Labour would never win an election as long as Marcia Williams stayed with Wilson (he was right in 1970 but wrong twice in 1974, if only just). His rage still burned as fiercely as it did when, so to speak, he was turfed out.

Pincher described Wigg's as yet unpub- lished diaries as a time-bomb, but the old Colonel was a walking canister of Semtex while he was alive: he was the man who knew too much. It was just that he declined, under forcible persuasion, to light the fuse.

Pincher says, for example, that the Wigg diaries may tell what really happened in the 1966 seamen's strike. Wilson and Wigg knew the truth of it because Wilson ordered, probably at Wigg's suggestion, the bugging of the London flat where the strike leaders held their secret meetings. It was the transcript of those buggings which led Wilson to describe the ringleaders of the stoppage as a group of politically motivated men. Names and quotes would still be embarrassing.

Wigg kept his silence about everything for a very long time. Then, in the summer of 1974, word reached Wilson that he had written an autobiography and that part of it was devoted to an excoriating criticism of Lady Falkender, as Marcia Williams had just become. The pot was about to boil over. Among his threatened revelations, it was rumoured, was the reproduction of the birth certificates of her two illegitimate sons, whose existence was not generally known at the time of writing.

One of the only two journalists Wilson trusted called on him one evening in the Prime Minister's room at the Commons, off the corridor behind the Speaker's chair. 'We've got him!' exulted Wilson. `Who?' inquired the journalist. 'Ted Heath?' No,' said Wilson, impatiently, `George Wigg.' He said no more, and after the journalist left I asked him what that was all about.

His answer was truly shocking, in the old-fashioned sense of the word. Appar- ently, in an effort to stop Wigg 'doing a Crossman' and writing a full and frank account of his time in and around No. 10 as paymaster-general, Wilson had turned to John Silkin, the wealthy minister of planning and local government and former chief whip, to find out what he could about Wigg. Contributions Wigg might have made to charity were not what Wilson had in mind.

Silkin, no doubt drawing on his contacts when he practised as a solicitor, hired a pri- vate detective to trail Wigg and report back his findings. The private eye diligently fol- lowed Wigg one evening to a one-bed- roomed flat in London occupied by a woman. Wigg did not emerge until the next Morning; ipso facto, as they say in Govan. It Was also said that the woman had a son. The inference drawn — how validly I haven't the faintest idea — was that Wigg was his father. Wilson handed me a scrap of paper with the address of the woman presumably the mistress whom Pincher says Wigg 'discreetly enjoyed' — written upon 'You keep it,' said Wilson. I didn't, because I lost it before I could decide whether I wanted to be responsible for such a nasty piece of information. Silkin, either directly or through an intermediary, must have made Wigg aware of what was known about him because Wigg's book, when it was published, made no waves. Either its more sensational reve- lations had been excised or the rumours about them had been wildly exaggerated.

I had had my fill and more of Lady Falk- ender's problems that summer, some wide- ly publicised and some not. After the Ince-in-Makerfield slag-heaps deal — the so-called Wigan Alps affair — her peer- age, and now Wigg's reputed attacks, I felt like chucking it. Protecting her was not why I joined. But we were between general elections. Had I left No. 10 I couldn't have done so in silence. Yet the political dam- age the truth might have caused would haw been too much. I wasn't going to be held responsible for losing the election which was coming in October.

Nevertheless, it was a grubby episode. Like Pincher, I'm not convinced Wigg was a kerb-crawler; he certainly roamed cen- tral London seeking to buy the first edi- tions of the next morning's newspapers long after he left the government. In 1969, for example, during my early days at No. 10 and two years after he had departed, he was still sending in his malevolent thoughts about the conspirators in Fleet Street.

I was asked to examine first and last edi- tions of the Times submitted by Wigg and copiously annotated to demonstrate how bias had altered the prominence given to various news stories during the night. I hadn't been a sub-editor for nothing. I pointed out to Wilson that the first edition was a pretty poor effort and that the recast- ing by the last edition had produced a much more professional-looking paper. He accepted my version and Wigg was disgrun- tled. We saw no more of his researches.

But he continued to seethe with anger, against the papers, against his former boss and against Marcia Williams. He probably blamed them all for his death.

The author was chief press secretary to the prime ;ninister (Harold Wilson) from 1969 to 1970 and from 1974 to 1976.

`From today this is the beat you'll he working to.'