A nest
of vipers
Philip Ziegler
THE HEAT OF THE KITCHEN by Bernard Donoughue Politico:s, £25, pp. 392, ISBN 1842750518 GLIMMERS OF TWILIGHT by Joe Haines Politico's, £20, pp. 216. ISBN 1842750712 Donoughue and Haines were the David and Jonathan of Harold Wilson's kitchen cabinet, swifter than eagles, stronger than lions. It may be doubted whether they can properly be described as lovely or pleasant, but in their books they are not divided. The Heat of the Kitchen and Glimmers of Twilight have been elegantly twinned by their publisher, with the same photograph of Harold Wilson on the jackets, flanked by the appropriate author. Donoughue has written a full-dress biography. Haines only an account of his seven years or so at No. 10, but the heart of both books is the same.
The two authors have a lot in common. Both came from poor homes and bettered themselves by talent, hard work and fierce ambition. Both were committed socialists from childhood. Both were pragmatic moderates, deploring the greed and arrogance of the trades unions which undermined Wilson and destroyed the government of Jim Callaghan. They differed on Europe, but neither felt passionately about the issue. Both distrusted ideology and loathed the doctrinaires of the Left. Both hated Marcia Falkender.
Because his book covers the whole of his life, this last preoccupation plays a smaller part in Donoughue's book than in Haines'. It is, his publisher hopefully assures us, 'beautifully written and searingly honest'. `Beautifully written' is nonsense; Donoughue's prose rarely rises above the workmanlike. If honesty implies some effort to achieve objectivity, then that word is equally misapplied. Objectivity and autobiography are perhaps incompatible, but the author's endless recitals of how he was the only person to get things right while everybody else was too stupid to listen are wearisome and, in the last resort, unconvincing.
His book contains some good things. His account of his childhood is vividly done: the Daily Herald, he tells us, was both the household's staple reading and then served as lavatory paper — thus neatly illustrating both his family's poverty and its politics. The years with Robert Maxwell are treated with circumspection — he barely knew the man, one is led to believe; disliked what he saw of him; and made frequent efforts to resign — but Donoughue's version of events confirms the impression that he was no more involved with or aware of his employer's criminality than several other respectable members of the establishment. His picture of life at the Ministry of Farming and Food provides a gloomy vision of Whitehall at its most complacent and intransigent. But the period which he shared with Haines in Downing Street takes up almost half the hook and provides the most dramatic and disturbing reading.
This is a cherry at which Haines has already taken a pretty malignant bite in The Politics of Power, but though the earlier book was vituperative enough in its account of life at No. 10 it hardly prepared one for the diatribe to be found in Glimmers of Twilight. The title, taken from Browning's 'The Lost Leader', makes it clear that Wilson is unlikely to be the hero of the story; but nor is he the villain. The authors have a different target. As much as David and Jonathan, Donoughue and Haines remind one of the brothers in The Duchess of Ma/fl plotting the destruction of their sister; but Duke Ferdinand and the Cardinal never pursued the hapless Duchess with half the vengeful fury that their modern counterparts lavish on Marcia Falkender.
It will be no news to anyone that Marcia was a disruptive influence at No. 10, generally disliked by the staff and fiercely jealous of anyone who seemed likely to establish a close relationship with the Prime Minister. She treated her employer with embarrassingly public demonstrations of contempt and often provided a damagingly distracting element at times of crisis. In these books, however, the charges are fleshed out with new and lurid detail. Haines records that, when Wilson offend
ed Marcia by taking his wife out to a birthday dinner without first informing his secretary, she got her revenge by summoning Mary Wilson to her house and greeting her with the words: '1 have only one thing to say to you. I went to bed with your husband six times in 1956 and it wasn't satisfactory.' So embroiled did the atmosphere become that Wilson apparently once broke into Marcia's garage so as to steal back private papers that she had purloined. The final phase, writes Haines, was 'destructive to the point of being catastrophic; there was abuse of public and private funds, obsessive suspicion of civil servants and a distinct sense of corruption in the award of honours'. Things got so bad that, according to both Donoughue and Haines, Wilson's doctor, Joe Stone, volunteered to 'dispose of' Marcia and sign a certificate stating that the death had been due to natural causes.
The mystery is why Wilson put up with it. Donoughue suggests that Marcia had evidence of their brief affair. In the early 1960s Wilson had successfully sued an American newspaper which had implied that he and Marcia had made love. Marcia could have exposed him as a perjurer and thus destroyed his career. Another theory, which Donoughue attributes to Lord Goodman, is that Marcia's knowledge of Wilson's dodgy transactions in the field of East-West trade enabled her to blackmail him into submission. All this is speculation; it seems more likely that Wilson stuck with Marcia out of loyalty and because he valued her honesty and judgment. What is certain is that No. 10 during Wilson's declining years was an unhealthy place to be.
At one point Wilson is quoted as saying that Marcia was 'obsessed' with Donoughue. It would be equally true to say that Donoughue and Haines were — and apparently still are — obsessed with Marcia. Why, some 30 years after the event, should they think it necessary to dredge up all this dirt? To set the record straight, they would say. Future historians and biographers, according to Donoughue, will have to explore deeply into the relationship between Wilson and his political secretary; 'and none of his biographers has so far entered that tricky legal minefield'. Pimlott and Ziegler, writes Haines, 'suffer from the inevitable handicaps which beset all biographers who did not know personally their subject ... Ziegler had a great sense of it, but neither he nor Pimlott was in a position to experience it.' To judge from these books Pimlott and Ziegler should be thanking their lucky stars that they were denied the privilege. None of the principal protagonists emerges with credit from this gruesome story. No. 10 under Wilson was a snake-pit: Donoughue and Haines have successfully demonstrated that they could bite as fiercely as any other reptile and that their venom has not weakened with the years.
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