Margaret Thatcher described him as “the most able of politicians” and Tony Blair considered him “the most effective Labour leader of all time”.
Such elegies on the death in 1995 of Harold Wilson, 79, a two-time Labour prime minister, from Alzheimer’s and colon cancer, betray nothing of the reality of his final years, spent in the relentless grip of dementia and, as we have seen, forced to consider selling his personal and political papers to meet the high and rising costs of care.
Five years before her death, Thatcher’s government had been alarmed by plans to sell the archives of Lord Wilson of Rievaulx for £212,500 (about £700,000 in today’s money) to McMaster University in Canada, newly released Cabinet Office papers revealed this week.
Besides concern that his collection had gone abroad – and breached the so-called 30-year rule – the files also reveal sadness at “the case of a former prime minister falling on hard times in this way”.
“I doubt that Harold, in all his glory, and he was not, would have wanted or tried to sell official documents,” said Joe Haines, 96, his press secretary at 10 Downing Street.
The truth is that the illness that robbed him of his brilliant mind also deprived him of any real means of earning a living after he left Parliament in 1983, after almost 40 years.
“He never had much money. Because of his mental state he couldn’t write articles or make speeches, and his income would have been his pension as a former prime minister,” said Haines, who estimated at the time that the sum was “relatively small”.
“He was given a job by [former Labour MP and late media proprietor] Robert Maxwell was appointed as an administrator of some sort, but it was really just to help him out because, as I knew, his powers were waning in 1976.
The Wilsons, who had two sons, had for decades owned a three-bedroom flat in Westminster, where Mary, a poet, cared for him and continued to live, as well as a holiday bungalow bought in 1959 on the Isles of Scilly. When his wife, aged 102, died in 2018, her will revealed their combined worth was around £2m, nearly a quarter of a century after her death, according to reports.
Wilson, who led the Labour Party for 13 years and was prime minister from 1964 to 1970 and 1974 to 1976, surprised almost everyone when, at the age of 60 and just two years after winning his fourth election, he announced his resignation. He had no strength of character left and knew his mental state was deteriorating, Haines said.
Former Labour leader Neil Kinnock said: “I think there was an expectation that prime ministers would come from a certain class of society.” Edward Heath, Wilson’s Conservative contemporary, “would have been supported by various kinds of funds and contributions, and he would have been put on a few boards and so on, simply because he was a Conservative prime minister.
Lord Kinnock, 82, felt a “wave of sadness” when he learned that the politician he had admired since childhood had sought to sell his archives abroad. He said: “I realised the only way he could raise money was to sell his past. Life has not been very kind to him. He had no benefactors. He had a lot of people who succeeded because of him in terms of their political careers. But nobody has reciprocated.”
It was obvious that Wilson “didn’t have much money,” he added. “I heard he was trying to make speeches for money but couldn’t because he had lost his fluency.”
Wilson, who came from a lower-middle-class background, excelled at school and at Oxford University. He described himself as “the boy behind those lace curtains in the house in Huddersfield”. His father was a chemist and his mother a schoolteacher before she married.
“Harold’s main problem was that he wasn’t very good at getting money for himself,” said Lord Donoughue, 89, who created and ran No 10’s policy unit under Wilson.
After retirement, he was unable to capitalize on his long political career due to illness.
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No one had figured out how to deal with former prime ministers at the time, “because historically, whether it was the Conservative Party or the Liberal Party, prime ministers and leaders tended to be aristocrats with family mansions and land and things like that,” Donoughue added.
“The Conservative governments didn’t really bother with it because it was a Labour Party problem. And the Labour Party didn’t do what it should have done to put in place the kind of arrangements we have today. Now former prime ministers are being looked after, but it was assumed they would sort it out themselves.
“I still care about Harold, because it all ended so miserably, and it’s so sad.”
The National Archives, unearthed by the BBC, show that Andrew Turnbull, Thatcher’s principal private secretary, did explore ways to support Lord and Lady Wilson, but was told that the current prime minister’s “special funds” could not help. He also tried the parliamentary pension scheme, to see if its hardship fund could help.
In tributes in Parliament following Wilson’s death, the late Labour MP Gerald Kaufman, a friend and colleague of Lady Wilson, acknowledged the difficulties she had faced. “She went through a very long period of great stress, and the months and years leading up to Harold’s death were not easy for her.”
In 1991 a solution was found when anonymous donors funded the Bodleian Library in Oxford to purchase the papers, keeping them in the UK, with the money going into a fund set up for the Wilsons.
Wilson was MP for Ormskirk, which he won in 1945, and then for Huyton near Liverpool, until 1983, remaining, Kinnock suspects, “because he could not afford not to receive his MP’s salary”. He was elevated to the House of Lords.
He has come across as a desperate figure in recent years. “It was sad,” Donoughue said, “to see him in the House of Lords looking lost. He would get up from his seat and not remember where the exit was,” he added.
After Wilson retired, Haines recalled seeing him at a dinner at the Café Royal and having a “half-hour animated conversation” as they put their coats back on at the reception. At the end of the evening, the two men picked out their coats at the same time and talked for another half-hour. “And it was quite clear that he didn’t remember seeing me earlier in the evening, because we talked about the same things again. It was very sad.”
