Powerful member of Harold Wilson's inner circle

Born: March 10, 1932;

Died: February 6, 2019

LADY Falkender, formerly Marcia Williams, who has died aged 86, was personal and political secretary to the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson and when her boss was in her office, was one of the most powerful women in politics.

It was claimed Lady Falkender drafted the former prime minister's controversial list of resignation honours, which became dubbed "The Lavender List", because it was written on lavender-coloured paper, but in 2007, Lady Falkender won £75,000 in libel damages from the BBC over her portrayal in a drama-documentary which wrongly claimed she had compiled the honours list and that in doing so she included the names of people who had assisted her personally or from whom she hoped to receive assistance personally in future. It also wrongly suggested that she had had a brief adulterous affair with Wilson and had subsequently used this to blackmail him.

However, the relationship remains one of the most famous and mysterious in modern political history. The uncanny influence she exercised over Mr Wilson - and over his decisions - frightened many MPs and was widely resented in Whitehall.

Often, it appeared from the outside, Mr Wilson would submit meekly to her demands. Occasionally - to the horror of his more conventional aides - she would shout and scream at him, treating him like a small boy. One press office official said at the time: "Marcia yelling at Harold was the only kind of discussion we ever heard them have."

However, as she daily gained more influence and power at 10 Downing Street, so she was more and more exhilarated by the pace of life at the centre and relished her skirmishes and victories over those jealous of her astonishing position. But the press, ever eager to establish a sexual relationship, failed to discover anything more intimate than a passionate political rapport between them.

However, a sensational new claim that the pair had an affair was made in a book, published in 2002, by Joe Haines, who was the then prime minister's press secretary. Haines reported that, in 1972, Marcia summoned Mr Wilson's wife Mary and bluntly told her of the alleged fling.

She is reported to have told the astonished Mrs Wilson: "I have only one thing to say to you. I went to bed with your husband six times in 1956 and it was not satisfactory."

Lady Falkender made many enemies in Downing Street and Whitehall, but those who crossed her, and had flaming rows with her, invariably came off worse, even if they had won the argument.

This was largely because Mr Wilson always took her side in every dispute, whether she was in the right or the wrong. She was a daunting woman and you trifled with her at your peril.

During Mr Wilson's years at the head of the Labour Party, both in and out of power, Marcia plainly had more influence over him - often, even total control - than any other individual, even than any fellow Cabinet minister.

One of the memorable highlights of her incredible career was Mr Wilson's celebrated and controversial resignation honours list which included, among other unlikely names, his publisher, Sir George Weidenfeld, his raincoat manufacturer, Sir Joseph Kagan, and a property tycoon, Sir Max Rayne - a bizarre list for an outgoing Labour premier.

The subsequent discovery of some of the names written on lavender-coloured notepaper in Marcia's handwriting, led to the suspicion, but no more, that she was responsible for the list. But it was pointed out that secretaries often do set down in writing the dictated thoughts of their employers.

Another strange feature of her life was a long-lasting affair with the late Walter Terry, one-time political editor of the Daily Mail.

Terry was Mr Wilson's favourite political reporter and was a leading member of the so-called White Commonwealth which the prime minister set up, involving a few handpicked lobby journalists.

The liaison between Marcia and Terry produced two sons. It was the only time she was in love. Once she said: "I do have lovely romantic dreams about how life might have been. I envy couples. But unless your partner is the right one, the one you want ... It would have been very nice to have married him, but it wasn't possible."

The so-called Duchess of Downing Street was born in March 1932, and educated at Northampton High School and Queen Mary College, University of London.

Her marriage to George Williams foundered after five years: he wanted to live and work in America and she did not.

She was private and political secretary to Mr Wilson over a period spanning from 1956 to 1983.

Once in Downing Street, she turned the waiting room outside the Cabinet Room into her own office, and exercised control over those who had access to Wilson.

Unsurprisingly, relations between Marcia and Mr Wilson's wife Mary were tense and occasionally stormy. But that slowly developed into a wary, respectful and even affectionate arrangement.

When Mr Wilson first got into government, Marcia ran into an immediate and absurd row with Derek Mitchell, the prime minister's principal private secretary. She wanted to get rid of the Downing Street pool of typists, saying they were "upper-class natural Tories" and unsuitable for a socialist administration.

However, no purge took place, but Mr Mitchell's victory was short-lived in that Marcia was gaining more and more power at No 10 as each day passed.

And she blamed the Labour leadership for not pushing more women to the top. Once she said: "Many leading Labour figures have an attitude to women's rights completely opposed to the whole spirit of a movement that believes expressly in equal opportunity."

In her memoirs, Downing Street In Perspective, Lady Falkender describes how the Labour leadership laughed in derision the day Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Tory Party in 1975.

She wrote: "They were all laughing, joking and slapping each other on the shoulders with remarks to the effect that all was now well. How could, they were asking, the Tories possibly win with a woman at the head?"

Only the prescient Mr Wilson and Peter Shore provided the cautionary and dissenting voices.

Marcia became a life peeress in 1974 and is survived by her two sons.