Margaret Thatcher described him as “the most skilful of politicians” and Tony Blair thought him “Labour’s most successful leader ever”.
Such elegies on the death in 1995 of Harold Wilson, 79, the twice Labour prime minister who had Alzheimer’s and colon cancer, betray nothing of the reality of his later years – spent in the unforgiving grip of dementia and, it has emerged, forced to consider selling his personal and political papers to meet the heavy and increasing costs of care.
Five years before his death, Thatcher’s government was alarmed at plans to sell Lord Wilson of Rievaulx’s archive for £212,500 (about £700,000 in today’s money) to Canada’s McMaster University, newly released Cabinet Office files revealed this week.
Aside from alarm about his collection going overseas – and breaching the so-called 30-year-rule – the files also reveal sadness at “the case of a former prime minister fallen on hard times in this way”.
“I doubt in his full senses, and he wasn’t, Harold would have wanted or tried to sell official papers,” said Joe Haines, 96, his press secretary at No 10.
The truth was that the disease that robbed him of his brilliant mind also deprived him of any real way of making a living once he left parliament in 1983 after almost 40 years.
“He never had much money of his own. Because of his mental condition he couldn’t write articles or make speeches, and his income would have been his pension as an ex-prime minister,” said Haines, who estimates that at the time as a “comparatively small sum”.
“He was given a job by [former Labour MP and late media proprietor] Robert Maxwell, made a trustee of some kind, but it was really only to help him out because, as I knew, his powers were fading in 1976.”
The Wilsons, who had two sons, had a three-bed flat in Westminster they had owned for decades, where Mary, a poet, nursed him and continued to live, and a holiday bungalow bought in 1959 on the Isles of Scilly. On his wife’s death, aged 102 in 2018, her will revealed them to be worth a total of around £2m, almost a quarter-of-a-century after his death, according to reports.
Wilson, Labour leader for 13 years and prime minister from 1964-70 and 1974-76, astonished almost everyone when, aged 60 and just two years after winning his fourth election, he announced his resignation from office. He had no fight left in him and knew he was deteriorating mentally, said Haines.
Former Labour leader Neil Kinnock said: “I think it was expected that prime ministers would come from a certain class in 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 PM.
Lord Kinnock, 82, felt a “surge of sorrow” on learning the politician he had admired since childhood had sought to sell his archives overseas. He said: “I realised about the only means he had of raising money was to sell his past. Life didn’t deal with him wonderfully well. He had no benefactors. He did have a lot of people who did very well out of him in terms of their political careers. But nobody reciprocated.”
It was obvious Wilson “hadn’t got much money”, he added. “I heard stories that he was trying to make speeches for money but was unsuccessful because he had lost his fluency.”
Wilson, from a lower middle-class background who excelled at school and at Oxford University, described himself as “the lad from behind those lace curtains in the Huddersfield house”. His father was a chemist, his mother a schoolteacher before marriage.
“The main problem for Harold was he wasn’t very good at getting money for himself,” said Lord Donoughue, 89, who set up and headed the policy unit at No 10 under Wilson.
Once retired, he was unable to capitalise on his long political career because of illness.
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No one had then worked out how to look after ex-prime ministers, “because historically, whether it was the Conservative or the Liberal party, prime ministers and leaders had tended to be aristocrats with family mansions and land and things like that,” Donoughue added.
“The Conservative governments did not bother about that too much because it was a Labour problem. And Labour hadn’t done what it ought to have done to set up the kind of arrangements we have now. Today, ex-prime ministers are looked after but then there was an assumption they would look after themselves.
“I still care about Harold, because it all ended so miserably, and that’s so sad.”
The National Archives files, unearthed by the BBC, show Andrew Turnbull, Thatcher’s principal private secretary, did explore ways to support Lord and Lady Wilson, but was told “special funds” available to the current prime minister could not help. He also tried the parliamentary pension scheme, to see if its hardship fund could assist.
In parliamentary tributes on Wilson’s death, the late Labour MP Gerald Kaufman, a friend and colleague, acknowledged the hardships when he paid tribute to Lady Wilson. “She has gone through a very long period of great stress, and the months and years that preceded Harold’s death have not been easy for her.”
In 1991, a solution had been reached when anonymous donors funded the Bodleian Library in Oxford to buy the papers, keeping them in the UK with money going to a trust set up for the Wilsons.
Wilson served as MP for Ormskirk, which he won in 1945, then Huyton near Liverpool, until 1983, remaining, Kinnock suspects “because he couldn’t afford not to be getting his Commons salary.” He was elevated to the House of Lords.
He cut a forlorn figure in later years. It was sad, said Donoughue, “seeing him in the Lords looking lost. He’d get up from his seat and he couldn’t remember where the exit was.”
After Wilson retired, Haines remembers seeing him at a Cafe Royale dinner event and having a “lively half-hour chat” as they handed their coats in to reception. At the end of the event, the two picked their coats at the same time, chatting for another half hour. “And it was quite clear he didn’t remember seeing me earlier in the evening, because we went over all the same things again. It was very sad.”