In 1974, US President Richard Nixon visited London. At the time, Harold Wilson’s Labour government was struggling to ride out a media storm over a dodgy land deal involving the brother of the prime minister’s formidable political secretary Marcia Williams. As he went up the stairs in No 10, Nixon passed a young woman from the press office. “Say,” he asked his host, “is that the one we’ve been reading about?”
It was not. The woman on the stairs was not Williams but Janet Hewlett-Davies, whose true significance to the Wilson government of that time has only been hinted at until now. Ben Pimlott’s 1992 biography identifies her as a “special favourite” of the four-time prime minister, whose wife, Mary, became irritated by “what at times appeared almost like a schoolboy crush”. Now, though, two veteran Wilson aides, his press secretary Joe Haines and his policy unit chief Bernard Donoughue, have revealed a well-kept secret. They claim that Mr Wilson and Ms Hewlett-Davies, both married, were having an affair during his second period as prime minister from 1974-76.
