The death of a “deeply kind and remarkable” woman from Hove has prompted her old colleagues to reveal her affair with the former Prime Minister Harold Wilson.
Wilson had the affair with Janet Hewlett-Davies who died peacefully at her home in Nizells Avenue, Hove, in October last year, at the age of 85.
The pair worked together in 10 Downing Street in the 1970s when Wilson was Prime Minister and she was his deputy press secretary.
The affair was revealed by Joe Haines, Wilson’s former press secretary and Hewlett-Davies’s immediate boss, in an interview with The Times.
Mr Haines, 96, and Wilson’s former adviser Bernard Donoughue, now Lord Donoughue, 89, spoke out after keeping the affair a secret for half a century.
Mr Haines told The Times that Hewlett-Davies was “astute, intelligent and trustworthy” and never sought to gain from having been the Labour leader’s mistress.
Lord Donoughue said: “We kept it secret because we thought it would be used damagingly against him at that time. There’s no reason for that now.
“And we waited until they had both died – Wilson some time ago and Janet just a few months ago – and so I felt as a sometime historian this was important to go in the historical record of Harold Wilson.”
Lord Wilson served as Prime Minister from 1964 to 1970 and then again from 1974 to 1976. He died in 1995 at the age of 79.
Lord Donoughue said that Wilson had cryptically confessed the affair to him during a walk around No 10 towards the end of his second spell as PM.
The Labour peer told the BBC: “He, in a very Wilsonian way, because he wasn’t a very direct person, he said he was very pleased I was a friend of Janet.
“So I, knowing him, know that he would not have raised that unless he had got some interest or concern, so I knew that he was asking me: did I know about him and Janet?
“And I replied by saying I thought Janet was a lovely and terrific person and I then added, in a Wilsonian way, which I had learned from him, and I’m very pleased your relationship is so close and so good.
“And that way I let him know that I knew – and then he said that she was a lovely person and he had never been happier.”
Lord Donoughue added that the affair had provided “a little sunshine at sunset” for the Prime Minister.
He had become increasingly paranoid about the security services and the challenges of dealing with a very slim majority, economic difficulties and, some have suggested, the early stages of dementia.
Wilson was beset by rumours that he was having an affair during his time in Downing Street – but with his political secretary Marcia Williams who became Baroness Falkender in 1974 on his recommendation.
The rumours were always denied and the secret of his affair with Hewlett-Davies, some 22 years his junior, never emerged until now.
Haines told The Times that it was “a love-match” and that she visited him in his retirement.
On her death, she was described on the website of the Church of the Annunciation, in Washington Street, Brighton, as “a deeply kind and remarkable person who we shall dearly miss”.
Lord Wilson’s wife of 55 years, Mary, died in 2018 aged 102. Barry Hewlett-Davies died in 2016 after 62 years of marriage. The couple had no children.
Ah, perhaps in a universe far, far away, they are both “discussing Ugandan affairs”