She hated the limelight, she rarely gave interviews and she remained a fiercely private woman right to the end. But the death of Mary Wilson this week at the age of 102 has triggered a wave of public affection and respect for the former Labour prime minister’s wife that she probably never even guessed existed.
The 1960s satirists mocked Mary Wilson as the epitome of middle-class domesticity. But the real woman was a much more formidable person than that, recall those who know what she went through.
“She was an intelligent woman, and a very interesting one,” said Cherie Blair on Friday. “She could be quite acerbic and firm. She did not enjoy Downing Street life. And she was the first prime minister’s wife who really had to deal with the press. She didn’t suffer fools gladly. And I’m afraid in politics there are quite a lot of fools.”
If the job of prime minister is a lonely one, the job of the prime minister’s consort is in many respects an even lonelier one. Mary Wilson was the epitome of a woman thrust into the public arena without in any way seeking the spotlight. Her husband, Harold, became an MP in 1945 and went on to lead four Labour governments between 1964 and 1976. Unlike Audrey Callaghan, Cherie Blair and Sarah Brown, Mary Wilson did not have to balance her public role with a separate career of her own.
Wilson’s death makes the exclusive club of past or present prime ministerial consorts more exclusive than ever. Now there are just six of them. The oldest member is Clarissa Eden, widow of Anthony, who turns 98 this month. The youngest is Samantha Cameron, who is more than half a century younger.
“I was in awe of her when I first met her in 1995 at Harold Wilson’s memorial service in Westminster Abbey,” Blair said of Mary Wilson. “But she was very kind and nice, and we made a point of inviting her to a number of events in the years that followed, including the celebrations of Labour’s centenary in 2000.”
Until she became too frail, Wilson divided her life between the Scilly Isles, where the Wilsons holidayed regularly and where Harold is buried, and a small flat near Westminster Cathedral, in London’s Victoria district, where her regular visitors included close family, Harold’s former political secretary Marcia Falkender and the former cabinet secretary Robin Butler and his wife, who were near neighbours.
“Mary was a very private woman who had very strong traditional Labour views,” Blair said. “She was a nuclear disarmament supporter and she was opposed to the Iraq war. She probably thought that Tony and I were a bit too rightwing. Her flat in Victoria was like a shrine to her life with Harold, with his Order of the Garter and some of the gifts he received when he was in office.”
The No 10 consorts get on well with each other. They meet occasionally at public events, at which they are always placed in the chronological order of their partners’ premierships – the Majors, the Blairs, the Browns, the Camerons and now the Mays. “We may not agree politically, but we have all been thrown together by the extraordinary circumstances of life at Downing Street,” said Blair. “It brings you together to have that sort of thing in common.”
Harold Wilson’s finances were modest, and it was John and Norma Major who first made sure Mary was properly supported by the state and had access to an official car when she needed one to attend public events and commemorations. The Blairs kept up the contact after 1997, inviting Wilson to visit Chequers with her granddaughters, who had been christened there.
“On one occasion,” Blair recalled, “we were in an official car coming into north London when Mary asked if we could take a small detour to the house in Hampstead Garden Suburb.” A blue plaque had been placed on the home in which the Wilsons had lived before they moved into Downing Street in 1964. “Mary was keen to have a look at it, so we did. It was a lovely moment.”
But it wasn’t just the Blairs who kept Wilson in their minds in her later years. In her 90s her first grandson and third grandchild was born. The birth brought her a personal letter from Buckingham Palace, signed by the Queen, congratulating her on the new addition to her family.
