Harold Wilson’s sad final days revealed by Cabinet Office archives

Margaret Thatcher described him as “the most able politician” and Tony Blair called him “Labour’s most successful leader ever”.

Such elegies on the death in 1995 of Harold Wilson, aged 79, the two-time Labour prime minister who was suffering from Alzheimer’s and bowel cancer, betray nothing of the reality of his later years, when he was in the relentless grip of dementia and, it transpires, was forced to sell his personal and political credentials to pay the high and rising cost of care.

Five years before his death, Thatcher’s government was alarmed by plans to sell the archive of Lord Wilson of Rievaulx to Canada’s McMaster University for £212,500 (about £700,000 in today’s money), newly released Cabinet papers revealed this week.

In addition to concerns about his collection going abroad – thereby violating the so-called 30-year rule – the files also reveal sadness at “the case of a former prime minister who fell on hard times in this way”.

“I doubt that Harold, if he was in his right mind (which he wasn’t), would have wanted or tried to sell official documents,” said Joe Haines, 96, his spokesman at Number 10.

The truth was that the illness that robbed him of his brilliant mind also robbed him of any ability to earn a living when he left parliament in 1983 after almost 40 years.

“He never had much money of his own. His mental state prevented him from writing articles or making speeches, and his income would have been his pension as a former prime minister,” said Haines, who estimated it at the time as a “relatively small amount.”

“He was given a job by (former Labour MP and late media proprietor) Robert Maxwell, and was appointed a kind of administrator, but that was really just to help him because as I knew, his powers were taken away in 1976.”

The Wilsons, who had two sons, had a three-bedroom apartment in Westminster that they had owned for decades, where Mary, a poet, cared for him and continued to live, and a holiday home they bought in 1959 on the Isles of Scilly. When his wife died in 2018 at the age of 102, her will revealed According to reports, almost a quarter of a century after his death, they are said to be worth a total of around £2 million.

Wilson, Labour leader for 13 years and prime minister from 1964-70 and 1974-76, surprised almost everyone when he announced his resignation at the age of 60 and just two years after winning his fourth election. He had lost his fighting spirit and knew he was deteriorating mentally, Haines said.

Former Labour leader Neil Kinnock said: “I think it was to be 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 things like that, simply because he was a Conservative prime minister.

Lord Kinnock, 82, felt a “wave of sadness” when he heard that the politician he had admired since childhood was planning to sell his archives abroad. He said: “I realised that the only way he could raise money was by selling his past. Life wasn’t particularly good to him. He had no benefactors. He had a lot of people who did very well in their political careers. But no one else did the same.”

It was clear that Wilson “didn’t have much money,” he added. “I heard stories of him trying to give speeches for money, but not being able to because he had lost his fluency.”

Wilson, from a lower-middle-class background who excelled at school and Oxford University, described himself as “the boy behind those lace curtains in the house in Huddersfield”. His father was a chemist, his mother a teacher before marriage.

“The biggest problem for Harold was that he was not very good at making money for himself,” said Lord Donoughue, 89, who set up and headed the policy unit at No 10 under Wilson.

After his retirement, illness prevented him from benefiting from his long political career.

No one had thought at the time about how to look after ex-prime ministers, “because historically prime ministers and leaders, whether it was the Conservative or the Liberal Party, have tended to be aristocrats with family homes and land and things like that,” Donoughue added.

“The Conservative governments didn’t bother about that because it was a Labour problem. And Labour hadn’t done what it should have done to set up the kind of arrangements we have now. These days, ex-PMs are looked after, but back then there was an assumption that they would look after themselves.

“I still care about Harold, because it all ended so badly, and that’s so sad.”

The files of the National Archives, excavated by the BBC, show Andrew Turnbull, Thatcher’s chief private secretary, investigated ways to support Lord and Lady Wilson, but was told that the “special funds” available to the current prime minister could not help. He also tried the parliamentary pensions system, to see if the emergency fund could help.

In parliamentary tributes on Wilson’s death, the late Labour MP Gerald Kaufman, a friend and colleague, acknowledged the hardships as he paid tribute to Lady Wilson. “She had been through a very long period of great stress, and the months and years leading up to Harold’s death were not easy for her.”

In 1991 a solution was found when anonymous donors funded the Bodleian Library in Oxford to purchase the papers. The papers remained in the UK, while the money went into a special fund set up for the Wilsons.

Wilson served as MP for Ormskirk, which he won in 1945, and then for Huyton, near Liverpool, until 1983. Kinnock suspects he remained so “because he could not afford not to receive his Commons salary.” He was elevated to the House of Lords.

He cut a forlorn figure in later years. It was sad, Donoughue said, “to see him in the House of Lords, looking forlorn. He got up from his chair and couldn’t remember where the exit was.”

After Wilson retired, Haines recalls seeing him at a Cafe Royale dinner event and them chatting for a “lively half hour” while dropping off their coats at the reception. At the end of the event, the two picked up their coats at the same time and chatted for another half hour. “And it was clear he didn’t remember seeing me earlier in the evening because we were talking about the same things again. It was very sad.”