Article informationauthor, Sancha Bergrole, BBC News
July 23, 2024
Former prime minister Harold Wilson agreed to sell his entire archive of personal and political papers to help pay for his care in the final years of his life, according to documents released by the National Archives.
Lord Wilson had originally planned to sell the collection to Canada’s McMaster University for £212,500 (about £700,000 in today’s money).
He has Alzheimer’s disease and “requires ongoing care, the costs of which are significant and will increase,” according to one document.
But the proposal to sell the newspapers overseas caused unease among senior officials in Margaret Thatcher’s government.
In early January 1990, Cabinet Secretary Robin Butler wrote to another official warning that Lord Wilson’s former private secretary, Lady Marcia Volkender, was “putting together proposals” to establish a repository in Canada for the papers of former prime ministers.
Part of the profits would be used to support Lord and Lady Wilson, who, as reported to Sir Robin by his predecessor, Lord Armstrong, were “not currently well off”.
The documents said there was no “enthusiasm” among Cabinet Office officials about the sale, with one staffer pointing out that Lord Wilson’s documents were still subject to the so-called 30-year rule.
Government documents are transferred to the National Archives but are kept secret for a period of time before becoming eligible for public release – in the 1980s it was 30 years, but this has since been reduced to 20 years.
Officials said that if the Wilson Papers had been sent to Canada, the 30-year rule would never have been implemented.
“He has no right to sell.”
McMaster University had hoped to include in its archives documents from Lord Wilson’s time at Number 10. The Labour leader served as prime minister for two terms, from 1964 to 1970 and again from 1974 to 1976.
Sir Robin thought that taking the newspapers out of the country would cause “public unrest”, and Thatcher’s chief secretary, Andrew Turnbull, said he was unhappy with the “political/moral” nature of such an idea.
“Though formally these are Lord Wilson’s private papers, they are part of our history and, needless to say, are not something he can ‘sell’,” he wrote in March 1990.
He said the trade union movement should support Lord Wilson if he needs further care in old age.
Nevertheless, that summer the Cabinet Secretary explored ways of supporting Lord and Lady Wilson: “It is extremely saddening, he wrote, that a former Prime Minister should find himself in such a difficult position.”
He was told the “special fund” available to current prime ministers wouldn’t help him, so he tried the Parliamentary Pension Scheme to see if the hardship fund might help. Government briefings also proposed to increase the pensions of former prime ministers.
However, the proposed pay increase was just £5,000 a year.
Lord Armstrong had supported Mrs Volkendorfer, and in November 1990 she told him that the Wilsons were “delighted” to hear that they were receiving an increase in their pensions, which would “clearly help their day-to-day living”.
However, the amount was “completely incomparable” to what Canadian universities were offering.
Solution Found
Lord Armstrong had suggested it was “impolite” for newspapers to be taken out of the country.
Mrs. Volkender responded: “There has been so much suffering that ‘politeness’ and ‘inpoliteness’ are no longer relevant.”
She said the money from the paper would be useful “just like selling a house or a piece of art or a diamond brooch.”
The Cabinet Office was told there were no legal obstacles to the sale.
By July 1991, however, an alternative solution had been found: the trustees of the Wilson Archive found an anonymous donor who would provide funds for the Bodleian Library in Oxford to purchase the documents.
The money will be donated to a trust fund set up for the Wilsons’ benefit.
They will remain in the UK, and will be stored in a secure location – until now Lord Wilson had been storing the archives in the basement of the National Car Parks building in central London, with the help of the company’s chairman, who is a “loyal supporter”.
Lord Wilson died in 1995, aged 79.