The day Harold Wilson’s mistress caught the eye of a controversial US president

Janet Hewlett-Davies, the Downing Street deputy press secretary who allegedly had a secret affair with Harold Wilson in the 1970s, has attracted the attention of a controversial US president.

During a state visit to the UK in 1974, Richard Nixon – just months before his resignation over the Watergate scandal – mistook her for Marcia Williams when he saw her at 10 Downing Street.

According to the Times, the Prime Minister’s spokesman at the time, Joe Haines, claims that Mr Wilson – Prime Minister from 1964 to 1970 and from 1974 to 1976 – confessed to him in private that he had cheated on his wife Mary with Mrs Hewlett-Davies.

During his tenure and afterward, Mr Wilson was the subject of rumors of an affair with his high-profile political secretary, Marcia Williams, who later became Baroness Falkender. He always denied it and successfully sued on one occasion.

In fact, while Mr Wilson was prime minister, Mrs Williams had two sons with a leading political journalist, Walter Terry, who was political editor of the Daily Mail and then the Sun.

Mr Nixon’s amusing mistake is revealed in the recent biography of Mr Wilson by Labour MP and shadow minister Nick Thomas-Symonds, who describes what happened in a chapter on Wilson’s return to Downing Street for his second term as prime minister.

In a passage about Mr Wilson’s bitter battles with several national newspapers over the allegations against him and Ms Williams, Mr Thomas-Symonds writes: “Those were heady days, although there was a slight respite .

“Nixon, on a state visit to Britain, was at 10 Downing Street on April 7 and saw Janet Hewlett-Davies, Haines’ deputy, thinking she was Marcia Williams. ‘Is this the one we’ve been hearing about?'”

Ms Hewlett-Davies was so unassuming, compared with the larger-than-life personalities of Mr Haines and Baroness Falkender, that Nixon’s gaffe is the only reference to her in Mr Thomas-Symonds’ biography of Wilson.

She is not even mentioned in an earlier biography by historian Philip Ziegler.

Breaking his silence after 50 years, Mr Haines told The Times that Ms Hewlett-Davies, who was his deputy, had admitted to her boss that she had had an affair with Mr Wilson before he resigned in 1976.

Now aged 96, Mr Haines told the newspaper: “The astonishing thing is that no one but me knew about Janet’s affair with Wilson, which she did not sought no advantage whatsoever.

“It was certainly a love match on his part, and the joy Wilson showed me suggested it was for him too.”

In his comments to The Times, Mr Haines also claims the affair significantly boosted Wilson’s morale in the two years before he resigned as prime minister for health reasons in 1976.

According to the Times, the only other person who may have known about their romance at the time was Bernard Donoughue, now a veteran Labour Party figure who was then head of the policy research unit at 10 Downing Street.

He told The Times that Mr Wilson told him his friendship with Ms Hewlett-Davies “made him happier than he had ever been”.

Like Mr Wilson, Ms Hewlett-Davies was married at the time of their relationship and was 22 years younger than him.

She died aged 85 last year, after a career in Whitehall communications and later as public relations director for controversial media mogul Robert Maxwell, who then owned the Labour-supporting Mirror newspaper group.

During his tenure at 10 Downing Street, Mr Haines was a short-tempered press secretary whose relations with political journalists became so bad that he at one point suspended daily briefings.

In the House of Commons press gallery, there are caricatures on the walls of lobby journalists of the time – including Mr Terry, Ms Williams’ lover – barred from Downing Street.

Mr Haines went on to become a columnist and executive at the Daily Mirror under Maxwell and was never short of opinion on politics and – indeed – political journalism.

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Mr Donoughue, now 89, regularly attends the House of Lords and parliamentary Labour Party meetings on Monday evenings.

A cheerful and friendly soul, he was one of the sources for the BBC comedy Yes Minister, with Baroness Falkender.