The most important characteristic in the makeup of the complex personality of the journalist Joe Haines, who has died aged 97, was loyalty. He was loyal to his family and a few carefully chosen friends; he never forgot the poverty and the culture of his working-class childhood and was thus always loyal to the journalistic trade that had enabled his escape from it.
He demonstrated unwavering personal devotion while employed by the two men, the politician Harold Wilson and the publisher Robert Maxwell, who dominated the significant years of his working life. Yet superseding all of these, and perhaps also explaining some of his enigmatic career decisions, was his loyalty to the Labour party.
He justified the publication of two of his books exposing the extraordinary shenanigans that had played out in private behind the doors of Wilson’s office while Haines was his press secretary on the grounds that the revelations were in the interests of the party.
His personal allegiance to Wilson, whom he served at the end of his first spell as PM (1969-70), as leader of the opposition, and again as PM from 1974, had collapsed in the welter of recriminations that followed Wilson’s resignation honours list in 1976.
On leaving Downing Street, Haines joined the Daily Mirror in 1977 as a feature writer, and principal leader writer from 1978. He defended his decision to continue after the paper was bought in 1984 by Maxwell, whom he had denounced two days earlier as “a crook, a cheat and a liar”, by asserting that he had been persuaded that by doing so he could maintain the paper’s supposedly influential support for the Labour party. Under the new proprietor he was an assistant editor and group political editor (1984-90).
Haines loved observing the practice of power at close hand, as he did in different ways both in Downing Street and at the Mirror headquarters in Holborn, central London, and enjoyed his role as a sort of consigliere to both men. He liked to see himself as indispensable, and his vanity was flattered by the reliance both learned to place upon him and, in particular, on his quick wits and brilliant turns of phrase.
But coupled with this, he had a born journalist’s natural instinct to share information, which made telling the story of the chaotic power politics he had witnessed at Westminster irresistible.
His account of Maxwell’s life, in the authorised biography published in 1988, which was widely derided as hagiography, was less easy to explain but had its roots in Haines’s need to be needed. He was flattered to have been given the assignment, although privately he would come to regret it bitterly after Maxwell’s death in November 1991 and the exposure, some weeks later, of the massive multimillion pound fraud that Maxwell had perpetrated.
Haines’s embarrassment was compounded by having initially hailed Maxwell as the heroic saviour of the Mirror Group, when his proprietor’s body had been found at sea, and then dismissing as “tosh and falsehood” rumours of a financial scandal that swiftly began to circulate. A subsequent Trade and Industry report on the Maxwell case, published a decade later (2001), issued a mild rebuke to Haines, who had been a director of Mirror Group Newspapers and the group’s Scottish newspapers from 1986 until 1992, stating that he should “have discharged the responsibilities that went with that position” and “therefore bears a limited measure of responsibility”.
It was a professional ignominy from which he never truly recovered. It tainted his reputation and although he worked briefly as a political columnist for the Today newspaper (1994-95), after that he lived out his retirement embittered by his experience of both journalism and politics. That retirement was spent in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, and measured an even greater distance in lifestyle than the miles from his birthplace in the south London docklands.
His father, also called Joseph, was a stevedore who died in 1930, leaving his widow, Elizabeth, to raise two-year-old Joe and his two older sisters on her wages as a hospital cleaner. It would later be said, jokingly, that Joe himself was a classic case of “Bermondsey dockers’ syndrome”, growing up tough, with a streetwise survival instinct and an innate antipathy towards the elite. “For those with nowt, there was nowt, except the Labour party,” he said later, recalling trips to the seaside for poor children like him, organised by the party or by trade unions.
The family had hop-picking “holidays” in Kent, outings paid for by the money they earned in the orchards, and young Joe developed an early passion for football. At the age of 14, after only elementary schooling, he joined the Press Association as a messenger boy. He did the same job, running errands, in the London office of the Glasgow Herald before being promoted to liftboy and then copytaker.
He read Dickens and must have been encouraged by the possibilities therein; his ambition and intelligence were duly rewarded. In 1954 he became a parliamentary reporter for the Glasgow Bulletin and thereafter, empowered by what he learned sitting in the press gallery of the Commons, like Dickens himself a century earlier, he was promoted as a political correspondent, moving to the Scottish Daily Mail in 1960, and the Daily Herald in 1964 as it became the pre-Murdoch Labour-supporting Sun.
He was known as a Labour man, having joined the party as a teenager, and in 1969 Wilson offered him the post of deputy press secretary in Downing Street. He became press secretary within months.
The ensuing seven years until Wilson’s surprise resignation – about which Haines claimed he knew in advance – are remembered more by the later revelations of tempestuous rows between the various members of the Labour leader’s private office, coupled with allegations of sleaze, sex and scandal, than for Haines’s part in the political events of the day. Haines and his friend Bernard Donoughue (now Lord Donoughue), head of the policy unit, were ranged against the head of Wilson’s political office, Marcia Williams (who became Lady Falkender) in an ongoing struggle for the ear of the prime minister.
All three would subsequently detail this in a number of books, and the violent rows and recriminations continued thereafter for more than four decades. Haines’s first memoir, The Politics of Power (1977) was denounced by Wilson and Falkender as “a farrago of twisted facts”. When he returned to the subject in Glimmers of Twilight (2003), he caused a sensation by claiming that Wilson’s doctor, Lord (Joe) Stone, had even once offered to “dispose of” Falkender.
In the event she died in 2019, the year of his final book, Kick ’Em Back: Wilson, Maxwell and Me, a typically truculent attempt to salvage some of the damage he had caused to his own reputation by his biography of Maxwell.
One particular source of Haines’s resentment was the peerages offered to a number of controversial – and later discredited – businessmen contained in the so-called “lavender list” drawn up on Wilson’s retirement and allegedly written on Falkender’s own lavender-coloured writing paper. Haines himself turned down a peerage in 1976 and contemptuously publicised the fact that he had done so, by saying that he did not dance, sing or do imitations.
Perhaps more significantly, Haines became the first press secretary to acquire a public profile. This was partly because he had a difficult relationship with the parliamentary lobby journalists, among whom he had been numbered, and his unpopularity resulted in public friction with the press. In 1975, the year after Wilson returned to No 10 as prime minister, relations were so bad that Haines even suspended lobby briefings for a period – in order, he said, to teach the press a lesson.
He also embarked on legal action against the Times for calling his staff “professional liars”. He won an apology out of court, but not many friends in journalism. In 2024 he gave the Times an interview in which he revealed that Wilson had a relationship with his deputy press secretary, Janet Hewlett–Davies, who had died the previous year.
Haines described Labour in 2018 as “the party to which I have given my life”. He was a member of the Bermondsey branch as a young man and a councillor in Tonbridge, Kent, for nine years (1963-69 and 1971-74). In May 2024 he gave a party “to renew old friendships and repair broken ones” – it was, it seemed, his own way of saying farewell.
In 1955 he married Irene Lambert; she died in 2022.
• Joseph Thomas William Haines, journalist, born 29 January 1928; died 19 February 2025
