Prime Minister Parodies (Private Eye) - Harold Wilson: Mrs. Wilson's Diary

Harold Wilson: Mrs. Wilson's Diary

Mrs Wilson's Diary was the imaginary diary of Prime Minister Harold Wilson's wife Mary, in the style of the then-popular BBC radio serial Mrs Dale's Diary. Written primarily by John Wells with input from Richard Ingrams and Peter Cook, it chronicled the events in Wilson's life from Mary's more down-to-earth and homely perspective. Mrs Wilson was presented as seeing herself as comfortably middle class, in contrast to the working class pretensions (and middle class actuality) of her husband, for example the Wincarnis (a brand of tonic wine) and the worsted suits with two pairs of trousers (Wilson was from Huddersfield, a town famous for the manufacture of worsted cloth).

The "Diary" caught the mood of the nation in the mid to late sixties, and helped to raise the profile of the magazine from a fledgling publication to that of a popular and well-known satirical voice. The column subsequently appeared as a sketch on satirical television programmes, and was adapted as a musical play under the eye of Joan Littlewood (music by Jeremy Taylor), being performed in the West End. It also inspired a similar feature in the American magazine National Lampoon named Mrs Agnew's Diary, purporting to be the actual journal of Vice President Spiro Agnew's wife.