Joe Haines (journalist)

Joseph Thomas William Haines (born 29 January 1928) is a British journalist and former press secretary to Labour leader and Prime Minister Harold Wilson (1969–76).

Born in Rotherhithe, then an impoverished area of London with appalling housing conditions, Haines was the youngest child of a stevedore who died when he was 2. His mother, a cleaner at a hospital, brought up the family. He joined the Labour Party as a teenager. At 14, Haines became a copyboy on the Glasgow Bulletin, and then a lobby reporter at Westminster in 1950.

In 1954 Haines became the political correspondent for George Outram & Co. in Glasgow, before moving to Edinburgh around 1960 to work for the Scottish Daily Mail. From 1964 he was employed by the pre-Murdoch Sun, and became Harold Wilson's press secretary in 1969.

In 1974 Wilson had a health scare over a racing heart complaint, but "I told the press, who believed me when I said that Harold had the flu," Haines recalled in 2004. "We had an economic crisis and we had a majority of three", he explained.

In Glimmers of Twilight (2003), Haines claims that Wilson's doctor Joseph Stone offered to murder Marcia Falkender, the head of Wilson's political office, after she attempted to blackmail Wilson over an affair they had twenty years earlier. The BBC, in an out-of-court settlement with Falkender, paid her £75,000 after these claims were repeated in The Lavender List, a drama documentary written by Francis Wheen and broadcast in 2006. Although Haines himself has not been sued, as a libel action involving him as the source it is generally accepted that the BBC settled because the original claimant would not stand behind the story. Roy Hattersley later referred to Glimmers of Twilight as a "book of tall tales". The allegations relating to Stone were repeated in the BBC's documentary The Secret World of Whitehall (2011).

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