1976 Prime Minister's Resignation Honours

The list caused controversy as a number of recipients were wealthy businessmen whose principles were considered antithetical to those held by the Labour Party at the time.

Roy Jenkins notes that Wilson's retirement "was disfigured by his, at best, eccentric resignation honours list, which gave peerages or knighthoods to some adventurous business gentlemen, several of whom were close neither to him nor to the Labour Party.

Dismissing the notoriety of these two names, both of Wilson's academic biographers, Professor Ben Pimlott and Philip Ziegler, writing in the 1990s long after the purported events stress that there was never any question at the time or subsequently of financial impropriety in the drawing up of the list.

The origin of the name "Lavender List" derived from the claim made by former press secretary and journalist Joe Haines that the head of Wilson's political office, Lady Falkender, had written the original draft on lavender-coloured notepaper.

Joe Haines expressly denied any financial impropriety in the compilation of the list on national television in an interview on BBC's Panorama on 14 February 1977.