While at Oxford, Wilson taught French to London University external degree students at St Clare's.
Photographs taken by Wilson of five daughters of the Great and the Good published in Isis in 1969 proved controversial and were taken up by the Charles Greville column in the Daily Mail and later by Eamonn Andrews on the BBC Television programme What the Papers Say.
[citation needed] In 1982 Wilson and his son Mark visited the Cocos Keeling Islands in the Indian Ocean at a time of heightened tension between the US and the USSR as the latter sought a base to counter the Indian Ocean presence of US forces on the island of Diego Garcia in the Chagos Archipelago.
Highly controversial in light of the political sensitivity of such a visit (albeit with the tacit approval of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office), the expedition was nearly blocked from leaving the Seychelles by the Seychelles and Mauritian prime ministers and only obtained permission to sail for Chagos after the intervention of British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.
Wilson and his wife had two children, Mark Nicholas Leal (1974) and Jacqueline Emma Muir (1978).
In 1996 Wilson served as a Young Enterprise business adviser at Bryanston School, Dorset.