Born Marcia Field in her parents' town of Long Buckby, there is an unconfirmed rumour that her mother was an illegitimate daughter of King Edward VII.

[3][4] Lady Falkender was educated at the independent selective Northampton High School and read for a BA in history at Queen Mary College, University of London.

[6] Questions were repeatedly raised in the press at the time about the propriety of her many commercial dealings; however, both Wilson and Williams successfully sued many London newspapers for libel.

[7] Later, Wilson publicly called for a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the press because of the defamation in the media, and that there had been a concerted smear campaign to de-stabilise his administration by MI5.

Wilson took that power to award peerages for himself, and later told his policy adviser Bernard Donoughue that he did it because "that gal Marcia insisted on it".

[5] Donoughue's diary recorded Wilson telling one of his staff that he had just quarrelled with Falkender, who was demanding "peerages for friends".

[5] Donoughue's diary actually credits the "that gal Marcia insisted on it" comment to Freddie Warren, who ran the Chief Whip's office in No.

In a BBC Panorama programme aired on 14 February 1977, when asked to clarify his book, Haines explicitly and unequivocally denied any financial impropriety in the compilation of the list.

According to Charles Moore, Thatcher's biographer, "The purpose of the meetings was for Lady Falkender to convey to the Tory campaigners her assessment of what the Labour party was thinking."

[23][2][1] In October 2023, a biography of Falkender was published which suggested that she and Wilson had conducted an affair shortly after they met, which was over before he became prime minister.

According to an unpublished memoir by Wilson's election agent, George Caunt, the couple first met at a dinner at Labour's headquarters in April 1956.

[24] McDougall's book has many details about her political career and her private life, including amongst other things how the press held off from publicising matters such as the potentially career-destroying revelation that she had had two children out of wedlock, and how she hid her pregnancies from the 10 Downing Street personnel.