Jack Straw must come clean about his role in the Jeremy Thorpe scandal

The memoirs of Joe Haines, now being serialised by the Mail on Sunday, are certain to rank among the most revelatory and important of the 20th century. Joe Haines was Harold Wilson’s press secretary, but in truth – as with Alastair Campbell and Tony Blair – he was far more than that. Wilson told Haines that he gave him the job ‘to conceal what you really do’.

Haines has already revealed the existence of a plot to kill Marcia Falkender, Wilson’s political secretary. He has provided testimony that Wilson and Falkender had a brief affair in the 1950s. He suggests that Falkender’s extraordinary hold over the prime minister resulted less from the fact that they had once slept together than that Wilson may have committed perjury by denying that they had done so after the affair was hinted at in a newspaper.

Haines’s memoirs, though of great historical importance, have been eclipsed by Edwina Currie’s diaries.