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. Fair enough: they relate to events that took place a generation ago. Not so the latest instalment, which concerns the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, and his walk-on role in the scandal which brought down Jeremy Thorpe, leader of the Liberal party, during the mid-1970s.

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Haines reveals that shortly after the second 1974 general election Harold Wilson asked Barbara Castle, the social security secretary, to produce details of National Insurance records relating to Norman Scott, Thorpe’s long-time lover. When Castle balked at carrying out this task, Wilson told her to ‘get Jack Straw’ to do it. Jack Straw was then Barbara Castle’s special adviser. Haines records that Wilson ‘got what he wanted’.

Haines is explicit about why Wilson sought the information. He was clinging to power by a two- or three-seat majority. The prospect of a Tory/Liberal pact of the kind that Edward Heath and Jeremy Thorpe so nearly negotiated after the February 1974 election was a constant threat.