Mary Wilson

She was a familiar figure from the 1960s, largely as the result of the satirical diary of a suburban housewife, penned in her name but by other hands in the pages of Private Eye, and as the off-screen presence in Mike Yarwood’s impressions of her husband, “Oh, Mary, come and listen to this,” he was fond of exclaiming.

She disapproved of the first satire, though she kept her counsel, but was said to have quite enjoyed the second.

Lady Wilson outlived her husband of 55 years, who was born in Huddersfield and served as MP for Huyton in Merseyside, by more than two decades.

Born Gladys Mary Baldwin in the Norfolk town of Diss in January 1916, she was the daughter of a Congregationalist minister, and wrote poetry from the age of six.

Her father’s work took the family around the country, and it was in Cheshire, at the Port Sunlight plant of Lever Brothers, that she began work as a typist after leaving school.

She met her future husband at a nearby tennis club in 1934 and the pair married on New Year’s Day in 1940. In what was seen as a rebellious move for a churchman’s daughter, she declined during the ceremony to say that she would “obey” him.

She had not expected to become a politician’s wife. Her husband had graduated from Oxford and become a research assistant to the social reformer, William Beveridge, but the war had intervened and, classified as a specialist, he left to join the Ministry of Supply.

He arrived in the Commons as part of the Labour landslide of 1945 and, to the surprise of many, not least himself, found himself in Clement Attlee’s post-war government as Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Works. Within two years he had been promoted to Overseas Trade Secretary.

Mary, meanwhile, remained in the shadows. Her first published collection of verse, Selected Poems, in 1970, included one in which she appeared to describe the end of a love affair upon which she had embarked at around that time.

The book, considered revelatory at the time, sold in the tens of thousands, and whatever the sniffier critics thought of it, she did not want for support from among the literati.

Sir John Betjeman was a friend; she hosted him at Number 10 and he wrote a poem about a journey they took together to Diss. In 1976, an invitation to join the judging panel of the Man Booker Prize confirmed her credentials.

She had a sometimes disharmonious political relationship with her husband, opposing him in the 1975 referendum on joining what was still then known as the Common Market – but there was no doubting her devotion to him, and she resolutely refused to believe gossips who thought he had become too personally involved with his political advisor, Marcia Williams, whom he made Lady Falkender upon his retirement.

The Wilsons’ years after Downing Street were difficult, as he fought progressive memory loss. He died from colon cancer and Alzheimer’s disease in May 1995, at 79

Baroness Wilson is survived by her two sons, Robin and Giles.