How have we managed without the expression “sunshine at sunset”? As in, when an older married man is granted sex with a much younger colleague and better still, keeps it quiet? So much so that his wife stays on to nurse him through Alzheimer’s disease?

We owe this promising euphemism to the former Harold Wilson aide Bernard Donoughue, 89, who appeared on Radio 4’s Today programme last week. He was confirming gossip that he and the former Labour prime minister’s press secretary, Joe Haines, 96, have treasured for 50 years: Wilson, during his final term in office, had an affair with Janet Hewlett-Davies, Haines’s Downing Street deputy.

They think it’s time her story came out, Hewlett-Davies having recently died, so that, Haines says, historians can recognise “her importance to Wilson’s morale”. Wilson’s alleged confessions (“I’ve never been happier”) are supplied, along with relevant logistics. At Chequers, Haines says, Hewlett-Davies once swapped rooms with his, which adjoined the prime minister’s, allowing Wilson to sneak in. “And what did he do? He left his slippers under her bed.”

Would Hewlett-Davies, who remained married, rewardingly employed and never divulged the affair, have cared for these disclosures? Or for being, personally, summarised as a kind of human Sertraline? The Today programme did not inquire.

How about Marcia Williams, the powerful private secretary critical throughout Wilson’s career and probably for a time his lover, who is still loathed by Haines and Donoughue? Donoughue only took the opportunity on Today to belittle her (“She would shout at him........

© The Guardian