Mrs Wilson's Diary

Prime Minister parodies are a long-running feature of the British satirical magazine Private Eye, which have been included in the majority of issues since the magazine's inception. The parodies consist of one arch satirical personification of the Prime Minister of the day, and use that personification to send up continuously that Prime Minister's personality and style of leadership, and the personalities and general features of his cabinet. Such are their popularity that the parodies usually find their way into mainstream culture far beyond simply being viewed as a joke within the pages of Private Eye, and are subsequently mentioned often in other journalistic appraisals of the individual in question.

Mrs Wilson's Diary was the imaginary diary of Prime Minister Harold Wilson's wife Mary, in the style of the BBC radio serial Mrs Dale's Diary. Written primarily by John Wells with input from Richard Ingrams and Peter Cook, it chronicled the events in Wilson's life from Mary's more down-to-earth and homely perspective. Mrs Wilson was presented as seeing herself as comfortably middle class, in contrast to the working class pretensions (and middle class actuality) of her husband, for example the Wincarnis (a brand of tonic wine) and the worsted suits with two pairs of trousers (Wilson was from Huddersfield, a town known for the manufacture of worsted cloth).

The "Diary" caught the mood of the nation in the mid to late sixties. The column subsequently appeared as a sketch on satirical television programmes, and was adapted as a musical play under the eye of Joan Littlewood (music by Jeremy Taylor), being performed in the West End. It also inspired a similar feature in the American magazine National Lampoon named Mrs Agnew's Diary, purporting to be the actual journal of Vice President Spiro Agnew's wife.

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