Joe Haines

Posted: February 19, 2025

JOE HAINES, political journalist and press secretary to former Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, and later political editor, leader writer, assistant editor and director at the Daily Mirror, died on February 19 [2025], aged 97. His funeral will be at 2.30pm on Monday, March 31, at the Kent & Sussex Crematorium, Benhall Mill Road, Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent TN2 5JJ

Obituary by JULIA LANDGON/photo: Mirrorpix: Joe Haines was a man who liked to be needed and his considerable talent was such that two men, in particular, recognised how much he could do for them. They were Harold Wilson and Robert Maxwell and, in its way, the job that Joe did for them both was really quite similar: he wrote their speeches and their public statements; he told them what they could say and what they couldn’t; he told them the truth and, as a consequence of all of these attributes, he did his best to burnish the public image of both. History proved that he was more successful with the prime minister than with the newspaper proprietor.

Haines was a poor boy from the London dockland slums, an auto-didact who read Dickens, and who graduated from being a newspaper messenger and liftboy to sit in the parliamentary press gallery as a reporter, just as Dickens did himself. He was a Labour Party person, boy and man, and Wilson picked him to join the Downing Street press office in 1969. He ran Wilson’s press operation from then until 1976 when he joined the Daily Mirror, initially as a feature writer, later as group political editor and from 1986–1992 additionally as a director. After the inquiry into Maxwell’s scandalous financial shenanigans, Haines was found to have a “limited measure of responsibility” in consequence of his position.

The thing about Joe was that he could write the pants off anyone and he had a born journalist’s desire to share (almost) anything he knew with someone else. He believed in the public interest, he thought the Labour Party and the Daily Mirror served the public interest and yet he executed the swiftest political U-turn in history by backing Maxwell’s ownership of the Mirror almost within hours of denouncing him as a “crook and a liar”. He thought it would save the Mirror, but history and his hagiography of the bouncing Czech showed Haines to be a victim of his own vanity. It was a tragedy he had to live with until the age of 97, alone since his wife Rene’s [Irene Lambert] death in 2022. They had no children.

Joseph Thomas William Haines January 29 1928–February 19, 2025