Wilson's choice of appointments caused lasting damage to his reputation; former home secretary Roy Jenkins noted that Wilson's retirement "was disfigured by his, at best, eccentric resignation honours list, which gave peerages or knighthoods to some adventurous business gentlemen, several of whom were close neither to him nor to the Labour Party." In the 1990s two large academic biographies of Wilson were published by Philip Ziegler and Ben Pimlott. Both authors asserted that there was no financial impropriety in the compilation of the list. Pimlott observed in his biography of Wilson that political secretaries often write down lists at the instructions of their employers, and that in this case the fact that the list was pink does not itself prove anything. Both Falkender and Wilson maintained that the list was Wilson's. Falkender said it was compiled on Wilson's last day in Downing Street: “He put a pad in front of me of the pink paper that was stock paper back then and asked me to write out the names. My typewriter had been packed away so I wrote them down by hand. It really didn’t feel momentous."