Shirley Williams
oldie political legend of the year
Shirley Williams will not relish being labelled an ‘oldie’. At 87, age may have affected her mobility, but it has done nothing to vanquish her indomitable spirit nor her commanding intelligence.
Last summer, I accompanied her on an intrepid, last-minute expedition to Amiens Cathedral – we were on our way to visit the grave on the Somme of her mother’s fiancé killed in the First World War – and was struck, as I always am when I’m with her, not only by her energy, but also by her extraordinary powers as a speaker and debater.
She will go down in history as one of the great communicators of British politics in the second half of the 20th century. In a dry season for political talent, it’s striking to remember how prized she was not only for her charisma and essential decency, but also for the way she combined cogent argument, in that warm, mellow voice of hers, with a genuine interest in other people’s opinions.
More than Margaret Thatcher’s forbidding example, she became a role model to female MPS across the party spectrum, especially as a pioneering woman cabinet minister in the 1970s.
Born in 1930, the daughter of Vera Brittain (author of Testament of Youth) and political scientist George Catlin, she was evacuated to America at the age of nine, remaining there for three years and beginning a lifelong love affair with the United States (she later made a successful second marriage to Richard Neustadt, the pre-eminent scholar of the American presidency).
After Oxford, she worked as a journalist and as secretary of the Fabian Society, and fought three parliamentary seats unsuccessfully for Labour before being elected to the Commons in 1964. She was rapidly promoted and talked of as a future prime minister. She broke with Labour in 1981, arguing that it was no longer the democratic socialist party she had joined, and co-founded the SDP, Britain’s first new major political party in eighty years. Her prospects as prime minister receded as the party’s bright dawn began to fade. But perhaps she never wanted the job anyway.
‘Now you can see that I could never have been PM,’ I remember her saying to me once, when she managed to give her party minders the slip and got lost on a long and muddy walk.
In January 2016, she gave her final parliamentary speech in the House of Lords, where she’d been leader of the Liberal Democrats for a time (and, incidentally, refused to have a portrait of Asquith hanging in her office, as she strongly disapproved of his treatment of the suffragettes). She spoke, six months before the referendum, of her abiding belief in the importance of Britain’s membership of the European Union.
Many years ago, William Rees-mogg, a friend from university days, published a profile of her in the Sunday Times. It was a patronising assessment, of the kind that so-called ‘men of consequence’ dealt out to women in public life in those days. But, in one respect, Rees-mogg was spot on, when he compared her to ‘the silken Myfanwy’, heroine of John Betjeman’s poem. The description still fits: ‘Ring leader, tom-boy, and chum to the weak.’