As a politician Shirley Williams always seemed as ready to listen as talk, and this despite her possession of a huskily mellifluous voice. She also gave the impression that fussing about her appearance did not feature high on her list of priorities. In the sexist Seventies, her diminutive form would pointedly surface in newspaper photographs — hair tousled, head tilted, ear cocked, with the whole of her attention evidently fixed on someone else.
In 1981, when she abandoned the Labour Party to join the so-called Gang of Four in founding the Social Democratic Party — signing what would become known as “the Limehouse declaration” at David Owen’s east London house — it had to be pointed out that she couldn’t face the waiting press wearing a sweatshirt and looking dishevelled. Deborah Owen lent her a smart top and jacket while someone else went in search of a hairbrush.
As well as having a reputation for unkempt poshness, she had a digressive and busy mind and nearly always managed to turn up a few minutes late for everything, a pathology to which she admitted in her memoirs.
Williams was nevertheless widely tipped to become the country’s first female prime minister, at least until Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party in 1975. Even after she left the Labour Party the initial expectation was that she — rather than the claret-sipping Roy Jenkins or the vanity project that was David Owen — would emerge as the Social Democrats’ leader.
If she never quite fulfilled what at one time seemed her destiny either in the Labour Party or with the SDP, it was arguably because she lacked the unremitting discipline and dedication of the total politician. Yet luck also played its part. If she had not lost her seat at the 1979 general election she would almost certainly have been chosen at least as the Labour Party’s deputy leader when James Callaghan retired from the leadership in 1980 (in which case the SDP would presumably never have materialised). Again, had she not betrayed “a fatal hesitation” over the Warrington by-election in the summer of 1981 — a hesitation that allowed Roy Jenkins to leap in and become the SDP’s standard-bearer — nothing, probably, could have stopped her both from winning the seat and going on to be the new party’s first leader. All the later quarrels and rivalries that destroyed the unity of the Gang of Four might then have been avoided.
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Shirley Vivien Teresa Brittain Catlin — she took the name of Williams from her first husband — was born into the left-wing establishment in 1930. Her mother, Vera Brittain, was the celebrated feminist and pacifist who wrote the bestselling First World War book Testament of Youth, while her father, Sir George Catlin, was a soldier in the Second World War and a peripatetic academic with close links to the old Labour Party power structure. It was from her father, a devout Catholic, that she learnt about the notion of just war theory, where war has to be morally justifiable with a series of guidelines. He hated prejudice and had great social tolerance.
As a child her happiest memories were of living at her mother’s little cottage near Lyndhurst in the New Forest during the war. They began spending more time there because their London house in Chelsea was damaged from bombing, and her mother found it the perfect place to write. She was three years old when she had a dim feeling that her mother was well known. When she was seven her headteacher told her how delighted she was that her mother was going to appear at speech day. “I was utterly horrified — partly because I knew I’d be beaten up in the playground.”
It was in a professional, cosmopolitan household that the young Shirley and her elder brother, John, were initially brought up — if, given their parents’ commitments, largely by the Scottish housekeeper and her husband.
Evacuated to America just after the fall of France in 1940, the two children returned home in 1943. Immediately enrolled at St Paul’s Girls’ School, she went on to win a scholarship from there to Somerville College, Oxford, becoming the first woman to chair the Oxford University Labour Club. It was also there that she followed her father into the Roman Catholic church, a faith that remained vital to her throughout her life even though she always considered herself a rebel Catholic, campaigning from within the church against Vatican dogmatism and supporting contraception and an end to a celibate priesthood.
Already intensely political, she fought her first parliamentary campaign at Harwich in Essex at a by-election in 1954. Making her living as a journalist — originally on the Daily Mirror, where she said she was “hopeless”, and then, more happily, on the Financial Times — she contested the seat again at the general election of 1955, still using her maiden name of Catlin.
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In both contests she was comfortably defeated and despite fighting and losing in the more marginal constituency of Southampton Test at the 1959 general election, her first real break in politics came when she was appointed general secretary of the Fabian Society at the age of 29 in 1960. Here she succeeded her future SDP colleague Bill (later Lord) Rodgers. The Fabian Society ranked at the time as something of a powerhouse and both the propaganda and the research sides of the organisation continued to flourish under Williams’s leadership. Her own sights, however, were set on the House of Commons. In 1963 she secured the Labour nomination for the winnable Hertfordshire constituency of Hitchin.
After Labour’s victory and her own in October 1964, Williams was correctly viewed as one of the most promising recruits to the government back benches. She immediately became parliamentary private secretary to the minister of health, Kenneth Robinson. Within two years she had secured her place on the Treasury bench, as parliamentary under-secretary to the Ministry of Labour. She did not, however, establish much rapport with her boss, the right-wing trade unionist Ray Gunter, and only found her feet when she was promoted first to be minister of state at the Department of Education and Science under Anthony Crosland, and then at the Home Office under James Callaghan.
The Wilson government’s defeat at the general election of 1970 interrupted Williams’s ministerial career at what might have been a crucial stage. In the event, however, the loss of office did not matter: in opposition she was instantly elected to the shadow cabinet, in 1972 jointly topping the poll. She took over first as spokeswoman on social security, moving up to assume the Home Office brief after Roy Jenkins (in company with George Thomson and Harold Lever) resigned from the shadow cabinet over the party’s anti-EEC stance in April 1972.
Although Williams was a passionate pro-European of long standing, she did not resign: like Roy Hattersley, she rested content instead with sending a sharp letter to Harold Wilson warning him of the dangers of departing from the line on Europe that had been pursued while the party was in government. It is only fair to add that Jenkins, as deputy leader, discouraged younger members of the opposition front bench from joining him in his protest walk-out. But the fact that David Owen, for one, disregarded that advice, and that Williams did not, was probably responsible for raising the first doubts about the amount of steel there was in her political make-up.
In any case, taking refuge in a kind of half-way house of disagreement without departure did her little good. When Jenkins rejoined the shadow cabinet in the autumn of 1973 she was reluctantly forced to sacrifice her Home Office watching portfolio to him and found herself relegated to the sidelines as opposition spokeswoman on prices and consumer protection. Rather to her disappointment, it was to this new cabinet post — and not, as she had hoped, to the Home Office or education — that Wilson appointed her in March 1974 when the party returned to power.
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At the new department of Prices and Consumer Protection there was little that Williams could do but practise the politics of exhortation. The sad proof of her failure in this evangelical endeavour is perhaps best reflected by the fact that within a year inflation had reached 27 per cent — and the measures ultimately taken to halt it owed far more to Michael Foot at the Department of Employment and Jack Jones as head of the TGWU than they did to the minister specifically charged with keeping a vigilant eye on the rise in prices.
Once Callaghan succeeded Wilson as prime minister, Williams — to her evident relief — was soon moved to take over the Department of Education and Science. Here again, though, the record is mixed. With Callaghan’s active encouragement she launched “a great debate” on education, but it is by no means clear what, if anything, was achieved. Participation was the political buzzword and a succession of regional conferences were held at which the new secretary of state explained her “problems and priorities”.
Such was her enthusiasm for the comprehensive schools programme started under Crosland in the 1960s that she was blamed by the Conservatives and quite a few parents for killing off most grammars. Meanwhile, her more acerbic socialist critics noted that nothing, despite her own long-cherished beliefs, was done about the charitable tax status of fee-paying schools and little about improving the standards of the state sector either.
None of that, however, affected the genuine regard in which Williams was held both in parliament and outside it. When her defeat was announced at Hertford and Stevenage, as her original constituency of Hitchin had by then become, in May 1979, it was almost as if a day of national mourning had been declared: on radio and television Conservative spokesmen vied with their Labour opposite numbers in emphasising how much she would be missed from the next House of Commons.
Like her Tory forerunner Sir Edward Boyle 15 years earlier, she had transcended party and become everyone’s idea of the reasonable person in politics. She even managed to make her lifelong campaign against nuclear weapons seem strangely proportionate and reasonable. “I like fighting for what I believe in,” she once said. “I’m a good public speaker and I enjoy the relationship with the public. You’d find I’m somebody who ends up talking in most trains and buses I get into. I love talking to people and they enjoy talking back to me. The rather encapsulated role of a permanent secretary would not suit me at all.”
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It was this aspect of her appeal, as the shrewder Labour loyalists realised, that made her defection to the SDP less than two years later so damaging. Great efforts were made, not least by the Labour Party’s new leader, Michael Foot, to keep her within the fold. At first the omens did not look too bad. Alone in the original Gang of Four, Williams was a member of Labour’s national executive committee and she stayed there until the month of the Limehouse declaration in January 1981. It was at her behest, too, that the new organisation was launched not as a political party, as Jenkins had wanted, but as a pressure group operating under the cover of the title of “the Council for Social Democracy”. Even once the party itself had been founded it was Williams who was most anxious that it should have a radical cutting edge. She had always been opposed to a centrist party — and indeed had publicly asserted in the summer of 1980 that such a party would have “no roots, no principles, no philosophy and no values”.
In one sense, she was, of course, to confound her own judgement. Of all the SDP’s early triumphs, Williams’s victory at the Crosby by-election of November 1981 was perhaps the sweetest. Throughout the campaign she demonstrated effortlessly what few had ever doubted: that in her own person she was the new party’s greatest electoral asset. Her conversion of a Conservative majority of 19,000 into an SDP one of 5,000 remains the short-lived SDP’s proudest battle honour.
Sadly it was the kind of electoral earthquake that was always unlikely to survive the more settled conditions of a general election. Even so, but for redistribution, Williams always believed that she could have clung onto the seat at the election of 1983, but by then the hour for “breaking the mould” had almost certainly passed. It may be that part of her recognised this. Originally an active supporter of David Owen for the leadership — she nominated him against Roy Jenkins in the first leadership election in 1982 — she lived to acknowledge that she had made a serious mistake in not standing herself.
Her aversion to the adversarial side of political life hampered her career in other respects. The streak in her personality that made her always want to listen to both sides of an argument held her back, as did her willingness to kowtow to the big, bullying beasts of the Labour cabinets of the 1970s, not only Jenkins but also Crosland, Tony Benn and Denis Healey. Certainly, with the autocratic Owen established after 1983 in the leadership, there was little part for her to play even as president of the new party. Increasingly absent in the United States from 1980 onwards — where, as a visiting fellow at Harvard, she met her second husband — she fought a somewhat pro forma campaign at Cambridge at the 1987 general election, easily losing to the sitting Conservative MP, Sir Robert Rhodes James, and ending up only barely ahead of the Labour candidate.
In 1993 — she did not fight a seat at the 1992 general election — she was made a life peer on the nomination of the Liberal Democrats’ first leader, Paddy Ashdown. Although already over 60 she soon made her presence felt in the upper house and it was no surprise when, following the resignation through ill health of her old Fabian confrère, Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank, she was chosen to be his successor as leader of the 60-odd Liberal Democrat peers, thus completing a hat-trick for the original Gang of Four, Lord Rodgers’s own predecessor having been Lord Jenkins of Hillhead.
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In the mid 1990s, shortly before Tony Blair’s landslide victory, Peter Mandelson offered her an olive branch in the hope that she would return to the Labour fold as an elder stateswoman. She rejected it.
Always an effective performer in debate, the new Liberal Democrat leader in the Lords was perhaps seen to less advantage in administrative matters, her notorious unpunctuality reputedly driving at least one chief whip to the brink of resignation.
For the British public, however, Williams continued to exercise her almost magical persuasive power. She was a highly valued contributor to radio and television current affairs programmes long after, with some relief, she abandoned the Liberal Democrat leadership in the Lords to another former SDP member, Lord McNally, in 2004. She remained a workaholic, rarely going out for lunch — preferring a sandwich in the office — putting in a 66-hour week and getting by on six and a half hours sleep a night.
In 1955 she married the philosopher and future provost of King’s College, Cambridge, Bernard Williams. He was an atheist but tolerant of her Catholic faith. Their marriage breakdown in 1974 was caused primarily by their working in towns 50 miles apart, which meant that they only saw each other at weekends. Secondly, as Williams explained, it was by social stigma: “Some people in the 1970s could be cruel to the husbands of well-known women, and they would refer to him as Mr Shirley Williams or as my consort. He was a generous, brilliant man and a great philosopher, but being treated like that grated with him.”
After the couple separated in 1970 she had to bring up their daughter, Rebecca, as a single, working mother. In her turn Becky, who is a lawyer, did not have a carefree married life. Her husband contracted a rare form of septicaemia caused by a cat scratch that lasted for nine years and he died in his early fifties.
Williams’s brother, John, meanwhile, was a widower when he died in 1987 and he and his wife left two children. They joined Williams’s family and that year she got married again, to Richard Neustadt, the Harvard academic and author of the classic American political work Presidential Power. She later said she hadn’t wanted to remarry but Dick, as she called him, persuaded her, not least by explaining that his first wife, who had been a friend of hers and died of MS, had wanted him to marry her. He died in 2003.
Although appointed to the somewhat curiously named chair of elective politics at Harvard University as long ago as 1988 — and continuing to occupy that position for a dozen years — Williams never really did herself justice as an academic, producing only a smattering of books, the majority tending to have an autobiographical element.
The truth had always been that it was her own special mixture of eloquence and charm that secured her unique place in British public life, and that remained constant until the end of her life. She regretted little, did not dwell on might-have-beens and throughout her long parliamentary career always considered herself both a reformer and a rebel.
Baroness Williams of Crosby, former Labour cabinet minister and first president of the Social Democratic Party, was born on July 27, 1930. She died on April 12, 2021, aged 90