AUTOBIOGRAPHY: Climbing the Bookshelves By Shirley Williams Virago, 423pp, £20
THE INTELLIGENT, almost 80-year-old face looking out from the jacket of this book says it all.
Bright observant eyes, slightly untidy hair and a big generous smile: this is the admirable woman who has been involved in politics and public life in Britain for half a century.
Her autobiography is that rare thing: a modest, slightly self- deprecatory and, above all, honest account of her long life and times. As Baroness Williams of Crosby she is still a formidable presence, with an exhausting list of international commitments, not least as an adviser to Gordon Brown on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament. Meeting her when we were both working with women in eastern Europe, and in Dublin when she visited, I found her personally impressive, warm and erudite.
Williams is the daughter of the pacifist writer Vera Brittain and the political scientist and philosopher Sir George Catlin. The unsatisfactory (to me) title of Williams’s book refers to her escapades as a child in scaling the heights of her parents’ bookshelves to slake her thirst for knowledge.
That childhood was marked by the fact that her mother was cold and remote – Williams forgives her because of the grief Brittain carried for the young men in her life, including her brother who had been killed in the Great War. She adored her father while acknowledging his weaknesses – he yearned to be a politician, but never was, and loved notoriety and important people. Her parents respected her formidable intelligence and had no old- fashioned attitudes towards the development of whatever career she chose.
“Politics invaded our conversations, Mussolini stalked through our soup, France smirked in our puddings.” The family always supported the Labour Party, part of the aristocratic left-wing intelligentsia of those early- to mid- century years.
The precocious Shirley at one stage chose to attend a Church of England elementary school that was rough and tumble, to put it mildly, and decided to go along with her classmates’ assumption that she was the cook’s daughter. As a teenager she harangued Herbert Morrison for two hours in an air-raid shelter on matters political. (The hapless Morrison had been a dinner guest in her parents’ house when the sirens went off.)
Williams’s father was a convert to Catholicism through following the works of Cardinal Newman. When Shirley, a Catholic herself, spent a brief time as secretary of state for Northern Ireland from the Home Office (1966), James Chichester-Clarke took the home secretary, James Callaghan, aside and said: “We can’t talk to her about anything important – I’m sure you understand.”
“In that case,” said Callaghan, “you won’t be talking to anyone at all.”
Williams is best known for her role in the foundation and leadership of the Social Democratic Party, after years of dismay at the destructive influence of the hard left on the Labour Party. “It was a cancer destroying the party,” she says.
Her own electoral fortunes swung wildly, and she accepted victory and defeat with a calm philosophy that most politicians find hard to emulate. Despite becoming SDP president, she lost two elections, in 1983 and 1987. Nevertheless, the continuous national debate surrounding the SDP and its philosophy was crucial in the formation of the modern British political establishment.
Running through this book is Williams's continuing assessment of attitudes towards women and the difficulties they face in politics. She describes Margaret Thatcher as running a royal court, with William Whitelaw as the grand vizier, Cecil Parkinson as squire and young Tories as Rosenkavaliers. A rare example of the few women in Westminster working together comes when they decided to wear stiletto heels and stamp on pesky bottom-pinchers in the crowded voting lobbies – next day expressing feminine concern when a male colleague limped in with an injured foot.
Tony Blair comes in for a lengthy assessment, mostly negative. “Blair’s mastery with words, his dazzling charm, his blending of apparent personal modesty with stunning hubris . . . his ability to sum up people . . . and accurately assess how much use they could be to him . . . I consider him to be a brilliant fixer who could turn promises and people to his own advantage.”
“A complex man,” Williams writes later, “Blair is above all else an actor, an actor whose preferred roles range from Coriolanus to Henry V.” She explains Blair’s Iraq decision thus: “When confronted by power greater than his own (Rupert Murdoch or George W Bush), he yielded to it so as to maintain his own influence.”
By contrast, Williams has the greatest respect and admiration for Gordon Brown, whom she considers has a serious intellect, is deeply loyal to the real Labour Party and is a highly principled man.
Why did this formidable woman never reach the summit of British politics? She observes herself and her life with a disarmingly honest cool eye.
“Like many women of my generation, I thought of myself as not quite good enough for the very highest positions in politics.” She ran for deputy leader of the Labour Party but never for leader. She didn’t fight Roy Jenkins for leadership of the SDP (much to the disgust of David Owen). She accepted the criticisms of herself as being disorganised and “lacking the killer instinct” (and ruefully admits to being hurt by opponents’ anagram of her name – “I whirl aimlessly”).
She notes that when her first husband left her she had no partner who believed in and supported her – something she considers indispensable for women in politics (while noting that this is changing).
Despite the fact that she was never prime minister, Shirley Williams was a central influence on the development of contemporary British politics and political thinking. This is a valuable account of that contribution.
Gemma Hussey is a former minister for education, founder and director of the European Women's Foundation, and author ofAt the Cutting Edge: Cabinet Diaries 1982-87 andIreland Today: Anatomy of a Changing State
