Climbing the bookshelves
Shirley Williams
Virago
432pp
£20
Many Progress readers probably think of Shirley Williams as Labour’s first woman prime minister who never was. And as Labour came towards the end of the last, less satisfactory period of Labour governments from 1964 to 1979, that would have been a reasonable judgement. Denis Healey may well have inherited the leadership from Jim Callaghan, but after that Shirley was the rising star.
That this didn’t happen is of course largely due to Harold Macmillan’s fabled ‘events’. But Shirley’s character, which shines through in this fascinating, readable but typically a bit disorderly autobiography, played a part too.
Shirley is a politician of principle who on some things wouldn’t bend. So when the Labour conference decided in 1980 on a policy of withdrawal from the European Union, Shirley announced that she could never serve in a government committed to such a policy and withdrew from renomination in her old Stevenage seat. I can still remember the shock waves through Labour that her decision caused.
Her lifelong values have been as a ‘democratic socialist’, as this former leader of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords cheerfully still describes herself in the final chapter of her book. She is a socialist, because as the child of a privileged but highly progressive upper middle-class home, she resented the social injustice she found around her. She first experienced it in the lives of the servants who worked for her parents in affluent Cheyne Walk in Chelsea when she visited their welcoming Battersea home, and at the state junior school she insisted on attending. That sense of injustice was reinforced by three years as a wartime evacuee in the United States when she developed a boiling determination to sweep away the outdated class privileges of British society.
Her socialism is also strongly internationalist. That is the basis of her commitment to Europe and to human rights. She brought the same burning indignation to her opposition to Anthony Eden’s adventurism at Suez as to the breach of international law that she felt the Iraq war represented, despite the hope she had originally vested in Tony Blair.
But she put a lot of emphasis on the ‘democratic’ too. Having travelled widely in Europe at the end of the second world war, she was no friend of the communists and the privileges of the nomenklatura. In the late 1970s she, like many others, feared that the Labour party was being over-run by a hard left that had little commitment to parliamentary socialism. With the ascendancy of the Militant tendency and other Trotskyist groups in so many constituencies, she felt not that she was leaving the Labour party but that Labour was leaving her. And once she had decided to fight and not to trim, there was no stopping ‘our Shirl’.
There is another aspect of Shirley’s self-perceptions that played a part in the political journey she undertook. As a woman in politics she felt like an outsider, despite being the daughter of Vera Brittain, author of Testament of Youth and one of the most outstanding women of her generation. According to Shirley, men had their cliques and were good at giving each other a political ‘leg up’. They weren’t interested in doing the same for women, though interestingly Herbert Morrison, Peter Mandelson’s grandfather, was in her case an exception to this rule. But she felt this sense of isolation throughout her life and in part it accounted for her relationship of admiration but distance from Roy Jenkins and his clubby circle.
There is also some sadness in the book. There is the moving story of the break-up of her first marriage to the philosopher Bernard Williams and the tough experiences she had in the 1970s trying to combine the lives of single mother, devoted constituency MP and national Labour figure. But the joy that she found at Harvard and through her second marriage to the wonderful Dick Neustadt shines through as a triumph of the human spirit over adversity.
What makes Shirley great is that in all the grubbiness of politics, here is someone who for all their very human flaws, has devoted themselves to a long life of public service. She is an inspiration to the profession of politics and any one, particularly women, who want to live a fulfilling political life. It can be the noblest thing in the world to do.