In the Cabinet and Out of Labour, 1974–2018

Abstract

When Labour won the 1974 general election, the Prime Minister Harold Wilson appointed Shirley Williams first as Secretary of State for Prices and Consumer Protection and next as Secretary of State for Education. In 1979, Labour lost the election and Williams lost her seat, the only Cabinet Minister to do so. As the Labour Party drifted to the left, Shirley Williams lost confidence in it. In 1981, she resigned from the party and helped create the Social Democratic Party. This chapter examines her role as Cabinet Minister and chart Williams’ disillusion with the party she had joined as a teenager. It concludes with a discussion of her political life.

In February 1974, Labour won the general election and once more Harold Wilson became Prime Minister , this time with a majority of only three. He appointed Shirley Williams , now aged 43 as Secretary of State for Prices and Consumer Protection , a new department largely created to give Williams a place in Cabinet (Fig. 11.1). Once again, there were two women in the top tier of government ‘not because they’re women. It’s just that they can run rings round most men in the Commons’. ¹ As with other female Cabinet Ministers , Shirley Williams received equal pay , earning £16,000 a year (£13,000 from her Cabinet position and £3000 parliamentary allowance) making her a top earner. ² And like Castle and Hart before her, she was tipped to become Britain’s first woman Prime Minister . ³ The American Time magazine thought her ‘the most brilliant woman in British politics’ and predicted that she would become one of the world’s future leaders. ⁴ It was never to be. Just after she was appointed to her first Cabinet post Shirley Williams confessed that ‘the thing she really dislikes is feeling herself disliked’, a character trait that ill-suits a politician, especially one who aims for the top government position. ⁵

Fig. 11.1

(©Keystone Pictures USA/Alamy Stock Photo)

Shirley Williams on the Front Bench

Secretary of State for Prices and Incomes, March 1974–September 1976

For nearly two and a half years, Shirley Williams took on ‘the awesome task of damming a river in spate’. ⁶ Her main role was to control prices, a job at which she could fail firstly because she was a new Secretary of State, in charge of a new department and secondly because she was in charge of ‘prices – over which she had no control, at a moment of unprecedented inflation’. ⁷ Most of the nationalised industries, including coal, electricity and the railways, wanted to increase prices as the cost of oil was escalating daily, and they needed to absorb the costs. In addition, world food prices were predicted to rise by 30% which would inevitably hit the British consumer. ⁸ The Financial Times commented that it ‘is a pity that male Prime Ministers tend to think of women in terms of the shopping basket and it is particularly a pity for Mrs Williams to have been handed a booby-trapped shopping basket’. ⁹ ‘I do not deny’, Williams told the Commons ‘that I have a daunting job at a daunting time’. ¹⁰

Williams was very aware that low-income families spent a higher proportion of their incomes on food than the rich and wanted to make the price of food her priority. As soon as she took office, Shirley Williams promised to protect the weak, ‘those who are ravaged, terrified and worried by inflation … we shall do all we conceivably can to control these disastrous inflationary pressures upon ordinary men and women ’. ¹¹ On March 12, 1974, she asked the Cabinet to approve ‘stricter price controls, to make selective use of subsidies for items which are significant in the family budget, to improve price marking and to require unit pricing’. ¹² Williams ‘had in mind payment of subsidies on a short list of selected foodstuffs’ such as milk, butter, cheese, sugar and bread. ¹³ The Cabinet agreed and the Labour Government subsidised six basic foods, namely milk, butter, bread, cheese, flour and tea ‘because of their importance to the budgets of low-income families and not least pensioners’. ¹⁴

In addition, Williams proposed cutting the profit margins of shopkeepers. In June 1974, her well-known negotiation skills became evident when she persuaded the Retail Consortium to offer a list of essential foods and household supplies—potatoes, beef, lamb, chicken, baby milk, bread, butter and cheese—at special reduced prices. ¹⁵ In addition, Williams stopped all rent increases for a year and pegged the interest rate for mortgages. She also negotiated a 50% price reduction with Roche for Librium and Valium: the pharmaceutical company had been grossly over-charging the NHS for use of its drugs. Wilson praised her publicly; The Guardian reported that she possessed ‘an admirable reputation for integrity, personal and public. Seen by many as thoroughly decent, honest and honourable, the ideal of what a politician should be’. ¹⁶

Most people enjoyed working with Shirley Williams since ‘she was always very appreciative, avoided apportioning blame and could express herself candidly without causing offence’. ¹⁷ A few disagreed: one Conservative MP called her the Mary Poppins of the present administration; Tony Benn maintained that she was the most reactionary person he knew. ‘She gives the impression of being so nice’ Benn stated and she ‘is now being built up as the great heroine. “Shirley keeps our food prices down. Shirley protects our shopping baskets” and so on when she is, in fact, doing nothing beyond doling out money to industry’. ¹⁸ Tony Benn’s comments were vindictive rather than accurate. Shirley Williams had earlier attacked Benn’s industrial strategy in Cabinet, an attack viewed ‘as the mostly closely argued and fully backed with evidence. … Benn sat there looking very pale, first rocking back and forwards in his chair and later scribbling furiously, no doubt for his diary’. ¹⁹ Benn’s industrial strategy was completely defeated and ‘everyone went away very happy – except Benn’. ²⁰

Shirley Williams was popular with the civil servants in her department because she held regular briefing sessions and took them out to lunch. ²¹ Wilson’s head of policy research felt that her weakness was being a little disorganised, rarely punctual, and seeming rather befuddled. In fact, he argued ‘she is not particularly muddled on politics or policies, but she gives that impression. … If she could get herself ‘organised’ with all the trappings of efficiency, she would have to be taken very seriously indeed’. ²²

Certainly, Williams tried to keep a grip on prices. But she couldn’t keep a grip on wages. Michael Foot , who had replaced Barbara Castle , favoured free collective bargaining rather than wage restraint and wages ineluctably rose. This could have caused personal conflict, but luckily for Cabinet harmony, both parties were collegiate, polite and charming—Shirley Williams penned notes to Foot in Cabinet which began ‘Michael Honeybunch’. ²³ Nevertheless, it was an unmanageable situation: no government could hope to hold down prices without controlling wages. In 1975, inflation was running at 26%, fuelled as much by wage increases as by price rises. Wage demands, sometimes of 30%, were seen to be crippling the economy.

The left-wingers in the Labour Party thought the economy would improve if Britain left the Common Market , citing high food prices as a reason for leaving. Shirley Williams thought otherwise. At the September Labour Party Conference, she announced she would resign if a Labour Government tried to take Britain out of the Common Market . ²⁴ Wilson, now with a tiny majority after the October 1974 election, decided to hold a referendum, basically to placate some of his fractious backbenchers and party activists and to keep his carefully cemented Cabinet from cracking. He was seen as taking a risk with the country’s future for the sake of keeping his party more-or-less united.

Harold Wilson , like Edward Heath before him, broke the constitutional convention of collective Cabinet responsibility and allowed his Ministers to put forward their own beliefs and campaign against each other. Harold Wilson, Shirley Williams , Roy Jenkins and Roy Hattersley led the campaign to stay in Europe; Barbara Castle , Michael Foot and Tony Benn led the campaign against. Williams was chair of the Labour Campaign for Europe. She warned that leaving the EU would be a ‘stupendous act of folly’ and would lead to greater unemployment . People did not realise, she insisted, ‘how sharply retaliatory other countries would be to Britain if we left the Market. …It is nicer to believe Britain is still one of the great powers … and can get food from Commonwealth countries grateful to dispose of it to us more cheaply … in spite of the fact that Commonwealth leaders have said they want us to remain in the Market’. ²⁵ Moreover, Williams maintained that firms with a potential selling market of 250 million would be more likely to invest in Britain if we stayed in. And leave Britain if we were no longer in the EEC . She criticised those who saw Europe as a ‘rich man’s club’ arguing that the European Commission had put forward minimum working conditions, redundancy rights, pension provisions and other welfare rights.

In an article for The Guardian, Williams insisted that the world was too interdependent for Britain to go it alone. Many of the world’s pressing problems, she argued, were ‘multinational or international: how to control nuclear weapons … how to cope with environmental pollution which respects no boundaries; … how to feed the fast-rising population … how to curb multi-national companies; how to distribute the wealth and resources of the globe more fairly; … how to keep the peace’. ²⁶ The British electorate agreed with her. The remainers won by over 60%: 17.3 to 8.4 million voted in favour of staying in the EEC . The matter was thought settled.

On March 16, 1976, Harold Wilson resigned. He had been leader of the Labour Party for 13 years, Prime Minister for over seven. There was a struggle over who should succeed: Shirley Williams was considered a candidate. She was one of the country’s favourite politicians ‘coming over as concerned, sincere, highly intelligent and human’. ²⁷ A month earlier Margaret Thatcher’s election as leader of the Conservative Party prompted one political analyst to comment that a short time ago ‘the odds against Britain’s major political parties being led by two women would have been as astronomical as those on lightning hitting the same place twice. But if Mrs Margaret Thatcher wins the next general election , it is possible that the Labour Party too might swallow its male chauvinist pride and turn to a woman’. ²⁸ In reality, Williams’ chances of securing the leadership were seriously damaged by the election of Margaret Thatcher as it ‘would look too much like a gimmick’. ²⁹

Michael Foot , Tony Crosland , Roy Jenkins , Tony Benn and Denis Healey all entered the leadership contest; Shirley Williams did not. In her own view, she was too inexperienced and at the age of 46, too young. She had never coveted the top job, confessing to one reporter that she did not think she was good enough and that there were several people in the Labour Party who were better than her. ³⁰ It seemed as if she was frightened of success, perhaps she had genuinely thought she had come far enough. Moreover, analysists have suggested that a woman will only apply for a job if she is certain she can do it well, and if she thinks she does not have all the necessary attributes she will not even put herself forward. Certainly, some believed that Shirley Williams was not tough enough to rule Labour and was sometimes too woolly and uncertain in her judgements.

Jim Callaghan won. Callaghan dismissed Castle, kept Williams at the DPCP and put her as chair of several fractious Cabinet committees knowing that her amenable and collaborative nature would ensure results. Shirley Williams was now the only woman in the Cabinet. The Chief Secretary to the Treasury Jack Diamond, a powerful figure, urged an end to food subsidies. Shirley Williams disagreed because any increase in the price of basic commodities would hit the most vulnerable sections of the community hardest such as ‘pensioners, those on low incomes, and those with large families. We subsidised the cheaper sources of nourishment to help the poor; hence, sharp price increases in subsidised foods must discriminate against them’. ³¹ She won the argument in Cabinet, but by now, the Labour Government had lost a series of by-elections and was dependent on Liberal support to remain in office.

Secretary of State for Education and Paymaster General, September 1976–May 1979

In September 1976, Callaghan moved Williams to Secretary of State for Education and Paymaster General posts which she held concurrently. Here, she was pushed to the limit of her endurance, trying to balance parliamentary business with that of parenting. ‘You get your sleep down to 5 and half hours a night’. She confided to Melanie Phillips that ‘the basic question is how you fit everything in. … After I get home with my red box it’s half past eleven at night. I manage it because I’m physically strong, and I live nearby and I dash to and fro’. ³²

Just after her appointment, Tony Crosland became ill and resigned as Foreign Secretary. Rumours were rife. Newspapers expected the Chancellor Denis Healey to replace him and discussed who should follow Healey : Shirley Williams was a favoured candidate, largely because she had a good intellectual grasp of economics. In addition, the appointment of Williams would appeal to the electorate ‘counter-balancing to some extent the loyalty many women voters feel for Mrs Thatcher ’. ³³ It would claimed The Observer ‘bring into the key post … one of the most original and sensible minds in British politics’. ³⁴ However, Callaghan left Healey as Chancellor and appointed David Owen as Foreign Secretary. Shirley Williams remained in Education.

Shirley Williams had already shifted her parliamentary focus from prices to education. From now on, all her parliamentary contributions, from comprehensive education, teachers’ salaries, school meals and parental choice focussed on education. Williams was appointed because she was likeable and thought to have enough personal authority to convince teachers and the general public of the need to reform. James Callaghan , who had not attended university, believed in the power of education to transform society. In October 1976, he gave a speech at Ruskin College, Oxford in which he spoke of the unease felt by parents about the current informal methods of teaching. In his speech, he argued for a ‘basic curriculum with universal standards’ and for all pupils to have ‘basic literacy, basic numeracy’. ³⁵ Shirley Williams was invited to write a consultation document, known as a Green Paper, on curriculum reform. A series of eight regional conferences—known as the Great Educational Debate—were held in which Williams listened to all the various pressure groups: teachers, unions and parents. Not surprisingly the Green Paper was a compromise document, seen to be too conciliatory and too unwieldy. The Cabinet rejected it and Williams was forced to re-write it six times.

On July 4, 1977, Shirley Williams introduced her final draft. In the 54 page document, she argued that the government must complete the process of making secondary schools comprehensive and that schools ‘should be accountable for their performance’. Williams advocated a core curriculum of fundamental subjects which every pupil in UK schools should study and which would take up half the school day. She insisted that as ‘our society is a multicultural, multiracial one, the curriculum should reflect a sympathetic understanding of the different cultures and races that now make up our society’. ³⁶ Her proposals were not enacted, but her idea of a national curriculum was taken up by Margaret Thatcher who authorised ‘a much more draconian’ one. ³⁷

In addition, the Secretary of State for Education aimed to raise standards by making the teaching profession a graduate profession and by setting up a General Teaching Council which would be consulted about entry levels to the profession, standards of professional behaviour and requirements for in-service training. Williams succeeded in making teaching a graduate profession but failed to set up the Council. The next Labour Government introduced this: the dynamic feminist Carol Adams became its first chief executive and steered its development in a way Williams would have favoured. ³⁸

In January 1977, Williams announced the closure of 30 teacher training colleges because a dramatic decline in the birth rate had led to fewer pupils and thus a need for fewer teachers. In fact, the government could have chosen to decrease class size and make state schools more like public and private schools with their generous staff-pupil ratios. Williams defended her decision by arguing that to do otherwise meant ‘leaving our kids a legacy of £9,000 million debt by the year 2005. … we have to live in the real world, we have to be realistic Socialists, and we have to decide what our priorities are’. ³⁹ She was all too aware that government debt was increasing and that there was pressure from the International Monetary Fund to cut public expenditure. As she pointed out, the Labour Government ‘was believed by the financial markets to lack financial discipline, to be unwilling to grasp economic realities, and to be profligate with public spending’. ⁴⁰ Consequently, Williams felt she needed to cut back on teacher training. At the time of these cuts, large reserves of gas and oil were discovered in the North Sea, though unfortunately royalties from the oil would not be received until the late 1970s.

Shirley Williams is best remembered for her championing of comprehensive schools . The 1976 Education Act required local authorities to re-organise their secondary schools into comprehensives, but a number of local authorities remained vague about their plans, hoping that if they delayed until the next general election , the policy might be overturned if Labour lost. Shirley Williams took these reluctant authorities to court: the High Court ruled that the 1976 Act required local authorities to do the government’s bidding. In 1978, Williams informed the House that comprehensive schools provided for over 80% of secondary schools compared with 62% in 1974 ‘but I shall not be satisfied until all schools are reorganised’. ⁴¹

Williams faced opposition from both sides of the political spectrum: the Labour left felt she was not putting her words into deeds quickly enough. Caroline Benn, Tony Benn’s wife, accused Williams of being reluctant to push forward comprehensive education. In contrast, the Conservatives called her a ‘tyrannical bully girl’ for overriding local authorities. At the 1977 Tory Party Conference, Margaret Thatcher deplored the destruction of grammar schools in the name of equality. People from her background, she claimed, ‘needed grammar schools to compete with children from privileged homes like Shirley Williams ’. ⁴² Moreover, Williams was accused of hypocrisy because she had sent her daughter Rebecca to Godolphin and Latymer, a voluntary aided girls’ grammar school and then to Camden High School for Girls.

Shirley Williams ’ appointment as Minister of Education had been greeted positively, but two and a half years later, her popularity had slipped. There were ‘damaging criticisms (emanating from the Civil Service ) of her abilities as an administrator. Everyone loved her but she had the place in chaos and dithered badly’. ⁴³ Tony Crosland thought she spent too much time worrying about detail which should have been handled by her civil servants rather than directing overall policy. She also found it hard to make a decision independently and constantly needed the re-assurance of Cabinet. Moreover, Shirley Williams found that her negotiating skills were not strong enough to convince the teaching profession of the need to curb their pay claims. Her final weeks in office were marked by an acrimonious dispute with the teaching profession: in March 1978, she was forced to settle two educational disputes by awarding a 10% pay increase to teachers and a 9.8% increase for university lecturers.

Out of Office and Out of Labour

Shirley Williams went into the May 1979 election confident that she would return to Parliament as MP for Hertford and Stevenage; she had after all enjoyed a 9000 majority at the last election. She lost, her majority swept away by an 8.1% swing to the Tories. Labour lost 50 seats overall, Callaghan resigned and Margaret Thatcher became the first-ever female Prime Minister of a party that historically had opposed women’s equality. Undoubtedly, Williams was affected by a general dissatisfaction with Labour, but she had forgotten an important rule in politics: the need to look after her local electorate. During the campaign, she was largely absent from Hertford because she was ‘constantly used at Labour Press conferences to present the acceptable face of socialism , thus neglecting her constituency’. ⁴⁴ In contrast, the Conservative candidate, Petrie Bowen Wells, knew the importance of nursing a district and focussed his campaign on popular policies like offering the sale of council houses at reduced prices. At the count, Williams stood tired and red-eyed as the returning officer read out the news of her defeat. It was the defining moment of the 1979 election—she was the only Cabinet member to lose her seat. It was seen as a shattering psychological blow to Labour. Callaghan stated ‘she is one of the most distinguished Parliamentarians, a woman with great heart and intellect and sympathy to match’. ⁴⁵ She had once been tipped as the first female Prime Minister . Now it was the end of an era. A different type of women —Maggie Thatcher —was set to dominate.

Shirley Williams was 49 years old. There was a widespread assumption that her political life was dead. Williams was out of Parliament, though not without influence and used her new found freedom from Parliament to write regularly in newspapers and appear frequently on television. She also remained on the NEC , battling to keep the Labour Party in the middle ground of politics. When the position of Deputy Leader fell vacant, Shirley Williams reluctantly agreed to put her name forward. Fearing unwelcome publicity, she did not campaign or garner support for herself: Michael Foot won by 166 to 128.

After its defeat, the Labour Party became embroiled in another of its familiar battles, emerging with a conviction that it lost because it was not ‘socialist’ enough. In contrast, Williams thought it was too socialist. She and others hoped that the Labour Party might show a willingness to admit past errors and be more sensitive to the concerns of the electorate rather than Labour Party members or trade unionists. Shirley Williams was a moderate who feared that Labour’s radical agenda would scare off voters, particularly as the Militant tendency seemed to be growing within the Labour Party. Earlier, Williams had been outraged by the dismissal of Reg Underhill’s report on Militant, a report which warned that representative democracy was at stake if the group was allowed to continue. She insisted that ‘the tactics of the hard left, dragging the meetings out, moving resolutions when most people had gone home, upbraiding and sometimes intimidating their opponents, wearied local members’. ⁴⁶ When Reg Prentice was de-selected from East Ham North, Williams argued that the Revolutionary Socialist Party and the Militant Tendency were trying to take over the Labour Party . She criticised its idea of a monolithic political system with a monolithic economic ownership and control which meant a one-party state and the nationalisation of all industry and commerce. ⁴⁷ ‘Modern Trotskyism ’ she insisted ‘holds liberty and democracy in total contempt. Its version of socialism has nothing to do with the British Labour Party’s version’. ⁴⁸ In her view, the Labour Party was devoted to the ‘method of democracy – progress by persuasion rather than by compulsion – as to the objectives of socialism’. ⁴⁹ Moreover, Williams believed Labour needed to match party policy to the demands of the electorate, maintaining that there was a ‘troubling divergence between the priorities of Labour activists and those of the electorate’. ⁵⁰

The Labour Party , despite the attempts of Williams, moved leftwards. At the October 1979, Conference Callaghan and the Parliamentary Party were criticised for selling out socialism . Conference called for the mandatory reselection of MPs, for the party manifesto to be written jointly by Ministers and the National Executive and for leaders to be elected by an electoral college consisting of trade unions , party members and MPs. Conference voted overwhelmingly for the first two proposals, but the last was deferred for a special meeting to decide. Nonetheless, the vote marked the tolling of the ‘Passing Bell’, warning of the impending death of the independence of MPs, the parliamentary representatives of the Labour Party . It wasn’t too little socialism , Williams insisted, that lost Labour the election but too much trade union power. Shirley Williams appealed to conference ‘for God’s sake stand up and start fighting for yourselves. The Parliamentary Labour Party has a right to be heard before it agrees to its own castration’. ⁵¹

Shirley Williams was still loyal to Labour, still trying to heal the wounds inflicted by its electoral loss. Her initial desire to fight the battle within the Labour Party , according to The Guardian, was clear evidence that she had ‘every intention of carrying on in the party and none at all of sliding off into the centre ground’. ⁵² On May 31, 1980 at a special Labour conference, she began to change her mind, largely because of the fierce fighting over proposals to change the way the leader of the Labour Party was elected. At the time, the Labour leader was elected by MPs, but in the name of greater democracy, the left wanted trade unions and the constituency parties to have an equal vote. In Williams’ opinion, this meant compromising the integrity of the Parliamentary Party, which had been elected by millions of voters. Once again, the Labour Party was in turmoil, the main difference being that this was a constitutional wrangle rather a debate about policy.

Shirley Williams complained that the conference ‘indulged in an orgy of condemnation’ when both Callaghan and Healey were heckled and booed throughout their speeches and David Owen was jeered all the way through his. ‘The intolerance and savagery of the conference delegates’ drove Williams towards breaking away from the party. ⁵³ She insisted that the NEC was ‘acting like crewmen of the Titanic who’ve decided to have a punch-up in the engine room’. ⁵⁴ ‘What a bloody mess’ she wrote in her diary. ⁵⁵

On August 1, 1980, three of Labour’s leading moderates, Shirley Williams , David Owen and Bill Rogers issued an ‘uncompromising call to fellow members of the party to join them in a last-ditch battle to save the party and the Labour movement for democratic socialism ’. ⁵⁶ Voters, they insisted, ‘would undoubtedly refuse to back a far-left party’. ⁵⁷ They published a 3000-word statement in the Guardian and the Daily Mirror. Its opening sentence read ‘The Labour Party is facing the gravest crisis in its history – graver even than the crisis of 1931… If the Labour Party abandons its democratic and internationalist principles … the argument may grow for a new democratic socialist party’. ⁵⁸ They called for a mixed economy, British membership of the EEC and NATO and included a thinly veiled threat that if the Labour Party abandoned its democratic principles, a new social democratic party (SDP) might be created. In a direct attack on Tony Benn , the three condemned the ‘willingness of some leading members of the party to flirt with extremists who openly regard democracy as a sham’. ⁵⁹

In September 1980, at the Labour Party Conference in Blackpool chaired by Judith Hart , another nail was hammered into the moderate Labour coffin. The conference opened with a speech by Tony Benn in which he advocated re-nationalising Britain’s leading industries, withdrawing from the EEC , disarming unilaterally and abolishing the House of Lords when Labour was next elected. Benn’s speech received an instant roar of approval; Shirley Williams commented ‘I wonder why Tony was so unambitious? After all, it took God only six days to make the world’. ⁶⁰ There were appalled reactions from a number of moderate delegates who were ‘undeniably angry that through his demagoguery he had nullified the party’s earnest attempts … to get itself taken seriously’. ⁶¹ Conference also voted to abolish private education, to introduce a wealth tax and a 35-hour week, to leave Europe, to remove all American missile bases, to ratify the reselection of MPs and to support unilateral disarmament.

At an evening meeting organised by the Campaign for Labour Victory, Shirley was shouted down and even spat at. The hall ‘seethed with hatred’ of her, especially when she condemned the NEC for agreeing to allow the Leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party to be elected by party members rather than MPs, calling it a ‘travesty of democracy’. Shirley Williams was at her best: clear, direct, combative with a political ruthlessness that she had never shown before. Perhaps for the first time in her life, Shirley Williams was up for a fight. She believed that her Labour Party, the party she had joined at 16, a party to which her parents, family and friends belonged, a party she had been involved with all her life was under threat. She was fighting for her political life, trapped in a corner by the left and their acolytes, witnessing the party she had loved and nourished, self-destruct. Williams was most probably personally wounded by this antagonism. She liked being popular and was certainly unused to the level of abuse hurled at her by so-called colleagues, members of her party. Not surprisingly, she threatened that if she found ‘the party moving away from the values of political democracy, then I would find it impossible to stay’. ⁶² She urged the silent majority in the party to mobilise, warning that ‘too many good men and women have remained silent – keeping their heads down. The time has come for them to stick their heads up over the parapet and start fighting, because if they don’t they won’t have a Labour Party any longer that is worth its name’. ⁶³ A significant number of delegates agreed and she was re-elected to the NEC , though she slipped down to second place behind the more radical Judith Hart .

It got worse for Mrs Williams. On October 15, 1980, Callaghan resigned and elections were held for a new leader. Shirley Williams remained one of the most popular personalities in the party and could possibly have won the leadership contest. However, because she was no longer an MP, she was debarred from standing: Michael Foot beat Denis Healey to the leadership by ten votes. Shirley Williams congratulated Foot on his win though warned him that he needed to control the far left. She was worried that the new Labour Party leader ‘seemed to accept blithely the erosion of democratic forces within the party and was unable to fathom the gravity of Labour’s plight’. ⁶⁴ It was to be the last time a leader was chosen by MPs.

According to the Liverpool Echo, Shirley Williams gave one of her finest performances at the conference. She knew the ‘gap between reformers, revolutionaries and utopians in the Labour movement had always been wide’ and believed that the present Labour crisis ‘was a conflict about its character – whether the party was to be a protest movement or a prospective government of the country’. ⁶⁵ In an open letter to Eric Heffer, Shirley Williams warned of the danger of imposing party control on elected representatives, using the words of Clement Attlee to shore up her argument. Attlee , Williams stated, had insisted that the Prime Minister must always remember that he is more than a party leader. ‘His Government’ Attlee stated ‘is responsible to Parliament, and through Parliament to the nation. If you begin to consider yourself solely responsible to a political party, you’re halfway to a dictatorship’. ⁶⁶ Williams maintained that the party ‘has just thrown away any chance of defeating Mrs Thatcher in the next election’. ⁶⁷ She was to be proved right. In November 1980, Shirley Williams declared that she would not run again as a Labour candidate if the party carried on with its current policies.

In January 1981 at a special conference delegates voted for a change in the way it elected its leader. In future, the party leader would be elected at the party conference in which 40% of the votes would be held by trade unions , 30% by constituency parties and only 30% by the Parliamentary Party. It was viewed as a ‘savage slap in the face’ for Labour MPs, a ‘disaster for the Labour moderates. A shattering triumph for the Left’. ⁶⁸ Shirley Williams believed that a secret ballot of MPs was the only democratic way to choose a leader. In her view, to describe the new voting system as being ‘more democratic than a secret ballot by individual MPs who are members of the PLP and elected by millions of Labour voters is a travesty of language’. ⁶⁹ It was hard to see, she insisted, how it could be ‘compatible with parliamentary democracy’ when MPs and Labour leaders were more accountable to the party than the electorate. ⁷⁰

By this time, Williams was fed up with the way the Trotskyist Militant tendency tried to manipulate parliamentary politics, unhappy with what she saw as ‘the calamitous outcome’ ⁷¹ of the Labour Party Conference, repelled by the current direction of Labour policy and hurt by the bitter personal recriminations against her. She was set to leave. The conference decision propelled the march out of the party by what was known as the ‘Gang of Four ’: Shirley Williams , David Owen , Roy Jenkins and Bill Rogers . On January 18, 1981, the four met at David Owen’s house in Limehouse, wrote and read out a joint declaration (the Limehouse Declaration ) to the reporters gathered outside, a declaration which was published in The Guardian a week later. The ‘Gang of Four ’ complained that ‘a handful of trade union leaders can now dictate the choice of a future Prime Minister . The conference disaster is the culmination of a long process by which the Labour Party has moved steadily away from its roots’. ⁷² Their policy was targeted to appeal to the middle ground: they sought to reverse Britain’s economic decline with a healthy public and private sector, to create an open, classless and more equal society, to improve the quality of public services, to correct ‘ugly prejudices based upon sex, race or religion’, to encourage public enterprise, co-operative ventures and profit-sharing, to de-centralise decision making in industry and government and to keep Britain in the European Community, in NATO, the UN and the Commonwealth . An official split had been declared. Shirley Williams likened the experience to taking a raft down the Colorado River—full of rapids and unknown rocks that could capsize the newly built raft of social democracy. ⁷³

On February 9, Williams resigned from the NEC and from the Labour Party . The party, she argued, was ‘not the democratic socialist party I joined but a party intent on controlling those of its members who are elected to public office by the people of Britain. I believe that to be incompatible with the accountability of MPs to their electors which lies at the heart of parliamentary democracy’. ⁷⁴ Michael Foot , the newly elected leader tried to persuade Williams to stay in the party on the grounds of loyalty, predicting that she and her allies would destroy the party or at least keep it out of office. Foot regarded Williams highly: she was a decent human being, a good Cabinet colleague and a popular politician who could appeal to the general public. ⁷⁵ His appeals were to little avail.

Founding the Social Democratic Party, March 1981

On March 26 at the Connaught Rooms, Covent Garden, Shirley Williams and the group launched their new party, the SDP the first political party to be formed since Labour in 1900. It was thought to be a huge success: 500 reporters from newspapers and journals came to the launch and 43,000 new members were recruited. At first, Williams had been reluctant to form a new party, fearing that a centre party would have ‘no roots, no principles, no philosophy and no values’. ⁷⁶ It was not an easy decision to leave the Labour Party and she compared it with ‘pulling out my own teeth’. ⁷⁷ In her letter to the NEC , she wrote that she was resigning from the executive ‘only because I believe the party I loved and worked for over so many years no longer exists’. ⁷⁸ She was accused of deserting Labour because she had too genteel an upbringing and had not been ‘able to stand the rough and tumble like those of us who are used to scrapping in working-class organisations’. ⁷⁹

Most thought Williams was a great loss to the Labour Party ; it had lost one of its most popular figures and one of its most successful campaigners. Those on the left-wing of the party disagreed. Tony Benn was unsympathetic, claiming that ‘some left to establish a political party more worthy of their own personal ambitions. Others because they resented the challenge from Labour’s rank-and-file to hold them accountable for their actions. Some because they should never have been in the Labour Party in the first place and the rest because they were too stupid or corrupt to be able to survive. Whoever ends up in partnership with such a motley crew of careerists, elitists and deadbeats will need all the media support they can get’. ⁸⁰ As mentioned earlier, Judith Hart accused Shirley Williams of ‘being cynical and power hungry’. ⁸¹ The upshot was that it split the Labour Party , transformed the political landscape and weakened the left, thus helping to keep Margaret Thatcher in power.

Shirley Williams wanted the new party to be democratic and ‘socialist, committed to greater equality, redistribution of income and wealth, comprehensive schools and the National Health Service ’. ⁸² The Social Democrats believed in collective leadership: Shirley Williams , David Owen , Roy Jenkins and Bill Rogers jointly headed the new team. It was agreed that Jenkins would be in charge of co-ordinating policy; Rodgers would look after party organisation; Owen would lead the parliamentary group; and Williams would be in charge of communications and publicity. A Steering Committee, which became the National Committee, was set up, chaired in rotation by one of the Gang of Four . It was a new form of democracy. In Williams’ view, ‘collective leadership spelled friendship and a common objective, by contrast to the civil war in the Labour Party and the growing strains in the Conservative government’. ⁸³ At the launch, the group showed its commitment to a collective approach by answering questions in rotation.

Shirley Williams was still out of Parliament and needed to find a seat to contest. Unfortunately, she found it difficult to make hard decisions. When a Labour seat in Warrington became vacant, she resisted, despite fierce persuasive tactics by her colleagues and a headline in The Sun shouting ‘You Can Do It, Shirl’ and declined to run for Parliament. The response to her turning down the offer was far from what she expected: newspapers turned on her. She was thought to lack political guts and accused of abandoning the parliamentary ship. Journalists asked whether her indecisiveness was the whole pattern of her career because ‘she likes being liked and making decisions makes enemies’. ⁸⁴ Her good common sense and instinctive caution allowed her not to crash, Robin Oakley commented, but it meant that she could not fly either. David Owen believed it to be the worst decision Williams had ever made, the most damaging decision for the future of the SDP and put paid to her chances of leading the new organisation.

However, it was not caution that led her to decline the candidacy but something far more pragmatic: Shirley Williams had a young daughter, a dependent stepmother and no substantial financial resources; if she gave up her job and failed to win a seat, she would be economically challenged. Her ‘daughter was doing her university finals and she has a hard enough time without my adding to it. Sometimes you have to not do something in politics if you want to keep your family in one piece. It is true for men, but especially true for women. But the media never believe that there really can be a personal reason and I was portrayed as a coward. I don’t regret it in the sense that my daughter’s wellbeing would always have to come first, but politically it was a big mistake’. ⁸⁵ In the end, Roy Jenkins ran for Warrington and lost.

In 1981, a seat became vacant in the Conservative stronghold of Crosby, and this time Williams was persuaded to fight it, knowing that if she refused the media would regard her as a coward. She felt ‘like someone on the edge of a cliff that was crumbling beneath me’. ⁸⁶ The Liberal candidate gallantly withdrew and campaigned for Williams instead. Shirley Williams started from scratch with no party base in a constituency that was quintessentially Conservative. It was the height of the Thatcher government’s unpopularity: interest rates and unemployment were both high, and there was a lot of unrest in the cities. Yet Crosby was no sinecure and Williams had to fight hard for the seat. She was criticised for her support of comprehensives, her dislike of independent private schools and by the anti-abortionist Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child for not opposing abortion vigorously enough. But Williams knew how to campaign: she was a seasoned politician. She visited schools, knocked on doors and held countless meetings. Once she went on a six-hour tour of the constituency in an open Land Rover in the pouring rain, confirming her total dedication to win the by-election. The Times, which could never pass up an opportunity to make comments on her appearance, said she looked ‘like a furry little creature of field and woodland’ because she refused to wear any head-covering. ⁸⁷

Social Democratic Party MP for Crosby, November 1981–June 1983

On November 22, 1981, Williams ‘pulled off the most dramatic success’ ⁸⁸ when she overturned a Conservative majority of 19,272 into an SDP one of 5289, an unprecedented 25% swing. It was seen the biggest upheaval in a by-election and as ‘convincing confirmation’ that the Alliance was going to be successful, as ‘if the present disarray in the Labour Party continues the SDP may even find itself becoming the main opposition’. ⁸⁹ She was seen as the woman politician that both men and women liked and trusted, ‘the only candidate with an established national reputation’. ⁹⁰ Immediately after the result was declared, Shirley Williams claimed that her victory was a ‘new beginning for Britain’. ⁹¹ There was not she claimed ‘a single safe seat left in the country’ and predicted that the Social Democratic and Liberal Alliance would win the next general election . ⁹² There were, claimed The Guardian, ‘few sights more cheerfully disgusting than a victorious election team at breakfast’ when at 4 a.m. Shirley Williams celebrated on an early breakfast of champagne, bacon and eggs. ⁹³ When she met her campaign team, Shirley Williams ‘unzipped a great soppy grin of pure delight, and the roaring crowd fell even more deeply in love’. ⁹⁴ The next day she did what Margaret Bondfield and others had done before her: she toured her new constituency. As she stepped out of her hotel, she was spontaneously hugged by a local woman. ⁹⁵ It was, one commentator noted, as if people felt liberated, hanging out of bedroom windows to see her pass by and blowing car horns when they spotted her. She was borne ‘in triumph through the sweaty mass, symbolically and precariously perched on the shoulders of Mr Tony Hill, the Liberal candidate who stood down’ in her favour. ⁹⁶ Newsweek claimed that ‘the rules of British politics suddenly changed last week. In a remarkable changing of the guard, the Tories lost their Crosby bastion to Shirley Williams … and to her eight-month-old party, the Social Democrats’. ⁹⁷

Shirley Williams was the first elected SDP Member of Parliament. In what she called her ‘re-tread’ maiden speech, Williams spoke of her ‘great delight’ in returning to the House, ‘a particular delight to be elected the first Social Democrat Member of Parliament’. ⁹⁸ In marked contrast to her first maiden speech, Williams was confident enough to criticise, confident enough to dissent, confident enough to be unpopular. She attacked Thatcher’s government, claiming that ‘in the two and a half years that I have been out of the House, we have seen nothing but deterioration in the prospects of the British economy. Today, the British people are being sacrificed on the altar of monetarism … perhaps the epitaph written on the coffin of the British economy will read “Rest in peace. You died for the cause of a lower public sector borrowing requirement”’. All that might have been acceptable, she insisted ‘if there were any evidence that the Government was building for the future, but sadly, there is none. … the Government are at present operating just as fierce an economic and financial constraint against investment and capital expenditure as against any other sort of expenditure’, a situation which disadvantaged us in Europe and the wider world. ⁹⁹ She said she was returning to ‘an old man’s club. … It’s terribly out-dated: there’s too much spare time boozing and too many old men. We could do with more women to put it into shape with regular hours of 9 to 8’. ¹⁰⁰ The Times, which could not resist the opportunity to comment on her appearance, said ‘She was looking very smart. This meant she had sacked Oxfam as her couturier’. ¹⁰¹

The SDP needed a leader and Shirley Williams was a significant contender. However, Roy Jenkins was hungry for the job and briefed against her, making continuous derogatory remarks about her disorganised lifestyle. David Owen wanted her to run for the leadership as she had a higher profile and was more popular than Jenkins. ‘What he failed to recognise’, she noted, ‘was my lack of self-confidence. … I was also concerned about making enemies’. Shirley Williams did not run for SDP leader. On July 2, 1982, Jenkins became leader of the SDP; in September, Shirley Williams was elected President. Her role was to lead the party in the country while Roy Jenkins led the SDP in Parliament.

This time Shirley Williams nursed her constituency in Crosby. She read every letter, signed each one personally and held regular surgeries. She would travel up from London every fortnight to meet her constituents. Don’t turn anyone away, she told her liaison officer. She listened to their problems and helped solve them. She visited schools, colleges and hospitals. But it wasn’t enough. She had won her seat in a by-election, at a time when the Conservatives were at a political low. General elections are different: Williams recognised she had a ‘Herculean task on her hands’ if she was to win the next election.

The next election took place against the background of the Falklands War , a war that ended with a British victory and a huge wave of support for Margaret Thatcher and the Conservatives . The electorate had forgotten that the war had been avoidable. Williams realised that ‘as the Conservatives rose, the Alliance sank’. ¹⁰² In the 1983 general election with a newly upbeat Conservative Party buoyed up by victory over Argentina, Shirley Williams lost her Crosby seat by 3405 votes. ¹⁰³ She was never to sit in the House of Commons again.

On June 21, 1983, David Owen replaced Roy Jenkins as leader of the SDP . Unfortunately, according to Williams, David Owen preferred to lead by personal command rather than democratic means, preferred to use his charm and evangelical gift for attracting publicity rather than build a party. Williams warned him that ‘democratic governments aren’t formed by one, or even two, people’. ¹⁰⁴ He ignored her advice. The SDP became a one-man band rather than the well-rehearsed orchestra Shirley Williams had envisaged.

In the 1987 general election , Shirley Williams ran as SDP candidate for Cambridge, thought to be ‘a nice, reasonable, Shirley Williamsish sort of place full of thoughtful, moderate people’. ¹⁰⁵ It was to be the last seat she would fight. Thatcher’s government was unpopular in the university town because of its cuts in the higher education budget: Cambridge’s Conservative MP Robert Rhodes James looked vulnerable. However, Rhodes James was an outstandingly good local MP who had opposed the education cuts and supported grammar schools . The Cambridge electorate valued its grammar schools and remembering Williams’ commitment to comprehensive education voted for the sitting candidate. She lost the election by 5000 votes. It was a disappointing result overall for the SDP which only won five seats; the Conservatives won an overall majority of 101 and Labour, now under the leadership of Neil Kinnock , was regaining its strength. Shirley Williams , Roy Jenkins and Bill Rodgers, three of the founders of the SDP all lost their seats.

The SDP was now too weak to go it alone: it merged with the Liberal Party . At first, the combined party called itself the Social and Liberal Democrats , then the Liberal Democrats under the leadership of Paddy Ashdown . It was a troubled period for the new party, largely calmed down by the re-assuring presence of Shirley Williams . Charles Kennedy maintained that in the time ‘leading up to the merger, Shirley was a tower of strength where others wavered. And in the aftermath, as the infant Liberal Democrats struggled to be recognised as a new force in British politics, she was in some respects the guarantor of our credibility’. ¹⁰⁶ David Owen refused to join them, despite the pleas of Williams.

On December 20, 1987, now safely divorced in the approved Catholic way by having her first marriage annulled, Shirley Williams married an American academic and political advisor Richard Neudstadt . In June 1988, she became Public Service Professor of Electoral Politics at Harvard. Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats were in decline. The great breakthrough and transformation of British politics never came. The SDP had emerged during a period of turbulence in the Labour Party . By 1990, the situation was very different. Under the leadership of Neil Kinnock , the Labour Party fought to restore its credibility and electability making the Liberal Democrats almost a redundant force. In a final irony, The Times argued ‘they merely became party to Labour’s reawakening’. ¹⁰⁷

Shirley Williams may have left Parliament but she was not finished with politics. In 1989, she became immersed in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism , launching Project Liberty an organisation which offered advice to the newly created democratic countries. She wanted to stop the ‘cowboy capitalists’ who were taking over the former Soviet Republic and ‘snapping up state assets for a song’. ¹⁰⁸ She called it ‘jungle capitalism, the capitalism of unrestrained greed’ ¹⁰⁹ and warned that the winners in the short term would be the ‘spivs and wide boys’ not the long-suffering people of Eastern Europe. ¹¹⁰

A Life Peer, 1983

In 1993, she was created a life peer—Baroness Williams of Crosby—and for the next three years, she commuted between the House of Lords and Harvard until she moved back to Britain. It was perhaps in the House of Lords that Williams found her true voice. She was known for being organisationally haphazard but brilliant at speaking. She was ever a collegiate person, never a leader, always willing to compromise, always willing to see the other person’s point of view, always willing to listen and always reluctant to take unpopular decisions. She never enjoyed having to fight her corner, to reprimand those who did not tow the party line or do her bidding. In the House of Lords , Williams had no department to run, no civil servants to organise, no constituents to nurse and no elections to fight. She was free to speak her mind, to be herself.

In her maiden speech, Williams focussed on the situation in the former Yugoslavia. In 1980, President Tito of Yugoslavia had died, followed by the collapse eleven years later of the Soviet Union. Yugoslavia was a multi-ethnic country which had been kept together by the force of communism and the magnetic personality of its President. It soon fell apart. First of all Slovenia seceded, then Croatia , followed in April 1992 by Bosnia –Herzegovina—each of these moves was opposed by the Serbian leader of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic whose primary wish was to keep the country united. Soon, encouraged by Milosevic, Bosnian Serbs took over large parts of (mainly Muslim ) Bosnia and laid siege to Sarajevo, its capital. In her speech, Williams specifically and prophetically mentioned the vulnerability of approximately 700,000 men, women and children, mostly Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks), trapped by the Bosnian Serbs. In Sarajevo, she had seen ‘children dodging down the streets – many of them marked by snipers from the hills surrounding Sarajevo – in a desperate attempt to get water, bread and other supplies for their families’. ¹¹¹ She asked for peace monitors to be placed on the Bosnian-Serbian border. Every subsequent peer who spoke paid tribute to her. Baroness Chalker commented that she would bring an ‘incisiveness, clear-thinking and forward-looking mind for which she is so well known’ to the House of Lords . ¹¹²

During the break-up of Yugoslavia, Shirley Williams went with Paddy Ashdown and members of the UN High Commission to report on the situation. They found villages that had been pillaged, torched and abandoned. During a visit to one village, she left the group because she had noticed that only men from the village turned out to meet them. Williams knew that Kosovar Muslim women would be unlikely to talk freely with male visitors and went to seek them out. She found women hidden at the back of farms, out of sight, and discovered that many of the women had been systematically raped and abused as a weapon of war. This was nothing less than a form of genocide because no traditional Muslim man would marry a woman who had been raped. ¹¹³ Williams appealed to the Conservative Government for safe havens and safe passages for the civilians fleeing from the conflict and for the British Government and the UN to protect civilians from the ‘Bosnian Serbs who have never proved themselves willing to accept any of the norms or understanding of civilised conduct’. ¹¹⁴ Her words carried little weight. Not until July 1995 with the massacre of approximately 8000 Muslims at Srebrenica did the world take notice. In 1997, a Labour Government returned. It supported NATO’s decision to intervene; in early 1999, the Serbs withdrew from Kosovo leaving the area under NATO protection.

In 1997, Labour won a landslide victory with a manifesto which closely resembled the manifesto produced by the SDP —more closely, Williams pointed out ‘than co-incidence alone could explain’. ¹¹⁵ She was not tempted to join New Labour, possibly because she thought Blair lacked a clear set of principles. According to Paddy Ashdown , Williams did not have a high opinion of Tony Blair , thinking him to be a fixer who did not know what he stood for. ¹¹⁶ She considered that Labour was now ‘efficient, modern, centralised and managerial. … It was just that the values of liberal democracy and of social democracy got lost somewhere along the line’. ¹¹⁷

In 1998, Williams became the Lib-Dem spokesperson for Foreign Affairs and its Deputy Leader in the House of Lords ; in 2001, now aged 71 she was elected Lib-Dem leader in the Upper Chamber. Here, she helped shape the Lib-Dems response to the Iraq war. After the September 2001 attacks on America , George Bush sought revenge and accused Iraq of holding ‘weapons of mass destruction’. The United Nations pleaded for restraint. Both the Americans and the British Government ignored the United Nations and in March 2003 declared war on Saddam Hussein. All the Lib-Dems voted against the Iraq war, with Shirley Williams warning that the war would create ‘a human catastrophe on a scale that we cannot imagine’. ¹¹⁸ Saddam Hussein was deposed, and when no weapons of mass destruction were found, Williams questioned the way in which the government had taken Britain to war. Iraq , she claimed, was a mess as the country slid into chaos. She asked Tony Blair ‘was it for this outcome that so many lives have been sacrificed? Was it for this outcome that so much destruction was permitted? Was it for this that we have now brought about an even more difficult situation vis-à-vis the terrorist threat?’ ¹¹⁹ Earlier Shirley Williams had warned that ‘there is always a danger that, far from suppressing terrorism, we will encourage a new wave of terrorism’. ¹²⁰

Shirley Williams wanted to combat terrorism by transforming the world’s global economic institutions. She believed that military power alone would not eradicate terrorism, arguing that three things were essential ‘first, the belief that the constitutional and peaceful path can lead to results that will not be achieved by violence alone; secondly, that the world is ready to address some of the issues that are the causes of terrorism; and thirdly that the world recognises the level of resentment towards the global injustice that still exists so powerfully in our world and that seems so far to have been little lessened by the forces of globalisation’. ¹²¹ Williams had been brought up by a pacifist mother and throughout her life was opposed to nuclear proliferation. She was a leading member of several anti-nuclear organisations and served as Commissioner of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament. In 2007, she accepted a Labour Party position, in a group consisting of former senior Ministers in foreign affairs, as an independent advisor on nuclear proliferation; in 2009, she joined a cross-party group—the Top Level Group of UK Parliamentarians—for the advancement of nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation.

In the 2010 general election , the Labour Party was led by a vacillating Gordon Brown, the Conservative campaign lacked focus and the Liberal Democrats were buoyed up by the charming personality of their leader Nick Clegg . It looked as if the Liberal Democrats might be on course for a huge gain in seats. This was not to happen: the party in fact lost four seats. It was, once again, the first-past-the-post system which failed them. However, the Conservatives did not win a majority and went into coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Shirley Williams hoped that the Liberal Democrats would make a pact with Labour but its leader Nick Clegg thought otherwise and agreed to join the Conservatives with devastating results for the party she had helped create.

In 2016, Williams retired from the House of Lords ; in 2017, she received the Order of the Companion of Honour in recognition of her services to political and public life.

Conclusion

Shirley Williams achieved much in her life. At times, the press depicted her as prime ministerial material: in 1974, she was The Sun’s Woman of the Year, a natural performer at ease in the spotlight. Her popularity with the public made her a likely choice as leader who would win elections. But whereas Thatcher became leader of her party then Prime Minister , Shirley Williams never became primus inter pares, that first among equals. Instead, she is viewed as a great ‘might-have-been’ in political history. ¹²²

There were a number of reasons why she did not become leader of the Labour Party . Some believed Williams’ refusal to look the part hindered her in reaching the top. It is argued that her unkempt image, her disregard for how she looked seemed to hint at a disorganisation in her life which made her unsuitable for high office. Bernard Donoughue argues that the ‘the fact that she dresses, stands, walks and sits like an over-full sack of cabbages does not help’. ¹²³ This is pure sexism: Michael Foot faced all sorts of adverse and negative comments about his appearance yet still became leader. Others explain her lack of advancement to deeper and at times more misogynistic causes: she was a woman in a predominantly male party. The Guardian later alleged that the Labour Party ‘has been led by a long procession of straight male Wasps … women find it hard to advance beyond the Blair Babe cheerleader stage: namely its appetite for jargon and boys-toys technospeak, its domination by pompous, lecherous, seat-sniffers, the tourniquet-tight Boy’s Town inner circle of spinners and bullies’. ¹²⁴ This is ironic given that these were often the same reporters who regularly dismissed or undermined women politicians by referring to their looks rather than their capabilities. In fact, the Labour Party has always been committed to women’s equality: it was the first political party to support votes for women, had championed equal pay and put in place all-women shortlists which gave a huge boost to the numbers of women MPs elected in 1997.

More crucially, Shirley Williams was thought to be too amiable to preside over Labour’s bouts of internecine warfare. She disliked ‘ousting rivals, disciplining colleagues or taking unpopular decisions’ ¹²⁵ and liked being liked too much, a personality trait that did not lend itself to the role of party leader. In order to reach the top, Shirley Williams would have needed to accept that being unpopular was part of the package of power. She also needed to be more ambitious, more ruthless and cunning: she certainly lacked the killer instinct of Tony Blair or Ed Miliband who were willing to jeopardise friendship and family to gain the top position. ‘Like many women of my generation and of the generation before mine’ she confessed, ‘I thought of myself not quite good enough for the very highest positions in politics. I ran for Deputy Leader of the Labour Party in 1976 against Michael Foot , but never for leader. I was President of the SDP and the first SDP MP to be elected, but I conceded the party leadership to Roy Jenkins without a fight’. ¹²⁶ Without the hunger or the adversarial skill to get to the top, Williams seemed destined to underachieve.

Significantly, neither Wilson nor Callaghan promoted her to Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary or Chancellor of the Exchequer, high offices which are considered stepping stones to becoming Prime Minister . Her lack of promotion may have been due to sexism though it was more likely to have been because Williams was not considered a good manager. Tony Crosland had doubts about her effectiveness in government. ‘She was seen as a brilliant performer … but taking charge and managing a team and taking a risk and being unpopular was another matter’. ¹²⁷ According to Callaghan , Williams failed to make a distinct and positive mark in education. She may have re-organised secondary education by closing grammar schools and supporting comprehensives, but this was not policy formation. In fact, it was Williams’ greatest characteristic—her willingness to listen, to compromise and to understand—that was her downfall. She saw, like the intellectual she is, both sides of the question and was thus considered indecisive. However, running a department is not the same as running the country. She was one of the government’s best spokeswomen, ‘an undoubted vote-winner, coming over as concerned, sincere, highly intelligent and human’. ¹²⁸ As a figurehead, Shirley Williams would have been a popular choice among voters and may well have changed the nature of the prime ministerial role by being more collegiate than others before or since.

While Shirley Williams was a distinguished politician for over 45 years with many achievements to her credit, it is perhaps her character and her personality that are her most remarkable features: she is seen as one of the few honest open and authentic faces in a political world often regarded as mendacious and insincere. David Steel considers her ‘a rare being in the world of politics: she is regarded as a national treasure’. ¹²⁹ People believed that Shirley Williams was in politics to make a difference to the world, not make a difference to her personal life.

One of Williams’ legacies was setting up the SDP which at one time was predicted to replace Labour as the official opposition. Those on the left still see her as betraying Labour by not sticking with the party in times of stress and consequently allowing Margaret Thatcher to reign supreme for over a decade; others see the SDP as a catalyst, forcing Labour to scrutinise its electoral failures and return to a more moderate stance. Ultimately, of course, the SDP failed to capture the middle ground. When Tony Blair moved the Labour Party to the centre of politics, the SDP joined the ‘elephant’s graveyard of breakaway parties, its tomb alongside those of the New Party, National Labour, the National Liberals and even the once-proud ILP ’. ¹³⁰ In the 1990 Bootle by-election, the SDP candidate won fewer votes than Screaming Lord Sutch’s party: Shirley Williams ’ dream of restructuring British politics was ended.

Notes

• 1. Daily Mirror, September 24, 1974, p. 9.

• 2. The average wage in 1974 was £2020.

• 3. Daily Mirror, March 6, 1974, p. 4.

• 4. Ibid.

• 5. Daily Mirror, August 2, 1974, p. 10.

• 6. The Guardian, March 4, 1974, p. 14.

• 7. The Times, November 22, 1976, p. 8.

• 8. The Guardian, March 6, 1974, p. 6.

• 9. The Times, March 6, 1974, p. 13.

• 10. Hansard, March 14, 1974, cc499–511.

• 11. Ibid.

• 12. CAB 129/175/5 March 12, 1974.

• 13. Ibid.

• 14. Hansard, January 30, 1975, Vol. 885, cc636–757.

• 15. The Times, September 6, 1974, p. 4.

• 16. The Guardian, March 19, 1976, p. 14.

• 17. Mark Peel , Shirley Williams: The Biography, 2013, Biteback, p. 204.

• 18. Ibid., p. 212

• 19. Bernard Donoughue, Downing Street Diary, June 28, 1974, Jonathan Cape, 2005.

• 20. Ibid., August 2, 1974, 2005.

• 21. Ibid., June 26, 1975, 2005.

• 22. Ibid., June 26, 1975, 2005.

• 23. The Guardian, March 22, 1994, p. 12.

• 24. Birmingham Post, September 26, 1974, p. 1.

• 25. Shirley Williams , The Guardian, May 17, 1975, p. 6.

• 26. Shirley Williams, The Guardian, May 18, 1975, p. 11.

• 27. The Guardian, March 19, 1976, p. 14.

• 28. Milton Shulman, Newcastle Evening Chronicle, August 8, 1975, p. 4.

• 29. Shirley Williams, The Guardian, March 17, 1976, p. 1.

• 30. Newcastle Evening Chronicle, August 8, 1975, p. 4.

• 31. Shirley Williams, Memorandum CAB/129/190/23, July 12, 1976.

• 32. Shirley Williams, quoted in The Guardian, May 13, 1980, p. 8.

• 33. The Times, February 17, 1977, p. 15.

• 34. The Observer, February 20, 1977, p. 12.

• 35. James Callaghan , Ruskin College, October 18, 1976. Callaghan sent his daughter to a fee-paying school.

• 36. Shirley Williams , Education in Schools: A Consultative Document, CAB 129/197/4, July 4, 1977.

• 37. Shirley Williams, Climbing the Bookshelves, Virago, 2009, p. 235.

• 38. Carol Adams began her career teaching History at an inner London school. She then taught at the Tower of London before managing the History and Social Science Centre. In the 1980s, she became the country’s first inspector for equal opportunities. In 1990, she became Chief Education Officer for Wolverhampton, moving from Shropshire four years later. She resigned from the GTC in 2006 because of ill health and died on January 11, 2007. David Cameron abolished the organisation she had helped create.

• 39. The Guardian, October 1, 1976, p. 7.

• 40. Shirley Williams, Climbing the Bookshelves, 2009, p. 241.

• 41. Hansard, May 16, 1978, Vol. 950, cc90.

• 42. Margaret Thatcher , quoted in The Guardian, October 15, 1977, p. 3.

• 43. The Guardian, November 4, 1978, p. 7.

• 44. The Birmingham Post, May 5, 1979, p. 5.

• 45. The Birmingham Post, May 5, 1979, p. 1.

• 46. Shirley Williams , Climbing the Bookshelves, 2009, p. 267.

• 47. Shirley Williams, The Times, October 30, 1980, p. 12.

• 48. Simon Hoggart, The Guardian, January 22, 1977, p. 1.

• 49. Ibid., p. 6.

• 50. The Guardian, October 3, 1973, p. 5.

• 51. Williams, quoted in Mark Peel , Shirley Williams: The Biography, 2013, p. 284.

• 52. Simon Hoggart, The Guardian, January 22, 1977, p. 1.

• 53. Shirley Williams , Climbing the Bookshelves, 2009, p. 267.

• 54. The Guardian, December 30, 1979, p. 22.

• 55. Shirley Williams Diary, June 4, 1980, quoted in Mark Peel , Shirley Williams: The Biography, 2013, p. 286.

• 56. The Guardian, August 1, 1980, p. 1.

• 57. The Liverpool Echo, August 1, 1980, p. 7.

• 58. Shirley Williams , Climbing the Bookshelves, 2009, p. 275.

• 59. The Guardian, August 1, 1980, p. 1.

• 60. The Times, September 30, 1980, p. 1.

• 61. Ibid.

• 62. The Journal, September 29, 1980, p. 1.

• 63. The Journal, September 30 1980, p. 1.

• 64. Mark Peel , Shirley Williams: The Biography, 2013, p. 294.

• 65. Shirley Williams, The Times, October 30, 1980, p. 12.

• 66. The Times, September 30, 1980, p. 12.

• 67. Shirley Williams , The Times, October 2, 1980, p. 1.

• 68. Sunday Express, January 25, 1981, p. 1.

• 69. Shirley Williams, The Times, October 30, 1980, p. 12.

• 70. Shirley Williams, The Times, January 24, 1981, p. 12.

• 71. Statement by Shirley Williams , David Owen and Roy Jenkins , The Guardian, January 26, 1981, p. 2.

• 72. The Illustrated London News, March 1981, p. 15.

• 73. Shirley Williams, Climbing the Bookshelves, 2009, p. 282.

• 74. Shirley Williams , letter of resignation to the NEC , The Times, February 10, 1981, p. 1.

• 75. Kenneth O. Morgan, Michael Foot : A Life, Harper Perennial, 2007, p. 394.

• 76. Phillip Whitehead, Dictionary of Labour Biography, Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.

• 77. Shirley Williams, Climbing the Bookshelves, 2009, p. 278.

• 78. Shirley Williams, The Guardian, February 10, 1981, p. 1.

• 79. John Golding, quoted in The Guardian, July 14, 1983, p. 15.

• 80. Tony Benn , London Labour Review, December 1981, p. 17.

• 81. The Guardian, October 6, 1981, p. 4.

• 82. Shirley Williams , Climbing the Bookshelves, 2009, p. 280.

• 83. Ibid., p. 285.

• 84. Robin Oakley, Daily Mail, quoted in Mark Peel , Shirley Williams: The Biography, 2013, p. 314.

• 85. Shirley Williams, The Times, December 30, 2003, p. 8.

• 86. Shirley Williams, Climbing the Bookshelves, 2009, p. 291.

• 87. The Times, November 23, 1981, p. 3.

• 88. The Guardian, November 27, 1981, p. 1.

• 89. Illustrated London News, January 1982, p. 5.

• 90. The Times, November 23, 1981, p. 9.

• 91. Liverpool Echo, November 27, 1981, p. 6.

• 92. The Guardian, November 27, 1981, p. 1.

• 93. The Times, November 28, 1981, p. 2.

• 94. The Guardian, November 28, 1981, p. 1.

• 95. Liverpool Echo, November 30, 1981, p. 8.

• 96. The Guardian, November 28, 1981, p. 1.

• 97. Charles Kennedy , ‘A New Politics, 1981 and 2010’, in Andrew Duff (editor), Making the Difference: Essays in Honour of Shirley Williams, 2010, Biteback, p. 67.

• 98. Hansard, December 8, 1981, Vol. 14, cc725–818.

• 99. Ibid.

• 100. Shirley Williams , The Times, December 2, 1981, p. 1.

• 101. The Times, December 2, 1981, p. 26.

• 102. Shirley Williams, Climbing the Bookshelves, 2009, p. 301.

• 103. In the 1983 general election , the SDP and Liberal Alliance gained 25.4% of the votes, only 2.2% less than Labour’s 28% though the iniquities of the first-past-the post system meant that the SDP gained 23 seats and Labour 209.

• 104. Shirley Williams to David Steel, quoted in Mark Peel , Shirley Williams : The Biography, 2013, p. 324.

• 105. The Guardian, June 4, 1987, p. 6.

• 106. Charles Kennedy , ‘A New Politics, 1981 and 2010’, in Andrew Duff (editor), Making the Difference: Essays in Honour of Shirley Williams, 2010, p. 75.

• 107. The Times, June 4, 1990, p. 11.

• 108. Shirley Williams, Climbing the Bookshelves, 2009, p. 341.

• 109. Ibid., p. 344.

• 110. Shirley Williams, The Guardian, July 6, 1990, p. 23.

• 111. Hansard, HL Deb, May 27, 1993, Vol. 546, cc502–538.

• 112. Baroness Chalker, Hansard, HL Deb, May 27, 1993, Vol. 546, cc502–538.

• 113. Shirley Williams , Climbing the Bookshelves, 2009, p. 374.

• 114. Hansard, HL Deb, July 12, 1995, Vol. 565, cc1717–1728.

• 115. Shirley Williams, Climbing the Bookshelves, 2009, p. 322.

• 116. Paddy Ashdown , The Times, October 23, 2000, p. 3.

• 117. Shirley Williams, Climbing the Bookshelves, 2009, p. 322.

• 118. Mark Peel , Shirley Williams: The Biography, 2013, p. 387.

• 119. Shirley Williams, Hansard HL Deb, September 7, 2004, Vol. 664, cc448–556.

• 120. Shirley Williams, Hansard HL Deb, November 28, 2002, Vol. 641, cc860–898.

• 121. Shirley Williams, Hansard HL Deb, May 14, 2003, Vol. 648, cc245–293.

• 122. Roger Liddle, ‘Is the Progressive Alliance Dead? A Personal Reflection’, in Andrew Duff (editor), Making the Difference: Essays in Honour of Shirley Williams, 2010, p. 90.

• 123. Mark Peel , Shirley Williams: The Biography, 2013, p. 224.

• 124. The Guardian, February 16, 2002, p. 7.

• 125. Mark Peel , Shirley Williams: The Biography, 2013, p. 225.

• 126. Shirley Williams , Climbing the Bookshelves, 2009, p. 395.

• 127. Bill Rodgers, quoted in Mark Peel , Shirley Williams: The Biography, 2013, p. 420.

• 128. The Guardian, March 19, 1976, p. 14.

• 129. David Steel, ‘The Liberal View’, in Andrew Duff (editor), Making the Difference: Essays in Honour of Shirley Williams, 2010, p. 67.

• 130. The Times, January 16, 2001, p. 7.