Shirley Williams

The Right Honourable The Baroness Williams of Crosby PC
Secretary of State for Education and Science
In office 10 September 1976 – 4 May 1979
Prime Minister	James Callaghan
Preceded by	Fred Mulley
Succeeded by	Mark Carlisle
Paymaster General
In office 10 September 1976 – 4 May 1979
Prime Minister	James Callaghan
Preceded by	Edmund Dell
Succeeded by	Angus Maude
Secretary of State for Prices and Consumer Protection
In office 5 March 1974 – 10 September 1976
Prime Minister	Harold Wilson James Callaghan
Preceded by	Position established
Succeeded by	Roy Hattersley
Shadow Home Secretary
In office 19 October 1971 – 4 May 1973
Leader	Harold Wilson
Preceded by	James Callaghan
Succeeded by	Roy Jenkins
Member of Parliament for Crosby
In office 26 November 1981 – 9 June 1983
Preceded by	Graham Page
Succeeded by	Malcolm Thornton
Member of Parliament for Hertford and Stevenage
In office 28 February 1974 – 3 May 1979
Preceded by	Constituency Abolished
Succeeded by	Bowen Wells
Member of Parliament for Hitchin
In office 15 October 1964 – 28 February 1974
Preceded by	Martin Maddan
Succeeded by	Ian Stewart
Personal details
Born	Shirley Vivian Teresa Brittain Catlin 27 July 1930 (1930-07-27) London, United Kingdom
Political party	Liberal Democrats (1988–present)
Other political affiliations	Labour (1964–1981) Social Democratic (1981–1988)
Alma mater	Somerville College, Oxford Columbia University
Profession	Journalist
Religion	Roman Catholicism

Shirley Williams, Baroness Williams of Crosby PC (born 27 July 1930) is a British politician and academic. Originally a Labour Member of Parliament (MP) and Cabinet Minister, she was one of the "Gang of Four" rebels who founded the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 1981. In 2001–2004, she served as Leader of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords, and served as Adviser on Nuclear Proliferation to Prime Minister Gordon Brown from 2007 to 2010. Williams also serves as Professor Emerita of Electoral Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. In 1980 she received an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of Bath.

Early life

Born Shirley Vivian Teresa Brittain Catlin, Williams is the daughter of a political scientist and philosopher Sir George Catlin, and the feminist and pacifist writer Vera Brittain. She was educated at various primary schools including Mrs Spencer's School in Brechin Place, South Kensington, and Christchurch Elementary School in Chelsea, Talbot Heath School in Bournemouth, St Paul's Girls' School, London, and Somerville College, Oxford, where she was an Open Scholar. As a member of the OUDS she toured the USA playing the role of Cordelia in Shakespeare's King Lear. She was the first woman to chair the Oxford University Labour Club (1950).

After graduating as a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy, Politics and Economics she was a Fulbright Scholar and studied at Columbia University in New York City. On returning to Britain, she began her career as a journalist. In 1960, she became General Secretary of the Fabian Society.

Member of Parliament

After unsuccessfully contesting the constituency of Southampton Test at the 1959 general election, in the 1964 general election Williams was elected as Labour MP for the constituency of Hitchin in Hertfordshire, and rose quickly to a junior ministerial position. Between 1971 and 1973 she served as shadow Home Secretary. In 1974 she became Secretary of State for Prices and Consumer Protection under Harold Wilson, and, when Wilson was succeeded in 1976 by James Callaghan, she became Secretary of State for Education and Paymaster General, two cabinet positions held at the same time.

Controversy

Williams best known political achievement while in office was the creation of the Comprehensive school system and the abolition of Grammar Schools. Controversially she sent her own daughter Rebecca to one of the best selective schools in London, Godolphin and Latymer. The Williams family lived outside the catchment area of this school, so Rebecca was sent to stay with friends who lived close to the school, in order to qualify for entry.

Creating the SDP

Williams lost her seat to Bowen Wells in the Labour Party general election defeat of 1979 (her seat had been renamed Hertford and Stevenage in 1974). Williams's defeat was one of the most prominent of the election. She was interviewed by Robin Day for BBC Television's Decision 79 election programme shortly after learning that she had lost her seat. Merlyn Rees, the Labour Home Secretary, and Norman St John Stevas—the Conservative education spokesman who had frequently clashed with Williams at the Dispatch Box—both paid tribute to her. In 1981, unhappy with the influence of the far left in the Labour Party, she resigned from it to form the SDP, along with Roy Jenkins, David Owen and Bill Rodgers. Later that year, following the death of Conservative Sir Graham Page, she won a by-election in Crosby in Merseyside, becoming the first elected SDP MP.

General election defeat and after

Despite becoming SDP President, she lost her seat in the 1983 general election. She then stood for Cambridge in the 1987 general election, but lost to the Conservative candidate. Williams supported the SDP's 1988 merger with the Liberal Party to form the Liberal Democrats. During this time Williams served as a BBC broadcaster on Shirley Williams in Conversation and has since appeared on many television and radio programmes. She has appeared on BBC's Question Time more than any other panellist.

Harvard University

In 1988, Shirley Williams moved to the United States to serve as a full professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government until 2001, and thereafter as Public Service Professor of Electoral Politics, Emerita. Nonetheless, she remained active in politics and public service in Britain, the United States and internationally. During these years, Williams helped draft constitutions in Russia, Ukraine, and South Africa. She also served as director of Harvard's Project Liberty, an initiative designed to assist the emerging democracies in Central and Eastern Europe; as a board member and acting director of Harvard's famed Institute of Politics (IOP). Upon Shirley Williams' elevation to the House of Lords in 1993, she returned to the United Kingdom and continued a more public life; but has maintained a close association with Harvard University.

Life peer

Having previously turned down a DBE offered to her by the then-Prime Minister Jim Callaghan, Williams was created a life peer as The Baroness Williams of Crosby, of Stevenage in the County of Hertfordshire, in 1993 and subsequently served as Leader of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords from 2001 to 2004. Baroness Williams remains an active member of the House of Lords, and regularly speaks from the floor of the House of Lords.

Among other non-profit boards, Williams is or has been a member of the Council of Foreign Relations, the European Union's Comité des Sages (Reflection Group) on Social Policy, the Twentieth Century Fund, the Ditchley Foundation, the Institute for Public Policy Research, the Nuclear Threat Initiative. She also served as President of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, as Commissioner of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament and as President of Cambridge Student Liberal Democrats. Williams served as United Nations Special Representative to the Former Yugoslavia (with American politician Lynn Martin). Williams was also an attendee of the 2010 Bilderberg conference in Sitges, Spain.

In June 2007, after Gordon Brown replaced Tony Blair as Prime Minister, Williams accepted a formal Government position as Advisor on Nuclear Proliferation provided she could serve as an independent advisor. She remains a Liberal Democrat.

Her interest and commitment to education has continued, and she serves as Chair of Judges of the British Teaching Awards.

Williams is currently a member of the Top Level Group of UK Parliamentarians for Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament and Non-proliferation, established in October 2009.

Personal life

During the Second World War, Williams was evacuated to Minnesota, USA, for three years, where she experienced a society free from the English social class system that she opposed in her political career. She has been married twice. At Oxford she met Peter Parker (the future head of British Rail) and they had a relationship. In her autobiography ("Climbing the Bookshelves") Williams says that "...by the spring of 1949 I was in love with him, and he, a little, with me...".

In 1955, she married the moral philosopher Bernard Williams. Bernard left Oxford to accommodate his wife's rising political ambitions, finding a post first at University College London, where he worked from 1959 until 1964. He was later appointed Professor of Philosophy at Bedford College, University of London, while she worked as a journalist for the Financial Times. For 17 years, the couple lived in a large house in Kensington with the literary agent Hilary Rubinstein and his wife.

During this time, described by Bernard as one of the happiest of his life, the marriage produced a daughter, Rebecca, but the development of Shirley's political career kept the couple apart, and the marked difference in their personal values—Bernard was a confirmed atheist, Shirley a Roman Catholic—placed a strain on their relationship, which reached breaking point when Bernard had an affair with Patricia Law Skinner, then wife of the historian Quentin Skinner. The marriage was dissolved in 1974 and Bernard Williams and Patricia Skinner subsequently married and had two sons. Shirley Williams said of her marriage to Bernard:

... [T]here was something of a strain that comes from two things. One is that we were both too caught up in what we were respectively doing—we didn't spend all that much time together; the other, to be completely honest, is that I'm fairly unjudgmental and I found Bernard's capacity for pretty sharp putting-down of people he thought were stupid unacceptable. Patricia has been cleverer than me in that respect. She just rides it. He can be very painful sometimes. He can eviscerate somebody. Those who are left behind are, as it were, dead personalities. Judge not that ye be not judged. I was influenced by Christian thinking, and he would say "That's frightfully pompous and it's not really the point." So we had a certain jarring over that and over Catholicism.

In 1987, she married the Harvard professor and presidential historian Richard Neustadt. Neustadt died in 2003. She has a daughter, a stepdaughter, and two grandchildren. Williams is a Roman Catholic, visiting church almost every Sunday with her grandson.

In the media

Appearing on television discussion After Dark with Peter Ustinov in 1989

Williams has been a fixture of the British media for decades, and is indeed one of the most quotable politicians of the past 50 years. Williams also hosted in the early 1980s BBC TV's Shirley Williams in Conversation. She started her career soon after graduating university as a journalist, working firstly for the Daily Mirror and then for the Financial Times.

Williams also has appeared more than any other panellist on the BBC political talk show Question Time; most recently on 9 January 2012 in London.

In the fictional comic strip Invasion!, set in 1999 and first appearing in 1977, Shirley Williams was depicted as the Prime Minister, before being killed by the invading Volgans in the first episode. References are made to this event (and Williams's premiership) in later episodes, notably the recent reboot of the strip set in 2004, where Williams is still mentioned as having been the PM at the time of the invasion and is venerated to some extent by the resistance.

On Brian Eno's 1977 Before and After Science album, guest musician Robert Wyatt is credited for his percussion contributions under the pseudonym Shirley Williams.

Further reading

Shirley Williams has written several books including:

• Climbing the Bookshelves: The Autobiography of Shirley Williams, Virago Press Ltd (2009).
• God and Caesar: Personal Reflections on Politics and Religion (2003)
• Ambition and Beyond: Career Paths of American Politicians (1993) w/ Edward L. Lascher, Jr.
• New Party - The New Technology (1988)
• A Job to Live (1985)
• Politics is for People (1981)

For details of Williams's early life see:

• Vera Brittain: A Life by Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge (1995)

There is a substantial article on Shirley Williams by Phillip Whitehead in the Dictionary of Labour Biography, by Greg Rosen (ed), Politicos Publishing, 2001.

External links

• Profile at Parliament of the United Kingdom
• Contributions in Parliament at Hansard 1803–2005
• Current session contributions in Parliament at Hansard
• Voting record at PublicWhip.org
• Record in Parliament at TheyWorkForYou.com
• Profile at Westminster Parliamentary Record
• Profile at BBC News Democracy Live
• Articles authored at Journalisted
• Shirley Williams at the Internet Movie Database
• Shirley Williams collected news and commentary at The Guardian
• Baroness Williams of Crosby at the Liberal Democrats
• Faculty profile at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University
• The NS Interview: Shirley Williams, New Statesman, 12 May 2010

Parliament of the United Kingdom
Preceded by Martin Maddan	Member of Parliament for Hitchin 1964–1974	Succeeded by Ian Stewart
New constituency	Member of Parliament for Hertford and Stevenage 1974–1979	Succeeded by Bowen Wells
Preceded by Graham Page	Member of Parliament for Crosby 1981–1983	Succeeded by Malcolm Thornton
Political offices
Preceded by James Callaghan	Shadow Home Secretary 1971–1973	Succeeded by Roy Jenkins
New office	Secretary of State for Prices and Consumer Protection 1974–1976	Succeeded by Roy Hattersley
Preceded by Frederick Mulley	Secretary of State for Education and Science 1976–1979	Succeeded by Mark Carlisle
Preceded by Edmund Dell	Paymaster General 1976–1979	Succeeded by Angus Maude
Party political offices
New political party	President of the Social Democratic Party 1982–1987	Succeeded by John Cartwright
Preceded by The Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank	Leader of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords 2001–2004	Succeeded by The Lord McNally