Why didn’t Shirley Williams become Prime Minister? Reflections on her life

The death of Shirley Williams is a reminder of just how much British politics has changed since the 1970s, when she was seriously talked about as a potential Prime Minister. The truth is that Baroness Williams, as she later became, would have been a disastrous choice to lead Britain at a time of seemingly irreversible national decline. Instead, the right person got the job: Margaret Thatcher, five years older but from an incomparably less privileged background. Indeed, during the decade when Mrs Thatcher dominated politics, Mrs Williams failed even to win the consolation prize of leading the Opposition. 

It is hard today to recall how glamorous the young Shirley Williams must have seemed in the Sixties. Daughter of Vera Brittain, a celebrity author and feminist (Testament of Youth, 1933: bestselling memoir of nursing in wartime), and married to Bernard Williams, a leading figure in postwar philosophy, she was blessed not only with brains but film-star looks. Having run the Fabian Society, she was catapulted into Parliament in her early thirties. Under Harold Wilson’s leadership, women appeared to flourish on the Left. Barbara Castle, in particular, seemed irresistible — until she collided with the immovable object of the trades unions. Both Mrs Castle and Mrs Williams had the misfortune that their careers coincided with a period of industrial militancy, when several of the most powerful unions were led by men in thrall to Marxism — always a deeply misogynistic ideology. Their baleful influence on Labour continues to this day: it is no accident that the only women to become Prime Minister in this country have been Tories.

After a promising ascent to become Shadow Home Secretary in 1971, Shirley Williams found herself elbowed aside by the party’s big beasts when Labour returned to office in 1974. She allowed herself to be saddled with the non-job of Secretary of State for Prices and Consumer Protection — at a time when prices were out of control and the Government could do nothing to protect consumers against inflation. 

When Jim Callaghan took over in 1976, she became Education Secretary — another thankless task, with popular grammar schools closing, to be replaced with non-selective comprehensives. Unfairly or not, the perception was that privately educated socialists (such as her mentor Tony Crosland, who had driven the policy, or Mrs Williams herself, a Paulina) were pulling up the ladder behind themselves. It did not help that her own daughter attended a selective direct grant school. The contrast with Mrs Thatcher, an unashamed champion of meritocracy (even though as Education Secretary she had failed to halt the comprehensive juggernaut), was painfully obvious.

Having sat in Cabinet for only six years and made next to no impact, Shirley Williams was less damaged by her failure in ministerial office than might have been expected. Having avoided taking sides in the increasingly acrimonious division between the militant Left and the social democratic Right of the party, she might conceivably have emerged as a compromise candidate for the leadership. She could hardly have made a worse fist of it than the man who did take over from Callaghan: the veteran windbag Michael Foot. The Labour Party of the early 1980s was a little reminiscent of the Great War: toothless lions led by men in donkey jackets.

But in the 1979 election — a Tory landslide — Shirley Williams lost her seat. She was drawn into the machinations of what became known as “the Gang of Four”, which morphed into the SDP (Social Democratic Party). Once again, the clash of male egos (in this case, those of Roy Jenkins and David Owen) drowned out her sometimes sensible voice. Her star rose again, with a spectacular by-election triumph in Crosby in 1981. “Moderation” was her motto and it had a broad appeal in a period of polarisation. For a brief period, the SDP overtook both Labour and the Tories in opinion polls.

(left to right) Roy Jenkins, Dr David Owen, William Rodgers and Shirley Williams, 1981. (PA Images)

Then fate intervened again, in the shape of the Falklands War. The Iron Lady’s hour had struck. Even Foot’s patriotic support for the Government could not save Labour, let alone the pious pacifism of Shirley Williams — a legacy of her Catholic father rather than her martial mother. The SDP’s moment had passed — irrevocably, as it proved. In the 1983 election the new party held just six seats; Crosby was not among them. 

After this reverse, Shirley Williams never even attempted a comeback. She was not even asked to play second fiddle in the Alliance of SDP and Liberals, which eventually morphed into the Liberal Democrats. Instead, she spent most of her time teaching at Harvard, where she was much happier and soon remarried: an American academic who did not mind being outshone. Seamlessly, she slipped into the role of national treasure.

The most charitable explanation for Shirley Williams’s inability to assert herself when given the opportunity is personal rather than political. In 1970, she and her husband Bernard Williams separated, leaving her as a single mother; in 1974, just as her career peaked, the marriage ended. The glitz had worn off; between Westminster and Cambridge, their lives had diverged. So had their values: he was a fierce atheist, she a staunch, if heterodox, Catholic. Male pride came into it, too: according to her, he could not bear being patronised as “Mr Shirley Williams”. She later paid tribute to him: “He was a generous, brilliant man and a great philosopher, but being treated like that grated with him.” She was too kind: Williams was indeed brilliant, but he was also was notoriously vain and waspish. For all the talk of feminism, the Sexual Revolution did far more for men than for women. And when things fell apart, it was still the mother who was left to pick up the pieces — and, in the case of the Williamses, the daughter.

It is doubtless from this period of domestic turmoil that Shirley Williams’s lovable but unenviable reputation for being disorganised and dishevelled dated. Once the tabloids had stereotyped her as a woman who did not know or care what the public (i.e. the media) expected of her, it was easy for opponents to depict her as an entitled grandee who was out of touch with ordinary people. 

This was unfair: she was certainly no snob and her chatty, easy manner with everyone she met was one of her greatest assets. But in politics, unlike academia, appearances matter: while Mrs Thatcher was always immaculately turned out, Mrs Williams was perpetually short of a hairbrush. Boris Johnson may have made a virtue of his mop of unruly hair, but even now no woman could expect to get away with such sloppiness. Such is the enduring unfairness of politics — and not only in Britain. 

Shirley Williams was not, however, a victim of sexism. If she had really wanted to climb the greasy pole, she might have done it. The truth is: she did not love power and perhaps even feared what it might do to her. Too indecisive and scrupulous to destroy her enemies, as Mrs Thatcher destroyed Ted Heath and the Wets, she preferred to join the great and the good. She left the dirty work of cleansing Labour’s Augean Stables to Tony Blair. If the life of Shirley Williams teaches us anything, it is that Machiavelli was right: in politics, it is better to be feared than to be loved.

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