Decent, clever, charming, eloquent, hard-working, conscientious and terribly, terribly nice, Shirley Williams is one of Britain’s best-loved politicians.
Mark Peel’s admiring biographybegins in Chelsea in 1930. Shirley, as he matily calls her, was the eldest daughter of the political philosopher George Catlin and the bestselling author Vera Brittain. Life at home was affluent, comfortable and high-minded. The Brittains were privileged toffs who set out to remove privileges from toffs they felt lacked their idealism and sophistication. Shirley’s support for this manifesto achieved a stridency that sometimes grated even on her mother. Vera complained to a friend that the 16-year-old Shirley
kept me up till 2 a.m. holding forth in the usual domineering voice on the usual themes — the wickedness of being ‘rich’, the virtue of being poor, mediocre and obscure.
Shirley breezed through Oxford, where she was regularly tipped for political stardom. After losing Southampton Test in 1959, she captured Hitchin for Labour in 1964.
Everyone loved the idea that Shirley would become Britain’s first woman prime minister. In truth, she was disorganised and ill-disciplined and she lacked self-confidence and ruthlessness. Unguarded comments could make her sound aloof. ‘We haven’t time for gracious living,’ she told a newspaper, ‘we’re too busy.’ Presentational finesse eluded her. Harold Wilson’s press secretary looked her up and down: ‘An overfull sack of cabbages,’ he concluded. Ultimately she preferred a high mind and a clear conscience to the shabby compromises of power.
When Wilson resigned in 1976, Shirley was promoted to education secretary by James Callaghan. Her time had come. Callaghan launched a great debate on education in October 1976 and ordered Shirley to produce a green paper before Christmas. No chance, Jim, she said. Miles too early. She then set off on a consultation exercise as an outbreak of teaching conferences spread across the country. The green paper went through 50 drafts in which Shirley took ‘a close interest’, and when it finally arrived, six months overdue, it was dismissed as turgid, complacent and indecisive.
But Shirley refused to re-write it, arguing that every sentence had been lovingly crafted to reflect the agreed positions of all interested parties. Callaghan declined to publish it. Humiliated, Shirley identified a civil servant as the true author and claimed to have been too busy attending a subcommittee on industrial policy to have had any real input. She agreed to rustle up a new edition but added that she needed to ‘pretend to be sick’ in order to find enough time. This is a bizarre way for a minister to describe doing her job. Do these minutiae add up to much? Only that Shirley represents one of the tragic stereotypes of political life: the golden candidate who becomes the hopeless legislator.
Her greatest successes were negative. Labour’s campaign to degrade state education intensified under her stewardship. She scored a direct hit on St Marylebone Grammar (founded 1792). Some schools met Labour’s egalitarian terrorism with a pantomime of obedience. At my school the 1,000-strong pupil body was segregated according to ability after admission rather than before. There were nine streams in all. Smart teachers taught smart kids, average teachers taught average kids and dim teachers taught very little because truancy and shoplifting (‘retail fieldwork’) were rife. Other state secondaries went private. Result: even more posh schools for toffs. Perhaps that’s what Shirley meant by extending opportunity.
As the Militant Tendency plotted to turn Labour into a Trotskyite think-tank, Shirley defected to the SDP. This experiment in radical middle-of-the-roadism disintegrated all too swiftly, as the war of ideas gave way to the clash of egos. The SDP leaders probably felt they were born to rule. But to outsiders they looked like a crew of botched characters from a cancelled cartoon series: Roy Jenkins, a sherry trifle in spectacles, Shirley Williams, a Harvard cleaning-lady and David Owen, a wannabe Batman with a hole in his cape. The SDP retains a vestigial presence in our politics. The ‘Democrat’ bit in the Lib Dems’ title is a genetic hangover from the nuptials between the Liberals and the SDP in 1988.
Peel’s book is easy to read but excessively discreet. He skates over the collapse of Shirley’s marriage to the philosopher Bernard Williams in the late 1960s. Sloppy editing keeps squirting lemon juice in the reader’s eyeballs. Peel writes ‘flaunting’ for ‘flouting’ and ‘panacea’ for ‘catalyst’. In 1983 Shirley was not ‘out of Parliament, never to return.’ She was out of the Commons. She returned to Parliament in 1993 as a peer.
I’m sorry to have to highlight these blunders but I’m confident Shirley will read my corrections with joy in her heart and a flush of righteous pride in her cheeks. I’m a boy from a comp. Peel went to Harrow.
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