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  'I didn't think I was good enough to lead' |
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 | Reported by guardian.co.uk
on Sunday, 18 October 2009
(on October 18, 2009) |
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Shirley Williams talks about a political career that has spanned almost 60 years, and taken her from Labour to the SDP, then the Lib Dems and now the House of LordsShirley Williams is late, which is not entirely surprising.
In her admirably honest new memoir, she says she is always late, though her likable young assistant Jeremy defends her and insists that, on this occasion, it is not her fault.Anyway, after a 20-minute delay - time for me to explore her well- appointed office in a block opposite the Houses of Parliament and note the paperback copy of the collected John Stuart Mill resting on an armchair - she is here, greeting me, organising a cup of coffee, blocking her calls, introducing half a dozen subjects at once, trying to explain the virtues of the "Tobin tax" to me, saying hello to a fellow peer on her way to have her photograph taken in the street outside, saying further hellos to a dustcart driver she says she knows and to various passersby, worrying about her hair blowing in the wind, sending Jeremy back to the office to get a comb, walking very quickly (despite a slight limp) in the middle of the road .
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I am exhausted already, and we haven't even started the interview.That interview, when it does eventually begin, is also - like her windswept hair - a bit of a mess.
Shirley - I will reluctantly call her Williams hereafter, though it seems most unnatural - has a brilliant but digressive mind; I have been up until 1am reading her book and have not formulated my thoughts or questions with any coherence.
We are circling round her incident-packed 79 years, meeting only occasionally.From adolescent evacuee to single motherI thought I knew Williams pretty well - the public persona, not the person.
I've never met her before, though for some reason when we meet she says, "Good to see you again, Stephen." Perhaps she assumes that, at some time in her seminar-and-media-briefing-filled life, she has met every Guardian journalist.
But the Williams I am thinking about is still the 1970s Cabinet minister, the caring, slightly unkempt, much-loved Labour politician who, thoroughly hacked off with her party's lurch to the left, jumped ship with the Gang of Four in 1981 to found the SDP.
Her book, which labours under the odd title Climbing the Bookshelves, offers a far more rounded figure: the adolescent evacuee living with American friends of her family in Minnesota during the second world war; the lifelong Catholic who believes abortion should be banned; the public figure who has moved between politics and academe in the UK and US; the woman who faced marital discord and, after her separation from philosopher Bernard Williams in 1970, had to bring up her daughter Rebecca as a single mother while wrestling with the cares of state.It is a remarkable story, told with some aplomb, though ultimately lacking the art and writerly willingness to dig ever deeper shown by her mother, Vera Brittain, author of Testament of Youth.
The memoir is also handicapped by the fact that, at 79, Williams is still very much looking forward, active in Liberal Democrat politics (she was the party's leader in the Lords from 2001 to 2004), in the campaign against nuclear proliferation, and in her career-long fight to improve education.
She is too resolutely of the moment to worry unduly about making the past come alive."My husband Dick [her second husband, US academic Richard Neustadt, who died in 2003] persuaded me to do the book," she tells me when we finally settle down.
"I didn't really want to do one.
I had no desire to write a book.
But he hammered at me and said you must, mainly because my life covered extraordinary transformations in the world.
When I started out, there was a whole range of assumptions about women not being able to handle hard subjects, not being able to make decisions.
Now the whole thing has changed out of all recognition.
The second element was class.
One of the things that happened over my lifetime was the gradual dissolution of the concept of class.
From a very early age I hated the class structure in Britain, and that was underlined by having lived in the US from the age of 10 [she and her brother returned to their parents after the war]."It is typical of Williams that she describes her memoir as if it were a Fabian pamphlet, a dissertation on Britain's social mores.
Don't be put off - there is plenty of humanity in the book.
If sometimes, as a memoirist, she can't see the wood for the treaties, the book overall offers a corrective to our one-dimensional view of her.
"I'm very much seen as a popular domestic politician," she says.
"Well, that's OK, but it's not the way my life has been lived.
That's been rather different.
In a way, the international dimension can't show up in Britain because we're not really a country that has accepted, except in the most technical economic sense, globalisation.
We just don't see things that way yet."I fear I am as guilty as everyone else in resisting this wider perspective.
While she emphasises her decade as a politics professor at Harvard, her anti-nuclear proliferation work and her contribution to Project Liberty, helping emerging democracies in central and eastern Europe, I am banging on about the golden Labour cabinet in which she was education secretary in the mid-70s, Tony Benn and the Limehouse Declaration, and her failure to become - as had been widely predicted - Britain's first woman prime minister.I am quite attached to my stereo- typical Shirley, and my flippancy is pitted against her seriousness, as she tactfully recognises when, after I offer a pithy and euphonious summary of something she has just described at length, she says, "Ah yes, a good journalist." This may not be a compliment.
She was briefly a journalist on the Daily Mirror after leaving Oxford in 1951, and says she was hopeless, though she did manage a more successful stint later at the Financial Times before entering the Commons in 1964.Our initial meeting is not particularly productive, so I return a week later to have another go, this time getting more sleep beforehand.
I really do have to play the journalist, or she will bury me in complexity.
She will explain every last detail of the Tobin tax, while all I really want to know is whether she thinks Gordon Brown is bonkers.
OK, I realise I am part of Britain's political problem - the media's innate tendency to simplify - but we have to sell papers.Gordon Brown 'is such a complicated man'She doesn't think Brown is bonkers, as a matter of fact.
She thinks he is rather a good thing - to the consternation of some in her party she became an adviser to Brown on nuclear proliferation when he became PM - but recognises that emotionally he is hopeless.
"Gordon is such a complicated man," she says.
"As a person to work with he is terrific.
You can talk to him, he is open to ideas, he's interested, he's intellectually connected.
There's a lot of me that respects a lot of him, but his inability to communicate and this extraordinary inability to feel what the public mood is is very strange.
It's worse than it was.
When he used to spend a lot of time in Scotland, he wasn't like that and people saw him as being very much in touch with the public mood.
But not now, I think partly because he's absolutely wrung out with work.
His response to everything is to work harder, but he's already working as hard as it's possible for a human being to work."She believes he will now soldier on to the election, which she doesn't see as a lost cause for Labour.
"There is much greater drag on going back to the Conservatives north of the Trent," she argues.
"An awful lot is going to turn on timing.
If there are signs of a pick-up, I think Labour is in with a fighting chance, but it would be helpful for it to admit now, six months before the election, some of the mistakes it made.
It's crucial that it acts on banking bonuses and doesn't just sit there knitting its bloody fingers.
It's so obvious that something should be done.
After all, the Germans and the French are saying so, and we're saying, 'Oh no we couldn't dream of that.' Angela Merkel is not a communist, for God's sake.
The City isn't going to collapse because there's a limit on bonuses."If Labour does lose and Cameron becomes PM, she reckons he will have a tough time of it.
"I think the Conservatives are going to walk into an absolute maelstrom of trouble if they win.
They are not at all cohesive on their economic policy and, more importantly, they are in dead trouble over Europe.
When Cameron starts trying to get more John Major-style opt-outs, he's going to get a very dusty answer, because the European leaders have had it up to here with us.
Most of his ideas are going to be rejected, and the temptation for him will then be to say, 'We want an in/out referendum.' The consequences of that will have to be seen to be believed."Williams's commitment to Europe is one of the central tenets of her political life, and was a key factor that made her quit Labour in 1981 to co-found the SDP.
She is an internationalist above all else.
"I can see that one might love one's country," she says, "but to think it's intrinsically better because it just happens to be British or American or French is not something I understand." Also, she argues, national solutions are no longer enough to counter the problems we face, and the great international institutions are in urgent need of reform.
"The fact that India is still not on the UN security council is crackers.
The whole thing has been wrapped in a kind of shellac since 1944."Another institution in need of reform is parliament, about which she is withering.
"Parliament is on the edge of dying," she says.
"We have to have a fundamental reshaping of Westminster." She wants PR, multi-member constituencies, a reduction in the number of MPs to 350, a predominantly elected Lords, fixed-term parliaments, feedback on whether the laws passed work in practice, and "sunset clauses" so that laws fall into abeyance unless they are renewed.
Above all, she wants the power of the executive checked."Parliament is a rubber-stamp almost all the time now," she says.
"It's run by the whips, for the whips, and by the whips for the leader.
You've also got this devastating development of the presidential prime minister, which our system is not shaped to support.
That's the worst of all worlds.
If you've got a presidential system, you then have a very tough and independent congress, which is not in any way under the control of the leader.
To marry the deeply authoritarian, disciplinarian British parliamentary system with a presidential prime minister is a recipe for benevolent dictatorship at best.
That's the way we're going and it frightens me."'I like fighting for what I believe in'All this is brilliant, combative stuff, but it intrigues me that when I ask her to spell out her philosophy, instead of stately dogmas she offers me five key ideas, the first of which, naturally, is the Tobin tax (a levy on international currency speculation, in case you were wondering).
It seems a somewhat technocratic approach to politics, and I wonder if she would have preferred to have been a senior civil servant, perhaps permanent secretary at the Department of Education.
"No, I love fighting," she insists.
"I like fighting for what I believe in.
I'm a good public speaker and I enjoy the relationship with the public.
You'd find I'm somebody who ends up talking in most trains and buses I get into.
I love talking to people and they enjoy talking back to me.
The rather encapsulated role of a permanent secretary would not suit me at all."But she accepts her political life has been hampered by aspects of her personality.
She was too clever, too rational, able to see too many sides of a problem; she hated the adversarial style of the Commons; she kowtowed to the men who dominated that glittering 70s cabinet - Crosland, Jenkins, Benn, Foot, Healey - and says her biggest mistake was not to challenge Jenkins for the leadership of the SDP in 1982.
If she had won, she might have headed off the acrimonious split that bedevilled centre-party politics later when David Owen refused to join the Lib Dems and battled on with his inelegantly named (and ultimately doomed) Continuing SDP.
"That lost us a decade," she says.
Owen only got the message when his party finished behind the Monster Raving Loony party at a byelection in Bootle in 1990.Williams's career is one of glorious might-have-beens.
What if she had beaten Michael Foot when she somewhat reluctantly stood for the deputy leadership of the Labour party in 1976 - might she have resisted the rise of the left and averted the schism of 1981? What if she had stood against Roy Jenkins for the leadership of the SDP? Ultimately, she says, while extremely competitive, she lacked that last ounce of belief, ambition and desire needed to reach the very top.
"In the end I quailed at the responsibility of being leader.
I didn't think I was good enough." Now she recognises that she was too much in awe of her male colleagues.And what if she had accepted Peter Mandelson's olive branch in the mid-90s and returned to the Labour fold? Might she, as an elder stateswoman, have tempered Tony Blair's excesses? "No," she insists.
"Blair was a very considerable politician and a brilliant communicator, but he took the view that he could learn nothing at all from the past.
I remember Jim Callaghan saying to me on one occasion that he thought Blair had probably seen Thatcher three times as often as he'd seen him.
Callaghan was quite pained by that, because what was clear was that if Blair had wanted to continue with the Labour tradition he would have talked to Jim.
But he didn't.
He talked to Thatcher because he essentially saw the country as a business.
You remember all that stuff about Britain plc and so on? All absolute rubbish: you can't run a country as if it was a company."Happily, Williams does not dwell on might-have-beens.
She regrets very little, prefers to look forward, keep fighting.
She considers herself both a rebel parliamentarian, seeking political reform as far-reaching as that of 1832 and 1867, and a rebel Catholic, campaigning from within the church against Vatican dogmatism - she supports contraception and an end to a celibate priesthood.
Her ideals and passions, undimmed across a career lasting almost 60 years (she was first adopted as a parliamentary candidate at 22), are as vivid as, perhaps more vivid than, ever.
She is one of those people you feel privileged to have met.guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846.Shirley Williams: My working day7.30am Get up, have a shower, do some exercises, have breakfast, sometimes go for a swim.
9.15am Get to the office.
Go through post - hundreds of letters and emails every day.
11am Meetings, mostly about education and the campaign against nuclear proliferation.
1pm Rarely go out for lunch.
Usually have a sandwich in the office.
2.30pm Attend questions and some debates when the Lords is sitting.
Occasionally speak in debates.
7.30pm Dinner locally with friends or stepdaughter.
More meetings, the occasional concert or party.
11pm Get back to flat in Victoria.
Watch Newsnight, read for an hour or so, and go to bed at 12.30am or 1am.
Get by on around six and a half hours sleep, and reckon to work a 66-hour week.
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