In the late 1960s, Shirley Williams was sent to Holloway prison for prostitution. The experience of being "stripped and searched, given prison clothes, endlessly laundered and totally lifeless, and put in a stained and grubby cell" never left her, and, as someone used to the finer things in life, she was shocked by the prison's appalling toilet facilities. Of course, she was not really on the game; it was a wheeze to allow the youthful Home Office minister to experience prison on the inside. In characteristic fashion, she emerged 24 hours later with a burning passion to improve prison conditions and not a bad word for anybody. And to her surprise, as she admits in these engaging but frustratingly good-tempered memoirs, she even "came to have a high regard" for her jailers
A more unlikely streetwalker than Williams is hard to imagine. For the past 40 years, she has been one of the most earnest and articulate voices in our public life. A rising star of Harold Wilson's technocratic Labour government in the 1960s, she made it into the cabinet in 1974 and became not just one of Britain's most popular political characters but many people's favourite to become the first female prime minister. But it was what happened next that cemented her place in history. After losing her seat in 1979, she was one of the Gang of Four who broke away from a sclerotic, faction-ridden Labour party to form the SDP. And even today she remains one of the Liberal Democrats' best-known figures, an endearing throwback to an age when politicians actually thought about the question before they opened their mouths.
As this book unconsciously suggests, one of the things that prevented her rising higher in a Labour party obsessed by class in the 1970s was surely her background. The daughter of Sir George Catlin, an unsuccessful politician, and the pacifist feminist writer Vera Brittain, Williams enjoyed a distinctly privileged childhood, watching in awe as Nehru, HG Wells and Rebecca West came to call. Her parents named her after a Charlotte Brontë character whom they considered "a champion of social justice", and her book evokes a lost age of high-minded bohemianism, where the servants made the tea while the mistress scribbled away in her study. Perhaps not surprisingly, even Williams — a tomboyish tearaway as a child — found this all a bit much. "You're only interested in Hitler, not me," she told her parents when she was five — and she may well have been right.
If there was clearly an element of social guilt in Williams's political career, there was also a surprising lack of self-esteem. At one level, she seemed almost unnervingly self-confident: a woman who was threatened with expulsion from St Paul's girls' school because of her persistent mischief-making, and who later went skinny-dipping in front of Henry Kissinger's bodyguards, is clearly no shrinking violet. Yet what becomes clear is that behind the articulate self-possession, she never rated herself particularly highly. Explaining her refusal to run against Roy Jenkins for the SDP leadership in 1982, she writes that he was obviously "a greater person than I was" — an extraordinary thing for a politician to say. The insecurity was physical as well as political: even as a girl, she deliberately dressed down and refused to brush her hair, perhaps as a way of avoiding comparisons with her formidable mother. Indeed, her hair seems to have been an enduring source of anxiety: she recalls that when her father told Nancy Astor that she wanted to become an MP, Astor replied: "Not with that hair."
At one point, Williams admits that her enemies' anagram of her name, "I whirl aimlessly", was "both wounding and clever". And perhaps there was always a bit of whirling aimlessly about her. Whereas Margaret Thatcher, her only significant female competitor at the top of British public life, always seemed possessed of an unnerving moral certainty,
Williams often appeared to be thinking rather too much. It took enormous guts to walk out of the Labour party, yet she never quite shook the impression of being a middle-class ditherer, far too nice for politics. And while Mrs Thatcher gave the impression that she was never happier than when wringing somebody's neck, Williams always seemed happiest when she was wringing her hands.
If these memoirs have a flaw, it is that — predictably enough — they are much too generous. As usual, Williams has barely a bad word for anybody, except perhaps David Owen, who surely doesn't count. But her book stands up well against her contemporaries' autobiographies. It is less elegant and penetrating than Jenkins's, for example, but also a lot less pompous and self-important. And while she casts no new light on the politics of the last century, she writes beautifully and movingly about her youth, from her solitary cycling days as a teenager to the terrifying experience of being besieged by lustful Portuguese sailors as a wartime evacuee. Decent, sensible, honest and endearing, this book is Shirley Williams to a T. There are worse things in life, after all, than being too nice.
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