This interview was first published in May 2006 on my now-mothballed webiste politicsjunkie.co.uk
It was one of my first ever big gigs, and I am immensely grateful to Baroness Williams for taking the time to speak to me. I realised today that the interview is no longer available online, so I thought I would reproduce it here.
Shirley Williams has been in Parliament, on and off, for over 40 years, first as a Labour MP, then briefly for the SDP and finally as a leading LibDem peer.
She clearly still loves the job - her interview with politicsjunkie was delayed when she realised she wanted to make a point about Iraq in the Lords.
Despite not being in a visible role since she stood down as LibDem leader in the Lords, she is still a well known figure in Britain:
"Comprehensive education and the creation of the SDP - those are the two things people remember about me – oddly enough most people remember one or the other but not both."
When she returns from the chamber we settle down in her box-strewn office and politicsjunkie asks how a political animal like Williams adjusted to the pace of life in the Lords:
"I enjoy politics very much so I enjoyed the Commons – I found the House of Lords a bit quiet at first, but when we got to the situation where there was no overall majority, when the great bulk of the hereditary peers went in 1998, that changed the House of Lords into a much more interesting place than the Commons.
"I don’t miss the Commons. Most of the time I was there I was an opposition MP and the government of the day had huge majorities - that frankly makes the House of Commons a dull place.
"The outcome of almost every vote is known. It's only if you get a substantial rebellion on the part of the governing party that you actually have an interesting Commons where things are fluid. Basically it becomes a rubber stamp."
The recent history of the party she helped to found has not exactly been tranquil. As a senior party figure she was privy to the growing problem at the heart of the LibDems:
"I was aware that Charles had an alcohol problem. I spoke to him about it well before it became publicly known. What I am aware of is that if you have an alcohol problem then you have to give it up totally – its no use just having a few drinks on the side.
"I also know that the culture of politics is one that makes that extraordinarily difficult. I think he was in many ways a brilliant leader – the way he appealed to young people was very striking, the fact that he had no pomposity was remarkable.
"At the end of the day there were too many public occasions when Charles couldn’t handle it because he was under the influence of drink. It was becoming more and more evident to the media."
Williams rejects suggestions that the party had been ruthless and brutal in their removal of Kennedy:
"Actually the Liberal Democrat party behaved with extraordinary restraint. Charles had a problem for at least two years before anyone made it public and the party effectively covered up because they so appreciated the good things he had done.
"They really became quite worried and some of us who were, as it were, senior figures in the party became quite worried. In the end we came to the conclusion that Charles simply had to stand down."
Williams is no stranger to political turbulence. Born Shirley Catlin in 1930, she was the daughter of political scientist Sir George Catlin and the novelist Vera Brittain, best known for her World War 1 memoir 'Testament of Youth'.
Young Shirley was heavily influenced by both her parents, and was brought up as a Roman Catholic - her mother was a leading pacifist during the Second World War.
While studying at Columbia University in New York she met Bernard Williams, regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century. Shirley returned with him to Oxford and they married in 1955, despite her brief affair with four-minute-miler Roger Bannister.
Williams worked for the Financial Times as a journalist, gave birth to a daughter and lived happily in Kensington with her husband.
She became a Labour MP at the age of 34, winning Hitchin in the 1964 Labour landslide, and was an immediate star, becoming a junior minister.
In 1974, her marriage was dissolved - the athiest Bernard had grown distant from the religious - and increasingly ambitious - Shirley. That year she was appointed to the Cabinet by Harold Wilson as Secretary of State for Prices and Consumer Protection.
When Wilson was succeeded in 1976 by James Callaghan, she became Secretary of State for Education.
Williams will always be identified with the creation of comprehensive education, though much of the groundwork had been laid by her predecessor, Tony Crosland.
She is not impressed with the bill that the current secretary of state now finds himself piloting:
"I find the education proposals appalling. They're an attempt to bring the market to bear on education – as they are trying to do in the health service. These are both areas where the customer is captive – you can't choose to have healthcare – ditto with education – it’s a compulsory process you can't not have it.
"It's absurd to think that the market would operate in the normal way it would operate for cosmetics or soups. That means that your customer is in an extremely weak position.
"It's much more effective in my view to deliver a public service where there is accountability to parliament and government, not to try to deliver a market service where the providers have got something close to monopoly power.
"Where the education white paper is terribly weak is that it rests the whole of the non-selective principle on an admissions code which is even now not statutory. It’s a terribly weak protection – it means if the Tories get back in they can sweep it away just overnight.
"They are building a hierarchy of secondary schools, protected by what I can only call the codpiece of an admissions code. But within the system the pressures are all the other way – the academies want the brightest kids, then the specialist schools want the next brightest kids, then after that the trust schools.
"In every case the pressure will be to satisfy the sponsor – these are private business interests and there is no guarantee that their first concern is education. There is no system of sifting or enquiring into, no system of interviewing these people.
"Some of them are very curious people."
Curious people is an apt description of the gaggle of mis-matched Labour MPs who rocked the party in 1981.
Williams had lost her seat in the 1979 election and was disgruntled with the extreme leftists who seemed to be taking over the party. Moderate Labour MPs were being deselected from their constituencies by Militant socialist activists.
Something had to change and in 1981 Williams resigned from the party, along with fellow moderates Roy Jenkins, David Owen and Bill Rodgers, to form the SDP.
Later that year, following the death of Tory Rodney Graham Page, Shirley Williams won a by-election in Crosby in Merseyside, becoming the first SDP MP to be elected.
The SDP rocked the political establishment, at times hitting 25% in the polls. The Labour party reacted by swinging even further to the Left under Michael Foot while Thatcher's right-wing market-led policies became more strident. The SDP seemed the sane alternative.
Williams was elected SDP president but lost her seat in the 1983 general election. The party had failed to make a breakthrough at the ballot box, despite the unpopularity of Labour, who lost 3 million votes, their worst result since 1918.
The Falklands War had buoyed up support for the incumbent and the SDP revolution was stalled by an unfair voting system. The SDP-Liberal Alliance was a mere 675,985 votes behind Labour, but won only 23 seats with 25% of the vote.
Williams supported the party's subsequent merger with the Liberal Party in 1988, to become the Liberal Democrats.
The SDP/Liberal Alliance may never have lived up to their early promise but they changed the Labour party. The Limehouse declaration reads like a new Labour manifesto - taking on union power, a healthy private sector, a constructive role in the EU, the elimination of poverty.
By 1997, new Labour were in tune with many of the LibDem values. Use of the market where appropriate, regional assemblies, independence for Scotland were all policies the Liberal Democrats supported.
If new Labour started out looking like the SDP, where did it all start to go wrong?
"Round about 2002 the whole thing started going pear-shaped. The unbelievable levels of intervention in the public services from this government.
"A new law virtually every few months in the Home Office, reorganising every bloody thing, reorganising the police forces, the schools, the hospitals. Not once but twice and in some cases three times, with the result that we have got a demoralised and totally confused public sector that doesn’t know if it is coming or going.
"There seems to have been a sort of control madness on the part of the government."
One area where the government has been uncharacteristically slow to legislate is reform of the house of Lords. Since the proposals brought forward by Robin Cook in 2002 found no consensus in the Commons, the second chamber has been in a sort of limbo.
The recent scandals over peerages-for-sale has prodded the government into action, with an assurance that MPs will be given a free vote and Tony Blair indicating he will concede to an elected second chamber.
Baroness Williams has a very clear idea of how she wants the Lords to be selected:
"What I would really like is an 80% elected house with a long term – probably not renewable, maybe 10 years, elected by PR from the regions. But with a system like a multi-member constituency system – which allows the public to make the choice but not the party, in other words not a party list system."
She thinks she will get half of what she wants:
"I think we may well get the 80%, I think the government is likely to give in to a democratic element to the Lords. I think we are unlikely to get PR as the government gets scared anytime it goes near PR because you might just get a just voting system. And that would never do."
Williams left front-line British politics in 1988 and moved back to academia. She married for a second time, to Harvard academic Richard Neustadt, and moved to the United States, as Public Service Professor of Elective Politics at the John F Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University from 1988 and also lecturing in Princeton, Berkley and Chicago.
When we talk about the current tide of anti-American sentiment in the UK, it is clear Williams relishes her time in the States. She is sanguine about the current British distaste for America:
"Anti-Americanism is made up of two things – a very unattractive aspect of some of the older and posher groups in society, resenting America just for being big and successful, lively and exciting.
"On top of that there is a different kind of resentment, much more justified in my view, largely directed at the present administration. The US is beginning to change quite fundamentally and will never be again the kind of beacon of liberty that we thought of it as being in the 1940s.
"Roosevelt, Eisenhower, that whole period when America was deeply internationalist, deeply involved in the outside world, dominated by the civilised east coast intellectuals or west coast professionals.
"You now have the middle asserting itself, most of whom haven’t travelled abroad or if they have it is only on the briefest of visits. Most of them aren’t interested in abroad, know very little about abroad and they are becoming the dominant political force.
"They tend to be conservative, fundamentalist Christian and they are a very different ball game. A lot of Brits who have never been to Des Moines or Kansas City just don’t know that America and don’t like what little they do know about it. Even a change of president will not change that."
Returning from American academic life to British politics as a life peer with the title Baroness Williams of Crosby in 1993, she was Leader of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords from 2001 to 2004.
It is a mark of the love which the party have for this icon of the centre-left that her last speech at the Liberal Democrat party conference in autumn 2004 received an emotional standing ovation. She backed another well-loved figure, Sir Menzies Campbell, after Charles Kennedy stood down.
Williams insists the LibDems are back on an even keel, despite the rising concerns about Ming Campbell's recent performances in the Commons, notably at prime minister's questions:
"PMQ are a media silliness, real clown stuff. People watch PMQ in the same way they watch Rory Bremner, because it is a fun entertainment. It has got very little to do with real politics."
The mention of Ming leads Williams to a comparison with the new Tory leader - and criticism of the the press for reducing the debate to image and soundbite:
"We needed someone who could bring to bear a real degree of wisdom and judgment to matters, as Ming did to his credit over Iraq.
"Because of that people like the government and the foreign office treat him seriously. As they do not treat David Cameron seriously despite him being a brilliant performer at PMQ.
"Forgive me for saying this to you so sternly, but that is exactly the mistake the media make over and over again and that is why they are ruining politics."
Chastened, politicsjunkie asked Williams what made Ming the right choice, given that image is more and more important than substance in modern politics, whether the fault of the media or of politicians:
"Ming was the right choice and I was actually a sponsor of him. I think we needed an absolutely steady and reliable leader for a while against whom the press could not dig up anything.
"Ming is completely honest, completely devoted to his wife, most unlikely to be engaged in financial trickery. He is a good, upright Edinburgh man."
Williams' reasons reveal the depth of her political instincts, when one considers what happened to two of Ming's opponents for the leadership:
"Given that the media concentrates so much on personal weaknesses you really needed someone who that could not be alleged against."
As a representative of the media, image is everything to politicsjunkie - so what did the baroness make of the young pretender?
"We have to see - he is very attractive and obviously in the initial phase you get a reaction to him, which you would expect. He is the first good, exciting leader for some while for the Conservatives."
It is the threat from the far-right, more than the rise of green Conservatism, which has been occupying the chattering classes since the local elections. Williams asserts that comparisons with the 1970s are wide of the mark:
"The BNP are hardly a huge threat with 40 councillors - we are looking at a much smaller threat than in the 1970’s – there is no comparison at all.
"The National Front were very consciously racist, more than now, and it was stopped in its tracks by the extraordinarily courageous action of Edward Heath in sacking Enoch Powell.
"Enoch as you know went off to the UUWC (Ulster Unionists) and became a dud volcano.
"This time it's not just to do with race, an awful lot of it is to do with a feeling in some London boroughs and in certain parts of the Pennines that the government is not listening to them. "
Of the two things Shirley Williams is known for, one, the SDP, has been folded into a new political entity.
She still stoutly defends the other claim to fame, the comprehensive principle so closely identified with her as education secretary:
"In Scotland where the comprehensive system has been almost untrammeled by interventions from the centre you have got better results, more children staying on and this is a system which has been true throughout to the comprehensive ideal.
"In England and Wales they have become a political football and not been given the time and the peace and the support to settle down.
"It makes me very angry."
