Climbing the Bookshelves

"That’s very interesting, because I think that there is a fascinating juxtaposition of the de Gaulle book with Shirley Williams’s book. Shirley Williams is also a person of very strong conviction, but, as she herself said, she perhaps lacked enough confidence and ruthlessness to aim for the top job. She is a woman who had to fight her way in what was then a very male-dominated world, and, although extremely able, clever and with very passionate convictions, did not have that extraordinary sense of destiny that de Gaulle appeared to have. She is not the kind of person who thinks that in every situation she is bound to be right and must therefore push ruthlessly to get her way, as de Gaulle did. So she does offer a different model of leadership, one which would be much more consultative. She was not the leader of the Labour party, but she has been the leader of the LibDems in the house of Lords, and she has occupied very senior positions in government. A good number of people would like to have seen her as Britain’s first woman Prime Minister instead of Mrs Thatcher. But she never really made a ruthless bid for the supreme position because she’s not that kind of person. Well, that’s another interesting dimension to the book. Shirley Williams, as I think everyone knows, is a serious Catholic, and she talks about her upbringing and her father who was a Catholic convert. Yet the religious dimension to her life is very low-key in the book, and she certainly doesn’t claim the high moral ground as a result of it. She mentions, just as an aside, that Anthony Crosland was as regular about watching Match of the Day as she was about going to the Mass, and that’s about the only clue as to how important her Catholic faith is to her! She does come on to it a little more at the end where she talks about her admiration for the Liberation Theologians and of Jesus as a liberator who stood alongside the poor and the vulnerable, so that gives us an indication of where she stands. She is a serious Catholic, but also a Liberal, so it is not surprising that she is strongly opposed to the Pope’s views on contraception and she would like to see a married priesthood. She is a left-wing Catholic but she’s still a loyal Catholic. Her father was an intellectual who thought his way into the church, and she had many intellectual conversations with him when she was a child, conversations which had a good element of religion in them. So it was a good start from her father and also, on the emotional side, from the people she was very fond of who often looked after her when she was a child. In the House of Lords she has voted in line with the Catholic position on some things such as embryo research, although on a number of issues she is very much opposed to the present teachings of the church. What we need is people to go into politics who want to serve society. Now this may sound a bit sentimental, but the fact of the matter is that in the history of politics in this country, over the last 150 years, people went into the Labour party with a sense of a crusade, wanting to change society for the better, and there were a lot of people in the traditional Conservative party who had a sense of noblesse oblige who wanted to do their duty to the country. Now I’m not being blinkered – selfish ambition and legitimate ambition is there in all of us – but there was often a very strong sense of service in people who went into politics, and it would be a terrible shame if people only went into politics to pursue their own careers and their own ambitions. Yes, the problem is that the press assume that all politicians are only pursuing their own interests. That is totally untrue and very unfair. The fact of the matter is that politicians are a mixture like all of us and there is still a lot of altruism around. I’d like to see this strengthened so that the concept of serving society through politics is regarded as a very worthwhile vocation and one that is recognised by society as a whole to be such and not regarded in a totally cynical way, which it is by the newspapers at the moment."