Rt Hon Shirley Williams

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 29 January 2006

⏱️ 38 minutes

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the politician Baroness Williams of Crosby. Shirley Williams has spent her life immersed in politics. Her father was a Labour Party activist and her mother the writer and pacifist Vera Brittain. Their home was always filled with topical conversation, from the rise of Hitler to the Spanish Civil War.

She became a Labour Party member when still a teenager and, after a chance encounter in an air-raid shelter, formed a friendship with the then Home Secretary Herbert Morrison. She enjoyed a career within the Labour Party but, dismayed by its drift to the left, she abandoned it to become one of the Gang of Four who set up the Social Democratic Party in 1981 and later supported its merger with the Liberal Party. Now, as the Liberal Democrats are in the midst of leadership elections, she reflects on the difficulties the party has faced in recent months, and what it must do to regain public support.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: How Beautiful are the Feet by George Frideric Handel Book: Collection by W H Auden Luxury: PC linked to the internet

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2006, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My cost away this week is a politician Throughout her upbringing from her Chelsea childhood to her
0:34.9	Oxford and American education, she moved in political circles and absorbed the ideas of
0:40.1	reform and change. Her father was a labor activist, her mother a feminist and a pacifist. She sat
0:46.0	on Nehru's knee as a child and struck up a friendship with Herbert Morrison in an air-age shelter. Hardly surprising
0:52.1	then that she joined the Labour Party, became an
0:54.4	MP and then a cabinet minister, this under Wilson and then Callahan. But her support for
0:59.7	her party ebbed away during the late 70s as she watched it succumb to union control and
1:05.0	militancy.
1:06.3	She became one of the gang of four who founded the Breakaway SDP and for the last 20 years
1:10.9	through all its transformation since those heady days has been one of its best
1:15.2	known and eloquent advocates.
1:17.4	I wanted to be a politician and I have paid for it in many ways, she says, yet I would not have it otherwise she is
1:24.2	Shirley Williams so would you say Shirley that politics if you like has been your
1:29.4	vocation you didn't have a choice it's something you had to do. Probably. I think I started out by thinking
1:36.1	I might want to be a journalist when I was very young. I might want to be a farmer. But in a way
1:40.1	politics was insistent and for me it was an endless sitting in the
1:44.4	circle of the theatre of the world and I found it extremely fascinating so I got
1:50.5	involved in politics as a very young person indeed.
1:54.0	Of course it was always said that you were always tipped as going to be the first woman prime minister
1:58.4	before we'd even heard of Margaret Thatcher.
	...

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