Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1986, and the presenter was Michael Parkinson.

Music Our cast away today, it was a politician who, according to a newspaper poll, is regarded as being intelligent, determined and straightforward.

Now, given what most people think of politicians, that is indeed a rare tribute.

But then our castaway is one of Britain's more interesting political figures.

She's the president of the Social Democratic Party, Shirley Williams.

Shirley, welcome to our Desert Island.

You came from an extraordinary background. Your mother was, of course, a writer, your father, an academic and a journalist. Was it also a musical background?

Yes, it was a bit, Michael. My mother's mother, my grandmother, used to produce recitals to presumably small pressed audiences in the Midlands where she lived.

And my mother knew a lot about music because her brother, who was killed at the First World War,

was in fact intending to be a professional violinist.

So she could play very well as an accompanist to a violinist,

and that side of my family was really richly musical.

My father, not so, He was entirely a literary man,

and so part of my mother's love of music was rather overshadowed. But in her quieter moment, she often used to take up the piano and she often used to sing to the piano as well. Did you have any music of ambition yourself at any time in your career? I wanted to be an opera singer. In fact, I had a passionate desire to be an opera singer rather than a politician when I was a small girl.

I imagined myself standing there,

you know, singing the great arias and completely and absolutely bewitching the audience. And so, in order to forward my career,

I joined a choir, which actually happened to be the Culturist and Messiah choir, I remember,

because I was living in Culturist at the time. And I went off to sing the Messiah and was immediately allocated to the tenor section, which finished my musical career, because although it's nice to be a tenor, it's not an appropriate role for a woman to play, and there is no role of countertenor that I've so far heard of, which to me was a great disappointment. Let's now have your first choice of music then.

Well, my first choice, which is Elgar's introduction and Allegro, is a choice partly because it shows,

I think, some of the extraordinarily sort of stormy temperament that Elgar had, and also because, for me, it's associated with my family and with their strange mixture of great

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