Over at the New Statesman, Vince Cable has been reviewing Mark Peel’s new biography of Shirley Williams.

He starts off by expressing annoyance at the conclusion – and quite rightly, too, given her major contribution to national and international life over 6 decades:

She is, of course, approachable, informal, engaging and whatever else “nice” means. But “niceness” is also a dismissive put down, as in William Hague’s comment in an Oxford Union debate (quoted as the punchline of the introduction): “In politics, Mrs Williams, it isn’t enough to be nice.” And it misses the essential point, that she is an extremely interesting woman who has played a major role in British public life over a long period;

He points out that she had a professional background in economics, something she was never able to use in government:

Sexism also probably explains why in government Williams was not allowed to realise her ambition of an economic min­istry. The nearest she got was to be secretary of state for prices and incomes – part of the doomed project to curtail inflation through price controls – where she was deployed as the “housewife’s friend”. I am therefore somewhat baffled that, with that hinterland, she is so reticent in the current economic debate.

He also reminds us that she tackled a very contentious issue before he did:

Williams is now thought of almost exclus­ively as a politician who “broke the mould” while in opposition.  But before then, she served for almost a decade as a minister in government, where her achievements included piloting through parliament the  legislation to abolish capital punishment. I am indebted to her for her brief stint as higher education minister. She questioned for the first time the financial sustain­ability of mass free university education (there were then 635,000 students; now there are 3 million). She put forward 13 possible reforms, including student loans and longer terms. Outraged academics ceremoniously burned her polite questionnaires and students went to the barricades. When I had to grasp this nettle four decades later, I knew  I was in good company.

And the strength of this book?

Where the biography scores is less on the party politics – the Labour civil war and schism on the centre left is well trodden ground – than on the person behind the politician. Most commentators do not get much beyond Williams’s dress sense and unpunctuality. Peel describes a strange lack of self-esteem that prevented her (unlike Mrs Thatcher) from bidding for the top jobs,  and attributes this to the shattering of her self-confidence when her first husband went off with another woman. Her rather fitful engagement with party colleagues in the turbulent 1970s is explained in part by her role as a conscientious single mother,  as well as a politician.

You can read the whole article here.

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