Williams (no relation, unfortunately) is a remarkable woman and overlooked by our generation as a political figure. She read PPE at Somerville and almost as soon as she left stood as an MP, when she was just 23. During the 1970s she was variously Paymaster General, Secretary for Education, and found herself on the IRA’s hitlist as Minister for Northern Ireland. In the 1980s she then founded the SDP with fellow Labour defectors Roy Jenkins, David Owen and William Rodgers. Daughter of Vera Brittian, she is now Lady Williams of Crosby, residing in the House of Lords, having finished a ten year stint as an emeritus professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Governance and travelling the world to investigate nuclear proliferation.
For all such achievements, she is totally unpretentious, exuding quiet stoicism and bonhomie. She spoke eloquently and amusingly, managing to create the atmosphere of an intimate chat round the kitchen table, despite the heavy subject matter of constitutional reform and ideals of public service. She charmed the overwhelmingly middle-aged audience at Christ Church with the political anecdotes for which they were clearly hoping. When reminiscing about standing as an MP, she explained how voting patterns were revealed in front gardens: she didn’t bother with the tidy ones with boxwood hedges or gnomes as this was a clear indicator of Conservatism, broken prams or debris in the front on the other hand was a sure green light for Socialism, and those with slow growing, tenderly nurtured trees were Liberal Democrats.
Despite her trailblazing enthusiasm for female MPs, she was unimpressed by ‘Blair’s Babes’, a short-sighted stunt that had left her cold. Particularly niggling to her was that famous photo of them all, lined up in identical smart suits, as she said, a ‘faceless sweep of red, with lovely haircuts’. They were surrounding Blair ‘as though he were God in a Renaissance painting’, and they the innocuous, adoring cherubs.
She has all the homely honesty that people these days complain politicians are lacking. Unscripted, plainly-dressed, and softly-spoken, she earnestly mourned the era when politics was a ‘noble, high-minded profession’, when matters of ideology were passionately tousled over. Today she regrets that politics is ‘about details, not about the heart and body turned upside down’. It has become ‘a side show’ and respect for politicians is being lost.
As a topic of conversation the diminution of cabinet government perhaps sounds dull, but her heartfelt anxiety was arresting as she criticised the presidential prime ministerial style adopted by Blair and maintained, to our detriment, ever since. Parliament is too disciplined and has become a legislating machine, in her words, a ‘processing plant’ for ill-considered legislation, only half debated. Of the mind-boggling three thousand new laws created since 1997, a great many are ‘inadequate and superfluous’.
Particularly in light of the recent expenses scandal, for the first time in her life she is ‘rather worried’ because, in the minds of many, bankers and MPs have been conflated into one cheating incompetent elite. She doesn’t think that Britain is broken, but she is clearly apprehensive, not least of all because we have become so ‘dangerously apathetic’.
