Anticipate the demise of Gordon Brown. Imagine Labour’s search for a leader with voter-appeal. Picture a younger Shirley Williams, but with the experience and affection she already commands. Wouldn’t she be a powerful contender? Couldn’t a new Shirley Williams, updated for the 21st century and reinserted into the Labour Party, give the rest a run for their money? Lady Williams’s style of politics has weathered better than that of any of her erstwhile Labour contemporaries. She’s just the sort of thing they need.
Climbing the Bookshelves is the story of the woman who forsook all that, and what made her. The story of what made her is much the more interesting half. This is a better autobiography than many will have expected: sharper, franker, more self-critical, more vulnerable, and oddly more melancholy, for I think she thinks she’s failed.
Millions of us think we know her.
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