Decent, clever, charming, eloquent, hard-working, conscientious and terribly, terribly nice, Shirley Williams is one of Britain’s best-loved politicians.
Mark Peel’s admiring biographybegins in Chelsea in 1930. Shirley, as he matily calls her, was the eldest daughter of the political philosopher George Catlin and the bestselling author Vera Brittain. Life at home was affluent, comfortable and high-minded. The Brittains were privileged toffs who set out to remove privileges from toffs they felt lacked their idealism and sophistication. Shirley’s support for this manifesto achieved a stridency that sometimes grated even on her mother. Vera complained to a friend that the 16-year-old Shirley
kept me up till 2 a.m. holding forth in the usual domineering voice on the usual themes — the wickedness of being ‘rich’, the virtue of being poor, mediocre and obscure.
Shirley breezed through Oxford, where she was regularly tipped for political stardom.
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