I first came across Shirley when I was elected to parliament in the spring of 1966, two years after she became an MP. I didn’t know her well for years, but later we became close. I think Shirley was the most empathetic person I’ve ever met in my life. It’s a quality I’m rather good at judging because I don’t have it myself! You’d watch her work a room at a local Labour event and she’d never start by smarming up to a regional leader or a councillor. She’d settle down next to somebody who she’d have no political reason to talk to – a solid party worker – and you’d watch this person’s face light up.
This was always done spontaneously, without any ulterior motives. She just liked people and liked them to like her. She treated all people as if they had something important to say. She also had no side to her at all and that is why she was so hugely popular and loved by Labour moderates. It was also why Labour women just revered her and many of them, who sustained the Labour party through difficult times – and some still do – would have voted for her as SDP leader of the SDP.
This was one of the reasons why Shirley from beginning to end was my choice for leader. The eventual leader, Roy Jenkins, had already been rejected by the Labour party [in the 1976 leadership election, coming third behind James Callaghan and Michael Foot]. He had few of the characteristics that would pull Labour people to us. Shirley did. She had been a member of the Labour party’s national executive committee, where she was very tough on the undemocratic left. She had proved herself a doughty fighter.
The conversations that came to a head to create the SDP began on the first day of the Labour party conference in Blackpool in September 1980, in her hotel room. The mood was doom-laden – it had become clear that in almost every controversial area of policy the trade union votes were lined up with the Militant tendency for the biggest lurch to the left in Labour’s history. Shirley was right to remind people that there could be a “fascism of the left” – that was her phrase and a good one.
She had all the qualifications to be leader of the SDP, but she didn’t want to do it. I knew she was having challenges in her personal life, though that had not stopped her breaking away from Labour. She was trying to get her marriage [to philosopher Bernard Williams, who had left her in 1971; she was a Roman Catholic] annulled at the time by the pope, so I knew she had a lot on. But had she been leader, I think most of the predictable attacks on the new party would have held little weight with millions of voters and I have no doubt that in the 1983 election we could have taken more votes than the Labour party. Margaret Thatcher’s kind of female leadership was also something lots of people didn’t like – and I think this might have pushed people to vote for a woman like Shirley.
The SDP in its first year on its own was polling well ahead of the Liberals; above all because as our pollsters told us we were seen as a new party.
By forming the SDP, we were choosing to deal with the Labour party’s internal problems in this way; had the SDP got ot 40 to 50 seats, we could have come back into some sort of arrangement with the Labour party. I think we’d have been able to do that with a decent Labour leader, like John Smith. Shirley could have helped us do that.
Shirley and I progressively fell out over merging the SDP with the Liberals (I stayed with the SDP; she went with the Liberal Democrats). We weren’t in touch for years. Then in August 2006, Shirley, by then a Liberal Democrat peer, invited herself to our house in Greece. We were surprised but delighted. She said she was writing her autobiography and wanted to hear my side of the story. This again shows the mark of her. She also talked to my wife, Debbie, a literary agent, about various aspects of the book.
With our feet dangling over the side of the dock in the Greek sea, Shirley and I started to discuss the past. I asked her bluntly why she did not stand in the Warrington byelection in 1981 (the first SDP seat that could have been won; Jenkins narrowly lost it), then did not contest the leadership in 1982 – I had helped get support together for her, but she nominated me instead.
The frankness of her answer shocked me: she had lost her self-confidence to lead. She later wrote in her autobiography about how she had lost her self-confidence and had suffered quite a lot at the hands of Roy’s acolytes who had spread rumours about her being disorganised, indecisive and incapable of leadership, which had reached journalists. I was appalled. Here was this highly talented, empathetic, experienced politician, on the surface ambitious and self-confident, and it was not that she feared losing Warrington, but feared winning it. She was right in her book to say that I failed to recognise her lack of self-confidence back then. I was very sorry about it.
But, after 2006, I am pleased to say we became friends again and she came out to Greece again in 2019, a little frail but she was still the life and soul of the household. You didn’t need to drink with Shirley around. She loved going to see the sights – she’d be plodding up the hill way ahead of me – “Oh, Shirley, I don’t want to bloody go up there” – “Oh, come on!” She was on great form and there was much laughter. We didn’t spend time on the ifs of politics at all. She was just a joy to be with.
