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“... Mark Peel organises his serviceable authorised biography of Shirley Williams around an ostensible conundrum. Why didn’t Williams achieve more politically? Why did the polarising, hectoring Margaret Thatcher, rather than the consensus-seeking, appealing Williams, become Britain’s first woman prime minister? This is a common question ...”

“... the launch of the manifesto that came to be known as the Limehouse Declaration. When Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen and I met together that morning, we were clear in our intention: in breaking the mould of contemporary politics, we would create a new radical centre, push the Labour Party into third place, change the electoral system and usher ...”

“... and Roy Jenkins (both grammar school and Oxford, Jenkins the son of a miner MP) not to mention Shirley Williams (professional parents, St Paul’s and Oxford): social mobility had already carried them to Labour’s outer limits. At the least, it had to be expected that they and others like them would put their own children in private schools and that ...”

“... one has yet produced a satisfactory alternative to Croslandism. That is the real significance of Shirley Williams’s tantalisingly brief, but potentially explosive attempt to sketch out a social democratic approach to a world of low growth, expensive energy, scarce resources and high unemployment. ...”

“... early betrayals of the SDP: the conversations which David Steel and I had with Bill Rodgers and Shirley Williams at the Konigswinter Conference in April 1981 and the Llandudno fringe meeting at which Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams spoke on the same platform as Jo Grimond and David Steel. Both occasions were ...”

“... of social democrats who, in 1979, saw no advantage in leaving Labour for a putative centre party. Shirley Williams spoke for many when she said it would have ‘no roots, no principles, no philosophy and no values’. Today there are still many social democrats who remain in the Labour Party, hopeful of reversing the balance of fortune and of reinstating ...”

“... the fact that Michael Foot’s huge overflow meeting attracted less press wonder and applause than Shirley Williams’s. But to a Londoner, these local papers seem pretty fair and accurate – stating but not overstating the obvious fact, recognised by the Telegraph papers in London, that the Labour man, Ossie O’Brien, is by far the most able ...”

“... represented as the Venus de Milo, and with a tear running down her cheek? I can only guess why Shirley Williams is carrying a copy of the News Chronicle, or why Jimmy Hill has an Arab headdress, or why Lord Home stands bat in hand before a broken wicket. Craig Brown says that in his caricatures Boxer mixed ‘the base and the suave’, but there is ...”

“... and which has led Roy Jenkins and David Marquand to abandon the party. A desperate public cry to Shirley Williams: why have you got so lost in that company, one with ineffable self-confidence but without either a social base or alternative policies – you who once knew the Labour Party as inherently a coalition? I think of my late and lamented ...”

“... of my family ... would be penalised for opinions they do not share’. Brittain’s daughter, Shirley Williams, had become a Labour MP in 1964 and her mother wrote to a friend that, although she wished ‘Shirley were more revolutionary in her politics ... really she never has been! She takes after George ...”

“... especially, by returning to its old courses, could readily steal back the clothes that Roy and Shirley had snatched. If the SDP’s obvious appeal could indeed convert the other parties to moderation, its very triumph would destroy its own raison d’être. But so far there has been no reactive change of line by cither Conservative or Labour. Over the long ...”

“... groups for regular support. Does the SDP in Britain signify, as its leaders on the left such as Shirley Williams would like it to, a realignment amongst the forces of progress; or does it, on the contrary, signify the growth of an ‘anti party’, a party of protest supported by the electorate as a symbol of distrust of party politics and of the ...”

“... who was threatening to resign and cause an unwelcome by-election in Bermondsey at a time when Shirley Williams, riding on the crest of the SDP’s initial wave of popularity, was waiting to surf victoriously through Bermondsey confident of Mellish’s good will (‘I love that woman,’ he has been quoted as saying) and of the amenable Catholic-Irish ...”

“... will wince over its strictures on public expenditure and the role of government intervention. Shirley Williams, who has brought to the cause of Europe the passion which her mother gave to pacifism, will find Dr Owen’s advocacy of a tough line within the Community somewhat disagreeable. Bill Rodgers may not be happy with some of the confessions ...”

“... This alternative Soviet strategy puts Zaslavskaya in the camp of Tawney, Tony Crosland and Shirley Williams and the kindlier tradition of democratic socialism: ‘The task of a socialist society is to retain the advantages of centralised economic planning, while at the same time finding ways of combining it with a greater stimulation of market ...”