Shirley Williams - Personal Life

Personal Life

During the Second World War, Williams was evacuated to Minnesota, USA, for three years. She has been married twice. At Oxford she met Peter Parker (the future head of British Rail) and they had a relationship. In her autobiography ("Climbing the Bookshelves") Williams says that "...by the spring of 1949 I was in love with him, and he, a little, with me...".

In 1955, she married the moral philosopher Bernard Williams. Bernard left Oxford to accommodate his wife's rising political ambitions, finding a post first at University College London, where he worked from 1959 until 1964. He was later appointed Professor of Philosophy at Bedford College, University of London, while she worked as a journalist for the Financial Times. For 17 years, the couple lived in a large house in Kensington with the literary agent Hilary Rubinstein and his wife.

During this time, described by Bernard as one of the happiest of his life, the marriage produced a daughter, Rebecca, but the development of Shirley's political career kept the couple apart, and the marked difference in their personal values—Bernard was a confirmed atheist, Shirley a Roman Catholic—placed a strain on their relationship, which reached breaking point when Bernard had an affair with Patricia Law Skinner, then wife of the historian Quentin Skinner. The marriage was dissolved in 1974 and Bernard Williams and Patricia Skinner subsequently married and had two sons. Shirley Williams said of her marriage to Bernard:

... here was something of a strain that comes from two things. One is that we were both too caught up in what we were respectively doing—we didn't spend all that much time together; the other, to be completely honest, is that I'm fairly unjudgmental and I found Bernard's capacity for pretty sharp putting-down of people he thought were stupid unacceptable. Patricia has been cleverer than me in that respect. She just rides it. He can be very painful sometimes. He can eviscerate somebody. Those who are left behind are, as it were, dead personalities. Judge not that ye be not judged. I was influenced by Christian thinking, and he would say "That's frightfully pompous and it's not really the point." So we had a certain jarring over that and over Catholicism.

In 1987, she married the Harvard professor and presidential historian Richard Neustadt. Neustadt died in 2003. She has a daughter, a stepdaughter, and two grandchildren. Williams is a Roman Catholic, visiting church almost every Sunday with her grandson.