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This past week would have seen the 91st birthday of Baroness Williams of Crosby – better known as Shirley Williams – who died aged 90 in April this year. In this interview, first broadcast in February 2011, presenter Roy Jenkins spoke to Shirley Williams about her life, faith and politics.

Williams was first elected to Parliament in 1964 as a Labour MP. She held two cabinet posts in the Callaghan government and, as one of the original ‘Gang of Four’, she helped form the Social Democratic Party in 1981. Subsequently she sat as a very active Lib Dem peer into her mid-80s.

As one of the world’s most distinguished female politicians, she lectured and advised in many different countries, and, like her late second husband, was a Professor Emerita of Electoral Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Shirley Williams was a practising Roman Catholic, and she made a number of appearances on All Things Considered, the most recent when she spoke on faith and politics at the University of Wales, Newport in 2011.