For the first time in my life I have shed a tear for someone who I never met.
My husband met Shirley Williams when they went canvassing together about eleven years ago. He could not believe how energetic and enthusiastic she was canvassing for the Liberal Democrats.
I think that she, more than any politician of the last sixty years, could have steered our country in a different and better direction..
How much better our history might have been if Shirley Williams, rather than Margaret Thatcher had become our first woman PM.