William Shawcross
Sir William Hartley Hume Shawcross is a British journalist, writer, and broadcaster. He is the incumbent Commissioner for Public Appointments. From 2012 to 2018 he chaired the Charity Commission for England and Wales.
Shawcross has written and lectured on issues of international policy, geopolitics, Southeast Asia and refugees, as well as the British royal family. He has written for several publications, including Time, Newsweek, International Herald Tribune, The Spectator, The Washington Post and Rolling Stone, in addition to writing numerous books on international topics: the Prague Spring, the Vietnam War, the Iranian Revolution, the Iraq War, foreign assistance, humanitarian intervention, and the United Nations. His works Sideshow and The Quality of Mercy were among The New York Times Book Review's books of the year.
Early life and education
The eldest of three children, William Shawcross was born on 28 May 1946 in Sussex, to the barrister Hartley Shawcross and his second wife Joan Mather. At the time of his birth, his father was the Labour MP for St Helens, the Attorney General for England and Wales, the first British principal delegate to the United Nations, and the Chief Prosecutor for the United Kingdom at the Nuremberg trials. His mother died in a riding accident on the Sussex Downs in 1974. His father died at the age of 101 in 2003.Shawcross was educated at St Aubyns Preparatory School in Rottingdean, followed by Eton College, and University College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1968. After leaving Oxford, he attended Saint Martin's School of Art to study sculpture and became a freelance researcher for The Sunday Times. Unable to obtain a permanent position at the newspaper, he wrote his first book, a biography of the Czechoslovak leader Alexander Dubček, which was published in 1970.
Career
After leaving Oxford, Shawcross worked as a journalist for The Sunday Times, and contributed to a book by its journalists on Watergate.In 1973, as a Congressional Fellow of the American Political Science Association, Shawcross worked in Washington, DC, on the staffs of Senator Edward M. Kennedy and Representative Les Aspin.
From 1986 to 1996 Shawcross was Chairman of ARTICLE 19, the international centre on censorship.
From 1997 to 2002, he was a Member of the Council of the Disasters Emergency Committee, and a board member of the International Crisis Group from 1995 to 2005.
Shawcross was appointed a member of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees's Informal Advisory Group in 1995, a post he held until 2000.
From 1997 to 2003, he was a member of the BBC World Service Advisory Council.
In 2008, he became a Patron of the Wiener Library, and in 2011 he joined the board of the Anglo-Israel Association and was appointed to the board of the Henry Jackson Society.
Shawcross was appointed to the chairmanship of the Charity Commission for England and Wales on 1 October 2012, serving 2 three-year terms as its chairman until February 2018. His appointment was controversially extended in 2015; a decision that was criticised as "rushed" for "political reasons" by his opponents. A January 2018 assessment of his tenure concluded that he "won praise from government but heavy criticism from within the charity sector."
In March 2019, he was named by the UK Foreign Secretary as Special Representative on UK victims of Qadhafi-sponsored IRA terrorism. In March 2020, he delivered his report to the Foreign Secretary but, controversially, it was not made public.
In January 2021, the British government appointed Shawcross to head the review of its anti-radicalisation programme, Prevent. Amnesty International and 16 other human rights and community organisations announced they would boycott the review in protest at the appointment of William Shawcross as its chairman as they feared a "whitewash" because of his perceived anti-Muslim political positions.
Shawcross was appointed the Commissioner for Public Appointments in September 2021.
As commissioner, on 24 January 2023 he opened an investigation into the appointment of Richard Sharp to the chairmanship of the BBC amid allegations that the then-prime minister, Boris Johnson, had recommended Sharp's appointment after Sharp had helped secure a loan guarantee agreement for Johnson. Six days after beginning the investigation into Sharp's appointment, Shawcross wrote to Julian Knight, the chair of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, to recuse himself from its deliberations, disclosing that he had met Sharp "on previous occasions" which could give the impression of a prior conflict of interest. Shawcross announced that he would be handing his investigation to an "independent person" to complete while retaining the other regulatory powers of his office.
Political views
Shawcross's politics have been described as having moved to the right throughout his life. His 1979 book on Cambodia, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia, resulted in Shawcross's being "lauded by liberal intellectuals and America's East Coast elite." The US left continues to praise Shawcross's earlier work; for example, in September 2019, Sideshow was cited at length in an opinion piece in The Intercept defending Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.As an initial indicator of how his views were shifting, in his 1990 introduction to the revised edition of his 1970 biography of Alexander Dubček, Shawcross wrote:
My own principal criticism is that I did not realize adequately that the experiment of humane Communism, or Socialism with a Human Face, was impossible, perhaps even a contradiction in terms. ... The last twenty years have shown nothing so much as the catastrophic nature of Communism everywhere. Wherever Communism has triumphed—I think particularly of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos—its consequences have been utterly disastrous.
In 1992, he wrote an "admiring" biography of Rupert Murdoch. In 1994, about his 1970s journalism from Vietnam, in light of subsequent abuses by the governments of Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos, Shawcross wrote:
I think I concentrated too easily on the corruption and incompetence of the South Vietnamese and their American allies, was too ignorant of the inhuman Hanoi regime, and far too willing to believe that a victory by the Communists would provide a better future.
Following the attacks of 11 September 2001, he supported the US invasion of Iraq.
His 2003 selection by Buckingham Palace to write the authorised biography of the Queen Mother was described as drawing "Shawcross into the bosom of the monarchy in a way rarely enjoyed by any layman", and the resulting book led to him being described as a "royalist writer." The biography was published in 2009, and a collection of letters followed in 2012. He is a pronounced royalist, who is frequently complimentary of the Royal Family, for example in an April 2020 piece for The Spectator on Queen Elizabeth II, titled "Thank God for the Queen":
"One happy result of the horrible virus is that it has prompted the Queen to give us not one but two statements of her faith in this country and God. Together they demonstrate vividly the exquisite, strong but light touch of our almost timeless monarch."
In 2006, Shawcross warned of "a vast fifth column" of Muslims in Europe who "wish to destroy us"; we should not shy away from labelling the problem "Islamic fascism".
In a 2010 article for National Review Shawcross described Britain as a "mere piece of the bland but increasingly oppressive Bambiland of the E.U., promoting such PC global issues as gay rights and man-made climate change." He also criticised "postmodernism"; defining it as "a disastrous creed that there is no objective truth and that everything is relative" and likened it to a form of appeasement. In the same article, Shawcross described Labour's "'multicultural' ideology" as a "catastrophe" and implied that Labour's immigration policy was designed to "dilute Britishness".
In his 2012 book Justice and the Enemy, Shawcross defended the use of torture and waterboarding at Guantánamo Bay as a natural "response to the most urgent problems" of terrorism.
In November 2018 he appeared to walk back his 1979 criticism of Henry Kissinger in Sideshow; in an argument that Kissinger should be allowed to speak at New York University, Shawcross noted "regret" for the "tone" of his prior criticism of Kissinger, which he minimised as "a policy disagreement over Cambodia", as opposed to "a moral crusade", and he concluded that Kissinger "is an extraordinary man who deserves respect."
In November 2019 he came out in support of Britain's exit from the European Union, on the basis of the EU's problematic nature and approach, writing in The Spectator that "there are risks in proceeding with Brexit. But there are far greater risks in abandoning it."
The change over time in Shawcross's politics has been compared to the political shifts of his father Hartley Shawcross, Paul Johnson, and Christopher Hitchens. While noting speculation about other reasons for the shift, American journalist James Traub speculated that "it's more instructive to consider the possibility that Shawcross has remained true to his principles, but that a morally driven foreign policy looks very different after 9/11 than it did before."
Selected books
''Dubcek'' (1970, revised 1990)
Shawcross's first published book was a biography of Alexander Dubček, the leader of Czechoslovakia during the 1968 Prague Spring whose "socialism with a human face" briefly brought freedom into the Soviet Bloc. According to the introduction to the 1990 edition, the book's genesis was in Shawcross's travels to Czechoslovakia as a 22-year-old recent college graduate in 1968–69, when he witnessed the Prague Spring and its aftermath. In April 1969, as his first assignment, The Times sent Shawcross to Prague to report on Dubcek's deposition from power, which led him to decide "I would like to write a book about Dubcek", and to spend several months in Czechoslovakia researching it. The book concluded that Dubcek "was quite convinced that he had discovered in 1968 that for which philosophers and philanthropists have for centuries searched—the just society. He may have been right."The New York Times Book Review, in December 1971, named Dubcek among the year's "noteworthy titles", describing it in a June 1971 capsule review as: "Written less than a year after Alexander Dubcek's resignation, this biography of the Czech leader by a London journalist is an authoritative, first‐rate job."
Shawcross revised and reissued Dubcek in 1990 upon its subject's return to prominence and power during the Velvet Revolution, following two decades of rustication.