Sir William Hartley Hume Shawcross (born 28 May 1946) 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 (1979) and The Quality of Mercy (1984) were among The New York Times Book Reviews books of the year. 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.

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.

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:

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My own principal criticism [of his own 1970 book] 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.

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In 1992, he wrote an "admiring" biography of Rupert Murdoch.

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Following the attacks of 11 September 2001, he supported the US invasion of Iraq.</blockquote>

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 (except in Muslim lands) 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.

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.

Crime and Compromise: Janos Kadar and the Politics of Hungary Since Revolution (1974)

Shawcross next wrote "a political study of Hungarian politician János Kádár" who, like Dubcek, "tried to negotiate with Communist dogmas to create more humane regimes." Dean thought that the book portrayed Kadar less well than it did Hungary: "One senses that Shawcross would have liked to have produced a biography of Kadar but was stymied by the incompleteness of information." To write it, Shawcross interviewed over 300 people and reviewed thousands of US Government documents, some classified Top Secret, obtained using the Freedom of Information Act. According to one summary, Sideshow

<blockquote>

denounces the systematic destruction of Cambodia by the Nixon Administration as a consequence of the Vietnam War and for the sake of a mere strategic design. The study stresses how the decision to attack a neutral country was a patent violation of the American Constitution. As in his previous two books, Shawcross combines an interest in international policies with a private focus on the personal relationship between Nixon and Kissinger. The study argues that the President and his Secretary of State reproduced in their international relations the same pattern of falsehood that characterized their association. — is frequently quoted; whenever Shawcross's lifetime of writing is reduced to one sentence, that's it.

Sideshow received high praise and awards. The Pulitzer Prize jury recommended a special citation for it in the 1980 awards based on its "extraordinary qualities", although it was ineligible for the prize because its author was not American; the Pulitzer board declined that recommendation, however. The New York Times Book Review selected Sideshow among its top 17 "Editor's Choice" books of 1979, describing it as an "indictment" of Kissinger and Nixon. It won the George Polk Award in Journalism's Book Award for 1979. Columnist Anthony Lewis wrote in The New York Times,

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I think it is the most interesting and the most important book on American foreign policy in many years. On more than foreign policy, really: on the American constitutional system. For it is a textbook — a gripping, factual textbook — on what can happen when the system is violated.

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John Leonard of The New York Times wrote that in addition to being "meticulous[ly]" documented, "it has the sweep and the shadow of a spy novel as it portrays the surreal world of power, severed from morality, paranoid, feeding on itself." Observing that both Sideshow and Kissinger's memoir, White House Years, were included among The New York Times Book Reviews best books of 1979, Herbert Mitgang asked each author about the other's volume. Kissinger called Sideshow "a shoddy, outrageous work that is filled with inaccuracies," adding, "And you can quote me." Following the publication of Sideshow, Peter Rodman, an aide to Kissinger, concluded that Shawcross's work was "a fraud" and "a compendium of errors, sleight of hand, and egregious selectivity", according to R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., who published Rodman's criticism in his conservative magazine, The American Spectator. Shawcross, in turn, described Rodman's critique as "a rotten piece of work" and wrote a response ("demonstrating the fallacies, if not the fraud, of almost all of Mr. Rodman's points"), which The American Spectator published, with Rodman's further reply. Shawcross later became friends with Tyrrell and Rodman. In 2007, Shawcross and Rodman co-wrote a New York Times op-ed, referring to their past differences over Cambodia but jointly arguing against U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. When Rodman died in 2008, Shawcross was "much saddened", as he later wrote, and sent Tyrrell a note expressing his grief. The book finds positives and negatives of each player, but overall, the United States, in particular the U.S. Embassy in Thailand and its Ambassador, Morton Abramowitz, "comes out looking pretty good. Vietnam appears to have been the main obstacle to the Cambodians' relief."

The Quality of Mercy has received less attention than some of Shawcross's other books, but is highly regarded by some critics, while also receiving negative criticism from others. The historian and Cambodia expert Ben Kiernan, who was "Shawcross's interpreter for several weeks" when he was researching the book, wrote a long critical essay. The Australian journalist John Pilger—who is criticised in The Quality of Mercy,—reportedly attacked Shawcross in a New Statesman review as a "born-again cold warrior." But Ed Vulliamy, in The Guardian, called it "Shawcross's bravest, most complicated and astute work", commenting that "the little-known Quality of Mercy examined and challenged deficiencies in the international aid programme to Cambodia, which lavished assistance on the remnants of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, perpetuating the violence." The New York Times concluded, "This is a startling book and most of it is very persuasive." He stated that on most counts, "Mr. Shawcross's subtlety and lack of sanctimony are remarkable." He also considers it "noteworthy that a journalist who in the past attacked American policy so fiercely has, in this book, portrayed at least the United States Embassy in Bangkok as one of the best informed and most decently efficient actors in the refugee drama." Shawcross drew several lamentable parallels, for example that "in Ethiopia as well as Cambodia, humanitarian aid was being used by a Communist regime to underwrite war." It retraces the odyssey of the last Shah of Iran after being driven into exile by the Iranian Revolution, first to Egypt, and then in succession to Morocco, the Bahamas, Mexico, the United States, Panama, and finally back to Egypt, where he died. Shawcross traces his interest in Iran to the 1960s: "Ardeshir Zahedi, the Shah's Ambassador to London, became a firm friend of my family then, and has remained so since." Much of what criticism the book received arose from its narrow focus. One Middle East expert, Daniel Pipes, wrote that Shawcross "has done his best to eke out the details of this sad, small tale. But this reader concludes that he has pretty much wasted his time, and Shawcross himself seems to know it." Another, Zalmay Khalilzad (later Republican-appointed U.S. Ambassador to, successively, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the United Nations), criticised the book for not highlighting the Carter administration's failures in its dealings with the Shah. Ajami further criticised Shawcross's choice of sources from the Shah's circle, and his credulous attitude toward them. In a critique that may have foreshadowed Shawcross's later writing about another royal family, Ajami posited that Shawcross's sources, including the Shah's twin sister, Princess Ashraf, were able to work their royal charms to disarm his reportorial skepticism. The pundit Andrew Sullivan, in The New York Times Book Review, described Murdoch as "what a Murdoch paper would surely call a suck-up."

Despite the issues raised, Mitgang's review was generally positive, while Sullivan wrote that Shawcross, albeit "unwittingly", "achieved something very valuable", in "expos[ing] the banality of a highly sophisticated and successful businessman", and "plac[ing] the real issue behind the story of Mr. Murdoch's career—the nature of a democratic culture—away from the petty demonization of an entrepreneur and on the larger forces that have determined his fate."

The 1992 publication of Murdoch raised a brief flurry in the literary world. The New Yorker, then edited by Tina Brown, published a short Talk of the Town piece by Francis Wheen, wondering how "could Willie Shawcross, who made his name in the seventies with Sideshow, an indignant expose of Henry Kissinger's destruction of Cambodia, become Murdoch's hagiographer?" David Cornwell, better known by his nom de plume John le Carré, wrote a responsive letter in defence of Shawcross, calling Wheen's essay "one of the ugliest pieces of partisan journalism that I have witnessed in a long life of writing." When Brown said she would only publish Cornwell's letter if he cut it to one paragraph, he released it to the press instead, and the contretemps drew much media attention.

Deliver Us From Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords, and a World of Endless Conflict (2000)

Deliver Us From Evil overviews the work of the United Nations during the 1990s to ameliorate situations in many of the world's trouble spots of that decade, largely as seen through the eyes of Kofi Annan, whom Shawcross accompanied on his travels.

Reviews were mixed to negative. Some meted out limited praise: "highly readable, if at times repetitive and scattershot," "admirably fair in his judgments,"

At the most negative end of the spectrum, a capsule review in The New Yorker concluded: "Shawcross's reporting here is often secondhand; his prose is dreary; and his thinking (which frequently takes refuge in anti-Americanism) is lazy. The result is an insult to the gravity of the issues he purports to address, and—worse—to the anguish of the world's politically endangered peoples." Shawcross's optimistic attitude "as a booster for the UN" was criticised as unwarranted by reviewers from left and right, with all arguing the UN has a long record of failures. while several found fault with the book's analytical conclusions (or, more precisely, its lack thereof).

Allies (2003)

Like other Shawcross books, Allies was published under two different subtitles, in a 2003 hardback as "The U.S., Britain, and Europe in the Aftermath of the Iraq War", and in a 2005 paperback as "Why the West Had to Remove Saddam." The book has been described as a polemic, rather than a work of journalism, with some commentators observing that, unlike other books by Shawcross, it has no footnotes. One critic wrote of Shawcross as "a vocal supporter of President George W. Bush's war on terror and praises Tony Blair's interventionist policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, writing off criticism of the two leaders as hysterical." The National Review wrote, "Shawcross has written an outstanding justification of the Anglo-American effort to drive Saddam Hussein from power. It is an exemplary piece of moral clarity and fine writing."

The Economists review of Justice and the Enemy found the book lacked "original research on al-Qaeda", its Nuremberg comparisons unhelpful, and its author "keener to score points against all those who roundly condemn President George Bush's strategy" than to draw useful conclusions. The Independent described it as a "shameless justification of the policies of the Bush administration" in which "justice is a surreal concept totally subordinate to the "security" of the US".

Private life and honours

In 1970, he married the writer and art critic Marina Warner; their son, born in 1977, Conrad, is an artist. The marriage ended in divorce in 1980.

Shawcross married Michal Levin in 1981. Their daughter, Eleanor, is a political advisor, who worked as director of the Number 10 Policy Unit under Rishi Sunak from 2022 to 2024 afterwards being made a conservative Peer, and is married to Simon, The Lord Wolfson another Conservative life peer.

Shawcross married his third wife, Olga Polizzi, in 1993. Alex Polizzi, the hotelier and television presenter is his stepdaughter.

Shawcross was appointed Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (CVO) in the 2011 New Year Honours and knighted in the 2023 Birthday Honours for public service.

He has lifelong ties to Cornwall where he is a keen campaigner in the preservation and protection of local Conservation Areas. His campaign succeeded in obtaining Grade II listing for St Mawes's historic and endangered sea wall.

In 2009, Shawcross signed a petition in support of film director Roman Polanski, calling for his release after Polanski was arrested in Switzerland in relation to his 1977 sexual abuse case

Publications

  • Watergate: The Full Inside Story (co-author, 1973)
  • Crime and Compromise: Janos Kadar and the Politics of Hungary since Revolution (1974)
  • Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia (1979), New York Times Editor's Choice Book of the Year, awarded a George Polk Award
  • The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience (1984), New York Times Editor's Choice Book of the Year, awarded the Freedom From Hunger Media Award
  • (also published as Rupert Murdoch: Ringmaster of the Information Circus) (1992)
  • Queen and Country: The Fifty-Year Reign of Elizabeth II (2002)
  • Counting One's Blessings: The Selected Letters of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother (2012) (editor)
  • The Servant Queen and the King She Serves (2016)

References

  • Official website.
  • William Shawcross on GOV.UK
  • Official page as Commissioner for Public Appointments.
  • William Shawcross on The Guardian
  • Biography of William Shawcross by the British Council.
  • Profile for The New Statesman (2003).
  • Profile for The Independent (2015).
  • Profile for The National (Scotland) (2022).