William Shawcross

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William Hartley Hume Shawcross, (born 28 May 1946 in Sussex, England), is a British writer and commentator, as well as the former Chairman of the Charity Commission for England and Wales.

Education

Shawcross attended St Aubyns Preparatory School in Rottingdean, Eton College, and Oxford University College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1969. He studied sculpture at Saint Martin's School of Art after leaving Oxford.

Private life and honours

Shawcross' father was a politician, advocate, Chief British Prosecutor, and life peer Hartley Shawcross. Joan Winifred Mather, who died in a riding crash on the Sussex Downs in 1974, was his mother.

Marina Warner, a writer and art critic, and their son, Conrad, became an artist in 1970. In 1980, the couple announced that they had divorced.

In 1981, Shawcross married Michal Levin. Eleanor Osborne's daughter was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers to George Osborne from 2008. Boris Johnson's mayoral campaign had her predecessor. Eleanor is married to Simon Wolfson, Baron Wolfson of Sunningdale, who is the son of David Wolfson; the father and son are both Conservative life peers and are the current and future chairmen of Next.

In 1993, Shawcross married Olga Polizzi, his third wife. Alex Polizzi, a hotelier and television host, is his stepdaughter.

He has lived in Cornwall for his entire life, and he is an active campaigner for the preservation and protection of local Conservation Areas. His campaign gained a Grade II listing for St Mawes' iconic and endangered sea wall.

In the 2011 New Year Honours, he was named Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (CVO).

Shawcross signed a petition in favour of film director Roman Polanski, calling for his freedom after Polanski was arrested in Switzerland in connection with his 1977 sexual harassment lawsuit.

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Career

Shawcross writes and lectures on issues of international policy, geopolitics, Southeast Asia and refugees, as well as the British royal family. He has written for a number of publications, including Time, Newsweek, International Herald Tribune, The Spectator, The Washington Post and Rolling Stone, in addition to writing numerous books.

His books include studies of recent international topics: the Prague Spring, the Vietnam War, the Iranian Revolution, the Iraq War, foreign assistance, humanitarian intervention, and the United Nations. Two of them, Sideshow and The Quality of Mercy, were included on The New York Times Book Review's annual lists of the roughly 15 top books of the year for 1979 and 1984, respectively.

Since 2002, he has also written several books about the British royal family, including the official biography of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, published in 2009. He writes glowingly about the royal family, for example in an April 2020 piece about Queen Elizabeth II captioned "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 in God. Together they demonstrate vividly the exquisite, strong but light touch of our almost timeless monarch."

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.

Shawcross was Chairman of ARTICLE 19, the international centre on censorship, from 1986 to 1996. He was a Member of the Council of the Disasters Emergency Committee from 1997 to 2002, and a board member of the International Crisis Group from 1995 to 2005.

Shawcross was a member of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees's Informal Advisory Group from 1995 to 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 took up the Chairmanship of the Charity Commission for England and Wales on 1 October 2012, and was chairman until February 2018. His appointment to a second three-year term in 2015 was called "controversial" at the time, with some Labour Party members raising concerns about how it was handled. 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 Prevent, its anti-radicalisation programme. 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.

He was appointed a Commissioner for Public Appointments in September 2021.

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