Vote 100: MPs and peers on the women parliamentarians they most admire from the past century

A century after the first women gained the right to vote, we asked some of the current crop of leading politicians to tell us about the female parliamentarian they most admire from the last 100 years

Sir Vince Cable - Shirley Williams

Shirley Williams is still one of the most recognisable and influential figures on the political landscape, even though she first became a minister half-a-century ago and her political life stretches over almost the whole of the post-War period.

Together with Margaret Thatcher and Barbara Castle, she was one of the dominant women politicians of that era with a long list of accomplishments. These included being the co-founder of a new party, the SDP, and, then, the Liberal Democrats, which I now have the honour to lead.

And the party has proved a lasting political force - this month marks the 30th anniversary the formation of the Lib Dems, which has become a party of both local and central government.

Shirley was also, with Roy Jenkins and Ted Heath, one of the most significant and committed Europeans in British politics and I know she feels personally the hurt of seeing that ideal under an existential threat. Shirley started her political life on the left as a teenager, in the Labour Party, and the egalitarian, social democratic ideas she espoused - and put into practice as Education Secretary in the late 1970s - remain essentially intact. She translated these principles into her personal life: she has always been unassuming and down to earth, but with a modern lifestyle.

She is a true liberal and this was reflected in the stands she took on race and immigration in the 1960s, capital punishment, prison reform and, later, the civil libertarian values of the Liberal Democrats.

Shirley managed to be a liberal but also a committed Catholic, as was Charles Kennedy, and saw no contradiction between the two.

And she has an international perspective - not just about Europe. In both her personal and academic lives she has been fully trans-Atlantic in outlook.

Shirley battled against the prevailing, casual misogyny that was used to put down her generation of women. One of her legacies was to have paved the way for the many women who are now entering politics.

Some of the skills that made her so admired are no longer so prized: she has been a powerful speaker in what has become the age of the autocue. Her personal trust and warmth as a stump campaigner no longer count for so much when social media platforms are replacing personal engagement.

But she remains a well known political figure and one much loved by the public as well as those close to her.

Sir Vince Cable is MP for Twickenham and Leader of the Liberal Democrats

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