William Shawcross

Sir William Hartley Hume Shawcross CVO (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 many publications, including Time, Newsweek, International Herald Tribune, The Spectator, The Washington Post and Rolling Stone, in addition to writing books on topics such as the Prague Spring, the Vietnam War, the Iranian Revolution, the Iraq War, humanitarian intervention, and the United Nations. His works Sideshow (1979) and The Quality of Mercy (1984) were listed among The New York Times Book Review‍'‍s books of the year.

Quotes

• [John] Pilger's early Cambodia films, Year Zero (1979) and Year One (1980), were very moving, made Cambodia and the horror of the Khmer Rouge rule a real issue for millions of people and raised a lot of money for Cambodia. But I thought both films were flawed by the equation of America and the Khmer Rouge. By skilful orchestration of emotions and actuality, Pilger seemed to show that, of governments, only the Vietnamese really cared about helping Cambodia and that official Western aid was designed to subvert rather than succour. I thought that this was dangerous nonsense, dangerous for hungry Cambodians, because the Vietnamese had put outrageous restrictions on aid. Also, to accept Vietnamese domination of the country seemed to me like accepting Soviet domination of Poland because they liberated it from the Nazis.
  • "The trouble with John Pilger", The Observer (17 March 1991), p. 20
  • In an Observer article a week later, Pilger (with David Mumro) said he had compared "Pol Pot's reign" to "Stalin's terror". Shawcross was critical of Pilger's work in The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience published in 1984 and elsewhere.