Silvia Rodgers, who has died aged 78, came from the dark heart of turbulent 20th-century European history. She had politics in her blood, and it gave her the restless creative energy that brought her close to the centre of British political life for more than 50 years. Having rebelled against her parents' communism by becoming a committed social democrat in the Labour party, she went on to be a key and defiant intelligence behind the founding of the Social Democratic party in the 1980s.
She was born Silvia Szulman in the Jewish hospital in Wedding, a working-class district of Weimar Berlin. Her mother, whom she described as "a revolutionary by vocation", had escaped arrest in her native Poland by taking refuge in Berlin; her father was a stateless tailor. Both came from observant Orthodox families, but Marxism and feminism were the religions Silvia was brought up in. Of the 25 children in her class in 1938, only four survived the Holocaust. With her mother and brother, she followed her father to Britain in 1938, after an agonising wait when the SS searched their flat.
Silvia had a profound sense of dislocation, as she once described herself: "I was always off-centre. I was a Polish child in the German capital, a communist in a fascist state, a Jewish child in a German school, an atheist child in a Jewish Orthodox school, a refugee child in England."
The defining and happy moment in her life was meeting Bill Rodgers, later Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank but then the dashing young general secretary of the Fabian Society. They married in 1955. It was never an easy marriage, but something far better, a passionately interested one, in which her ardour was balanced by his rational intelligence in a common enterprise. It took Silvia into the aristocracy of Labour politics as Bill became an MP and a cabinet minister.
At Fabian conferences they met Hugh Gaitskell, and Bill was one of Hugh Dalton's final proteges. They were friends with the Croslands (before Tony met Susan), the Browns, the Healeys and the Callaghans, and had a lifelong companionship with Roy Jenkins and his wife, Jennifer.
The Rodgers were good at interesting fun: the best kind. They had legendary summer parties, thronged with politicians, journalists, writers, artists and academics. They danced exuberantly. There were marvellous holidays in Italy, with children and friends in a constant moving seminar of discussion. They were brilliant dinner party hosts. Although Silvia's food was great - herrings and red cabbage, lentils and duck - it was the conversation that really mattered. They always managed to produce, around their wobbly round table, proper talk about proper things. It was the kind of engaged discussion - the exchange of, at times, strong disagreements of a high intelligence - that helps both make and change the world.
Indeed, Silvia's background brought an un-British sense of urgency to politics. She was convinced that Labour was "finished" at a much earlier stage than her husband. During the winter of discontent in 1979, she would phone Bill's office to question whether he fully appreciated the anarchy she saw breaking out. The unions' behaviour, and the refusal of the legitimate Labour left to stand up to the Trots in the party, was, as she saw it, redolent of the weakness in the face of democracy's enemies that had led to the rise of Hitler.
In retrospect, this view seems exaggerated, but many felt something similar. Silvia was part of those innermost deliberations around the setting up of the SDP, and was proud of Bill's leadership as its vice-president (1982-87).
Yet her frustration at her non-official political status also stimulated another creative side. She was a successful artist, then found her true métier as a writer. In 1975, when her husband was minister of state for defence, she was invited to launch HMS Newcastle, a type 24 destroyer. It took her three attempts to break the bottle over its bows, the admiral hugged her and she became - to her own surprise - greatly attached to the vessel, following its 26-year life closely, through to its decommissioning.
Her fascination with the rituals of launching a ship lead to a PhD on the subject, under Rodney Needham at Oxford. When Bill became a life peer in 1992, she wrote an original anthropological account of the role (and space) of women in parliament. In 1996, Red Saint, Pink Daughter, a gripping memoir of her early life, got brilliant reviews; she was elected to the Royal Society of Literature and won the Jewish book prize. It is not a polite book, but it captures her disconcerting honesty and vital intelligence, and is a beautifully written piece of important history. She was working on her next book, The Politician's Wife, right up to her death.
There was always a whiff of cordite around Silvia. The early insecurity took a toll. But it also produced strong affections. Above all, she was a clever, warm, vivacious and generous woman: a sensitive support to many in distress. She got on very well with men, but she was also a close and intimate friend of many women. She is survived by her husband and their daughters, Rachel, Lucy and Juliet.
· Silvia Rodgers, writer, artist and political activist, born March 3 1928; died October 8 2006
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