Roy Jenkins

by John Campbell

  Above all, Jenkins was for at least the last thirty years of his life the embodiment of Britain’s liberal establishment – that calmly (or complacently) superior elite of overwhelmingly Oxbridge-educated politicians, dons, mandarins, judges, broadcasters and commentators loathed equally by the old Labour left and the Thatcherite new right. From an early age Jenkins made it his business to know everyone in this cosy world, anatomised in 1990 by his friend Noel Annan in his book Our Age. He belonged to all the most exclusive clubs and dining clubs in London and lunched with some member of ‘the great and the good’ almost every day of his adult life. He collected honours and awards of every sort, from the chancellorship of Oxford University and the presidency of the Royal Society of Literature to the Order of Merit. He was the Grand Panjandrum or Pooh-Bah of British public life – an extraordinary apotheosis for a miner’s son from Abersychan. This is why I have thought it important to try to narrate his political career in the context of this wider social, literary and quasi-academic life: more than any other individual, Jenkins’ immense network of friendships illuminates the assumptions and values of the British governing elite of the second half of the last century. It is also why I have not shied away from revealing his unconventional private life which reflects so much of the hidden world of that class in that era. I have tried to present the whole man in the round, and not just the politician.

  I also believe, however, that Jenkins’ long career throws a particularly clear light on the transformation in the conduct of politics over this half-century. When he was first elected to the House of Commons in 1948 the life of politics had not changed essentially since the days of his hero Asquith forty years earlier. Reputations were made and lost by speeches in the Commons chamber, while communication with the public was by speeches at packed and sometimes rowdy meetings up and down the country, fully reported in the newspapers. Television was in its infancy and even radio was largely barred from discussing current affairs. Politics was completely dominated by two class-based, ideologically opposed and well-supported parties: one predominantly middle- and upper-class and capitalist, the other largely working-class and avowedly socialist – though of course there was some overlap at the edges and generally cordial relations of mutual respect between the two. Both equally assumed that the future would be increasingly collectivist and egalitarian: Labour welcomed and sought to advance this process, while most Conservatives – before Margaret Thatcher – merely hoped to slow it. Up until the mid-1980s politics was genuinely a contest of ideas, between parties and within them: party conferences – particularly the annual Labour conference – were occasions for real argument and real power struggles, passionately conducted in public – and in due course televised – even if the vote was decided in advance by union block votes in smoke-filled rooms.

  This was the world in which Jenkins rose to become deputy leader of the Labour Party. He did it largely by being the most effective debater in the Commons when the floor of the House was still the cockpit of political conflict. By the time he left for Brussels in 1976 this was already beginning to change, as more and more political debate took place in radio and television studios, in interviews and soundbites rather than in set-piece speeches. When he returned to the Commons in 1982 Jenkins no longer fitted in. The Asquithian style that had dominated the House in the 1960s now seemed ponderous and old-fashioned; the satirical sketch-writers who had largely replaced the straight reporting of Parliament mocked his pomposity, and he was embarrassingly uncomfortable on television. Briefly in its early days the SDP managed to resurrect the crowded public meetings of an earlier age; but it did not last. Under Mrs Thatcher and Tony Blair and the insatiable demands of twenty-four-hour news, politics became the affair of strictly controlled media manipulation, trivial point-scoring and damage limitation that we suffer today. If I have devoted considerable coverage to the controversies and arguments of Jenkins’ era, it is because they seem to come from a different age when politics was a serious pursuit, taken seriously by serious people and seriously reported – yet at the same time more fun and more rewarding because real issues were felt to be at stake. Above all, it was still an age of optimism and rising expectations, unlike the present dismal era of cutbacks, economies, narrowing options and widening inequality. Coming out of the war, Jenkins’ generation (Labour and Conservative alike) had perfect confidence in a future of ever-increasing national wealth, expanding public services and personal leisure – a confidence which mounting economic difficulties, the unpredicted rise of Thatcherism, climate change and global terrorism have sadly dented. They may not have felt much like it at the time, but from the perspective of the early twenty-first century the 1950s and 1960s now seem almost a golden age. Of course the over-confident illusions of Jenkins’ generation contributed to the failures that Thatcherism set out to remedy; but the cure has been in its own way as bad as the disease. Over the whole seventy-year span from 1945 to the present no single career illustrates the heyday and retreat of social democracy in Britain more painfully than Jenkins’.

  For all these reasons this is a long book: I could not have done justice to all the facets of Jenkins’ career in a shorter one. It is based on a wide range of unpublished sources. First, since being appointed official biographer I have had full access to Roy Jenkins’ own papers, stored until recently at his home in East Hendred, now transferred to the Bodleian Library, Oxford. I am immensely grateful to Dame Jennifer Jenkins for giving me the free run of this collection, including the wonderful wartime correspondence between herself and Roy of which I have made extensive use in Chapters Three and Four. This archive naturally provides the core of the book, though frustratingly for the biographer there are a lot more incoming than outgoing letters: as a professional writer Jenkins did not like to put pen to paper more than necessary unless paid to do so, and always preferred to respond to correspondents over lunch or on the phone. Nevertheless his papers testify to the extraordinary range of his friendships as well as preserving the drafts of all his books, the text of hundreds of speeches and articles, his contemporary notes towards his memoirs, the full typescript of his Brussels diary, his bank statements, tax returns and wine merchants’ bills and – most valuable of all – his meticulously kept engagement diaries, which make it possible to trace his movements and whom he lunched with almost every day for more than fifty years.

  In addition to this private goldmine I have used the official records of the 1964–70 and 1974–6 Labour governments, housed in the National Archives at Kew; the Labour Party archive now in the People’s History Museum in Manchester; the SDP archive at the University of Essex in Colchester; and other collections of private papers held at the Bodleian (Harold Wilson, Barbara Castle, James Callaghan), the London School of Economics (Tony Crosland, Peter Shore and one or two others), University College London (Hugh Gaitskell) and Churchill College, Cambridge (Enoch Powell, Lord Hailsham, Neil Kinnock and others). I have been lent valuable private material by individuals, including particularly Rosie Alison, Lord Hattersley, Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank, Robert Harris and Patricia Grigg; and I have conducted more than fifty interviews with surviving friends, colleagues and contemporaries, as well as with members of the Jenkins family, who have given me every help and encouragement. Finally I have of course drawn extensively on the immense published literature about the Labour Party, the Wilson governments and the SDP: the diaries of Hugh Dalton, Richard Crossman, Barbara Castle, Tony Benn, Paddy Ashdown and others; the memoirs of Harold Wilson, Jim Callaghan, Denis Healey, David Owen and a dozen more; biographies by Ben Pimlott, Philip Ziegler, Susan Crosland and Giles Radice, to name just a few; countless studies of the period by journalists and historians; as well as Hansard, The Times and other newspapers and journals. No period of political history can have been so thoroughly documented as the second half of the last century.

  Finally I must declare my bias. Roy Jenkins was the first public figure I was aware of and always the one I most admired. I grew up as a near-neighbour of
the Jenkins family in Ladbroke Square. I remember vividly his vigorously eccentric style on the tennis court in the communal garden and the policeman outside his front door when he was Home Secretary; I even remember when someone scrawled ‘ASQUITH’ on one of the pillars. I was a Liberal at university – an endangered species in the late 1960s – and in the 1970s I was one of those consciously waiting for Jenkins and the Labour moderates to break out of the Labour Party, certain that they would have to do so sooner or later. When they did I was an enthusiastic foot soldier in the SDP, voted for Jenkins as leader and even wrote a short biography of him – my third book – published just before the 1983 election, in the course of writing which I helped at the Hillhead by-election in 1982. I was naturally a strong supporter of merger with the Liberals and took a dim view of David Owen. I met Jenkins several times when he was President of the local SDP branch in Kensington, where I then still lived, and continued to admire him almost without reservation, though to my regret I never came to know him well. I was disappointed when I heard that he had appointed Andrew Adonis to be his official biographer, and correspondingly delighted when the opportunity eventually fell to me after all. All this, I realise, makes me less than wholly objective as a biographer. In previous books, despite having lived through their premierships, I have written of Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher from a judicious distance. I can only hope that in this one my admiration and affection for my subject have not rendered me entirely uncritical.

  John Campbell

  September 2013

  1

  His Father’s Son

  DURING HIS LIFETIME a typically British controversy surrounded Roy Jenkins’ origins. To his critics in the Labour party – themselves often guiltily middle-class and privately educated – it was almost inconceivable that this grand figure, with his drawling accent and air of lordly entitlement, should have been born and raised in the very heart of the labour movement. The son and grandson of miners, raised in the South Wales coalfield between the wars, his father actually imprisoned during the General Strike: romantic class warriors like Michael Foot and Tony Benn would have given their eye-teeth for such an impeccable socialist pedigree. Long before he abandoned Labour to found a rival party in 1982, Jenkins’ enemies accused him of having rejected his roots and betrayed his class, practically from the moment he went to Oxford. Some alleged a purely political betrayal, asserting with Denis Healey that he was ‘never really Labour at all’.1 Others – most prominently Leo Abse, Labour MP for Pontypool and mischievous amateur Freudian – diagnosed a deeper apostasy: the authentic Welsh working-class identity which Jenkins derived from his father was undermined, Abse claimed, by the influence of his anglicised and socially ambitious mother, leaving the young Roy rootless, pretentious and déclassé.2

  But most of this is nonsense. Roy Jenkins was indeed born into the heart of the South Wales Labour movement; but he was born into a Labour elite that saw itself confidently on the way to becoming the new governing class. His father had been a miner, certainly, but there was never any question of Roy following him down the pit. By the time Roy was born, on 11 November 1920, Arthur Jenkins was already a full-time union official, chairman of the Pontypool Labour party and a Monmouthshire county councillor.fn1 He later became an alderman, Justice of the Peace, Vice-President of the South Wales Miners’ Federation (SWMF), a member of the National Executive of the Labour Party and in 1935 – when Roy was fourteen – MP for Pontypool. He then quickly became Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) to the party leader, Clement Attlee, and held that position throughout the war when Attlee was deputy Prime Minister. He was briefly a minister in the 1945 government before his early death. In short, Arthur Jenkins was not just a pillar of the local establishment in South Wales – where Labour already was the establishment – but also, when Roy was growing to political awareness, at the very heart of government and national politics. More than all this, however, he was also gentle, bookish, internationalist and resolutely unmilitant: all characteristics that he passed on to his son.

  Arthur exemplified, in Alan Watkins’ words, ‘the great (now largely lost) tradition of Welsh self-improvement’.3 He was born in 1882 at Varteg, a bleak moorland mining community five miles up from Pontypool in the easternmost valley of the Welsh coalfield, and educated up to the age of twelve at the Varteg Board School, when he left, like most of his contemporaries, to follow his father down the pit. After a dozen years at the coalface, however, educating himself through evening classes and discussion groups, he won a miners’ scholarship (worth £30 a year) to Ruskin College, Oxford – the enlightened institution founded in 1899 to offer the opportunity of higher education to working men who would otherwise have had no chance of it. The fact that Ruskin was not strictly part of the university did not stop Arthur regarding himself ever afterwards as an Oxford man. From there he gained another scholarship to study in Paris for ten months, where with his friend Frank Hodges (later general secretary of the Miners’ Federation) he forged lasting contacts with leading French socialists while learning to speak and read French better than his son ever did. ‘The classics of Russian fiction in his considerable library,’ Roy wrote years later, ‘were in French translations, which was unusual in the house of a South Wales miners’ agent.’4 Jenkins’ love of France in particular, and Europe in general, was directly inculcated by his Francophile father.

  Returning to Pontypool in 1910 after this two years’ mind-expanding absence, however, Arthur had little choice but to go back down the pit. Working in a reserved occupation, he was spared the still greater horrors of the trenches which culled so many of his generation; but he spent less and less time underground as he made his career in the union. In 1911 he became secretary of the Pontypool Trades Council; in 1918 he was appointed deputy miners’ agent for the Monmouthshire Eastern Valleys, and in 1921 he succeeded as agent. By this time he was also a county councillor and a governor of several local schools. Arthur was a good speaker and evidently not without ambition; yet he was an unusually unassuming politician – not at all a firebrand in the florid Welsh style associated with Nye Bevan, for example, raised in the next valley a decade and a half later. When Arthur died in 1946, aged only sixty-three, the obituaries all emphasised his scholarly manner. ‘This gentle and sensitive son of Wales seemed, at a first meeting, to be more the poet or the student than the man of action,’ wrote the Daily Herald.5 The South Wales Argus mourned ‘a man of outstanding personality and vision – an idealist and an internationalist, a self-taught man who started at the bottom of the ladder and, by perseverance and brilliant attainments, gained nationwide distinction without seeking it’.6 Other tributes praised his integrity and selflessness. Attlee called him one of the three most unselfish men he had met in politics.7

  Meanwhile Arthur had married, in 1911, Harriet (always known as Hattie) Harris, daughter of the foreman of the Bessemer steelworks at Blaenavon, three miles further up the valley. In the social hierarchy of the Welsh valleys her background was several notches above his. But her mother died when she was four and her father when she was seventeen; so when Arthur met her she had come down in the world, living in lodgings in Pontypool and working as an assistant in a music shop. By marrying the already up-and-coming Arthur it was Hattie who was bettering herself, though doubtless she was keen to regain the social position to which she had been brought up. After three years in a miners’ cottage at Talywain, Arthur and Hattie moved to a small but respectable terraced house set rather grandly above the main road through Abersychan – then a distinct village a couple of miles up the valley from Pontypool, with its own shops, police station, Working Men’s Institute and no fewer than six chapels – Baptist, Methodist and Congregational – as well as an Anglican church and a Catholic chapel.8 They named it Greenlands after the house where Hattie grew up. In 1915 she bore a stillborn son, and it was another five years before she conceived again, by which time she was thirty-four and Arthur thirty-eight. As the only child of mature parents, it is not surprising
that Roy was cosseted and somewhat spoiled. Curiously, however, Arthur’s diary for the days around his birth barely mentions the event. He merely noted that ‘H. is going along very nicely indeed’ and went into Newport as usual on 11 November for a council meeting.9 Fathers did not get involved in childbirth in those days.

  Before Roy was three the family moved again, 300 yards down the Snatchwood Road to a slightly larger house – also called Greenlands – less elevated but boasting a bathroom and a sizeable back garden running down to a railway track (and a monkey-puzzle tree in the tiny front garden). Arthur was now earning an unquestionably middle-class salary of £300 a year. Their neighbours were the headmaster of the local primary school on one side and the builder who had developed the terrace on the other. They had a live-in maid, and the union soon gave him the use of a motor car. The front room of the house was Arthur’s office, where a constant stream of people came to see him about their problems or union business. A cousin, interviewed in 1972, remembered ‘a very cosy house . . . there were always bright fires during the winter and vases of fresh flowers in the summer. And books! Why, there were books everywhere.’10

  This cousin denied that Roy was spoiled, ‘but his parents thought he was absolutely IT, there was no doubt about that’.11 Another agreed that Hattie ‘was very ambitious for him, from the earliest age, and made a tremendous fuss of him’.12 When, years later, the press began to look into his background, neighbours were happy to furnish memories of a rather pampered little boy. For instance, Derek Powell – the son of the next-door builder and one of Roy’s two best boyhood friends – remembered:

  Hattie literally smothered Roy with love. She would hardly let him walk down the street alone. He was always a shy boy. I sometimes wonder if that was because his mother swamped him . . . His mother . . . tried to shelter him from everything. For example when he was at primary school she religiously saw him across the village road every day. He could have become stand-offish as a result of this, and of being an only child. But with me and our little gang he was not given the chance.13