Roy Jenkins

by John Campbell

  As was normal in those more serious days, Pursuit of Progress was widely reviewed in both the national and local press, with an equally wide diversity of judgement on both the style and the content, ranging from the Aberdeen Press and Journal (‘fresh and interesting’) to the Glasgow Evening News (‘prosy and excessively dull’) and the National and English Review (‘rather sententiously written’). The Manchester Guardian somewhat surprisingly thought that ‘Some of Mr Jenkins’ arguments may seem strong meat for candidates with tender constituencies’; but the Communist Daily Worker predictably judged its value ‘zero’. In the New Statesman Dick Crossman found it ‘a little anaemic’; but Jenkins’ old tutor Thomas Balogh, in Tribune, while not uncritical, welcomed ‘a provocative historical analysis of permanent value’. Most balanced was The Economist, whose anonymous reviewer judged that, as a miner’s son who was also an intellectual, ‘Mr Jenkins can look at politics with a detachment rare among members of parliament on either side.’ His book, it concluded sagely, was ‘an important contribution to contemporary political thinking; that it raises far more questions than it answers is merely symptomatic of contemporary thinking’.46

  Sixty years on, the unquestioning assumption of a socialist future seems both misguided and painfully naive. But in 1953 – when the Tories too had embraced Keynesian planning – several reviewers questioned what was distinctively socialist about Jenkins’ prescription. One, his father’s old protégé Ivor Bulmer-Thomas (recently defected to the Tories and writing in the Daily Telegraph) wondered if Roy too was in the wrong party, but concluded shrewdly that he did belong with Labour on account of his belief in ‘progress’: ‘The great thing is apparently to keep advancing: it does not seem to matter so much where we get.’47 Another – the left-wing novelist-MP Maurice Edelman, writing anonymously in the Times Literary Supplement – perceptively suggested that Jenkins and the Gaitskellites in general were excessively complacent about the steadily improving future and the ability of the liberal revisionists to keep control of the party if things turned out less comfortably:

  For if there is peace [in Korea], accompanied by an American slump with two million unemployed in Britain, will not the Utopians and the nationalisers and the Russia-lovers and all the rest of them once again seek a more radical transfer of power than Mr Jenkins proposes? And even in a less extreme hypothesis, are not Mr Jenkins and the Oxford economists of the Labour movement unduly self-content in a dangerous world?48

  Time would eventually prove Edelman right; but not just yet.

  * * *

  fn1 A typical review in the right-wing weekly Time and Tide condemned his punitive attack on wealth: ‘The sole purpose is to prevent anyone living at a standard of life, on his own money and after paying his taxes, of which Mr Jenkins disapproves. This is the Socialism of the dead-level and the dead-end.’7

  fn2 New Fabian Essays was noticed, among other reviewers, by two American writers whom Jenkins would later count among his closest friends. The historian Arthur Schlesinger criticised both Jenkins and Crosland for their misguided emphasis on equality of outcome, not merely of opportunity; while J.K. Galbraith shrewdly sensed that Jenkins was ‘clearly troubled by his topic. Of the end he is not in doubt: he is distinctly and candidly worried about the means.’9

  fn3 Edith Pitt went on to become MP for Edgbaston from 1955 to 1962. She held several junior offices under Eden and Macmillan, became a Dame in 1962 and died in 1966.

  8

  Expanding Horizons

  AS LABOUR SETTLED into what turned out to be an eternity of opposition, Jenkins’ life expanded enormously. Living was becoming more comfortable as the war receded and the austerity of the immediate post-war years gave way to the growing affluence of the 1950s. As a young MP with the security of a safe seat but no early prospect of office, he could afford to relax and enjoy himself – and he did. His new, more expansive life comprised three distinct strands, which all overlapped and informed one another. He was still first and foremost a conscientious politician whose daily life was centred in Parliament; but he was also developing a successful secondary career as a prolific writer, both of books and journalism, while at the same time beginning to cultivate an extensive social life. Though the balance between them fluctuated, these three elements remained the components of his existence for the rest of his life.

  He later claimed to have attended the House ‘virtually every sitting day’ in these early years.1 At least up to 1955 the Conservative government’s majority was small, and unless paired he was required to be there every day to vote. Like most Members in those days he had no office, but had to dictate his correspondence wherever he could find space in a corridor. But he spent no more time than he could help in the Chamber listening to debates, nor did he serve on any Standing Committees. He was usually to be found in the library researching or writing his articles and books. He spoke in debates about four or five times a year, contributing carefully crafted and well-delivered speeches, almost exclusively on economic and financial matters, and asked questions, usually on technical points about sterling or the Bank Rate. He always spoke in the budget debate, and for a few weeks in the early summer would put aside his writing to focus on the Finance Bill (‘For that period I try to be a full-time legislator’).2 He was also careful to raise questions of concern to Birmingham. In May 1952, for instance, he initiated a Friday afternoon debate on lay-offs in the motor industry; and in March 1953 he opened an adjournment debate (at two o’clock in the morning) on unemployment in Birmingham.3, fn1 Altogether Hansard shows that he spoke a good deal more than Tony Crosland between 1951 and 1955, but much less frequently than Woodrow Wyatt. He was invariably complimented by the next speaker, but his style was already distinctly mannered. One Tory remarked in 1951 that Jenkins combined ‘the impetuosity of youth’ with ‘the gestures of the elder statesman’;4 and in April 1954 Sir Waldron Smithers – an archetypal knight of the shires – offered the usual felicitations with more than usual emphasis: ‘I do congratulate the hon. Member on his fluency. I think the way he spoke was wonderful, though I do not agree with him.’5

  He enjoyed his first distinct parliamentary success in February 1954 when he was chosen to introduce a Labour motion calling for an inquiry into a spate of predatory takeover bids – most prominently Sir Charles Clore’s bid for the Savoy Hotel – which, he alleged, were not genuine business developments at all, but ‘financial manipulations . . . dealing almost exclusively with quick money returns’, which ‘put large untaxed capital profits into the hands of certain individuals and undermined the policy of dividend restraint’. The Tory who followed him condemned his ‘spiteful and vicious party political propaganda’, exemplifying Labour’s ‘pathological hatred of profit’.6 But the respected Labour Member for Leeds North-West, Charles Pannell, noted in his local paper that Jenkins spoke with few notes and ‘with remarkable authority for a young man. There was wit and polish and a buoyancy about it all.’ According to Pannell, he scored a particular hit with a neat riposte to Rab Butler, who had sought to defuse the issue by saying that they should remain ‘cool, calm and collected’. ‘It seems to me,’ Jenkins mocked, ‘that Mr Clore and Mr Samuel remained pretty cool, pretty calm and they certainly collected.’7 Unfortunately this crack does not appear in Hansard; maybe he only made it privately, or on another occasion. Winding up the short debate, Gaitskell repeated Labour’s call for an inquiry, but Butler batted it away, and the motion was comfortably defeated.

  Jenkins’ constituency obligations were not onerous, but he was perfectly assiduous by the standards of the time, when MPs were not expected to spend much time in their constituencies, still less live there. (In his autobiography Roy Hattersley remembered a newly elected Member for Sheffield in 1950 promising to visit the constituency every three months – and this being taken as a very handsome commitment.)8 Jenkins normally went to Stechford one weekend and one other evening every month to do a ‘surgery’ with his new agent, Harold Nash, and attend church bazaars, school
prize-givings and the like; but there was no demand for political meetings, so he rarely had to make a serious speech. Each September he would pay a longer visit of seven to ten days – more from habit than because it was very useful. Members for rural seats, he wrote in a newspaper article at the time, used to tour the outlying villages of their constituencies:

  But my constituency has no villages. It is a suburban chunk of a very big city, and, apart from elections, three public meetings a year, at selected points, cover it quite adequately. I therefore spent my time, not in addressing the public, but in holding policy discussions with the active members of my local party and in talking over administrative problems – housing, education and the like, with the members and officials of the vast Birmingham municipality.

  This year (1952), however, ‘lacking . . . the nervous stimulus of an election atmosphere’, he confessed to finding ‘ten days a long time’.9 No doubt that feeling grew over the next decade. Visiting Washington for the first time in 1953 and finding most of the Congressmen and Senators out of town, he commented unfavourably on the ‘excessively close attention to their constituencies which the American system demands’, clearly grateful that the same was not expected of British MPs.10

  In twenty-six years Roy and Jennifer never bought a home in the constituency and no one ever suggested that they should. He – and more rarely she – used to stay with Austin and Dora (Dink) Hitchman and their two daughters, all of whom became good friends. Austin Hitchman was a skilled craftsman – he serviced bakery ovens, not in Birmingham alone, but all round the country; they were Labour members, but not very politically engaged, so they kept Jenkins relatively insulated from local rivalries, which was as he liked it. He enjoyed businesslike relations with the city councillors – in those days major local dignitaries who jealously guarded their independence of central government. ‘The town clerk and the other major officers were figures of great, rather frosty authority,’ he recalled, who did not expect their MPs to interfere in local matters.11 He gave advice when asked, and always came up for the local elections, but that was all. In return, the local party largely respected his freedom of conscience on national issues. His only moment of real difficulty came over German rearmament in 1954. Since 1950 the Labour leadership, in government and then in opposition, had reluctantly accepted the need for rearming West Germany under NATO; but the left – supported by some violently anti-German right-wingers like Dalton – was strongly opposed, and the issue provoked several backbench rebellions. The Stechford party was unanimously Bevanite on this as on other matters, and in March 1954 Jenkins faced a showdown with his activists, with the real possibility that he might be disowned. But he took the argument boldly to them, persuaded them to respect his right to differ and won by thirty-two votes to two. This meeting, he confessed in his memoirs, was ‘a watershed. Before it, I had been rather nervous of the Stechford party; after it I was not.’12 He had no more trouble with his constituency until the 1970s when the character of the Stechford constituency party, like others, began to change.

  After only five years as a Birmingham MP, following the 1955 election, Jenkins was elected chairman of the Birmingham group of Labour Members, succeeding Victor Yates, the Member for Ladywood, one of seven Bevanites suspended the previous year for voting against German rearmament.fn2 Woodrow Wyatt in one of his many memoirs claimed that Jenkins virtually asked his permission to stand. ‘You’re playing for the big stakes aren’t you? Do you mind if I stand . . .? I think it is more important to me than to you.’13 If true, this would suggest a surprising diffidence on Jenkins’ part. But the story is nonsense, since Wyatt had lost his Aston seat through redistribution earlier that year, so was not eligible to stand. The Birmingham Gazette saw Jenkins’ election as ‘a tribute to the esteem in which he is held, since he does not live in Birmingham’; whereas Yates was a habitual rebel, Jenkins was ‘known as an unswerving supporter of the official leadership and policy of the Labour Party’.14 But some already recognised him as more than that. The political correspondent of the Birmingham Mail hoped to see Jenkins and the young Tory Member for Handsworth, Sir Edward Boyle, rising together to the leadership of their two parties. ‘The fancy is tickled by the prospect of these two Birmingham members, each with a political lifetime stretching ahead, forming a kind of Gladstone–Disraeli rivalry throughout the decades of the mid-twentieth century in the Commons.’15 Boyle indeed rose rapidly to the Cabinet, but sadly for this prediction chose to leave politics in 1969, just as Jenkins was reaching the top.

  Years later Jenkins had to write to the press to deny a persistent story that he disliked Birmingham and breathed a sigh of relief each time he left it: on the contrary, he insisted, what he missed on leaving Parliament in 1976 was not the House of Commons, but his constituency – by which he meant some of the people in it, the Hitchmans, the Balmers and some others.16 In truth there was little to love in Stechford itself, or in Birmingham, which at the end of his life he described coolly – and slightly egotistically – as ‘a very worthwhile place to represent’.17 He liked to play with the idea that Birmingham was a ‘border town’, equidistant between the North, the South and Wales (which suited his own ambivalence), and all Brummies therefore immigrants: Welsh, Scots, Irish and, increasingly by the 1960s, Caribbean and Asian. But he felt for Birmingham none of the real affection he later felt for Glasgow, Hillhead. Nevertheless he was ‘deeply grateful’ to the city and the constituency not only for sustaining his career for a quarter of a century but for allowing him to be – as he put it in 2002 – ‘a latter-day example of that now distinctly endangered species – the part-time MP’.18

  The other half of his working life was writing. Once he had secured his future in politics, Jenkins was keen to have another string to his bow, partly to supplement his income, but also to stave off boredom and give himself another interest – though since almost all his writing was about politics, it was more of a busman’s hobby than a complete contrast. But he was already determined not to be confined by politics. In 1951 he admired the effortless way Dalton seemed to manage his departmental work (‘He thought I was exceptional among ministers’, Dalton recorded, ‘in wanting to read books, meet people and go to places unconnected with my Department’).19 This was a model Jenkins would try to emulate when he held office himself. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s he made a point of reading widely – not only history and politics, but contemporary fiction: he kept up with the latest works of all the leading novelists of the day, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell being his particular favourites, as well as continuously revisiting Proust. He also discovered that he was a compulsive writer, and once he had got the habit he was, for the rest of his life, almost never without a book on the go, except for the relatively few years when he was in office, producing eventually some twenty-three titles as well as a continuous outpouring of journalism. No other front-rank politician besides Churchill has ever written so much – or so well.

  His first historical book, following his worthy but dull Attlee biography, was an elegant short account of the House of Lords crisis of 1911 which came out in February 1954. He had been working on it for some time, but put it aside in 1952 to write Pursuit of Progress. Like most of Jenkins’ books, Mr Balfour’s Poodle was based entirely on secondary sources – the biographies of the leading personalities, supplemented by Hansard and the Annual Register. Nevertheless in the period just before the explosion of academic history that followed the expansion of the universities and the opening of official papers in the late 1960s, it was quite an original venture and enjoyed considerable success. It was historical, but described events of only forty years before with unmistakable contemporary resonance. It indulged Jenkins’ identification with the Edwardian period, but at the same time underlined his view of Attlee’s Labour party as the natural inheritor of Asquithian Liberalism, while the Tories of 1950 were implicitly the lineal descendants of the ermined reactionaries of 1910. This continuity was explicitly spelled out in an appendix comparing the se
ats won by the Liberals in 1906 with those won by Labour in 1945. The title – derived from Lloyd George’s famous gibe that the House of Lords, far from being ‘the watchdog of the constitution’, had been reduced to the Leader of the Opposition’s ‘poodle’ – was criticised by some reviewers as too flippant, and some bookshops allegedly shelved it under ‘pets’. But it was generously praised by A.J.P. Taylor, Harold Nicolson and Leonard Woolf, among others, and also by Asquith’s daughter, the redoubtable Lady Violet Bonham Carter, who reviewed it in the Observer and wrote to her son Raymond: ‘It is by a young Labour MP called Roy Jenkins & is extremely good reading, very amusing & very pro-Father.’20 Mr Balfour’s Poodle established Jenkins’ reputation as a serious popular historian overnight. It did not sell particularly well – it earned him just £247 at the time – but it was republished at regular intervals and remains in print to this day.