Roy Jenkins

by John Campbell

  Its success led immediately to his next project. He was actually already in negotiation with Heinemann to write the official biography of Ernest Bevin, who had died in 1951. He had been approached by Arthur Deakin, Bevin’s successor as boss of the TGWU, and was initially ‘flattered and excited’ by the idea, which was for a major project in several volumes, to be financed by the union.21 But the negotiations stalled over Deakin’s insistence on retaining an unacceptable degree of editorial control. Jenkins soon came to realise that Bevin was not really his sort of subject – in fact a less suitable subject can hardly be imagined, trade union affairs not being among his interests – while Deakin began to wish he had commissioned Alan Bullock (as he eventually did) instead. So Jenkins was already looking for a way out when he was offered, out of the blue, a much more attractive alternative.

  Following the launch of Mr Balfour’s Poodle he and Jennifer were dining at the House of Commons with Tony and Caroline Wedgwood Benn when Mark Bonham Carter, who was dining at another table with his brother-in-law Jo Grimond, approached him to suggest that he should write a biography of the Victorian radical Sir Charles Dilke. This was a turning point in Jenkins’ life. Bonham Carter was Asquith’s grandson; he was also a director of the publisher William Collins. He and Jenkins had overlapped at Balliol, but Bonham Carter was two years younger and they had not been friends. Now, however, when Jenkins jumped at the Dilke commission, Bonham Carter became not only his publisher for the next thirty years, but one of his closest friends, as well as a useful link to the Liberal Party, which was still dominated by the Asquith connection.fn3

  Dilke was a wonderful subject, not primarily because he was an important figure in late-Victorian politics, a Cabinet minister under Gladstone and an ally and rival of Joseph Chamberlain, but because his career was wrecked by a sensational divorce scandal. Jenkins quickly read up on the case and accepted Bonham Carter’s invitation to jump ship. His contract, signed in June 1954, required him to deliver the book in eighteen months for an advance of £500. Collins were to have his next book too, unless it was a biography of the French socialist Leon Blum for Weidenfeld – another idea he had evidently been considering.22 In fact it took him twice that time. This time he did use unpublished sources – Dilke’s private papers, which were left by his executrix to the British Museum and only opened, under the terms of her will, in 1955. He thus had the biographer’s dream: a cache of previously unseen material, as well as all the ingredients of a sexual whodunnit to spice up the politics. Dilke was in many ways an admirable and interesting figure, but his biography would not have been a commercial prospect were it not for the scandal that brought him down.

  He had been well placed as a possible successor to Gladstone when he was accused, in July 1885, of having had an affair lasting some two and a half years with the young wife of a Liberal lawyer named Donald Crawford, who sued for divorce, naming Dilke as co-respondent. There was no substantial evidence against Dilke except Mrs Crawford’s uncorroborated word; but her story was highly circumstantial and included the titillating detail that their intercourse had sometimes included a third party – a servant girl named Fanny – ‘all three in a bed together’.23 Dilke strongly denied the allegation. But his counsel decided not to put him in the witness box, since he had enjoyed other affairs (including one with Mrs Crawford’s mother) which might have been revealed in cross-examination. In law his failure to give evidence did not count against him. The judge ruled that Dilke had no case to answer and dismissed the case against him; but at the same time he granted Crawford his divorce. This ambiguous result might have satisfied a private individual, but to a prominent politician whose name had been already dragged through the newspapers it was worse than useless. ‘The verdict,’ as Jenkins wrote, ‘appeared to be that Mrs Crawford had committed adultery with Dilke, but that he had not done so with her.’24 Public opinion, fanned by the pioneering investigative journalist W.T. Stead, assumed him to be guilty.

  Dilke had the case reopened, without success, and spent the remainder of his life collecting evidence to discredit Mrs Crawford’s story. He did actually succeed in resuming his political career; but he never held office again and was effectively ruined. There was in truth ample evidence that Mrs Crawford was a malicious fantasist who had relations with numerous other men but chose to accuse Dilke – for reasons unexplained – in order to secure a divorce from her husband. By his other irregular liaisons, however, Dilke had laid himself open to an accusation that he could not disprove. It was an extraordinary story, with wider political ramifications. It was whispered that either Lord Rosebery or Joe Chamberlain (supposedly Dilke’s closest ally) was behind the conspiracy to destroy his rival: both had curious dealings with Mrs Crawford. In his biography Jenkins was forced to conclude that the truth will never be known; but not before he had spent 150 pages – two-fifths of his book – scrupulously examining and testing the various allegations and hypotheses. No detail was spared, yet he contrived to treat the subject with perfect taste, for which the Times’ anonymous reviewer was profoundly grateful:

  Everyone who was aware of the extraordinary facts of Dilke’s life knew that once the papers could be got at there would be a sensational biography. It might well have been a pornographic one . . . One shudders to think what treatment this Life might have been given had it got into the hands of a brash biographer. Happily Mr Jenkins has treated it in just the right way.25

  The book, published in October 1958, reads quite dully today, but at the time it attracted enormous interest. Of all the generous reviews, perhaps the most gratifying was A.J.P. Taylor’s in the Observer:

  Mr Jenkins is an admirable writer who gets better with every volume that he produces. No Member of Parliament spends his time more rewardingly. Instead of gossiping in the smoking room, he works in the library; and puts every reader increasingly in his debt . . . If all Members of Parliament were as gifted as Mr Jenkins, professional writers would have reason to worry.26

  In addition, Jenkins received dozens of letters – from friends, from the great and good and from members of the public – congratulating him and offering new theories or titbits of evidence. He replied to them all. The Irish historian, diplomat and politician Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote that he believed Chamberlain was behind the conspiracy to ruin Dilke. Jenkins replied: ‘I agree entirely with what you say in this respect, but I could not tie up the details in a way to make me feel at all convinced that he was behind the whole matter.’ But he did not exclude it.27 Forty years later, when he contributed the Dilke entry to the new Dictionary of National Biography, Jenkins still acknowledged ‘considerable circumstantial evidence’ against Chamberlain, ‘but an absence of a convincing motive’.28 Ultimately, therefore, the story was frustratingly inconclusive. Meanwhile the mystery was made into both a television drama and, in 1964, a successful stage play, which ran for a year in the West End (under the title Right Honourable Gentleman) starring Anthony Quayle and Anna Massey. Jenkins received no money from this, though the play was clearly based on his book, but decided not to sue.

  The second strand of his writing was journalism. During his first three years in Parliament he had written about once a month for Tribune and occasionally elsewhere, mainly on economic subjects; but between 1951 and 1956 he enjoyed a wonderful opportunity to learn the harder discipline of writing a weekly column for an Indian paper called The Current, published in Bombay by a wealthy anti-Nehru MP, D.F. Karaka, who had been president of the Oxford Union in 1934 and married Roy’s cousin, Connie Peppin (now known as Pita). It was a bizarrely Anglophile publication, which billed itself (despite copious glamorous pin-ups of Western film stars) as ‘The Paper That’s Read in Clean Indian Homes’ and claimed a circulation of ‘under 1,000,000’. Puffed as ‘one of the most brilliant young members of the British House of Commons’, Jenkins was paid £5 per column: more important was the chance to hone his journalistic craft, week in, week out, with little likelihood of anyone in Britain reading what he wrote. His audie
nce was assumed to be closely interested in the minutiae of British politics, so much of what he wrote was a commentary on the week’s events at Westminster, which he described with a freedom and a satirical edge that he would not have risked in a British publication. A second theme was international affairs: he expatiated with seeming authority about the emergence of Communist China, the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, the prospects of German reunification, and a good deal about European politics – French, Italian, Yugoslav, all in a rigidly Cold War context – at a time when he never spoke on foreign affairs in the Commons. Finally he gave his readers a commentary on the British social scene, describing phenomena of such burning interest to the Bombay middle class as the Boat Race, ‘Teddy Boy’ fashion and Princess Margaret’s romance with Peter Townsend. These more trivial columns are in fact the ones of most enduring interest. He described the smog in London, the appalling traffic and Britain’s terrible roads; the thrilling draw in the Lord’s Test of 1953, which brought the House of Commons to a halt; declining standards of crowd behaviour at Wimbledon, with – already – few British players to support; and Billy Graham’s latest missionary crusade, which he thought unlikely to succeed, as ‘The English do not much like being evangelised’.29 Whether he actually went to Wembley to witness this event for himself before writing about it, however, must be doubtful. He filed an equally colourful report of the Coronation, describing peers and peeresses in their robes and coronets queuing at High Street Kensington tube station for a special train to take them to the Abbey – although he was actually in Pontypool, convalescing from glandular fever!

  This piece contained some interesting thoughts about the new Elizabethan age, however. He anticipated a long reign – he was right there at least – but also major changes to the monarchy that would render the ‘semi-feudal splendour’ of the Coronation still more incongruous, so that it might be the last ceremony of its kind.30 In the same vein he used his column to try out his progressive views about controversial social questions which he would shortly make his own: the campaign for equal pay (March 1954); homosexuality (April 1954); the prosecution of leading publishers for obscenity (November 1954); the first Commons vote to abolish hanging (February 1955); and the execution of Ruth Ellis (July 1956). Most characteristically, perhaps, he constantly described the weather – always an obsessive preoccupation. His very first column, in September 1951, set the tone: ‘It has been a dismal week, with the worst weather of the summer adding itself to the more serious disappointments of the breakdown of the Korean armistice talks and the failure of the Stokes mission to Persia.’31 Another, in 1955, began: ‘The Christmas weather has been calm and mild; but into the Foreign Offices of the Western World the French National Assembly has injected an atmosphere of storm.’32 In August 1954 he devoted a whole article to the miserably wet summer and speculated whether it was due to hydrogen bombs, jet aircraft or simply a bad year with seventeenth-century parallels in Pepys’ diary. The whole five-year span of these columns adds up to an extraordinarily vivid chronicle of the political and social scene in the early 1950s; it also turned Jenkins into a thoroughly accomplished journalist.

  A third genre that he began to develop in these years was travel-writing. The first year he appeared in Who’s Who (1949) he listed his recreation as ‘foreign travel’; and for the rest of his life he was addicted to it, making a point of recording how many times he had visited each country, where he had stayed and dined and what he ate. The apotheosis of this habit was his penultimate book, Twelve Cities, published in 2002, in which he stated, among other similar statistics, that he had visited Paris twenty times between 1947 and 1959 and New York nearly 200 times over five decades. Some of these trips were purely recreational, accompanied by Jennifer; but mostly they had some political or journalistic pretext, and he became very good at combining the two. Wherever he went he usually managed to get an article out of it, initially for The Current, then later and more lucratively for various British papers. In September 1951 he visited Yugoslavia and opened his report from Ljubljana with a strikingly evocative sentence: ‘The season for the starting of European wars is drawing to a close, and the Yugoslavs, more than most peoples, heave a sigh of relief for every week that passes without a Russian move.’33 In 1953 he went to America for the first time and not only described his general impressions over several weeks in The Current, but also wrote a long piece for The Sphere about the American iron and steel industry. And later in the decade, in 1958, he visited the Middle East and wrote four partly political, partly descriptive articles for the Birmingham Mail – from Kuwait, where he saw the new oil wealth beginning to change the traditional society (‘Cadillacs instead of camels’); Teheran, which he thought ‘a dull city . . . the streets have a nondescript air which I associate with the less attractive parts of Washington’); Beirut, where the leader of the Muslim insurgents received him with ‘three tommy guns hanging rather ostentatiously on the wall’; Baghdad (‘a hot, sticky, ugly town’) and Amman, which ‘reminded me more of Ebbw Vale than of a capital city’.34 His pieces on Jordan and Iraq were reprinted in the Spectator.35 Here, as in some of his more serious columns for The Current, one can see Jenkins beginning to fancy himself as a future Foreign Secretary.

  His 1953 visit to America opened an important new dimension to his life. He travelled – by sea, arriving in New York on the Queen Mary, no less – as part of a US government scheme to bring ‘young leaders’ to America; and in his case it was money well invested. Hitherto he had been, as he later wrote, ‘a young backbencher with few American contacts’,36 a staunch supporter of the Atlantic Alliance, grateful for Marshall Aid but critical of American capitalism. The two months he spent in the autumn of 1953, however, mainly on the East Coast in Washington, New York and Boston, but including a quick swing around the West Coast, the Midwest and the Deep South, ‘transformed my thinking and my emotions about the United States’. Since then, he wrote in his memoirs, ‘I have believed (probably falsely) that I understood America, and have felt very engaged with it’37 – an engagement that was not at all diminished by his later commitment to Britain’s role in Europe. His understanding was in truth very partial, since the contacts he made were almost entirely with the East Coast Democratic elite. He met the leading liberal Senator of the day, Hubert Humphrey, in Minnesota, and had an hour’s interview in Kansas City with ex-President Truman, whom he revered as a great president, but was naively disappointed to find showed ‘no evidence of genius, either hidden or overt’.38 But above all at Harvard he met the historian Arthur Schlesinger and the economist J.K. Galbraith, intellectual pillars of the Democratic establishment who became two of his closest friends: more than anyone else, their friendship enabled him henceforth to feel equally at home in liberal circles on both sides of the Atlantic.

  Quite early in his tour, however, he received news of his mother’s death – from a stroke at the age of sixty-seven. He had to fly home (from Detroit) for the funeral, but returned the next day to resume his interrupted schedule. As a result he missed out Chicago: an omission he compared to visiting Athens without seeing the Parthenon.39 He then continued on his way, reporting to The Current from Washington (on the ongoing McCarthy hearings and fears of an American slump), from San Francisco (on the West Coast’s preoccupation with China rather than Europe) and from Atlanta (on marginally improved conditions for African Americans – by which he meant fewer lynchings, though he was optimistic that ‘the discrimination which still exists has only a fairly short life ahead of it’), while never failing to describe the weather: the energy-sapping heat in Washington or the fog in San Francisco.40 He missed the Labour Party conference, but returned in time for the beginning of the new session of Parliament in November.

  Hattie’s death made possible a huge change in Roy and Jennifer’s family and social life. By the end of 1953 their third child, Edward, was on the way, joining Charles (born 1949) and Cynthia (born 1951). The flat in Cornwall Gardens was not exactly too small for this growing family �
� it was a big flat, on two floors – but it was increasingly inconvenient. No one wishes their parents’ death, but his mother’s passing fortuitously enabled Roy to sell Greenlands and look to buy somewhere more commensurate with his expanding lifestyle. They eventually found a tall early-Victorian house in North Kensington, just off Notting Hill Gate. Notting Hill, so expensive today, was then a run-down and still bomb-damaged area – the communal gardens fenced with chicken wire and the houses mainly divided into bedsits. As late as 1967 the New York Times described Ladbroke Square, not inaccurately, as ‘a comfortable island in the somewhat seedy Notting Hill area of London’.41 But 33 Ladbroke Square was a fine house and an excellent investment, as more middle-class professional families started to move into the area in the late 1950s and 1960s. Roy and Jennifer bought it for £5,250, but had to spend another £1,750 doing it up. To pay for this Roy negotiated an overdraft of £1,200 with Barclays in Pontypool; Tony Crosland stood guarantor for half of this loan.42

  They moved in the summer of 1954, shortly before Edward was born. With three young children as well as a large house to run, Jennifer was now primarily a housewife and mother – not at all the life she had imagined during the war. But she was far too energetic and public-spirited to be confined to the home. She had been obliged to give up her job with PEP in 1948, but she had not surrendered her independence: she did some extramural lecturing in the early 1950s and was soon laying the foundation for a remarkable career with a succession of admirable organisations. She was involved with the Consumers’ Association from its foundation (by the sociologist Michael Young, a former director of PEP) in 1957, joined the board and in 1965 succeeded Young as chairman. She quickly proved to be a consummate committee woman, and further appointments followed as she had more time: with the Design Council, the British Standards Institution and the Ancient Monuments Society – of which she was secretary (initially from Cynthia’s bedroom) in 1972–5 and ultimately president. She also served as a juvenile magistrate (standing aside when Roy was Home Secretary) and much later as chairman of the Historic Buildings Council (now English Heritage) and the National Trust, as well as a director of Sainsbury’s and the Abbey National. From the beginning of their marriage, or certainly from the moment Roy got into Parliament, they lived very independent lives: when Roy was not at the House of Commons until all hours he would often be away, in Birmingham or somewhere else around the country or abroad, for politics or pleasure, or the two combined. Yet it remained an exceptionally strong marriage, despite the strains that Roy imposed on it. Jennifer took an active interest in his career, yet allowed him freedom to pursue his own amusements; he relied heavily on her political judgement at every major turning point, while leaving domestic matters – even questions relating to the children – entirely to her. ‘It is not a matter of principle to me that the mother should make decisions about the children rather than the father,’ he told the Observer in 1967, ‘but equally it isn’t a matter of principle the other way. One thing is right in one family, and another is right in another family. This solution is right in my family, and I am perfectly happy that it should be so.’43