Roy and Jennifer Jenkins were among our favourite political guests because they were free from the compulsion to talk politics and really enjoyed talking about art and literature. When politics came up, Roy would always have interesting historical analogies to bring into the argument, for his scholarship was profound and in consequence his political ideas never partisan.66
This lack of partisanship should not be exaggerated – Jenkins was still by day a fully engaged Labour politician – but his historical perspective enabled him to make friends easily across the political divide. ‘As is so often the case in politics,’ he wrote years later of Labour’s first Chancellor, Philip Snowden, ‘he found it easier to get on with his opponents, while reserving his contempt and even enmity for his honourable friends.’67 Jenkins did not feel enmity or contempt for many people in his world, but he undisguisedly preferred the company of those who shared and – through their possession of agreeable country houses – helped to feed his increasingly expensive tastes. One such was John Jacob (‘Jakie’) Astor, the fourth son of Waldorf and Nancy Astor, who was Tory MP for Plymouth, Sutton, and Jenkins’ House of Commons ‘pair’ – that is, they cancelled each other out when both were absent from the House – until he stood down in 1959. Through Jakie, Jenkins got to know the rest of the Astor dynasty: his brothers Bill (the third Viscount, later caught up in the Profumo scandal); David (the editor-proprietor of the Observer); and Michael (also briefly an MP in the late 1940s). Jakie owned a big house at Hatley in Bedfordshire, and from 1961 let the dower house to Roy and Jennifer for holidays and weekends, with use of its large park, including tennis court and swimming pool, where Roy could play at being a country gentleman.
Another important connection was Ann Fleming. Born Ann Charteris, granddaughter of the ninth Earl of Wemyss, married successively to the third Baron O’Neill (who was killed in the war), the second Viscount Rothermere (the owner of the Daily Mail) and now (not very happily) Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, she was one of those dazzling, witty, but essentially shallow aristocratic women who found her métier as a hostess, entertaining a lively salon of writers, artists and academics, as well as the more interesting politicians, first at her London house in Victoria Square and later at her country house at Sevenhampton in Wiltshire. Though a thoroughgoing Tory and a crashing snob, she enjoyed catching Labour politicians in her net, most prominently Hugh Gaitskell, with whom she conducted a discreet affair from 1956 until his death, but also the rising stars of the party, including both Jenkins and Crosland.fn8 According to one friend, the publisher George Weidenfeld, she liked Roy ‘for his urbane conversation and slightly deferential affection’, and Tony for his ‘acerbic intellect and sheer good looks. She also liked their wives, which was rare.’69 Crosland lent Gaitskell his Chelsea flat for his assignations with Ann; she allegedly confessed that when in bed with Gaitskell she liked to imagine herself in the arms of the more dashing Crosland.70 Ann’s guilt-free adultery was typical of the smart world in which she lived – an Edwardian world, part aristocratic, part Bloomsbury, to which Jenkins was powerfully attracted and whose relaxed sexual mores he enthusiastically embraced.
From quite early in his marriage he was an unfaithful husband. After the first intensity of their wartime romance the physical side of the Jenkins’ marriage was never satisfactory. Like many driven men, Roy was highly sexed. Jennifer was not. She bore him three children between 1949 and 1954, but he was already seeking variety elsewhere, and Jennifer soon accepted – probably with relief – that he should do so, so long as there was no scandal, which there never was because he was not in the normal sense of the word a womaniser. He did not pursue his secretaries. All his extramarital relationships were first and foremost friendships – amitiés amoureuses, in which the amitié came first and the amour was secondary, like the cigar after a good dinner. They were all enduring relationships with mature, sophisticated and intelligent women, and well known to Jennifer. There was no scandal because he was careful to conduct all his affairs within strong marriages which they never threatened to break up; the two most important girlfriends of his middle and later years were the wives of two of his best friends. In the upper-class society of the 1950s and 1960s this was not unusual; and those who moved in those circles embraced the same freedom from middle-class morality. Gaitskell’s affair with Ann Fleming did not endanger his marriage to his wife Dora, nor did it weaken her devotion to his memory after his death. It was pretty well accepted that men had mistresses, and that wives too – once they had borne two or three children – had lovers. Roy and Jennifer were genuinely devoted to one another; but Jennifer accepted that Roy was ‘gregarious’ and had (like many charismatic politicians, from David Lloyd George to John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton) exceptional sexual energy. She was actually grateful – ‘within limits’ – to those who took the burden off her, so long as she liked them, which she generally did, and trusted them not to steal Roy from his primary loyalty to her. It was not perhaps what she had imagined when she married; but it was ‘not intolerable’. He in turn said that he ‘could not imagine loving anyone who was not very fond of Jennifer’. She put up with it because, with all his faults, she loved Roy, was devoted to his career and enjoyed his company and conversation more than anyone else’s; meanwhile he allowed her the independence, as the children grew up, to live her own life and pursue her own career.71
His infidelities probably started around 1950 or 1951 – that is, a year or so after Jennifer gave birth to their first child – when he became infatuated with Barley Alison, then a strikingly unconventional young diplomat. Born in Cannes, the daughter of an English mother and Scottish father who had inherited an Australian fortune, educated in France, Australia, Malaya and Kent, Barley had been a debutante in London just before the war, but was then recruited into SOE (the Special Operations Executive) and sent to Algiers, where she worked under Duff Cooper briefing and debriefing the agents who were being landed in occupied France to ‘set Europe ablaze’. When Cooper was appointed ambassador to liberated Paris in 1944 he took Barley with him. Despite her lack of formal qualifications she quickly became a Third, then Second Secretary – a rare distinction for a woman in the diplomatic service. In post-war Paris she knew Sartre, Cocteau and Camus, then moved in 1949 to the Foreign Office in London where she continued to mix in literary and artistic circles. It is not clear when she met Jenkins, but a letter she wrote him years later indicates that she knew him before he was thirty, so probably during 1950. Her name starts to appear in his engagement diary from the beginning of 1951. She was petite, dark, quick, exotic and evidently fascinating. By the summer of 1952 Jenkins was writing her passionate letters, some of which survive.
From a holiday cottage on the north coast of Brittany where he was staying with Jennifer and the two children – plus Tony Crosland – he wrote that he thought about her ‘almost incessantly’, but was careful not to mention her name in conversation.72 A few days later (by which time he was on his way to give a lecture in Berlin) he told her very frankly what was lacking in his marriage and wondered whether Jennifer knew about Barley or was deliberately closing her mind to the knowledge. He was missing Barley very much and longed to see her again.73 These letters were addressed to ‘my love’, but signed off with the same curious calibration of affection as his wartime letters to Jennifer: ‘Too much love’, ‘Quite a lot of love’ or ‘At best an average amount of love’.74 By 1953 the affair had cooled, but Roy still saw Barley as a confidante. Touring America that autumn, he wrote her long letters describing his impressions of the various cities he visited. ‘Every time I think of a good remark about America I long to have you to make it to. I know this will confirm your view that I merely treat you as an audience, but you are without question the best in the world!’75 By now Barley seems to have realised that a relationship with a married man who was not going to leave his wife offered her no future; she ended the affair, though Roy tried to keep it going a bit longer. In 1953 she left the Foreign Office and,
after a short spell of travel and freelance journalism, went into publishing. She joined George Weidenfeld as his fiction editor and over the following years built up a remarkable list of authors including Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, Piers Paul Read and Margaret Drabble, until in 1967 she left (taking her authors with her) to set up her own imprint, the Alison Press, as part of Secker & Warburg. Their affair gradually petered out, but she and Jenkins remained good friends. In 1954–5 they still met almost weekly for lunch or a drink or dinner; but Barley would also come to lunch or dinner at Ladbroke Square, where her brother Michael (later a Tory MP) was for some years the Jenkins’ basement lodger. She was now a family friend, to the extent that she was godmother to the Jenkins’ third child, Edward (born in 1954), and gave them all presents at Christmas.fn9 Barley had several more relationships and some heartbreaks over the years but never married. She remained an extraordinarily original and vibrant figure on the London literary scene, famous both for her parties – she was never without a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other – and for her devotion to her authors. When she died in 1989, aged only sixty-nine, but now a white-haired grande dame looking much older than her years – her Times obituary celebrated ‘one of the most outstanding and enterprising personalities in contemporary publishing’.77 Jenkins remained on good terms with her to the end and attended her funeral.
Barley Alison was unusual among Jenkins’ lovers in that she was not married. All the others were. Another probable early mistress was Helena Tiné, the wife of a young French diplomat based in London in the mid-1950s. She and her husband too became lifelong friends. Many years later, when Jenkins was President of the European Commission, Jacques Tiné was also in Brussels as French Ambassador to NATO, and he and Helena were frequent dinner guests. Jenkins’ two most important and enduring extramarital relationships, however, dated from the late 1950s and early 1960s. The first was Caroline Gilmour, the wife of the owner/editor of the Spectator and (from 1962) Tory MP, Ian Gilmour. Born Lady Caroline Montagu Douglas Scott, she was the daughter of the eighth Duke of Buccleuch (owner of some 280,000 acres spread over four estates in the Scottish Borders) and an aristocrat to her fingertips – slim, elegant, cool and slightly aloof. The second – a much softer and gentler personality – was Leslie Bonham Carter, the American-born daughter of Condé Nast (founder of the magazine empire), who was briefly married to the second Baron St Just, before marrying in 1955 Jenkins’ Balliol contemporary, now his publisher, Asquith’s grandson Mark Bonham Carter. Both women in their different ways exemplified the sort of upper-class society that Jenkins now inhabited in his private life when he was not being a Labour MP.
There has been much discussion about whether Gaitskell’s secret relationship with Ann Fleming was an appropriate liaison for the leader of the Labour party, and whether it influenced his politics. His most recent biographer, Brian Brivati, insists that Ann ‘meant nothing’ to him politically. ‘The picture of Gaitskell being sucked into a Tory world and turning his back on the class to which he was committed underestimates the man . . . She appealed to another part of himself entirely, and his ability to keep separate people who appealed to different parts of him had been illustrated over and over again in his life.’78 The same questions have been asked about Jenkins, and in his case it is difficult to be as confident as Brivati is about Gaitskell. For one thing, Gaitskell was a Wykehamist to start with, so he was less likely to be dazzled by upper-class society. For the same reason Gaitskell was always acutely conscious of his need, as a middle-class Labour leader, to cultivate his working-class support and was assiduous in attending trade union events and conferences – something Jenkins rarely felt the need to do. Jenkins compartmentalised his life only to the extent that he kept Birmingham separate from London. He performed his constituency duties conscientiously; but the rest of his political, literary and social life merged into one quasi-Edwardian round as his political style became self-consciously Asquithian. The widening of his social circle in the 1950s undoubtedly coincided with the dropping of his more left-wing ideas, most obviously towards the public schools. In an article in The Current on the defection of the spies Burgess and Maclean in 1955 he went out of his way not to criticise the number of Etonians in the Foreign Office, insisting that Eton was an excellent school and you would find a lot of Old Etonians among successful men in any sphere.79 In sending his own children to private schools he was by no means unusual in the Labour Party of the day, whose upper ranks from Attlee and Gaitskell down were dominated by public-school boys. Even the grammar-school products like Harold Wilson often sent their own sons to private schools without drawing serious criticism. In that respect Jenkins was no different from many others. ‘I do not think it is any worse for a Socialist to do this,’ he argued, ‘than it was for my father to pay my fees at Balliol before the war.’80 Nevertheless the impression that the company he kept accelerated his evolution away from socialism is difficult to deny.
Tony Crosland was not best placed to criticise Gaitskell or Jenkins in this respect. But when Susan Barnes reminded him of his own ‘Dukes’ Daughters period’ he explained to her – as she reconstructed his conversation many years later – that there was actually ‘a basic difference’:
Going to bed with some little actress . . . is hardly likely to affect one’s political standpoint. If you choose to associate, as Hugh does, with intelligent people whose political values are the opposite to your own, an insidious erosion of your political values can occur. I mightn’t think that if I hadn’t seen what’s happened to Roy.81
Jenkins did have one other interest which helped keep his feet on the ground. From 1953 until he entered government in 1964 he worked about one and a half days a week as a financial consultant for the John Lewis Partnership. This came about at the invitation of John Spedan Lewis, the son of the founder of the firm, who had read Pursuit of Progress and been impressed by it – though, according to Susan Crosland, the job was first offered to Tony, who turned it down.82 The profit-sharing philosophy of John Lewis made it a suitable sideline for a Labour MP, as well as a useful supplement to his income, as Spedan Lewis made clear in offering Jenkins the job:
You may, I hope, feel that an inside view of an enterprise of this kind might give some useful light upon pressing and weighty problems of the peaceful evolution of capitalism towards a healthier and more decent society. The supreme purpose of the Partnership’s creation was to throw light upon those problems.83
In a later letter Lewis hoped that the John Lewis Partnership could ‘resemble in a tiny way but to an appreciable extent the Athenian democracy in its best days’.84 When Jenkins – after consulting his leading supporters in Stechford – accepted, Lewis hoped it would prove ‘a useful general experience at your stage in a career of statesmanship’.85 Jenkins’ job, according to the chairman, Sir Bernard Miller, was to attend monthly board meetings and ‘give us an intelligent feel of what was happening in the economy, a broad economic picture, if you like’.86 For this he was paid £1,212 a year, plus a bonus paid in shares, which at the time was more than his parliamentary salary, though the latter rose to £1,250 in 1954 and his literary earnings soon outstripped both. His freelance income in 1955 was already £1,666, rising to £1,838 in 1957–8 and £2,977 in 1959–60. In addition he and Jennifer made £194 in 1955 from letting the basement of Ladbroke Square; and Jennifer contributed small sums (£62 in 1956) in lecture fees. His total income from all sources in the mid-1950s was thus around £3,000 a year (about £60,000 today).87 For comparison, Cabinet ministers at this time earned £5,000 and the Prime Minister £10,000.
For a few years he employed a literary agent – ‘a splendid literary gent of the period, with fine handlebar moustaches and a permanent occupancy of one of the two window tables in the Etoile restaurant’ – but soon dispensed with his services and did not acquire another until the 1980s.88 He paid an accountant, originally based in Piccadilly until she moved to Edinburgh, to handle his finances, but here too he was quite hands-
on himself: his personal accounts are detailed and scrupulous, but he did not like paying any more tax than necessary and was constantly challenging the Revenue’s demands. He was also in frequent correspondence with his bank manager in Pontypool to renegotiate his overdraft. In July 1957 he assured Mr Dibble, confidently but as it turned out wrongly, that MPs’ salaries were likely to be raised again shortly to £1,750 (in fact they were not raised again until 1964). Meanwhile he was owed £100 in repaid Indian income tax (presumably on his earnings from The Current); his new book (Dilke) was nearly finished; and he would deposit some shares (Hoover and John Lewis). By these means he hoped to keep within his £1,200 limit. Three years later, in 1960, as a result of Selwyn Lloyd’s credit restrictions, his limit was cut to £700. Jenkins appealed and requested an increase to £850, which was agreed.89
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