Altogether he lived well, but worked hard for it. The experience of sustaining a comfortable lifestyle by supplementing his parliamentary salary mainly by writing gave him a special insight, years later, when he came to write his biography of Churchill: he devoted a whole chapter, which other writers might not have done, to Churchill’s unending struggle to maintain Chartwell and support his family in the 1930s by a ‘frenzy of authorship and journalism’.90 Neither Jenkins’ earnings nor his outgoings were on Churchill’s scale; nevertheless his literary output and the range of his political and other activity in the 1950s should have been sufficient to refute the idea that he was lazy.
Meanwhile party politics were in a curious state of suspension. Churchill continued as Prime Minister, his failing health largely concealed from the public by a still-deferential press, repeatedly postponing his retirement in the belief that he alone could do a deal with Stalin to secure a lasting peace, and stretching the patience of his long-suffering heir apparent, Anthony Eden, almost to breaking point. On the Labour side, too, Attlee hung on as Leader of the Opposition mainly in order to block Herbert Morrison, while offering little sustained criticism of the government or sense of a dynamic alternative. Though the philosophical gulf between the parties was still wide, the practical difference between the economic policies of the Tory Chancellor, ‘Rab’ Butler, and his Labour shadow, Hugh Gaitskell, was so narrow – to the frustration of their more militant supporters on both right and left – that The Economist lumped them together as the composite centrist figure of ‘Mr Butskell’. Almost the only excitement in politics derived from the continuing fratricidal war between Gaitskellites and Bevanites within the Labour party.
In this battle Jenkins was not just a devoted Gaitskellite, but now viscerally anti-Bevan. In December 1953 he explained the right’s position candidly to Dick Crossman (himself a somewhat maverick Bevanite):
‘They – I mean we – feel that every speech, every action must now be considered as part of the power fight within the Party. That’s why we hate Bevanism. Before it began one could have free speech. Now one can’t afford to.’ He repeated several times, ‘We on the right feel that every force of demagogy and every emotion is against us. In the constituency parties, which are now Opposition-minded, the Bevanites have it all their own way. I suppose one must wait for the tide to turn, as it slowly did in the 1930s, away from the opposition-mindedness of 1931 to constructive policies.’
I asked him why he thought it was so terribly important to defeat the Bevanites and he said, ‘The electorate is extremely Conservative-minded and we can never win except with that kind of attitude represented by the right-wing leadership.’ He also added that, for people like himself and Tony Crosland, the very existence of the Bevanites and their popularity was the major factor in making him loyal to Gaitskell. In the sort of hopeless fight that Gaitskell was waging, one had to stand by him.
What was interesting about the whole talk, which lasted for an hour and a half, was Roy’s feeling that they were battling against the tide in the constituencies, that they must hang on for dear life. He also repeatedly emphasised that, just because the Bevanites were so strong, Gaitskell was more and more forced to rely on forces such as Arthur Deakin, which made him even further to the right than he would naturally be.91
It was the left’s opposition-mindedness that exasperated Jenkins. He was already, by temperament and conviction, a man of government, interested in winning and using power, not in the emotional satisfaction of empty protest. He saw the division in the Labour party after 1951 as a fundamental difference between, on the one side, serious politicians whose concern was to get back into office in order to give a better life to the mass of the population, according to certain principles but recognising the constraints of the real world and ready if necessary to make hard choices between shades of grey; and, on the other, a gang of irresponsible play-actors, some of them warm-hearted romantics, others narrow-minded ideologues, temperamentally suspicious of power and only concerned to preserve their sense of righteous indignation. His fear was that the self-indulgent posturing of the left would prevent the right from regaining power to resume the pursuit of progress. This fear was perfectly crystallised by Bevan’s second impulsive resignation from the Labour front bench in April 1954 over a relatively trivial disagreement with Attlee about Britain’s role in SEATO (the South East Asia Treaty Organisation, intended as a sort of Asian equivalent of NATO), which had taken the heat off the Tories just when things seemed to be going Labour’s way. Bevan, Jenkins wrote in The Current, ‘will not become Prime Minister, but there seems a real danger that he may prevent any other Labour man in his lifetime from doing so either’.92
Yet he could be critical of Gaitskell too. When the following year Bevan staged another intemperate outburst on the floor of the House of Commons, subjecting Attlee to a humiliating interrogation about Labour’s carefully fudged position on the use of nuclear weapons, he gave the disciplinarians in the Shadow Cabinet who wanted him out of the party what they thought the perfect excuse to withdraw the whip as a prelude to expelling him. After some hesitation, Gaitskell backed the hardliners led by Herbert Morrison. To Crossman, he revealed the depth of his paranoia by comparing Bevan to Hitler: ‘There are extraordinary parallels . . . They are demagogues of exactly the same sort.’ ‘If Nye were out of the Party,’ he argued, ‘the main Tory propaganda for the next Election would be killed, whereas if the Executive failed to carry his expulsion the Tories would assert that Bevan is indispensable and the main master of the Party.’93 But this sort of talk was too much for Gaitskell’s younger acolytes, who recognised that Bevan, difficult though he was, had a large following and a legitimate place in the party, as Tony Crosland told Dalton: ‘Tony . . . is very vexed with Hugh for taking, as he thinks, the wrong line over Bevan . . . He, with Roy Jenkins, Woodrow Wyatt, [Fred] Mulley and [Austen] Albu have been unconditional, unquestioning Gaitskellites, but now they are going to tell him what they think of this last incident.’94 Three days later Crosland, Jenkins and Wyatt wrote their leader a warning letter. ‘You must excuse this slightly formal letter,’ they began, ‘but we want you to consider seriously the views that it expresses.’ They believed not only that the Shadow Cabinet was wrong to press for the withdrawal of the whip on this occasion, but that it had mishandled several previous episodes too:
On all these occasions . . . we supported the platform with our votes . . . with various degrees of misgivings. There must, however, be a limit to the number of times on which one can vote the straight ‘ticket’ merely out of loyalty and regardless of our personal views. We therefore feel that we must in future have some freedom of action; and we think you ought to know that this is our present mood . . .
You know us well enough to realise that this in no way affects our feelings of both personal and political loyalty to you. We are pleased to be called ‘Gaitskellites’; we want you to be leader of the Party in the future and we shall do everything we can to see that you are.
We have, of course, occasional differences, in particular over Morrison. This is part of a wider view of ours that it is essential that any ‘Right wing’ leader must have the fairly solid support of the centre, which Attlee has, which Morrison does not, and which we want you to have. Our difference of opinion only arises because we believe that you and the ‘Right wing’ must in the future carry many people whose support you did not have last Wednesday morning.
Do not please think you have to write a reply to this – if one comes we shall all be too frightened to open the envelope! Can we not meet soon?
Yours ever
Roy, Woodrow, Tony95
Though happy to be Gaitskellites, Dalton’s ‘three wise young men’ were also anxious not to be identified too closely with the right. When they met over a boozy lunch in Hampstead two weeks later they told Gaitskell directly that he was ‘getting labelled Right Wing. And must devote more time and effort to attacking Tories.’ In reply Gaitskell retorted slightly peevishly that ‘h
e had to do so much of the anti-Bevan fighting because others did so little . . . some of his Trade Union supporters sometimes asked him why his young intellectual supporters didn’t take a larger share.’96 In the meantime, however, Attlee – the object of Bevan’s original outburst – had belatedly asserted himself in the cause of unity and by a single vote (14:13) the NEC drew back from the folly of expelling the party’s most charismatic leader at the beginning of what was likely to be an election year. Nevertheless the whole prolonged rumpus was a wonderful gift to the Tories. Just seven days after it was resolved Eden finally succeeded Churchill and immediately sought his own mandate.
Jenkins recalled the 1955 General Election as the dullest he ever fought. With a new, handsome and relatively young Prime Minister pitched against an elderly and bitterly divided Opposition, the Korean War over, a new Queen on the throne and the last vestiges of rationing finally lifted, the Conservatives could hardly fail to increase their majority. In fact, as Jenkins – writing in a Birmingham local paper – correctly warned, the economic outlook was less rosy than it appeared.97 Butler’s spring budget, taking sixpence off income tax, was a blatant bribe that fed the summer feel-good factor, but had to be embarrassingly reversed in the autumn once it had achieved its electoral purpose. In the meantime Jenkins, like most other candidates, had to go through the motions of a contest whose result, despite substantial boundary changes, was never in doubt. In The Current – where he could be fairly sure that no one at home would read it – he confessed the unspeakable truth that ‘most candidates would do equally well if they retired to the south of France for a fortnight’s holiday and issued an election address from there!’ But with characteristic precision he went on to give his Bombay readers a useful account of what electioneering in the 1950s involved – utterly different from half a century later.
He had already, he said, spent three days in Birmingham on ‘preliminary work’: drawing up his election address and getting it to the printers, writing several articles for local papers to appear during the campaign, and holding ‘a workers’ meeting . . . attended by about fifty of the keenest Labour party supporters, who were told the election plans by my agent and given a talk on general policy issues by myself’. Since then he had spent two days back in London clearing up other work, before going to Grantham to speak at three village meetings ‘on behalf of my friend Woodrow Wyatt, who has had to leave his previous constituency and is to fight there’. The next day he would return to Birmingham to hand in his nomination papers to the Lord Mayor. ‘Afterwards he will give us a drink and I will chat politely to my Conservative opponent, whom I have not yet met, and do the same rather less formally with some of the other Members for the City whom I knew in the last Parliament. Then we will have our photographs taken for the press, and the ceremony will be over.’
Since his seat was considered safe he would then do an evening meeting in a neighbouring marginal, before setting off on a three-day tour of the South-West arranged for him by Labour headquarters, doing two or three meetings every evening and one or two open-air meetings with a loudspeaker van during the day:
On Sunday, eleven days before the poll, I go back to Birmingham to start my own campaign in earnest. Apart from one quick visit to Southampton to speak for another close friend of mine who is fighting a very difficult seat,fn10 I shall from then on be continuously in Birmingham. I shall hold twelve indoor meetings in my own constituency. These will take place in school halls with an average capacity of about 150 people. If the experience of 1951 is any guide they will all be very well filled. But some people take the view that the great spread of television in the last three-and-a-half years will make attendance at meetings far worse than was previously the case.
In addition, there will be a great rally in a large covered market in the centre of the City. One of the other candidates in Birmingham will be in the chair, I will address the meeting for twenty minutes to half an hour, and Mr Attlee will follow and speak for about the same time. On this occasion we hope to have an attendance of ten thousand. Three days later the Conservatives will be holding a similar gathering in the same place, when their principal speaker will be the new Prime Minister.
Whether all this will affect the result I cannot say. I know that at the end of it I shall be very tired. I know too that if one did not exhaust oneself there would be little possibility of getting one’s supporters to work really hard. And their morale is of great importance. So perhaps it is all worth while.98
He was right about the effect of television on meetings. This was not because voters got their politics from the television – there was no election coverage apart from the official party broadcasts: the first election in which television played a significant part was 1959 – but simply because there was now better entertainment to be had by staying in. Compared with the three previous post-war elections, Jenkins wrote in a second article just before polling day, ‘meetings are sparsely attended – in some . . . the platform outnumbers the audience – workers are fewer and less eager to help, and the busy cheerful hum of the committee room is absent’. As a result turnout fell from 82 to 76 per cent – and the Labour vote by 1.5 million. ‘It is a far greater strain and a depressing business,’ he concluded gloomily, ‘to fight an election in an atmosphere of apathy, and it will be an enormous relief to candidates when it is all over.’99
The Tories gained twenty-two seats and increased their majority to fifty-eight. Redistribution had shrunk the Stechford electorate by more than 20 per cent, but did not seriously affect its political balance, and Jenkins still had a comfortable margin over his new Tory opponent:
Roy Jenkins (Labour) 23,358
J.M. Bailey (Conservative) 16,618
Labour majority
6,740100
Today a defeated Opposition leader – certainly a seventy-two-year-old leader who had now lost two elections – would resign immediately. But in 1955 Attlee still hung on. His heir apparent was the sixty-seven-year-old Morrison. In a party that still respected the principle of Buggins’ turn, Gaitskell felt himself – at forty-nine – too young and inexperienced to push himself forward and believed that Morrison must have his chance: he saw himself as the next leader but one. His friends, however, marshalled by Dalton, were desperate to jump a generation and bypass Morrison; and with Crosland and Wyatt both out of the House, Jenkins was now the most prominent of these younger supporters. ‘Nobody has pushed the claims of Mr Gaitskell with greater zest and fervour,’ the Daily Express noted. ‘He is an able young man with a bright future.’101 Gaitskell still insisted that there was no vacancy. But at the party conference at Margate he made a passionate avowal of his socialist faith which went a long way to humanise his appeal to those who had hitherto thought him merely – in Bevan’s cutting phrase – ‘a desiccated calculating machine’; then back at Westminster in November he led the attack on Butler’s emergency budget with a force of moral outrage that comprehensively buried ‘Butskellism’: as in 1952, Jenkins was again part of his Shadow Treasury team, described by Crossman as ‘the first effective fighting Opposition we’ve known for a long time’.102 These performances helped convince Attlee that he could now safely retire, and at the beginning of December he suddenly resigned. Gaitskell still needed persuading to come forward, but Jenkins took a leading part in convincing him that Morrison’s support was so weak that standing aside could let Bevan in. Helped by a brazenly cynical last-minute attempt by Morrison and Bevan to combine against him, which only discredited them both, Gaitskell won overwhelmingly on the first ballot with 157 votes against Bevan’s seventy and a humiliating forty for Morrison.
For Jenkins, Gaitskell’s victory was a ‘Wordsworthian’ moment which seemed to offer the prospect of a new dawn and boundless opportunity, both for Labour and for himself personally. ‘Apart from my joy at his triumph,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘I felt that for the first time I had influenced major events.’103 (Morrison evidently agreed, and did not speak to him again for seven years.) In T
he Current he wrote confidently that Gaitskell had now emerged ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ as the next Prime Minister of Great Britain. There was no reason why his tenure of office should not be ‘at least as long as that of Lord Attlee’; and ‘during that period it can hardly be doubted that there will be many years when he will enjoy the tenancy of no. 10 Downing Street’.104 This was a perfectly reasonable expectation in December 1955. In reality Gaitskell was destined to toil for seven long years as Leader of the Opposition and die without ever reaching Downing Street; even had he lived to lead Labour back to power in 1964, he would have been the third Prime Minister after Eden. Nevertheless Gaitskell’s replacement of Attlee marked a generational shift in the Labour Party of huge importance for Jenkins.
At the same time, he did not fail to pay due tribute to the retiring leader, who replied characteristically:
My dear Roy,
Thank you and Jennifer for your kind good wishes.
It has been a great joy to me to watch Arthur’s son growing in authority in the House.
I should like to live long enough to see you in office.
All good wishes.
Yours ever,
Clem105
* * *
fn1 In what is usually considered a period of full employment, unemployment in Birmingham was just 1.4 per cent compared with a national figure of 2.2 per cent. But this disguised a lot of part-time working.
fn2 Labour held eight of the thirteen Birmingham seats in 1955, but the MPs were an undistinguished lot. Jenkins apart, the only one of any note was Denis Howell (Small Heath), a former football referee who achieved brief fame as minister for the weather in the 1970s. Their calibre increased in the 1960s with the election of Brian Walden (All Saints) and Roy Hattersley (Sparkbrook).
fn3 The Liberals then had just six MPs and the party was very close to extinction; more than anyone else, Jo Grimond, who became leader in 1956, kept the flame alive and laid the foundation of its steady revival over the next half-century. He was married to Mark Bonham Carter’s sister, Laura.
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