Roy Jenkins
Page 24
fn4 In his memoirs he recalled an epic set of tennis with Charles, then aged thirteen, which Charles won 18–16. ‘He had never beaten me before. I never beat him again.’46 In later years Edward was one of the few people who could beat Roy at croquet.
fn5 Despite Jenkins’ earlier disapproval of private education, all three children attended private schools: Cynthia St Paul’s Girls’ School, and Edward the City of London School. After Oxford, Charles joined the Economist Intelligence Unit, where he stayed for his entire career, becoming European editor. Cynthia qualified as a solicitor, worked for some years in community law centres and later for the London Assembly. Edward went to Cambridge and became a barrister, taking silk in 2000.
fn6 The author vividly remembers, about 1965, seeing the Minister of Aviation and the Education Secretary (Crosland) with their wives playing together on the new court in Ladbroke Square. Jenkins’ idiosyncratic service action was exactly as Henderson described it.
fn7 Reminded many years later that he was always ‘very fond of ducal drawing rooms’, Jenkins replied: ‘Yes, but I was always very choosy about which dukes.’61
fn8 ‘Those whom she chose to like adored her,’ the biographer Frances Donaldson wrote in her memoirs, ‘everyone else disliked her very much because she made no attempt to disguise not wanting to know them. Everyone she did not wish to know was designated “a bore”.’68
fn9 A list, in Roy’s writing, of Christmas presents received, which has survived among his papers, includes presents from Barley for Roy, Jennifer and the two elder children. ‘Soap etc for Jennifer. Cig. holder for me. Snakes + ladders (Ch). Cy. Fish’.76 It would seem to date from c.1955.
fn10 This was Crosland, whose South Gloucestershire seat had been made unsafe by redistribution. Unfortunately Southampton, Test, turned out to be even less winnable, so he was out of the House for the next four years, until he secured Grimsby in 1959.
9
The Liberal Agenda
GAITSKELL’S ELECTION AS Labour leader in December 1955 did not, as might have been expected, propel Jenkins onto the front bench, but rather the reverse. The new leader’s priority was not to reward his supporters, but to unite the party by reconciling former opponents to his leadership. Accordingly he ignored Bevan’s truculent grumbling and offered him the job of Shadow Colonial Secretary, which he gratefully accepted; at the same time he sought to detach Harold Wilson from Bevan by appointing him to fill his own place as Shadow Chancellor. ‘A minor side-effect of this,’ Jenkins wrote in his memoirs, ‘was that it made me much less eager to devote time to the minutiae of Finance Bills’ than when it had meant working closely with Gaitskell.1 He still spoke frequently in economic debates over the next few years, but from the back benches, expressing his own views often on quite technical questions of taxation or monetary policy, not as part of Wilson’s frontbench team. But he also began to pursue wider – some might say more peripheral – causes, creating for himself a new identity as a leading advocate of liberalisation in a number of controversial areas of national life and, in the process, forging important alliances – and friendships – across party lines. It was also at this time that he discovered the second great theme of his political life: Britain’s place in Europe.
He still remained close to Gaitskell, but their friendship was as much social as it was political. While Gaitskell, always very conscious of being a Wykehamist leader of a still predominantly working-class party, was assiduous in cultivating his trade union and constituency supporters, he also liked to relax when off duty; and now that he was leader he was determined to make more, rather than less, time for private friendship, parties and dancing. For Jenkins this energetic conviviality was a large part of Gaitskell’s appeal (though he was not so keen on dancing). He too enjoyed the cross-party fellowship of politics and felt no guilt about accepting the hospitality of Tory hostesses like Ann Fleming and Lady Pamela Berry (wife of the chairman of the Daily Telegraph). While Gaitskell’s strictly political performance at the dispatch box and in party management was generally hard to fault, criticism of his leadership soon focused on his social life, which seemed to more puritanical elements in the movement – not just on the left, but also among his backers on the trade union right – inappropriate for a Labour leader. Even a supporter like Anthony Wedgwood Benn (not then on the left, but quite close to Gaitskell) wrote after attending a party he gave for the failed American presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson in 1957: ‘It was a little depressing to see the leader of the party half-way to being sozzled.’2 At the same time there grew up a damaging impression that Gaitskell surrounded himself with a narrow clique of middle-class intellectuals – not just Jenkins and Crosland, but Douglas Jay and Patrick Gordon Walker, Frank Soskice, Frank Pakenham, Denis Healey and a few others who (as Jenkins freely told Crossman) met socially ‘most Sunday evenings’, usually in Hampstead where Gaitskell, Jay and Gordon Walker all lived.fn1 Their easy access to the leader aroused the jealousy of less-favoured colleagues in the Shadow Cabinet or on the National Executive who felt excluded from these ‘secret confabs’.3 In terms of actual policy development the influence of this ‘Hampstead set’ was probably less than his critics thought; but undoubtedly Gaitskell’s Hampstead friends shared the same broad understanding of how the party should be changing in the second half of the century. This understanding was encapsulated by the publication in October 1956 of Tony Crosland’s The Future of Socialism, which was immediately hailed as the seminal text of Labour revisionism – and correspondingly condemned by unreconstructed Bevanites as a betrayal of their core beliefs. ‘Socialism?’ queried the headline of Tribune’s review. ‘How Dare he Use the Word?’4
Crosland’s book was not in truth strikingly original. What it did was to pull together with some style and wit, but also a lot of dense sociological analysis, the sort of ideas that had been floated over the past five years in New Fabian Essays and books by Jay, John Strachey and others, including Jenkins’ Pursuit of Progress, to redefine Labour’s raison d’être after 1951. It was less an economic blueprint than a manifesto for a new definition of socialism, based not on the old dogmas of public ownership and planning – now relegated to possible means, rather than defining ends – but rather on increased equality, the breaking down of class barriers and wider opportunities for personal fulfilment, all predicated on the most optimistic assumption of ever-increasing economic growth and future material abundance. In his final chapter Crosland conjured an alluring vision of what might be called ‘socialist hedonism’, involving ‘personal freedom, happiness and cultural endeavour, the cultivation of leisure, beauty, grace, gaiety, excitement, and of all the proper pursuits . . . which contribute to the varied fabric of a full private and family life’. He hoped to see Britain become ‘a more colourful and civilised country to live in’, with ‘more open-air cafés, brighter and gayer streets at night, later closing hours for public houses, more local repertory theatres, better and more hospitable hoteliers and restaurateurs, brighter and cleaner eating houses, more riverside cafés, more pleasure gardens . . . and so on ad infinitum’. Explicitly substituting the generous cultural vision of William Morris for the dour mechanistic socialism of the Webbs, Crosland famously concluded that ‘Total abstinence and a good filing system are not now the right sign-posts to the socialist Utopia; or, at least, if they are, some of us will fall by the wayside.’5
This was Jenkins’ philosophy too, and this part of Crosland’s book doubtless reflected many long conversations over the past five years – though Jenkins was not one of those whom Crosland thanked for reading his manuscript. They had both come a long way from their undergraduate arguments about class war in 1939–40. Writing in Forward (the Gaitskellites’ answer to Tribune), Jenkins hailed The Future of Socialism as ‘the most important book on socialist theory’ since Evan Durbin’s The Politics of Democratic Socialism in 1940, and briefly summarised its thesis: the present economic system could no longer be called capitalist, Labour’s short-term goals had b
een largely achieved between 1945 and 1951, and the ownership of industry no longer mattered, so socialism was now about two things – ‘the relief of the distress and poverty which still persists in fairly large pockets in this country’; and ‘the removal of the class barriers which still disfigure British Society’, especially by educational reform. He, like Crosland, no longer advocated the abolition of the public schools but their ‘rapid infiltration’, whatever that meant. Above all he endorsed his friend’s confidence that ‘high and rising consumption standards’ would naturally lead to greater equality, as in the United States. ‘The difference between a rich man and an ordinary man is much less when the former has a Cadillac and the latter a Chevrolet than when only the former has a motor car at all. Accordingly, Mr Crosland is highly impatient of those who appear to be attached to austerity for its own sake.’6
Austerity had never appealed to Jenkins, either politically or personally, so Crosland’s agreeable redefinition of socialism usefully countered any charge of inconsistency between his public policy and his private lifestyle – that combination of ‘good living and liberal ideas’ which Bill Rodgers noted when visiting Ladbroke Square. But The Future of Socialism also reflected his growing interest in libertarian social issues. Crosland specifically picked out ‘the divorce laws, licensing laws, prehistoric (and flagrantly unfair) abortion laws, obsolete penalties for sexual abnormality, the illiterate censorship of books and plays, and remaining restrictions on equal rights for women’, most of which, he declared, were ‘intolerable, and should be highly offensive to socialists, in whose blood there should always run a trace of the anarchist and the libertarian, and not too much of the prig and the prude’.7 Jenkins had already been focusing on this agenda for some years, as evidenced by his articles in The Current. In April 1954, for instance, he used the highly publicised trial of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu to call for the decriminalisation of homosexuality. The law should be changed, he argued, so that ‘private relations between adult men are not an affair which concerns the state’.8 In February 1953 he deplored the way a determined sabbatarian minority was able to block the reform of Sunday trading laws.9 And in the same month he wrote that the execution of the nineteen-year-old (and mentally defective) Derek Bentley for a murder actually committed by his sixteen-year-old accomplice (who was too young to be executed) had greatly strengthened the case for the abolition of capital punishment.10 These were all campaigns with which he would be prominently associated over the next decade.
But the cause that Jenkins was to make particularly his own was the censorship of books, which had suddenly assumed a new urgency in 1954 when the most illiberal Home Secretary since the 1920s, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, launched a ferocious crackdown on allegedly ‘dirty’ books under the Obscene Publications Act of 1876. Even the harmlessly naughty postcards of Donald McGill were seized by police at several seaside resorts, while Swindon magistrates ordered the destruction of a scholarly two-volume edition of Boccaccio’s Decameron. Among 132 prosecutions brought that year at least five were directed at reputable publishers of books of literary quality which could be freely published anywhere else in western Europe. Two of these prosecutions were successful, two failed and the jury was unable to agree on the fifth, so that publishers, printers and booksellers, all of whom could find themselves liable, did not know where they were. The Society of Authors established a committee chaired by the writer and veteran campaigner Sir Alan Herbert to campaign for a clarification of the law. As the only sitting MP on the committee (though Michael Foot, temporarily without a seat, and Norman St John Stevas, a young Tory barrister not yet in the House, were also members), Jenkins thus became the parliamentary leader of a campaign which was to occupy much of his energy for the next five years.
The government responded not by moving to liberalise the law, but to tighten it, specifically to deal with an influx (mainly from America) of what were known as ‘horror comics’. The 1876 Act was based on Lord Cockburn’s famous catch-all judgement of 1868, which defined obscenity as ‘the tendency of the matter charged . . . to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall’. As Jenkins wrote, the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Bill introduced in the spring of 1955 by the new Home Secretary, Gwilym Lloyd George (son of the Welsh Wizard, but now a Tory scarcely less reactionary than Maxwell Fyfe), ‘took all the objectionable features of Cockburn’s 1868 judgement and applied them in statute form to a new field’.11 In the House he called it ‘a thoroughly bad Bill’, which would make a bad situation worse by exposing serious literature to the same petty vigilantism as cheap pornography.12 The next month he introduced under the Ten-Minute Rule an alternative bill that incorporated the Society’s proposals.fn2 Meanwhile he and a handful of allies concentrated on moving amendments to the government Bill; the closest they came to success was in attracting sixty-five votes (including both Gaitskell and the Liberal leader Jo Grimond) for a clause to allow a defence on grounds of ‘literary merit’. ‘The fact that we had to argue it exclusively within the context of strip cartoons did not make the task any easier!’13
A Private Member’s Bill introduced by the Tory MP Hugh Fraser was talked out by a Home Office minister in 1956. The prospects improved marginally in the next session when Lord Lambton (whose courtesy title did not prevent him sitting in the Commons) won a higher place in the ballot and took up the Society’s Bill; and brightened again when Harold Macmillan – a publisher by profession – succeeded Eden in January 1957, and Rab Butler (who at the time was President of the Royal Society of Literature) became Home Secretary. Rather than send Lambton’s Bill to a Standing Committee, however, Butler offered a Select Committee to enquire more widely into the case for reform. This was duly established, with Jenkins again a leading member. After examining witnesses from all sides of the argument – from the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Public Morality Council to T.S. Eliot and E.M. Forster – the committee issued a compromise report balancing liberalisation in some areas with increased police powers in others. By this time, however, Lambton’s bill had fallen, so in 1958 (having failed to find another lucky Member willing to sponsor a Private Members’ Bill, and three and a half years after his first effort) Jenkins introduced another Ten-Minute Rule Bill, with the hope that this time the government might give it a fair wind or even take it up itself. Informed opinion and the serious press, from The Times and Telegraph to the Manchester Guardian and the New Statesman, were unanimously supportive. But again Butler, while professing sympathy with the object of the Bill, prevaricated, allowing a handful of backbenchers, encouraged by the government whips, to deny it a Second Reading – until Herbert mischievously announced his intention to stand as an Independent in a forthcoming by-election in Harrow East, which would probably have allowed Labour to win the seat. This timely threat magically galvanised the government into giving parliamentary time for an unopposed Second Reading – only for the Law Officers to table a slew of amendments in committee, which tilted the balance heavily back towards the police.
The central purpose of his Bill, as Jenkins summarised it, was to narrow the definition of obscenity to take account of the author’s intention:
The common law misdemeanour of obscene libel disappears and is replaced by a new statutory offence of which the essence is the guilty knowledge of the offender, who shall be judged by the likely dominant effect of his work on those among whom it is intended to circulate – not the possibility of its corrupting anyone into whose hands it might fall.14
The essential points were that a work should be considered as a whole – not condemned on the basis of a few titillating passages taken out of context – and that literary merit should be admissible as a defence. By giving up some lesser points (notably a provision that criminal proceedings should only be brought with the consent of the DPP) the reformers were able, after some tough horse-trading with the Home Office and Law Officers – the Attorney-General was
the famously reactionary Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller – to preserve these gains. Butler still showed very little urgency to drive it forward. Writing to Jenkins in December 1958 (incidentally mentioning that he was enjoying Dilke), he admitted that ‘people will say I was manoeuvring’, but pleaded somewhat wearily that ‘I had great difficulty finding time or opportunity for Obscene Publications. As one gets older one takes the criticisms of politics v. calmly.’15 Once in Committee, Jenkins and his band of allies – who included Kenneth Robinson and the former Home Secretary Chuter Ede on the Labour side, Mark Bonham Carter (Liberal, just elected at a famous by-election in Torrington) and the Tories Hugh Fraser, Maurice Macmillan and Nigel Nicolson (the last four all Jenkins’ Balliol contemporaries) – managed to carry most of the key votes by clear majorities: 10:5, 10:6 or 8:3. The Bill finally passed the Commons in April 1959, after the reformers had defeated (by 40:28) another government attempt at Report Stage to wreck it by widening its scope; but then the House of Lords passed more amendments, which Butler, with a hint of menace, advised Jenkins to accept if he did not want to lose his Bill altogether:
Quite frankly, I think that the worries which you and your friends have expressed about their possible effect have been exaggerated . . . We think these changes are entirely reasonable and I feel sure that, while you will of course have an opportunity to express your opinion during the discussion on the motions, you will want to think again about your idea of dividing the House.16
In the end, with time running out before the end of the session, the reformers had to settle for a more circumscribed measure than they had initially envisaged, which gave some protection to reputable publishers only at the price of giving the police increased powers to seize offensive material, and still leaving a lot of uncertainty to be tested by some celebrated cases (including Lolita and Lady Chatterley’s Lover) in the next few years. Nevertheless the 1959 Act was a considerable personal triumph for its principal sponsor, who earned the gratitude of the Society of Authors’ magazine: ‘The tactical skill exhibited throughout by Mr Roy Jenkins MP may well assure that this long overdue Statute . . . will go down in history as the Jenkins Act.’17 A private tribute came from one of his allies in the fight, Hugh Fraser: