With all his outside interests, Jenkins was beginning to be seen as a bit of a dilettante. But he was still a serious politician – on his own terms. Outside the House he devoted a good deal of time to the Fabian Society. He had been a member of its executive since 1949, attending weekend conferences and writing earnest papers on price control or fiscal policy; in 1954 he went on a Fabian jaunt to Austria, and by 1957–8 it was his turn to be chairman for a year. He took the job seriously and made a point of speaking at Fabian meetings all round the country – a commitment that not only repaid a debt to his past but also forged a key political relationship for his future, since he was frequently accompanied on his speaking trips by Bill Rodgers, the then twenty-nine-year-old general secretary of the Society who became MP for Stockton-on-Tees in 1962. A robust Gaitskellite who was initially more dazzled by Crosland than by Jenkins, Rodgers switched his allegiance on Gaitskell’s death in 1963 to become over the next thirty years Jenkins’ most loyal political supporter and right-hand man. In 1957 he found Jenkins an admirably decisive chairman who would get through executive meetings in an hour;38 but he also remembers Jenkins fretting about his lack of public recognition and deciding to make more speeches to raise his profile.39
Since he never belonged to a trade union, apart from the Society of Authors, this involvement with the Fabian Society was Jenkins’ sole connection with one of the affiliated organisations of the Labour movement beyond Westminster. But he made a point of speaking practically every year at the party’s annual conference – 1956 at Blackpool, 1957 at Brighton, 1958 at Scarborough. (By contrast, Crosland never bothered with conference after 1953.) In 1956 his interest in equality was recognised by his co-option onto a party committee on the subject (chaired by Gaitskell and including Wilson, Barbara Castle and the leading Bevanite Ian Mikardo); and at conference that year he spoke in the debate on its report, entitled Towards Equality, arguing that society was still ‘disfigured’ by class divisions and urging the taxation not just of large incomes but of inherited wealth by making death duties ‘a reality and not a fraud’, and by tackling tax avoidance.fn5 He still thought private education an important preserver of inequality, but he increasingly recognised the political difficulty of doing anything about it since – unlike excessively high incomes – the best possible education was in itself a good thing. One could level down great wealth, but should not try to lower educational standards.41
In 1957 he made a combative speech in the debate on nationalisation. Trying to forge a compromise around which Gaitskellites and Bevanites could unite, the National Executive had come up with a report, Industry and Society, which largely accepted the revisionist view that large-scale nationalisation on the Morrisonian model of 1945–51 was outdated and proposed instead a range of more flexible, small-scale forms of public enterprise. Though Bevan himself wearily accepted it, Industry and Society was furiously attacked by unreconstructed old left-wingers like Manny Shinwell who wanted no retreat from full nationalisation. In a heated debate opened by Wilson and wound up by Gaitskell, Jenkins made the best speech from the floor defending the report. None of the powerful speeches opposing the report, he asserted, offered any constructive alternative except ‘back to 1945’. But the position in 1957 was very different. A resolution moved by the Hornsey constituency party called on the next Labour government to nationalise the 512 biggest companies; but the President of the Board of Trade already had enough trouble trying to run three industries! Ownership without full control was the worst of all worlds, which would certainly lose Labour the election after next. Instead, the party must embrace the mixed economy and recognise the need for even publicly owned enterprises to make a profit. (Even the Co-op, Jenkins pointed out, made a profit, but called it a surplus.) ‘The key issue is not whether you make a profit, but what happens to it when it has been made.’ The essence of socialism was that the whole community should share it. Thus Industry and Society was not a retreat from socialism. ‘You will get more socialism by accepting it than by rejecting it. You have to win the next election before you get any public ownership at all.’ And Industry and Society gave Labour its best chance of doing that.42
The next year at Scarborough he urged another part of the revisionist case. 1958 was a ‘stop’ year in the ‘stop–go’ economic cycle of the 1950s. The previous July Macmillan had famously boasted that ‘most of our people have never had it so good’.43 But since then production had slowed and unemployment had risen, reaching 600,000 in January 1959. This, Jenkins urged, gave Labour the chance to present itself as the party of expansion: a difficult trick to pull off at a time when living standards were still rising rapidly, but politically vital, to counter the persistent association of Labour in the public mind with ‘drabness, rationing and restriction’; as well as economically right, since wages were rising ahead of production. Jenkins did not underestimate inflation (as Macmillan arguably did). What he argued in 1958–9 was that only in an expanding economy could living standards rise without inflation. Growth was the key, but growth combined with wage restraint. This was the theme of several speeches that he made in the House that year, and also of his speech to conference. On the one hand, he warned at Scarborough, ‘our bias must be for investment and against consumption’. On the other, ‘we must be a party of a rapidly rising standard of living, and I am very suspicious of those people, sometimes on the left, often with a standard of living well above average, who claim to see the corrupting effects of more motor cars or more washing machines, or other material benefits’. What he was doing was trying to combine the hair shirt of Stafford Cripps – which still had an appeal on the left: even Bevan railed that the workers were being bought off with consumer goods – with the socialist hedonism of Tony Crosland. Without mentioning Europe, he concluded with his characteristic call for the country to look forward positively, not resentfully backwards as at Suez. ‘The best antidote . . . is a buoyant economy, a rising standard of living and a faith in our economic future.’
An important sub-theme that he sounded repeatedly was the need for Britain, as part of the process of shaking off the burdens of empire, to rid itself of the obligations of the sterling area.fn6 Labour should be ‘very sceptical’, he declared at Scarborough, ‘about this mystique of sterling as a world currency, and we must think that that may be too high a price to pay if it has to be got at the price of stagnation and restriction at home’. It was ‘lunatic’ for the government to celebrate the first autumn for years without a sterling crisis by liberating dollar imports and moving towards restoring full convertability.45 This probably went over the heads of most of the delegates in the hall. But the problem did not go away: it blighted the first three years of the next Labour government in 1964–7, and it was not until Jenkins himself became Chancellor of the Exchequer, still fending off recurrent threats to sterling in 1968–9, that he was able finally to begin winding up sterling’s anachronistic obligations as a reserve currency.
In the run-up to the 1959 election Jenkins was given an opportunity that many of his fellow backbenchers would have killed for, when he was invited by Penguin to write one of three instant paperbacks setting out the programmes of the three parties. The Conservative Case was written by the current chairman of the Tory Party, Lord Hailsham (though it was actually a windy rehash of a book he had first published in 1947); while the historian Roger Fulford contributed The Liberal Case. Jenkins wrote The Labour Case (60,000 words, for which he received an advance of £500) very quickly in the early months of 1959 and delivered it in April; it was published, with its two companions, in July, in good time for the expected election, which Macmillan duly called in October. In his preface Jenkins stressed that his was an entirely personal and unofficial statement of Labour policy:
There is, fortunately, no rigid orthodoxy in the Labour Party. There is room for a wide variety of beliefs under its umbrella. It may therefore be worth while to set down why one person, holding rather moderate views, believes it to be of overwhelming importance that
the General Election should result in a Labour Government.46
His presentation of Labour’s aims accordingly bent over backwards to reassure those uncommitted voters whose support the party needed to regain power. There was little about nationalisation and still less of the confiscatory zeal that had still figured on his previous personal agenda five years earlier, or even two years earlier. He actually admitted that ‘the post-war Labour Government tilted the balance too much towards the austerity of fair shares, and too little towards the incentives of free consumers’ choice’.47 The objective was still to abolish remaining pockets of poverty and promote a more equal society; but this, Jenkins now argued, could be achieved almost entirely by levelling-up, via the magic of growth, without the need of punitive levelling-down. In his opening chapter he conceded that eight years of Tory government had produced a modest increase in general prosperity, but claimed that the country was still 10 per cent worse off than it need be (‘The principal fault of the British economy today is that it does not grow’).48 Living standards could rise much faster if the economy were run at full capacity, which would be greatly assisted if Britain would give up striving vainly to maintain the position of a world power, spent less on defence and adjusted to its position as a middle-sized European nation (though he respected party sensitivities to the extent that he did not explicitly advocate joining the Common Market). There were a couple of somewhat dutiful chapters on specific Labour policies – Crossman’s proposed superannuated pensions scheme, and plans to raise standards in state education as an alternative to doing anything directly about public schools; and some detailed suggestions of how Labour would revitalise the economy by directing investment more productively than the Tories (‘It requires the most skilful use of all the available weapons’).49 By the Thatcherite standards of thirty years later it was still a strongly interventionist programme. But the unquestioned assumption was that a broad range of progressive policies – better schools, higher benefits, improved social services and more provision for the arts – could be paid for out of the proceeds of 17½ per cent growth over five years (‘the same rate of growth that our neighbours in Western Europe are confidently expecting’), which would still leave room for ‘substantial tax reductions’ (balanced by some increased taxation at the higher level, notably a capital gains tax and closing loopholes).50 Three years after The Future of Socialism, The Labour Case represented the high-water mark of revisionist Labour confidence in an effortlessly expanding social democratic future.
Within this optimistic scenario, Jenkins gave special prominence to his own particular agenda with a final chapter entitled ‘Is Britain Civilised?’ in which he set out a shopping list of reforms whose prospects – although not party commitments – would be advanced by the election of a Labour government. The list was headed by the abolition of the death penalty (‘this presumptuously fixed penalty’), followed by the legalisation of homosexuality; the abolition of the Lord Chamberlain’s theatre censorship; reform of the licensing and betting laws; divorce law reform; reform of the ‘harsh and archaic’ abortion law; decriminalisation of suicide and attempted suicide; and the humanisation of immigration law. He concluded, echoing Crosland:
Let us be on the side of those who want people to be free to live their own lives, to make their own mistakes, and to decide, in an adult way and provided they do not infringe the rights of others, the code by which they wish to live; and on the side of experiment and brightness, of better buildings and better food, of better music (jazz as well as Bach)fn7 and better books, of fuller lives and greater freedom. In the long run these things will be more important than the most perfect of economic policies.51
These were the concluding words of Jenkins’ personal manifesto, published by Penguin as if it represented the general view of the Labour party, which it emphatically did not. Many ordinary party members and trade unionists must have been enraged by his cavalier interpretation of socialism: his book surely played a part in stoking the left’s campaign against the proposed rewriting of the party constitution by the ‘Hampstead set’ that surfaced after Labour’s loss of the election. Perhaps that overstates its importance, among the many thousands of words poured out in the course of an election campaign. But the most revealing passage in The Labour Case perfectly embodies the mature political philosophy at which Jenkins had arrived by 1959, and from which he never subsequently departed: coolly pragmatic, undoctrinaire and increasingly centrist. ‘Of course,’ he conceded, ‘the Labour Party does not stand only for economic expansion and a touch of realism about Britain’s world position’ (that ‘only’ must have raised some eyebrows). ‘Since its earliest days it has been infused by a desire to promote a more just as well as a more prosperous society’. (Again, the word order is unusual):fn8
At the same time it is a practical party. It is quite as much concerned with immediate reforms as with ultimate purposes. These reforms must be in the right direction. Any radical party must specify this, for without a sense of moving towards a goal, the idealism which is essential to the momentum of a left-wing party could not be generated. But the Labour Party does not ask its supporters to buy a ticket for the whole journey. It is always difficult to see how the course of politics will develop. The solution of one set of problems invariably uncovers new ones, the nature of which often cannot be seen in advance. And living as we do under a party system in which at least two of the parties have firm bases of support, alternating governments will no doubt continue to be the pattern of British politics.53
It was his sense of history that led Jenkins to accept that alternating governments were not just inevitable, but positively healthy. He never believed that any government should stay in power for too long. At the same time he believed firmly in what Sir Keith Joseph later called the ‘ratchet effect’, by which Labour governments would advance the march of progress, but Tory governments, while temporarily halting it, never – until Mrs Thatcher – attempted to reverse it. In later years he attached the same importance to maintaining momentum, without worrying too much about the ultimate destination, to the cause of European union. The journey, not the arrival, mattered. For a very clever man it was a curiously woolly, unenquiring and almost fatalistic cast of mind.
Most comment on The Labour Case thought the book revealed more about its author than about the likely policies of a Labour government. At least two reviewers already wondered how long Jenkins could remain in the Labour party. ‘The merit of Mr Jenkins, book,’ opined The Economist, ‘is that it charts the direction in which the Labour party, if it is ever to be really acceptable to the British public, must go.’ Unfortunately a Labour government, if elected, would not be made up of people like him. ‘The stratified remains of socialism,’ the anonymous writer concluded, ‘are an uneasy legacy for an undogmatically radical man.’54 In the Spectator Bernard Levin led up to a similar conclusion with an admiring sketch of Jenkins’ parliamentary style:
First, there is Mr Roy Jenkins, he of the bland and carefree countenance, the erudite dome, the wagging forefinger, the courteous approach, the gentle humour, the collar one point of which insists on riding up over his waistcoat (and frequently over his lapel). Mr Jenkins, as many a Minister has reason to know, carries the fastest statistic in the West, and will shoot the pips out of an inaccuracy at thirty paces.
But what was such an intelligent, rational man doing wasting his time in politics when he should be writing elegant history books? (Jenkins’ answer could have been that he managed to do both.) ‘Mr Jenkins,’ Levin suggested, ‘is the last surviving member of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.’ He was a member of the Labour Party ‘because his reason tells him to be, and while the Labour Party can continue to attract – and hold – such reasonable men, it will survive.’55
Jenkins’ belief in alternating governments certainly led him to hope for a Labour victory in 1959. He thought the Tories were tired, cynical, incompetent and reactionary and he desperately wanted to see Gaitskell as Prime Minister – in
which event he could probably expect some sort of office. But privately he was not optimistic. Sometime that spring a group of young Labour candidates, including Bill Rodgers, Peter Shore, Dick Taverne and Gerald Kaufman, took him to dinner at a scruffy Greek restaurant. Labour was ahead in the polls, but Jenkins was positive that they would not win.56 For a couple of years after Suez it had seemed all but certain that Labour would win comfortably. The government had led the country into a humiliating debacle, while Labour’s family quarrel had been successfully patched up, with Bevan now working reasonably harmoniously under Gaitskell as Shadow Foreign Secretary. In January 1958 Dick Crossman wrote that power after the next election was ‘now assumed to be inevitable’.57 But by a remarkable personal display of style and nerve, helped by an increasingly widespread sense of rising ‘affluence’, Macmillan turned the tables. A giveaway budget (ninepence off income tax), a hot summer and a glossy advertising campaign (‘Life’s Better With the Conservatives. Don’t Let Labour Ruin It’) propelled the Tories into a commanding lead by the time Macmillan called the election for 9 October 1959. Actually Gaitskell fought an excellent campaign and seemed to be closing the gap again, until he made what Jenkins in his memoirs – forgetting what he had written at the time – called ‘the most terrible mistake’ by promising that a Labour government would not increase the standard rate of income tax. In view of Labour’s ambitious spending plans this seemed either dishonest or irresponsible, and the Tories had a field day. ‘It was unwise, out of character,’ Jenkins wrote, ‘and had the undesirable effect of putting Gaitskell on the defensive for the rest of the campaign.’ With hindsight, however – and contrary to the contemporary view of David Butler and Richard Rose in their Nuffield study of the election – he did not believe it decisively affected the result. ‘The underlying current of the election . . . was that the hidden mood of the country was against the Labour party . . . In the circumstances no radical leader could have won.’58 Most historians would now agree.
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