Roy Jenkins

by John Campbell

  We do not intend to embarrass anybody, but we do intend to show that there is a substantial body in the Labour movement that still believes that one can get into the Common Market on reasonable terms, and this should be the aim.68

  Though Jenkins was at pains to deny it, the Observer’s Mark Arnold-Foster presciently saw in this press conference the seeds of a Labour split more serious than its predecessors since, unlike the nuclear weapons or Clause Four battles, this one could actually determine events. ‘Mr Jenkins and his men could help to decide history by making it possible for the Government to get Britain into Europe, despite Mr Gaitskell and its own murmuring Tory rebels.’69 This was acute, but premature. It would be another nine years before Jenkins and his supporters made it possible for the Heath government to take Britain into Europe against the opposition of the Labour party and a rump of Tory rebels.

  For the Labour conference in Brighton two weeks later the NEC produced a fudged document which still committed the party to keep negotiating for better terms. But when Gaitskell spoke on the Wednesday morning he blew this compromise out of the water with an emotional speech that was as traumatic for his supporters on the right as Bevan’s speech rejecting unilateralism in the same hall five years earlier had been for the left. He began by repeating that he was not against entry on principle, only the terms on offer; but then he invoked the sacrifices of Commonwealth soldiers at Gallipoli and Vimy Ridge and declared that for Britain to consent to become ‘a Texas or California in the United States of Europe’ would mean ‘the end of Britain as an independent nation state . . . the end of a thousand years of history’.fn10 He sat down to a standing ovation led by his old enemies on the left, which most of his friends refused to join. Jenkins did reluctantly stand (‘Afterwards I worked out a sophistical theory that standing was a tribute to the man, whereas clapping would have been a tribute to the speech’);71 but Jack Diamond, Bill Rodgers and others stayed firmly seated with their arms folded. Dora Gaitskell whispered to her neighbour, Charles Pannell: ‘Charlie, all the wrong people are cheering.’72

  This was a painful breach, personally as much as politically. For some weeks afterwards Jenkins and Gaitskell had no contact. It was Gaitskell who took the initiative to repair relations by inviting Roy and Jennifer to Frognal Gardens on a Sunday evening in late November where they were quickly back on friendly terms. They met again the following weekend in Paris. Jenkins was making a tour of European capitals for Encounter to assess the mood as the British negotiations reached the point of decision; Gaitskell was there to see de Gaulle’s Foreign Minister, to make sure the French government understood Labour’s position. They nevertheless enjoyed ‘a very jolly party’ with Jacques and Marie-Alice de Beaumarchais ‘in a restaurant . . . near the Odeon, where we ate a lot of shellfish and drank a lot of wine’.73 But the next morning Gaitskell felt unwell. Just before Christmas he went into hospital with a mystery virus. Jenkins visited him once, with no idea that he was seriously ill, before leaving for Washington on 12 January 1963 to research his article on the Cuba crisis. He was still in America when he heard first that Gaitskell was dying and then, on 18 January, that he was dead.

  He was given the news by the New York office of the Daily Express, which somehow tracked him to Connecticut and asked him for a tribute. When he could not instantly oblige, the reporter said that Harold Wilson had given them a very moving one. ‘Yes,’ Jenkins replied bitterly, ‘but you have to remember that he was very fond of Gaitskell.’74

  He decided not to return immediately. ‘I find Hugh’s death almost totally shattering,’ he wrote to Bill Rodgers. ‘Politics apart, I really adored him, and find the thought of coming back to an England without him almost unassimilable. It is rather as though an H-bomb had fallen in one’s absence.’75 Despite their disagreement over Europe, all his political hopes had been bound up in Gaitskell’s success. As it happened, that disagreement no longer mattered since on 14 January General de Gaulle had abruptly vetoed Britain’s application to join the Common Market. This ruthless démarche not only removed Europe as a source of contention from British politics for the immediate future, but also torpedoed the Macmillan government’s flagship policy, thus greatly boosting Labour’s chances of winning the next election. Had he lived, Gaitskell would surely have become Prime Minister within two years. As it was, the prize was cruelly snatched away and now seemed likely to fall to his successor – who was most likely to be Harold Wilson.

  The bereaved Gaitskellites tried desperately to prevent this outcome, but they were torn between two candidates. Their front runner was George Brown, who had been deputy leader since 1960 and only two months earlier had beaten off a challenge from Wilson by 133 votes to 103. Brown was one of the last working-class, non-university-educated figures in the Labour leadership. He was colourful, forceful, often brilliant, robustly anti-unilateralist and strongly pro-Market; but he was also volatile and unpredictable, especially when he had been drinking. Jenkins always had a high regard for him. He had ‘an untutored mind of the highest speed and quality’, he wrote in an obituary tribute in 1985. On the big issues, ‘he nearly always showed wisdom, verve and foresight . . . In a Cabinet with an unusual and excessive Oxford predominance, he had at least as good a brain as anyone around the table . . . He cared about causes more than himself. He had vision. He was a good friend. He enhanced life.’76 He deserved better than to be remembered as a drunk. But the fact was that in 1963 it was difficult to see him as Prime Minister. The right’s alternative was Jim Callaghan – a far more canny figure of similarly unprivileged background, a safer pair of hands, but in those days lacking personality. Callaghan was the choice of those who could not stand the thought of Wilson but thought Brown too much of a liability.

  Jenkins believed that they must stick with Brown, faute de mieux. When he could bear to think about the succession he wrote to Rodgers from Washington on 23 January, expressing both his antipathy for Wilson and his dim view of Callaghan:

  I am clear that Brown is the best available, and I hope Callaghan can be dissuaded from standing, as that is surely more likely to help Wilson than anything else. The decisive argument against Wilson, I think, is not the policy he would pursue, at any rate in the short run, or even his effect on wavering public opinion, but his undesirability as head of the Govt. A complete lack of trust at the top would infect relations all the way down, and make it a nightmare in wh. to serve. Callaghan’s faults are not these, but he has no real standing of his own in the country, so cannot be urged on that ground . . . He would be easily swayed by different gusts of pressure within the Party.

  He added that he would certainly be back in time for the first ballot on 7 February, but could not manage Gaitskell’s memorial service at Westminster Abbey on 31 January without cutting short his Washington interviews. ‘I would really rather have gone to the small funeral service, wh. Jennifer went to today. I think the memorial service will be vast & impersonal.’77

  Rodgers replied five days later, reporting that the Gaitskellites were ‘very evenly divided . . . I lean to Brown but am still open to persuasion . . . Tony leans to Callaghan but is open to persuasion too.’ In fact Crosland had already decided to back Callaghan and lobbied Brown to stand down, thus placing himself for the first time in the opposite camp from Jenkins and putting down a marker which earned its reward thirteen years later.fn11 There was some talk of Frank Soskice or Patrick Gordon Walker; but neither of these commanded serious support. Rodgers did not think the division of the anti-Wilson forces had done any harm. ‘On the contrary, the whole series of meetings we have held and the canvassing we have done . . . has resulted in a clearer anti-Wilson feeling than might have otherwise emerged.’ His prediction was that Wilson would lead Brown by 105:95 on the first ballot, with forty-five for Callaghan; but that Brown would sneak it ‘with a majority of fewer than ten votes’ on the second. But this was ‘the sheerest speculation’.79

  In the event he underestimated Wilson’s vote and overestimated both Bro
wn’s and Callaghan’s (the figures were Wilson 115, Brown 88, Callaghan 41). Had either Brown or Callaghan stood aside, the other might possibly have won on a straight right–left vote. But with Callaghan eliminated, most of his (and probably some of Brown’s) votes switched behind the front-runner, giving Wilson a comfortable victory by 144:103. While old Bevanites like Crossman and Barbara Castle – and even Tony Benn, who had fallen out with Gaitskell – rejoiced at the sudden improvement in their prospects, Jenkins, Crosland and the other Gaitskellites faced a bleak future. Crossman had lunch with Roy and Jennifer at the Athenaeum on the day of the second ballot (when the result was already all but certain):

  Both of them were completely knocked out by Gaitskell’s death. It makes a huge gap in their personal lives, bigger even than the gap in Crosland’s. I felt them to be generally in mourning for Gaitskell and not particularly enthusiastic for Brown . . . Nevertheless Roy was as implacable as ever and I spent most of lunch trying to make him say what makes him support a thug like Brown against a man of Wilson’s quality. Jenkins found it surprisingly difficult. First he tried to call Harold intellectually dishonest but he really couldn’t pretend that Douglas Jay or Patrick Gordon Walker show greater intellectual integrity. All Roy could say was that it was worse in Harold’s case because he was more gifted . . . Finally Roy said, ‘The fact is that Harold is a person no-one can like, a person without friends.’ ‘So much the better for him as Leader,’ I replied. ‘You admired Attlee. That loneliness was Attlee’s quality.’ Roy was indignant at the comparison and both of us finished lunch genuinely baffled as to what it was that caused the revulsion in each of us that the other didn’t share.80, fn12

  Such was Jenkins’ revulsion from Wilson’s leadership that he thought about leaving politics altogether. He was under strong pressure the other way from Rodgers, who lost no time after Gaitskell’s death in telling him, ‘You are our leader now,’ and urging him to spend more time in the House of Commons. ‘I take what you say about the H. of C.,’ Jenkins replied, ‘and will try to act upon it.’82 In fact he spoke even less in 1963 than he had done in 1961–2: with Europe now off the agenda, he spoke just three times – on the government’s defence White Paper in March, when he came out against Britain attempting to maintain an independent nuclear deterrent; on the budget in April; and in June in support of the Bill which allowed hereditary peers to disclaim their titles (while complaining that it did not address the broader question of reform or abolition of the House of Lords).83 In appointing his new front bench Wilson had extended one olive branch to the Gaitskellites by making Gordon Walker Shadow Foreign Secretary. (He was stuck with a predominantly right-wing Shadow Cabinet whether he liked it or not, telling his Bevanite friends that their time would come.) But with Jenkins he had no contact at all for nine months. In May, after a long talk with Crosland at a party, Tony Benn wrote that ‘with Hugh’s death his old courtiers feel out in the cold – exactly as I felt with Hugh. Roy Jenkins is bitter about it and jealous of what he conceives to be my relationship with Harold, which frankly is similar to his relationship with Hugh.’84 ‘In a slightly flat way,’ Jenkins wrote, ‘I just got on with Asquith, my other (mainly Observer) writing commitments, picking up the pieces from de Gaulle’s veto . . . advising John Lewis’s and pursuing my over-active social life.’85

  He also wrote a chapter for a tribute volume about Gaitskell, edited by Bill Rodgers, which appeared the following year with a dozen other contributors, including John Betjeman, Maurice Bowra, Arthur Schlesinger and Willy Brandt. To the question ‘What was Gaitskell’s legacy?’ he gave a three-part answer:

  First, the promise of being a great Prime Minister, not because he would necessarily have avoided mistakes, but because he would have infused the whole Government with a sense of loyalty and purpose . . . Second, a Labour Party with both the will and capacity for victory . . . And third, a memory which is a standing contradiction to those who wish to believe that only men with cold hearts and twisted tongues can succeed in politics.86

  Jenkins and Crosland were joint literary executors; and Crosland agreed that Jenkins should write the official biography. This was almost certainly a bad idea. He was not exactly in a client relationship, as he had been to Attlee; but he was much too devoted to Gaitskell’s memory to be objective. Fortunately the pressures of office soon forced him to abandon the commission. He and Crosland then appointed Philip Williams – an Oxford academic and one of the founders of CDS – whose immensely long, highly detailed, but excessively discreet volume (he drew a veil over Gaitskell’s relationship with Ann Fleming) finally appeared in 1979.fn13 By that time Jenkins had written another substantial biographical essay for The Times in 1973, later published in Nine Men of Power. Gaitskell remained his political hero, and a photograph of the lost leader stood on the mantelpiece in the dining room at East Hendred for the rest of his life.

  Leaderless and depressed, Jenkins was, in his own words, ‘an obvious sitting target for a job outside politics’. And in July there came an offer which seriously tempted him: the editorship of The Economist. Though not then boasting the international circulation and prestige it enjoys today, it was a venerable and respected title. The chairman and former editor, Sir Geoffrey Crowther, pressed him to accept. Jenkins was ‘surprised, flattered and excited’.88 The money was more than twice a Cabinet minister’s salary, while he had no confidence that he would get any sort of office from Wilson. On the other hand, as a writer used to his own byline, he would have chafed at The Economist’s anonymity; and editors cannot write too much themselves. Above all, he would have had to leave the House of Commons, and when it came to it he really did not want to make that break. Still he was tempted. He asked to be allowed to consider it over the summer, when he, Jennifer and the family went to stay near the Beaumarchaises in south-western France. It was Marie-Alice who told him that instead of trying to guess Wilson’s intentions, Roy should go and ask him. So he did. He saw Wilson in the Leader of the Opposition’s room at the Commons on 12 September, and immediately afterwards wrote a note of their conversation which was a good deal more detailed than the account he gave in his memoirs.

  Wilson was impressed by the Economist offer, which probably raised Jenkins’ standing in his eyes, so he was sympathetic to his dilemma. But at first he tried to play Jenkins along, suggesting that he postpone a decision in case there was an autumn election, or hinting that he could take the job and still join the government in a couple of years – maybe as some sort of ambassador to the EEC. When Jenkins objected that he would have no seat, Wilson said that seats could always be found. But Jenkins closed that avenue by saying that if he accepted The Economist, he would feel morally bound to stay at least five years.

  When Wilson asked what sort of job he would like in government, Jenkins said that he had started as an economist but had developed other interests, in defence and some home departments – almost everything, in fact, except social services. Transport he would find ‘fascinating’. When Wilson suggested a job in an overseas department he did not demur. Wilson assured him that his name was ringed for a ‘substantial’ job. But when Jenkins asked what that meant, they embarked on a delicate haggle between hypothetical options. Clearly, Wilson suggested, if he could be Chancellor, he would refuse The Economist. Jenkins agreed, but said that he would not decline The Economist just to be Financial Secretary. Wilson did not respond to this, but asked if he would take the Board of Trade. Jenkins said that yes, he would rather be President of the Board of Trade than editor of The Economist. Not surprisingly, he came away thinking that Wilson had half promised more than he possibly intended.89

  In his memoirs Jenkins wrote that by this time Crowther too was cooling on the offer, under pressure from Lord Robbins, chairman of the Financial Times (the principal shareholder in The Economist), whose ‘half-free-market soul was rather shocked by the idea of having a Labour MP as editor of Bagehot’s journal’. Though discussions continued for another few months, ‘they were never serious aft
er 17 September 1963’.90 In fact correspondence in his papers shows not only that Crowther remained keen to get Jenkins right up to Christmas, but that Jenkins too remained keen to keep the offer open until after the election, in case Labour lost or Wilson did not give him a job. When Alan Watkins (then writing the Crossbencher column in the Sunday Express) accurately reported his dilemma on 15 December, he wrote anxiously to Crowther hoping that the publicity would ‘not do too much damage’.91 But maybe he was just keeping his fallback option open. Eight years later – by which time it was abundantly clear that he had made the right choice – Jenkins admitted to the Birmingham Post that he had thought seriously about the Economist offer. ‘But I couldn’t really see myself doing it. Politics is my life. I’ve never wanted to do anything else. I knew that, when it came to the point, I couldn’t and wouldn’t quit. And I didn’t.’92 The following year Alastair Burnet was appointed.

  Meanwhile Jenkins had demonstrated his commitment to politics by standing for election to the Shadow Cabinet, for the first time since 1957. In fact he and Tony Crosland both stood – possibly influenced by another Crossbencher column which described the two of them, in its inimitable style, as ‘Tweedledum and Tweedledee’:

  Both Mr Jenkins and Mr Crosland went to Oxford and excelled at the Union. Both are economists. Both move in smoothly elegant circles and know their Latour from their Mouton Rothschild. Both were utterly loyal friends of Mr Gaitskell. And in a Gaitskell government both would have been set for a swift rise to the Cabinet.

  But I fear they have something else in common. A profound distrust of their new party leader which they scarcely bother to hide. Is their personal dispute with Mr Wilson too deep to be bridged? Unless they chuck it these two able, arrogant men will face a miserable choice: either to leave public life – or else put up with a seat on the back benches for ever.93