In his Stechford election address – printed in red, with the slogan FOR A NEW BRITAIN LET’S GO WITH LABOUR and a very smooth photo of the candidate – he promised an end to ‘Stop–Go’, with ‘a fair incomes policy . . . an attack on monopolies and market rigging . . . effective planning and a better taxation system’ to build up exports and save imports:
By these means [a Labour Government] would cut the knot which at present throttles our ability to expand production without running into economic crisis. We could then go ahead like many other countries at a steady 4 or 5 per cent a year.
‘This steady expansion,’ he confidently predicted, ‘is the key to paying for the great schemes of social advance which Labour puts forward.’ He mentioned housing, education and pensions, with a nod to helping the poorer countries of the world – but no specific mention of Europe.fn18 There was also a message from Jennifer on ‘women’s issues’, specifically (wearing her Consumers’ Association hat) the need for compulsory labelling and dating of food in the shops; and the usual family group with the three children – now aged fifteen, twelve and ten – in the back garden of Ladbroke Square.127
This was the last election Jenkins would fight as a purely local figure. He held his usual round of meetings in Stechford schools, chaired the big rally when Wilson came to the Birmingham Bull Ring, and spoke for Woodrow Wyatt in Bosworth, George Brown in Belper and a few more friends and pro-European candidates elsewhere. He wrote several newspaper articles – on Labour’s economic policy in the Daily Mail, a magisterial survey of foreign policy in the Daily Telegraph128 – but did no television and was barely reported in the national press. In one characteristic sally he described Quintin Hogg as ‘the nearest thing we have to Senator Goldwater of British politics’fn19 and – with the authority of his official biographer – refuted the idea that Gaitskell would not have supported all of Wilson’s policies.129 In another, when it was clear that whichever government was elected would face a balance-of-payments deficit in the region of £600 million, he followed the party line in asserting that the Tories were already planning to impose import restrictions in November:
Only Mr Maudling has to protest that everything is all right. He sits heavily but apprehensively on top of the Treasury like a chairman of an anti-volcanic society meeting on the top of Vesuvius and hoping he can get the vote of thanks over before the gurgles underneath him turn into another eruption.130
Despite recognition of a looming crisis, however, the polls narrowed. Wilson paraded his slide rule to emphasise his economic expertise, while Douglas-Home confessed that he used matchsticks to work out economic problems; yet the public still turned back to the Tories. All Labour’s talk of growth began to look a bit too facile. In the end Labour’s vote actually fell slightly compared with 1959; but the Tories’ fell more, while the Liberals doubled their share to three million, helping Labour to a bare overall majority of just four (Labour 317, Conservative 304, Liberals nine). After thirteen years in the wilderness Labour was back, but scarcely with the ringing mandate Wilson had hoped for, and facing a dire economic inheritance.
In Stechford, Jenkins nearly doubled his personal majority from its low point in 1959:
Roy Jenkins (Labour) 22,421
D.L. Knox (Conservative) 17,033
Labour majority
5,388131
After sixteen years in Parliament, he finally had the possibility of office. The next six years would transform him from a semi-detached literary dilettante to a central figure in British politics and a potential Prime Minister.
* * *
fn1 He would presumably have had to cancel his tour entirely if Labour had won the election, since Gaitskell would surely have given him some sort of office – perhaps in the Treasury or the Home Office. So either the American trip was arranged some time before Macmillan called the election, or Jenkins’ signing up to it is confirmation that he did not expect Labour to win.
fn2 Over dinner they had another ‘snappy’ argument when they discovered that they were both reviewing the memoirs of the former Tory party chairman Lord Woolton (Jenkins in the Spectator, Crossman in the New Statesman). Crossman said that Woolton was ‘a Keynesian Liberal, like the American Democrats. At once Jenkins spotted what I was at when I added, “What really distinguishes a Socialist is the belief in public ownership and State trading.”’10
fn3 This was a direct lift from J.K. Galbraith’s The Affluent Society, published the year before, which first drew attention to the phenomenon of ‘public squalor in the midst of private affluence’.13
fn4 The other four were Tony Benn, Roy Mason, Reg Prentice and George Thomson – all future Cabinet ministers under Wilson.
fn5 ‘It’s a slight exaggeration to say I resigned,’ he told Robin Day a few years later. ‘I was doing a very small job and I asked not to be reappointed . . . It wasn’t a very dramatic gesture.’36
fn6 Ever mindful of his creature comforts, he had not looked forward to going back to Blackpool. ‘It takes a long time to get there, the sea front is hideous, the hotels are inadequate’ and the weather was usually bad.38 This time, however, he found the place ‘slightly more agreeable than I had remembered it . . . The food was better, the weather was less wet and the illuminated tramcars were most impressive.’39
fn7 With his twin enthusiasms for Europe and consumer protection, Young – later Lord Young of Dartington – was an almost perfect combination of Roy and Jennifer.
fn8 Encounter was a political and literary journal, founded in 1953 and initially edited by the poet Stephen Spender. Its reputation was later tarnished when it was revealed to have been funded by the CIA as an anti-Communist weapon in the Cold War; but in the 1950s and 1960s it was an influential magazine.
fn9 The next month Jenkins wrote a long letter to the New Statesman refuting in great detail an article by Jay ‘more rooted than usual in false premises and exaggerated conclusions’, condemning ‘the backward-looking insularity which is the foundation of his whole case’:
He assumes throughout that the Britain of 1949 with its high direct taxes, its subsidised food, its detailed physical controls and its import restrictions had provided the ultimate answer to all social and economic problems. And he sees all outside problems by putting the wrong end of a specially opaque British telescope to his blind eye.60
Generally speaking, Jenkins did not quarrel with his political opponents. But this letter infuriated Jay, who accused him of using a deliberate misquotation to discredit his argument. In his memoirs Jay described the bitter ending of their friendship around this time. ‘It is hard in my experience to feel personal affection towards those who are actively working to destroy . . . something for which one cares deeply.’61
fn10 After this speech Jenkins was heard to declare bitterly that if Gaitskell lost the next election he could always become chairman of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.70
fn11 Crosland also calculated that if Wilson won on the second ballot, ‘he will know who put him there’.78 But this part of his calculation did him less good than he hoped.
fn12 Reviewing Anthony Howard’s biography of Crossman many years later, Jenkins recalled that Crossman spent this lunch denouncing Gaitskell ‘as though a poisonous plague had been removed from the Labour party. I was more struck . . . by Crossman’s self-destructiveness than by his malevolence.’81
fn13 Tactfully Jenkins chose not to review Williams’ book. Years later, however – after Williams’ death – he revealed what he thought of it when reviewing another, less reverential biography by Brian Brivati. ‘Alas, as Williams was a person utterly unlike Gaitskell, lacking his gaiety, his half-suppressed hedonism and his occasional frivolous warmth, it was inevitably not much good on the private Gaitskell.’ By contrast he commended Brivati for dealing ‘honestly, yet not pruriently or obsessively, with Gaitskell’s late-life intoxication with Mrs Ian Fleming . . . a passion which says more for Gaitskell’s astringent taste than for his political caution.’87
&nb
sp; fn14 Michael Stewart topped the list with 184, followed by Jim Callaghan. Twelfth and last of the successful candidates was the seventy-three-year-old Dick Mitchison, with 123. Denis Healey (143) was the only successful candidate under fifty (and the only one younger than Wilson). Tony Benn was fifteenth with eighty-two votes.95
fn15 This affair occasioned a rare flash of mild jealousy from Caroline Gilmour who wrote to ‘Darling Roy’ sometime in the mid-1960s: ‘I was deeply shocked to see that, so great is your passion for the princess that you had to copy her bedroom at East Hendred! Which visit, incidentally, I greatly enjoyed, and feel it was almost like the old days (before the affairs of state and the little lot monopolised you).’104
fn16 This may have been the same dinner party at the American Embassy described by Ann Fleming in a letter to Clarissa Avon in February 1964. She was seated between Roy and Bobby, whom she did not like. ‘He seemed humourless and aggressive with the nasty American desire for facts, not my strong point . . . It was a pleasure to turn to Roy Jenkins.’105
fn17 Taylor was a great champion of Lloyd George, whose much more vigorous love life he revealed a few years later by publishing his toe-curling letters to his secretary/mistress Frances Stevenson, as well as her diary.
fn18 Jenkins accepted that de Gaulle’s veto had knocked Europe off the agenda for the moment. But his commitment remained undimmed. ‘The problem,’ he wrote in the Daily Telegraph, ‘will present itself in a new form in a few years’ time. As a convinced “European”, I am not unhopeful about what a Labour Government, learning from the facts of international life, might do then.’126
fn19 Barry Goldwater was the Republican candidate opposing Lyndon Johnson in that year’s US presidential election. He was regarded as an extreme right-winger and lost by a landslide.
11
Office at Last
AS SOON AS it was clear that Wilson would be able to form a government Jenkins, like every other Labour MP hopeful of office, was plunged into an agony of anticipation mixed with apprehension, exactly as satirised in the opening episode of Yes, Minister. Would he get a job at all and, if so, what? After his reassuring talk with Wilson the year before he had reasonable grounds for confidence that he would be offered something. But it might not be in one of the departments he wanted: there was considerable speculation that he might get Education. Almost as important was how any offer compared with what was offered to others.
He did not hurry back to London while the last votes were being counted on Friday morning, but stayed in Birmingham to give lunch to his party workers; then he drove back to take part in a television discussion at Lime Grove during which the first Cabinet appointments were announced: notably Jim Callaghan to be Chancellor, with George Brown in charge of a rival economic ministry, the Department of Economic Affairs (DEA). This division – designed primarily to provide a suitable niche for Brown, but supposed to encourage ‘creative tension’ in economic policy – had been planned several months earlier. Brown had then pressed Jenkins to be his number two, but Jenkins resisted. ‘High though was my regard for many aspects of Brown’s brilliant but uncontrolled personality, I thought this would be more a recipe for emotional exhaustion than for calm ratiocination and effective decision-taking.’1 But what might he get instead?
Next morning he had a drink with Tony Crosland at his flat in Chelsea; he was relieved that Tony had not heard anything either, but jumped whenever Tony’s phone rang. After a nervous walk with Jennifer in Richmond Park in the afternoon he came home to a message – the phone having been answered by ten-year-old Edward – to ring 10 Downing Street immediately. When Jenkins did so he was summoned for 10.30 the next day. He then took Charles and Edward to see the new James Bond film Goldfinger at the Kensington Odeon. Bill and Sylvia Rodgers came to Ladbroke Square for dinner; they had just reached the cheese when Brown telephoned to tip Jenkins off that he was to be offered the Ministry of Aviation – outside the Cabinet, but heading his own department – while Rodgers was to be an Under-Secretary in the DEA. Brown summoned them all to his flat in Marble Arch, where they found the Croslands and learned that Tony was to be Brown’s Minister of State. One might imagine that for Labour’s ambitious young economists the DEA, which was supposed to be the powerhouse of the new economic planning, was the place to be, even in a subordinate position. But this was not how Crosland saw it: he was already in a furious altercation with Brown over devaluation. ‘Tony was in a black mood,’ Rodgers remembered, ‘because he did not want to become . . . George’s Number 2, least of all when Roy was to have a department of his own.’2 In the Whitehall pecking order, having your own ministry – any ministry – is better than being number two in any other department. This was a critical moment: the first of a series of steps by which Jenkins decisively overtook his old friend over the next few years, from which their relationship never fully recovered.
Wilson’s choice, setting aside past differences, showed that he already saw Jenkins as a clear-sighted problem-solver who could be placed straight away at the head of a complex department. In their conversation in October 1963 he had already hinted that he was thinking of giving him a job on the foreign affairs/defence side of the government, so Jenkins’ wider international interests, going beyond economics, probably gave him an edge over Crosland. But when he saw the Prime Minister in Downing Street the next morning Wilson took an age to come to the point, so he was grateful for Brown’s tip-off. Being forewarned, he had time to bargain. Before the election Wilson had planned to break up the Ministry of Aviation, putting civil aviation under Transport or the Board of Trade and leaving only the military side.3 But Jenkins, having taken an interest in the problems of BOAC for his Observer articles, was keen to keep the civilian side as well; and Wilson needed little persuasion. He was less cooperative over personnel. Jenkins asked for Tom Bradley as his junior minister, but Wilson insisted (‘unusually brusquely for him’) that he must have John Stonehouse.4 Jenkins appointed Bradley his PPS instead.fn1
Aviation might not sound like a key job in an incoming Labour government, but in 1964 it was a high-profile assignment with several big decisions to be made concerning both military and civilian aircraft. Jenkins’ appointment was generally well received. ‘Youngest Minister Gets Tough Air Job’ was the Daily Mirror’s front-page headline (Jenkins was forty-three at the time);5 while the Spectator predicted that ‘Mr Roy Jenkins will shine brightly at the scarcely impossible task of doing better than Mr Julian Amery’.6 Jenkins himself, both in his Observer articles and during the election (when he had no reason to expect to get the job himself), had criticised his Tory predecessor’s handling of BOAC in highly personal terms:
For a public corporation to work well there must be relations of trust between the top management and the Minister. Mr Amery is a thousand miles from creating such trust, and completely unsuited to his job.7
But BOAC was only one of the problems facing him. He had also to review – with Denis Healey at the Ministry of Defence – the prospects and the proper size and structure of the struggling British aircraft industry; and most immediately he had to take a view on whether to go ahead with the Anglo-French supersonic airliner, Concord (as it was still spelled in Britain).
Jenkins had barely found his office – on the second floor of the huge new Ministry of Defence building off Whitehall, with a fine view over the river – and was just beginning to read himself into his new responsibilities when he was plunged into a rough baptism. On joining the government he was obliged to sever his connection with John Lewis; but he was determined that ministerial office should not affect his lifelong insistence on lunching with someone practically every day, so on his third day he was about to give a farewell lunch to the chairman, Bernard Miller, at Brooks’s when his Permanent Secretary, Sir Richard Way, hauled him out – in person – to warn him of Whitehall rumours that the Cabinet had decided the previous day, as part of the spending cuts required by the £800 million deficit, unilaterally to cancel Concord. Here was the disadvan
tage of being outside the Cabinet. ‘The issue was plumb within the responsibilities of the Minister of Aviation, and I had not been consulted.’8 He was not in fact particularly committed to the project. His Observer article the previous summer had concluded sceptically that ‘The Concord . . . needs much harder economic analysis than it ever received.’9 The estimated cost had more than doubled in just four years since Amery had signed the agreement with the French. As the costs spiralled, the likelihood of being able to sell the plane diminished, so that even BOAC and Air France might need to be subsidised to fly it; while the so-called ‘sonic boom’ was proving worse than anticipated, threatening operating restrictions which would further affect its commercial viability. There was no great demand for supersonic travel; and scarce technological resources might be better employed in a multiplicity of less glamorous projects than one or two ‘prestige’ ones. The problem was that Amery had signed not just a commercial contract to co-produce the aircraft, but a full-blown treaty. It would be not only expensive but internationally humiliating to withdraw. Whatever his private doubts, both as a departmental minister defending his patch and as a proponent of European cooperation, Jenkins had to fight the decision.
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