To change anything, however, Jenkins had to overcome the Permanent Secretary, Sir Charles Cunningham, a formidable Scot who had been in post since 1957 and expected things to be done his way. He was almost sixty, but had been assured by Soskice that he could stay on beyond the normal Whitehall retirement age. Jenkins had other ideas. Again the opening episode of Yes, Minister was very near the mark, with the difference that Jenkins – unlike Jim Hacker with Sir Humphrey Appleby – was determined to have his way, and did so. Cunningham, who had come to the Home Office from the much smaller Home and Health Department of the Scottish Office, operated an ‘intensely hierarchical’ system by which all advice to ministers was submitted exclusively by himself. Instead of a full exposition of the alternative courses of action with the supporting arguments for each, allowing the Secretary of State to question a range of subordinate officials and form his own judgement, ‘everything came on one or two sheets of thick blue paper, boiled down to a few hundred words of lucid explanation, and boldly initialled “C.C.C.”.’5 The Home Secretary had either to agree or face a major confrontation. Jenkins was certain from the moment he entered the department that this must change. He also insisted that Cunningham himself must go; proposed to replace several of the older deputies and under-secretaries with new blood from other departments, ‘to correct a tendency to inbreeding and inward-looking’; and requested three specific individuals of his own choosing. He wanted David Dowler, his private secretary from Aviation, to head his private office; John Harris from the Foreign Office to handle his press relations; and Jeremy Hutchinson, QC, as a part-time legal adviser. He presented these demands at a difficult meeting on Monday, 11 January 1966. The next morning, in a stiff note of protest, Cunningham resisted them all.
First, while ostensibly acceding to the minister’s wishes, Sir Charles made clear his preference for his own method of submitting advice:
You asked that the practice of submitting matters of importance requiring a decision by Ministers in the form of a self-contained minute . . . ending with a recommendation should be discontinued and that we should revert to the former Home Office practice (which I personally regard as inefficient) of submitting all business in relevant files. Instructions have been given accordingly.
‘An inevitable consequence of this change of practice’, Cunningham claimed, was that the junior ministers would be less fully informed.6 But this was the opposite of the truth. When Cunningham tried to enlist them to support his rearguard action – ‘a nicely calculated attempt’, in Jenkins’ words, to stir up the ‘distinguished but slightly prickly trio’ whom he had inherited from his predecessor – they realised that a more open procedure offered them more input, not less. So Cunningham got no joy there.7
Then he strongly defended all the officials whom Jenkins wanted to replace; asserted that moving Dowler from Aviation was contrary to Civil Service rules; and objected to the secondment of Harris: ‘I regard as most undesirable an arrangement under which an individual officer who ought to work as a member of a team has a special relationship of this kind.’ He particularly deplored the proposal to bring in Hutchinson, ‘which will be regarded, if it is given effect, as a reflection upon a most distinguished and competent Home Office legal adviser’.8 No doubt, by established Whitehall convention, there was justice in all these objections. Nevertheless Jenkins got most of what he wanted. He managed to shift three of the five under-secretaries that he targeted. He was allowed to bring in Dowler and, after a short delay, Harris. He failed to get Hutchinson, but secured the appointment of another liberal-minded QC, Anthony Lester, instead. Above all, Sir Charles himself reluctantly moved on to become head of the Atomic Energy Authority. Jenkins told Barbara Castle on 14 January that he had had ‘an emotionally exhausting time’ battling with Cunningham. ‘He was furious, but I’ve got my way.’9 His new Permanent Secretary, Sir Philip Allen, had spent much of his career in the Home Office, but had most recently served in the Treasury, so ‘he did not count as a troglodyte’ and Jenkins quickly formed an excellent relationship with him.10
Jenkins’ determination to bring in his own people was characteristic of his way of working, which led to some criticism – in the Home Office and later at the Treasury and in Brussels – that he relied too much on his private office rather than using the full resources of the machine at his disposal. Certainly Dowler, until his early death, and Harris, in various roles for the rest of his life, were his closest advisers. Dowler, born in 1930, had joined the Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation straight from Cambridge and was quickly identified as a high-flyer; as Principal Private Secretary from January 1965 he proved so congenial that Jenkins insisted on taking him with him, against all normal practice, first to the Home Office and then to the Treasury. He was by all accounts brilliant – in Jenkins’ words, ‘one of the best and most consistently alert critical minds that I have ever encountered’ – with good political antennae and effective at driving progress.fn1 But Dowler was also a bit of a bully, sharp-tongued and could be insufferably rude: decades later one former colleague remembered him as ‘pure poison’.12 When he died suddenly of a congenital heart defect in January 1970, Jenkins wrote a warm appreciation in The Times: ‘I shall greatly miss his advice. But, even more, I shall miss the sheer pleasure of his company.’13 To another former secretary who had served under his ‘iron rod’, however, he acknowledged that Dowler was ‘a wonderful private secretary to me, but I suppose not altogether easy to work under’.14 Like many shy men who shrink from confrontation, Jenkins often needed someone else to do his dirty work for him.
John Harris, the same age as Dowler, had been around Gaitskellite circles for some years. He had started life as a journalist before becoming personal assistant to Gaitskell in 1959 – he was present at the Frognal post-mortem after the election that year – then served as Labour’s director of publicity up to 1964, when he went to the Foreign Office as special assistant to Patrick Gordon Walker and stayed on under Michael Stewart until poached by Jenkins. This was the beginning of a long, exceptionally close, but sometimes controversial association. Though paid as a civil servant, Harris acted as Jenkins’ personal spin doctor, infuriating his rivals by keeping his name constantly in the headlines; even before he officially started he was already advising Jenkins how to secure maximum coverage for his first big speech and which lobby correspondents he should invite for a drink.15 When Jenkins returned to the Home Office in 1974 he persuaded Wilson to make Harris a peer so that he could become – as Lord Harris of Greenwich – a junior minister in the department. In later life he became a slightly comic clone of his master, affecting many of the same mannerisms and intonations; but Jenkins valued him highly as ‘a counsellor of buoyancy, humour, flair and instinctive political wisdom’.16 Sometimes his activities probably did Jenkins more harm than good; but at every important moment of his career, from the Home Office to the SDP, Harris played a key role.
Jenkins had little time for his first three junior ministers, all considerably older than himself, who were already in place when he arrived and understandably resented his promotion over their heads. Alice Bacon, the Minister of State, a no-nonsense Yorkshirewoman and long-standing right-wing member of the National Executive, positively disliked him; she was eventually moved to Education, but not until August 1967. The two Under-Secretaries were George Thomas, the slightly sanctimonious Welsh Methodist who later achieved national recognition as the first broadcast Speaker of the House of Commons; and Lord Stonham, a former Labour MP and prison reform campaigner who had been given one of the first life peerages in 1958. Jenkins was relieved when Thomas was moved to the Welsh Office after the 1966 election and Wilson gave him instead Dick Taverne, a Gaitskellite barrister who was to become one of his closest associates. At the same time he managed to have Maurice Foley transferred from the DEA to deal more positively with race relations. Thus he gradually got a ministerial team that was more to his liking.
One aspect of the job that he found aggravating was the c
onvention by which the Home Secretary, as head of the Metropolitan Police, had a constable permanently stationed outside his front door. One Ladbroke Square neighbour, having heard him talking on television about the shortage of police, wrote to ask, ‘Is it really using a police officer to good advantage having one standing outside your front door?!’17 A few weeks later Jenkins himself wrote to the Commissioner questioning the practice; it was not only doubtfully necessary, in pre-terrorist days, but it provided ‘maximum boredom and discomfort for the police and minimum convenience’ to himself and his family; Jennifer thought the constable’s presence when they were at home and his absence when they were away an invitation to burglary.18 Eventually Jenkins got the protection withdrawn. But he still had a Special Branch detective shadowing him wherever he went. He once asked this bodyguard if he could stop him being assassinated. ‘I doubt it,’ the officer replied, ‘but being so close to you I could write a much better report.’19 And sometimes they could be useful. Over Easter 1966 – the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising in Dublin – Roy and Jennifer joined a weekend party at Ann Fleming’s country house at Sevenhampton. Ann wrote characteristically to Nicko Henderson:
Roy had two detectives because of the Easter rebellion, marvellous at moving furniture for the Roys and a boon and blessing for children because of revolvers in holsters under armpits and more than ready to give demonstrations.20, fn2
By the time he left the Home Office, Jenkins had grown used to them and confessed that when he moved to the Treasury he rather missed them.
Having lost no time in stamping his will on the department, Jenkins set out his intentions to Parliament in a judicious, carefully non-partisan speech of ‘incisive vigour’ in the Commons on 2 February, followed by a press conference five days later, both emphasising the priority he would give to fighting crime.22 But he had not been in office more than two months before Wilson judged the moment right to try to convert his precarious toehold on power into a secure majority, and called a General Election for 31 March 1966. This was the first election Jenkins had fought as a senior minister. He not only spoke much more widely beyond the West Midlands, but he fronted one of Labour’s morning press conferences and was chosen to deliver the party’s last radio broadcast, two days before polling day, in which he spoke authoritatively about the government’s record so far – constrained by the deficit left by the Tories – and its ambitions for the next five years: first to stimulate the economy by ‘a mixture of competition and planning’, regional policy and prices and incomes policy, and then to distribute the results fairly so as to eliminate ‘the remaining islands of poverty and hardship’ while giving ‘proper rewards’ to the wealth creators. This was the standard Labour line, in retrospect naively optimistic. But Jenkins also sounded two characteristic themes of his own. First, without mentioning Europe, he urged that a key issue for the future was Britain finding her ‘proper role in the modern world’:
A strong economy and a secure balance of payments position would do ten times as much for Britain’s influence as the one new aircraft carrier which the Conservatives want to build, or the base at Aden which they say they would not give up.
Second, he wanted to ‘put behind us Britain’s reputation for meanness in matters affecting the arts, sport and general amenities of life’. The government’s aim was ‘to use prosperity as a means to a more civilised and tolerant community’. On this rosy prospectus he asked the country to give Labour the ‘clear and decisive majority’ that he believed it had earned.23
The voters did as he asked, and Labour was returned with a landslide majority of ninety-eight and a share of the poll – 47.9 per cent – marginally higher even than in 1945. On this high tide, Jenkins in Stechford won 64 per cent of the poll and more than doubled his majority, despite the intervention of a third candidate:
Roy Jenkins (Labour) 24,598
David Knox (Conservative) 12,727
W. Dunn (Communist) 998
Labour majority
11,87124
Labour now seemed to have secured the platform it needed to become a great reforming government on the model of 1906 and 1945.
From his study of Asquith, Jenkins told Robin Day, he had learned that to succeed as a minister ‘you should concentrate on relatively few issues on which you think you can really do something decisive . . . not dissipate your energies over too wide a field’.25 If other colleagues wanted to make territorial raids on bits of his sprawling empire, he suggested a few days later – Fred Peart (Agriculture) to take over responsibility for wild birds, Kenneth Robinson (Health) drugs or Arthur Bottomley (Commonwealth Relations) the Isle of Man – that would be ‘OK by me’.26 His ‘core function’ was holding the balance between order and liberty; and here his first concern was to improve the organisation and equipment of the police. His most radical step was to cut the number of small local forces from 117 down to forty-nine (and later forty-three), which meant treading on a lot of local pride and more than seventy Chief Constables losing their jobs. This was, as The Times put it, ‘the greatest upheaval in policing since the time of Peel’, going a good deal further than the recommendations of a Royal Commission which had reported in 1962, and further than the Home Office thought he could get away with. Soskice had been waiting for the report of another Royal Commission on local government; but Jenkins just got on with it. The strongest resistance was in Lancashire, where thirteen local forces were merged into one. But reform was overdue, and Jenkins’ boldness was generally applauded.27 One of those who lost out, the Chief Constable of Leicester, Robert Mark, wrote in his memoirs that ‘the enforced amalgamation of police forces against the strong opposition of chief constables, local authorities and some civil servants . . . took real courage and determination . . . but proved so obviously right that Jenkins was quickly accorded the reward to which he was entitled, the enhanced respect of police and public alike’.28 This ‘sweeping and courageous’ reform, in Mark’s view, produced ‘immeasurable improvements in organisation, equipment, procedures, accountability and in common or shared services’ and began the transformation of the police ‘from a fragmented, essentially artisan service, often dominated by local politics or the central government, to a well-organised professional body much better equipped to resist outside pressures and to speak for itself’.29
Jenkins had already identified Mark as an exceptionally able and intelligent policeman, so he quickly found other roles for him and then appointed him Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, with the deliberate intention of putting him in line to become Commissioner. This was another brave move, since the Met had a jealous tradition of promoting only from within its own ranks: only one provincial policeman had ever been appointed to such a high rank in the London force, and he lasted just three years. When Jenkins offered him the job at the end of 1966 Mark asked him: ‘Have you consulted the Commissioner, and does he agree?’
There was a lengthy silence while Jenkins surveyed the ceiling. At last, choosing his words with typical Jenkinsian skill, he replied, ‘He has loyally promised to abide by my decision.’ It could hardly have been plainer, but for me, of course, it was Hobson’s choice. I therefore accepted with as good grace as I could muster.30
He was not made welcome. But Jenkins’ decision was abundantly justified when Mark eventually succeeded as Commissioner in 1972 and set about vigorously rooting out the corruption that was endemic in the London force.
Next Jenkins gave the police better equipment. In September 1966 he visited Chicago to study policing methods there.fn3 He had originally planned to go in June, but had to postpone his trip to deal with a prolonged seamen’s strike which was blocking the ports: as Home Secretary he chaired the Cabinet Emergencies Committee charged with keeping essential supplies moving. What he saw in America led him to accelerate two major reforms, which the police had long been pressing for. First, he greatly increased the provision of two-way radios so that policemen on the beat were no longer isolated units but could be sent
quickly wherever they were needed. In 1965 the Met had had just twenty-five radios for the whole force: Jenkins upped that to 2,500, with similar increases over the whole country.32 Second, he equipped the police with more radio cars, which had a double-edged effect: it made them more mobile, but also took them off the street, making them less visible and more anonymous. The public, preferring Dixon of Dock Green to Z-Cars, has been calling for more ‘coppers on the beat’ ever since.
All this could be done without legislation. Jenkins’ biggest challenge was to put together and carry a major Criminal Justice Bill. He outlined his proposals to Cabinet in August 1966, and by the end of the year he was ready to introduce what he described in a notably lucid and thoughtful party political broadcast as ‘the most far-reaching piece of Home Office legislation we have had for a very long time’. It brought together a somewhat miscellaneous ragbag of measures with a single purpose, ‘to strengthen the hand of those engaged directly in the war against crime’.33 They ranged from tighter controls on the purchase of shotguns (closing a loophole in the most recent legislation) through the streamlining of committal proceedings, the banning of ‘sprung’ (that is, last-minute) alibis and the introduction of majority verdicts in jury trials, to various measures to reduce the soaring prison population: release under licence, easier bail, suspended sentences and earlier parole, attachment of earnings instead of imprisonment for debt.fn4 These, he insisted, were not designed to make prison ‘softer’. ‘I am searching urgently for means of limiting the prison population, not because I dismiss the value of prison in the fight against crime, but because I want to use it as a much more effective weapon that it is today.’34 ‘I want to sharpen and not blunt the deterrent effect of prison, and I believe we can best do this by not acclimatising men to prison unless we have to.’35
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