‘You spoke as an adult to adults,’ one admiring friend, John Grigg, told him, ‘but also with a distinction and authority all your own.’54 ‘He presented the facts in straightforward fashion and without trying to wriggle,’ wrote the London Evening Standard the next day, contrasting Jenkins’ directness with Wilson’s slippery broadcast after devaluation. ‘By continuing in this way he could do much to reduce the present cynicism about politicians.’55 On the substance of the budget, too, the verdict of Fleet Street was overwhelmingly positive. The Guardian grumbled about a ‘bankers’ budget’,56 but most commentators echoed the economics editor of The Times, Peter Jay:
Roy Jenkins has risen fully and magnificently to the occasion. Yesterday’s Budget was really everything that was economically needed. It should give devaluation a virtually certain guarantee of success . . . Britain has now beyond any shadow of doubt done everything required to correct the fundamental weakness of the economy and the balance of payments . . . This offers the prospect of a distinctly liberal Budget in two years’ time when most of the debt should be paid off.57
From the most unpropitious circumstances Jenkins had achieved an astonishing personal triumph. Labour continued to trail twenty or more points behind the Tories in the opinion polls, and lost a string of by-elections over the next year by enormous margins, while the balance of payments still took an agonisingly long time to respond to his harsh medicine. During 1968 the Bank still had to shell out £1,400 million to support sterling in the exchange markets – nearly as much as in the three years before devaluation taken together – and the turnaround did not come until mid-1969. Yet in an unpopular government, under a severely discredited Prime Minister, Jenkins had established a position of personal authority that raised huge expectations. He was now widely seen as Wilson’s natural and inevitable successor, with constant suggestions that he should seize the reins sooner rather than later. But these siren voices only added extra pressure to his situation, pulling him in different ways. After three and a half years in office, the 1968 budget marked the end of his period of apparently effortless ascent. From now on his choices would become much more difficult.
After he left office in 1970 Jenkins wrote for the Sunday Times and Observer two thoughtful articles comparing the Home Office and Treasury, based on his recent experience of running both. He contrasted the intellectual self-confidence and informality of the Treasury, where officials habitually addressed each other by their Christian names, with the much greater defensiveness and formality of the Home Office, where surnames still prevailed. More seriously, he contrasted the way decisions had to be taken in each department. The climate of the Home Office, he wrote – remembering the Blake escape, the Shepherd’s Bush shootings, the Maidstone birching case and the Court Lees affair – was ‘one of tropical storms that blow up with speed and violence out of a blue sky, dominate the political landscape for a short time, and then disappear as suddenly as they arrived’. Meanwhile there was a heavy permanent workload of administration and legislation:
The climate of the Treasury, on the other hand, during most of my time there, was that of a long dark arctic winter, only slowly melting into a tentative spring. Changes, whether pleasant or unpleasant, could usually be foreseen at least a few weeks ahead, and were part of a general ebb and flow of events rather than some unexpected occurrence.
The Chancellor introduces no legislation apart from the Finance Bill and has relatively little routine administration in his own department. But he has to take a close interest in what is going on in every other department. ‘He has to attend all major ministerial meetings, and nearly always be either protagonist or antagonist.’58 Above all, given the centrality of the economy in modern government, he is seen to carry the whole fate of the government on his shoulders while peculiarly vulnerable to international forces outside his control. So it is a uniquely burdensome and stressful job.
Jenkins had a difficult baptism at the Treasury, and he was not initially impressed by what he found there. He blamed Sir William Armstrong for giving him bad advice about the timing of the budget; and when Sir Douglas Allen succeeded Armstrong as Permanent Secretary in May 1968, he wrote Allen a stiff letter saying that ‘a good deal of reorganisation and shaking up’ were needed to remedy some serious failures. A recent meeting about the bank rate was ‘I think the worst prepared on a major question in my experience as a minister’; while the contingency planning division that he had asked to be set up in February still did not exist. If they were forced into a second devaluation with as little planning as in November 1967 it would be ‘a major public scandal’ – for which he naturally did not want to be responsible. ‘There are obviously a lot of highly-talented and hard-working people in the Treasury,’ he concluded. ‘But as a coordinated and reliable machine it is not what I would have expected to find. It is living too complacently on its reputation, and if it does that for much longer the reputation will have disappeared.’59 Allen accepted the criticism, but pleaded in mitigation that contingency planning for devaluation had been hampered by the Prime Minister refusing to allow the possibility to be discussed.
Generally, however, Jenkins got on much better with Allen than he had with Armstrong and soon had the department working the way he wanted. Unlike Callaghan, who had frankly struggled with economic concepts, he found the work of the Treasury ‘intellectually satisfying’ and had the self-confidence to take his own decisions.60 Several senior mandarins testified how much they enjoyed working with him. One wrote in retirement that these two and a half years were ‘the happiest of my professional career. For the first time for many years a Chancellor was rising fully to his responsibilities.’61 Alec Cairncross too thought Jenkins ‘the ablest of the four Chancellors I served’ (the others were Selwyn Lloyd, Reggie Maudling and Jim Callaghan):
He listened to advice, but made up his own mind, explaining to his advisers the grounds for his decision. He was at times able to foresee contingencies of which his staff had not warned him, such as the possible devaluation of the French franc . . . He was not afraid to take extreme measures to overcome major dangers, adding more to taxation and cutting more from public expenditure than his advisers suggested and showing a sound judgement of what was at stake. This resoluteness . . . enabled him to carry the Cabinet with him after three years in which they had shrunk from much milder action.62
As at the Home Office, however, he aroused some resentment by relying too exclusively on his small circle of trusted advisers, in particular David Dowler and John Harris whom he had brought with him from the Home Office. Even Cairncross worried about ‘the Chancellor’s tendency to discuss policy with his little “court” . . . and then call together officials briefly to hear judgement before he invites them to give evidence’;63 and Jenkins’ engagement diaries confirm that before practically every big speech or major decision he would lunch with Dowler and Harris at Brooks’s. Even Douglas Allen once found that the only way he could get a real talk with the Chancellor was by booking the seat next to him on a flight to Washington. Many years later Jenkins recalled that at the farewell party the Treasury gave for him after Labour’s defeat his old Oxford friend Leo Pliatzky (then an Under-Secretary) slightly spoiled the eulogistic atmosphere by telling him that he could have been a better Chancellor if he had made more use of the middle ranks. ‘I muttered defensively that I had been trying desperately to avoid a second devaluation rather than to organise a running seminar for assistant and under secretaries.’64 He certainly preferred small purposeful meetings to large wool-gathering ones, largely because he disliked wasting time; he also stopped minor questions being referred to him so that he could concentrate on the big picture, and delegated as much routine as possible to his junior ministers.fn5 The result was that while some of those who worked closely with him admired him greatly, others found him remote.
Above all he was determined to break the departmental culture of working long hours for their own sake. ‘He had the greatest difficulty in dissuading offic
ials from working far into every evening as a matter of course,’ Samuel Brittan wrote in 1969.65 Harold Wilson used to complain that Jenkins left work every day at seven o’clock to go out to dinner; and the same charge recurs throughout the diaries of Crossman, Castle and Benn. ‘The way that man refuses to sacrifice his social life to his political duties never fails to astonish Harold and me,’ Barbara Castle expostulated in July 1968, ‘but he obviously feels strong enough to get away with it.’66 In so far as it was true, however, it was not due to laziness, but was a deliberate policy designed to avoid exhaustion. Jenkins believed strongly that tired and harassed ministers do not make good decisions, and that those who let their job take over their whole life lose their sense of perspective. He did not exactly work short hours as Chancellor, as he described in the Observer:
The hours were testing but not killing. It was only after I had been there for five months that I first had a day completely free from Treasury work. Subsequently I avoided such continuous over-application. Even so, I habitually worked on boxes of official papers or wrote speeches for at least six hours of each of the two weekend days, and from Monday to Friday I did something like a 12-hour day. But I very rarely worked after midnight, and still more rarely did I start, even in bed, before 7.30 a.m.67
Of Stafford Cripps’ habit of doing four hours’ solid paperwork before breakfast every day he wondered, ‘What on earth did he do? It is not necessary, particularly for a man of quick mind and weak body, to steal this additional four hours from sleep or leisure for the administration of the Treasury.’68 Jenkins’ mind was very quick and his health – unlike Cripps’ – was excellent. Like Asquith he had the power of dispatching work exceptionally rapidly, economically and decisively: not only did this leave time for relaxation, but after such concentrated exertion he positively needed it. Unlike Wilson, who used to sit up late in Downing Street gossiping obsessively with his ‘kitchen cabinet’ – Marcia Williams, Joe Haines and Gerald Kaufman – Jenkins liked to get away from politics in the evenings and at weekends.fn6 He did not hang around Westminster any more than necessary and was rebuked by the Chief Whip for his poor voting record. (Only Crosland’s was worse.)70 He believed that this determination to recharge his batteries actually made him a better minister. Reviewing the published diaries of his former colleagues in the 1970s and 1980s, Jenkins disputed Crossman’s suggestion that he lacked ‘industriousness’ (‘a quality which I think Crossman confuses with freneticism’) and mocked Barbara Castle’s account of her own working habits. ‘She was always “dragging” herself to early meetings, “crawling” with exhaustion out of Cabinet, and finally “creeping home” to a tired bed. She made exhaustion into a political virility symbol, and was foolishly critical of those who did not believe that decisions were best taken in a state of prostration.’71 The third Cabinet diarist, Tony Benn, had some sympathy with Jenkins’ determination to protect his sanity. When Peter Shore complained that the Chancellor ‘couldn’t work as hard as he and I did, and had to have weekends off, didn’t work in the evenings and, generally speaking, operated like a pre-1914 Minister’, Benn commented that this routine might upset the Treasury, ‘but it is the way to survive; frankly the pressure of life at the moment is too much for me’.72
Any idea that Jenkins was not thoroughly on top of his job is belied by his record as one of the most successful Chancellors of the past half-century. If Crossman, as Social Services Secretary, sometimes complained that he was poorly briefed on the intricacies of pensions, for instance, that was because pensions were, to the Treasury, a relatively marginal issue. Far more often both Crossman and Castle were forced to recognise his authority and effectiveness on the major issues on which he concentrated his effort. (‘When Roy wants to he takes trouble,’ Crossman noted in September 1968. ‘This morning he was really briefed from top to bottom and got exactly what he wanted.’)73 The central function of the Treasury on which he certainly did not skimp was the preparation of his annual budget. Jenkins presented three of them – the same number as Asquith – and he took immense care that they were all elegantly structured and intellectually coherent. He had studied the budgets of previous Chancellors: not only Asquith’s three, but Lloyd George’s (rather less exemplary) six, as well as those of Dalton, Cripps and Gaitskell. Above all, he considered that Callaghan’s three budgets between 1965 and 1967 had ‘lacked cohesion or purpose’ and was determined that his should be in a different class.74 He started thinking about the shape of the budget as soon as Christmas was out of the way: in 1969 he wrote down his first budget thoughts on the evening of Christmas Day.75 He deliberately broke the convention of strict ‘purdah’ surrounding the Chancellor in the run-up to the budget by discussing his options confidentially with the two colleagues whose views he most valued, Tony Crosland and Denis Healey, as well as with Wilson. Then, after he had decided on the detailed measures, he would spend many hours, alone or with David Dowler, writing, polishing and rehearsing his speech. In the tribute that he wrote on Dowler’s early death he recalled a passage in the economic analysis of the 1969 budget ‘which, through successive drafts, we could not get right’, until Dowler came in early one morning ‘to get the points in their correct logical sequence . . . Thereafter we had no trouble with the structure of the argument.’76 It was this perfectionist attention to detail that gave Jenkins’ three budgets their literary quality and contributed to their political success. Another important innovation was that he started publishing the economic forecasts on which the budget was based. This, wrote Samuel Brittan, ‘was rightly hailed as a major step forward’.77 William Davis in the Guardian thought it typical of Jenkins’ ‘adult approach and it merits the full cooperation of the press’.78
Every Chancellor’s crucial relationship is with his Prime Minister. Nigel Lawson’s experience under Margaret Thatcher and Gordon Brown’s tense rivalry with Tony Blair are only the most recent examples of how a dysfunctional relationship can undermine a government. Jenkins and Wilson, despite their different tastes and lifestyles – ‘good claret and good HP sauce’, as one journalist put it79 – actually worked pretty well together most of the time. Whereas Wilson and Callaghan ‘met only at times of crisis’ and the interconnecting door between Numbers Ten and Eleven was usually closed, Marcia Williams wrote that in 1967–70 ‘the door was always unlocked and very often open’, and the Prime Minister and Chancellor talked almost every day.80, fn7 This was partly because Jenkins clearly held the upper hand. Wilson had been damaged by devaluation and could not afford to lose another Chancellor, so Jenkins was effectively unsackable. An early example of Jenkins exerting his strength occurred in April 1968, soon after his first budget, when Wilson wanted to move Barbara Castle to the DEA. Jenkins had seen the results of divided responsibility for the economy when George Brown had been at the DEA, and he did not want another strong personality disputing his territory, so he vetoed the appointment, successfully flattering Mrs Castle that it was a compliment to her quality that he did not want her there. (‘Relations between us would be bound to be strained and I should regret that.’)83 Wilson backed down and created a new job for Mrs Castle as Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity instead, leaving the more lightweight Peter Shore effectively to wind up the DEA. There were limits to Jenkins’ influence – Wilson ignored his suggestion that he should make Denis Healey Foreign Secretary when Brown resigned, and reappointed Michael Stewart instead; and he played little part in foreign policy. But over the whole field of economic policy he was determined that he should be seen to be in charge: he later criticised some of his successors, even Lawson, for having tolerated ‘a degree of Prime Ministerial control over exchange rate policy, the core of Treasury responsibility, which I would never have accepted’.84 Wilson, though often jealous of Jenkins’ laudatory press, expertly spun by John Harris, accepted this, partly because he respected Jenkins’ competence and recognised that the reputation of the government depended on his success, and partly because most of the time he did not serious
ly believe that Jenkins was after his job. Jenkins, for his part, though still often critical of Wilson’s crablike methods and impatient with his chronic time-wasting, was genuinely grateful to the Prime Minister both for having given him the job and for his loyal support, and even grew quite fond of him.fn8 They were in fact bound together: they needed each other, and they both knew it.
Looking back over his career, Jenkins recognised that 1968–9 was the time when he could have become Prime Minister himself. Wilson was at the nadir of his popularity and Labour trailed by huge margins in the polls. Jenkins seemed to be the one minister with a chance of turning the situation round in time to win the next election, and there was constant press speculation that he could and should push Wilson aside and move next door. Moreover he had a devoted band of supporters working to promote this result. The ‘Jenkinsites’ were now a recognised group within the Parliamentary Labour Party, largely drawn from the 1964 and 1966 intakes. There were some older members and one or two trade unionists, but most were youngish, ambitious, middle-class and university-educated, bereaved Gaitskellites like Bill Rodgers who had cut their teeth in CDS in the early 1960s and had seen the light go out of their political life with Gaitskell’s death in 1963; or David Owen, an abrasive young hospital doctor who had won a Plymouth seat in 1966. They had never quite been able to see George Brown as a credible successor, but having come into politics under the influence of The Future of Socialism looked initially to Tony Crosland as their leader. Some, like Owen and Roy Hattersley, still saw Crosland as their philosopher, but had been persuaded by Jenkins’ much more decisive performance in office – and greater care to advance their careers – to switch their allegiance to him as their potential leader. The strong tribal identity within the group, Rodgers explained to David Butler in an off-the-record interview before the 1970 election, was based on an almost visceral antipathy to Wilson, who – however much his policies might disappoint the left – was not, in their view, a Social Democrat. ‘His style, attitudes values are not ours,’ Rodgers told Butler. ‘I see Harold as a usurper of my mother, Gaitskell’ – in the same way that the grieving Kennedys resented Lyndon Johnson. Rodgers’ picture of the Gaitskellite ‘family’ was rose-tinted:
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