Roy Jenkins
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fn14 Ahead of his time, Jenkins also attempted to control inflation by squeezing the money supply: he was the first Chancellor to get daily reports on the Bank’s money operations, and he actually fined the banks for lending too much. Enoch Powell – practically the only declared monetarist in Parliament at that time – applauded him for quietly doing the one thing that would reduce inflation, while pretending to do it by incomes policy, which merely transferred the blame for it from the government to the public.136
fn15 Hattersley’s visit to East Hendred is not recorded in Jenkins’ normally very detailed engagement diary. But he has described it so vividly more than once that one hesitates to doubt his memory.
fn16 These elliptical diagrams were known in the Treasury as ‘MacDougall’s Flying Saucers’, after the new chief economic adviser, Sir Donald MacDougall. Jenkins was a good enough statistician to be fascinated by them. He would take them back to East Hendred for the weekend, and often asked for more elaboration on Monday morning.152
fn17 Youth is of course relative. Jenkins was forty-nine – but Crossman was sixty-two, and Barbara Castle fifty-eight.
fn18 In his memoirs Jenkins remembered this slightly differently. He recalled Posner resolving the dispute between the Chancellor and his more cautious officials by saying that ‘£100 million or so between friends is nothing much to worry about.’ Either Posner changed his mind or Jenkins’ memory was wrong.170
fn19 Ann Fleming mischievously attended a meeting he addressed at Swindon on 5 June, standing conspicuously at the back in a fur coat (in June!), having promised not to heckle. Nicko Henderson (then Ambassador to Poland, but home on leave) went too. ‘I was struck by how fit he looked, as if, despite the election campaign, he had spent the last weeks on holiday in the Mediterranean. By contrast, the others on the platform looked distinctly pale.’ They all met up the next day for lunch at a Good Food Guide-listed pub, the White Hart in Hamstead Marshall, which was full of wealthy Tories. ‘“Roy’s much more likely to get eggs thrown at him here than in Swindon Town Hall,” I suggested to Ann as we arrived. “Yes,” she replied, “but they will be oeufs en cocotte, much more suitable for our Roy than raw eggs.”’186
fn20 Jenkins’ personal result in Stechford showed a higher-than-average swing against him – 7.1 per cent against a national swing of 4.7 per cent and a West Midlands swing (boosted by the local influence of Enoch Powell’s lurid warnings about immigration) of 5.6 per cent. His majority, though still quite safe, was almost halved, taking it roughly back to its 1964 level, though on a lower turnout he still won 56 per cent of a substantially enlarged electorate:
Roy Jenkins (Labour) 22,559
J.B. Stevens (Conservative) 15,848
D. Hardy (National Democrat) 1,438
S. Pegg (Communist) 298
Labour majority
6,711195
14
Europe before Party
LOSING OFFICE IS a shock – especially when defeat is as unexpected as it was for Labour in June 1970. Writing in 1971, Jenkins compared the experience to that of a prisoner released after several years inside. ‘There is a sense of release, but also a certain apprehension that the props of a familiar routine and the well-known jailers have been removed. A combination of greater freedom but greater responsibility for one’s own life stares one sternly in the face.’ He found himself initially not only without an official car or office, but with no staff: even his long-time secretary, Bess Church, was on holiday, and he was hopeless at coping by himself. He soon regained one of his familiar props by persuading Collins, his publisher, to employ John Harris as his part-time research assistant at £1,000 a year; and in 1972 he acquired another younger aide, Matthew Oakeshott, paid for by the Rowntree Foundation.fn1 Meanwhile since Jennifer’s ancient Morris 1300 was mostly kept in East Hendred, he used taxis to get around London until, as he noted in his diary with due self-mockery, he ventured onto the Underground for the first time in six years on 16 July. For a few weeks he felt disoriented. ‘In July I felt lost. In August I had a holiday [five weeks in Tuscany]. In September I got back to normal.’2
‘Normal’, however, was a life very different from that he had lived up to 1964. Then he had been a semi-detached backbencher, as much a writer as a politician. Now he was an ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer, still Labour’s principal economic spokesman and widely seen as the next leader, with a major decision to make immediately. Despite having led the government to defeat, Wilson had no intention of stepping down as leader; but George Brown’s loss of his seat in Belper had created a vacancy for deputy leader. The deputy leadership was in truth not much of a job: since it was created to save Herbert Morrison’s face in 1951, no deputy had ever succeeded to the leadership and it was by no means always held by the second man in the party. Nevertheless, when vacant it provided an opportunity for an important test of strength, as much between the different wings of the party as between individuals. Most of those who now considered themselves Jenkinsites – Bill Rodgers, George Thomson, David Owen, Dick Taverne, David Marquand and Bob Maclennan – thought it essential that Jenkins should stand for the Gaitskellite right against Michael Foot, the standard-bearer of the left, and he had little hesitation in agreeing. With hindsight he might have done better to have followed the example of Jim Callaghan and let it go. But Callaghan already had a seat on the National Executive as party treasurer, whereas the deputy leadership would give Jenkins a formal position in the party which he had hitherto lacked. Wilson encouraged him to go for it, possibly in order to bind his most dangerous rival to his leadership. Barbara Castle, however – whose unpublished diary for these years provides a vivid commentary on the deep split which quickly reopened in the party – was furious that the job was being ‘carved up for Roy’, and objected to Jenkins being handed a power base on the NEC ‘to which he could never get elected’. She threatened to stand herself until Wilson firmly discouraged her.3 In the event Fred Peart (the former Minister of Agriculture and Leader of the House) stood as a third candidate on an anti-Common Market ticket. The result was by no means a foregone conclusion; but on 8 July Jenkins was comfortably elected on the first ballot with the votes of 133 Labour MPs against sixty-seven for Foot and forty-eight for Peart (though no fewer than thirty-nine abstained). ‘It really is ironic,’ Mrs Castle fumed, ‘that the party had endorsed so wholeheartedly the man who denied them growth.’4 But the vote, which seemed to confirm Jenkins as front-runner for the eventual succession, was widely hailed as evidence that Labour was now a responsible governing party interested in regaining power as quickly as possible and was not, as so often in the past, going to swing left in opposition.
Garland, Guardian, 9.7.70 (British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent)
That soon turned out to be a mistake. But the deputy leadership contest did furnish one ominous pointer to the future. Jenkins had naturally hoped that Tony Crosland would support him; but Crosland declined to give him any such assurance, indicating that he would probably back Callaghan. When Callaghan did not stand, Crosland was possibly one of those who abstained rather than support his old friend. This, Jenkins noted, was ‘a phase, an important one . . . in the deterioration of our political relationship’.5 It was also an important symptom of the fragmentation of the Labour right.
Jenkins soon found the chores of frontbench opposition more demanding than ministerial work. For one thing he was expected to spend far more time in the House of Commons. ‘As Chancellor,’ he wrote in the Observer, ‘I answered questions once a month and made perhaps six speeches and six Ministerial statements a year. In opposition I find it necessary to be present for Question Time and part of the debate for at least three and possibly four days a week.’6 For a man who liked to spend every minute of his day purposefully, either at work or in relaxation, hanging about listening to other people’s speeches was intensely aggravating. As a star performer, he loved the big debates in the Chamber with the back benches cheering him on; he never stayed on to gossip in the bars
and tea-rooms afterwards, preferring to escape to his own haunts with his own coterie. When forced to mix with his fellow MPs his awkwardness and evident reluctance only increased his reputation for aloofness and elitism. He could still shine in set-piece debates: reappointed as Shadow Chancellor – not, as he might have hoped, Shadow Foreign Secretary – he replied effectively to Iain Macleod’s one speech as Chancellor before his death, refuting the charge that he had left behind an economic crisis.7 His speeches on these occasions were invariably carefully prepared and powerfully delivered. But he soon found it harder to be authoritative in opposition than in government with the resources of the Treasury behind him; and the first time he substituted for Wilson at Prime Minister’s Questions on 17 November he was ‘badly carved up’ by Ted Heath, which dented his confidence for a time.8, fn2
As well as weekly meetings of the Shadow Cabinet, where as Shadow Chancellor he still spoke with authority, Jenkins had a new obligation as deputy leader to attend the National Executive – an uncongenial body dominated by the trade union leaders and the resurgent left, on which he found himself increasingly out of place. Over the twenty-one months that he sat on the NEC he attended seventeen out of twenty-three full meetings; he was also an ex officio member of all sub-committees and attended about half the meetings of the Home Policy committee and the International committee, as well as various other party bodies like the National Council of Labour. But the Finance and Economic Affairs committee, which he chaired, met only four times; he was determined to keep economic policy to himself in consultation with his former Treasury colleagues like Dick Taverne and Harold Lever and other chosen advisers, excluding left-wing members of the NEC like Ian Mikardo: this proved an expensive dereliction, which allowed Mikardo and others to develop a far more left-wing programme in the Industrial committee.10 Jenkins also had to make a lot more speeches to Labour audiences around the country, and was expected to attend the whole of the party conference in October. He had always disliked the conference – especially when it was held at Blackpool – and privately described the 1970 gathering as ‘a thoroughly disagreeable week’, adding typically that ‘The gloom and strain were added to the filthy, oppressive, damp, muggy weather.’11 Now entitled to speak from the platform, he made what the Guardian called a ‘powerful and statesmanlike’ speech in the economic debate, attacking the new Chancellor, Tony Barber, for frittering his inheritance, which Tony Benn thought had ‘entrenched him strongly with the delegates’.12 But in a sign of the rapidly changing mood of the party he was heckled by Eric Heffer and other prominent left-wingers. ‘That week in the Fylde,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘took some of the edge off my zest for the politics of opposition.’13
He got back with much more enthusiasm to writing. Even as deputy leader and Shadow Chancellor he had no more intention of treating politics as a full-time job than when he was a backbencher. He noted in his memoirs that he received no offers from the City of the sort he was pretty sure would have been made to an outgoing Tory Chancellor. He was not greatly worried by this, however, partly because he never had any interest in finance or money-making for its own sake, but mainly because he could earn more from writing. Privately he confessed to being ‘a little surprised and disappointed’ that John Lewis did not want him back.14, fn3 But within weeks of losing office he was negotiating with publishers and newspapers a package of contracts worth several times more than his parliamentary salary. His diary shows him lunching with Ian Chapman of Collins on 30 June and 16 July, with Harold Evans of the Sunday Times on 15 July, and with William Rees-Mogg of The Times on 21 July. First he undertook to write for The Times over the next three years a series of ten biographical essays (10–15,000 words each) on a number of recent historical figures, for £1,500 each, plus an unspecified number of articles on issues of the moment. Then he resumed book reviewing for the Observer at £120 per review. In this first year he also wrote for both the Observer and the Sunday Times the long, thoughtful pieces already quoted reflecting on his contrasting experience of the Home Office and the Treasury. Most substantially – having abandoned the idea of writing Gaitskell’s biography – he contracted with Collins (for £30,000 over three years) and the American publisher Doubleday for a book comparing several pairs of American and British leaders, to be entitled The Presidency and the Prime Ministership, which was also to be serialised in the Sunday Times. He assured Harold Evans that it would be ‘based on a good deal of research’ and told him in January 1971 that he was already working on Franklin Roosevelt and Lloyd George.16 All that appeared, however, were two very bland articles in the Sunday Times Colour Magazine in August and September 1973. The contract was renegotiated later that year, but the book never materialised, though he did write some 50,000 words which eventually formed the basis of his 1984 biography of Stanley Baldwin.
What did appear steadily over this Parliament were his biographical essays for The Times, eventually published in book form in 1974 (one having fallen by the wayside) as Nine Men of Power. Jenkins’ first list of possible subjects included several – Lord Beaverbrook, Jawarhalal Nehru, Iain Macleod and Nye Bevan – whom he later dropped, probably because he could not have trusted himself to be fair to them. The final selection perfectly reflected his political sympathies and perspective. Three were Labour figures: Gaitskell (written for the tenth anniversary of his death in 1973 – ‘For many of us there is a sense of long term deprivation which, as the years go by, persists and even increases’); Ernest Bevin (of whom he wrote memorably that when he became Foreign Secretary ‘there was no other position in the Foreign Office, unless it was that of a rather truculent liftman on the verge of retirement, which it would have been possible to imagine him filling’); and Stafford Cripps (‘almost the only post-war Chancellor’ – until Jenkins himself is the unspoken implication – ‘to depart with his colours flying high’), who additionally fascinated Jenkins, as a student of career patterns, as one who ‘for a short time exercised an authority as great as it is possible to achieve without occupying the premiership itself, and who came to it by a route which is one of the least obviously charted in the history of British politics’.17
Three were American, reflecting Jenkins’ close identification with the post-Roosevelt Democratic Party: classless, progressive, liberal and outward-looking, his model of what the Labour Party could be, if it would only shed its antiquated commitment to old-time socialism. FDR himself – the architect of the New Deal – he left to his planned book on Presidents and Prime Ministers; but two of the three Americans in Nine Men of Power represented different aspects of his legacy. Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic candidate for the presidency twice defeated by Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956, was to Jenkins an American Gaitskell: a civilised liberal who would not stoop to conquer, but nevertheless ‘inspired a generation’. Jenkins had got to know him well in the early 1960s and had spoken to him on the phone, arranging for him to come to lunch at Ladbroke Square the next day, an hour before he collapsed and died in a London street in 1965. He admired both Stevenson’s modesty as a candidate (‘I don’t have to be President’) and his grace in defeat (‘He was too old to cry, but it hurt too much to laugh’).18 Even his inability to decide whether to run again in 1960 Jenkins portrayed as part of his attraction. He felt a lot of sympathy with Stevenson in his own dilemmas in 1970–73.
Robert Kennedy was a very different sort of Democrat. Under the influence of J.K. Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger and his continuing friendship with Jackie, Jenkins still romanticised the Kennedys. Jack he had hardly known, but Bobby he came to know quite well, and in Nine Men of Power he wrote of him very movingly – first with the world at his feet before Jack’s assassination, then ‘completely disoriented’ after it; finally, the last time they met, walking together at Martin Luther King’s funeral in Atlanta eight weeks before Bobby too was shot. Like others, Jenkins by then saw in Bobby much more than the ruthless Irish machine politician he had once been, and wrote poignantly of his rapidly maturing statesmanship, his comp
assion, vision and surprising rapport with ‘the dangerously alienated elements of American society’, and of his great potential had he lived.19 Jenkins may have been a bit star-struck, but there is love in this essay.
Jenkins felt no love at all for his third American, the Communist-hunting Republican Senator Joe McCarthy, the ‘black joker’ in his pack, of whom he could never have written a full biography, but whom he thought a phenomenon worth the three to four weeks he spent on each of these studies. His remaining three subjects were Lord Halifax (another odd choice, but an instructive career); the interwar French socialist leader Leon Blum (a nod to his father here); and J.M. Keynes, the only non-politician of the nine and the only one Jenkins never met or even saw (‘It is a great deficiency which I wish I could retrospectively repair. There is no figure of the past generation (with the possible exception of Roosevelt) with whom I would more like to have talked’).20 The interest of their subjects apart, these nine essays represent the consummation of Jenkins’ mature style: polished, urbane and epigrammatic, breathing a perfect confidence in his own political assumptions and historical judgement. The book is studded with passages of excellent writing; but one sentence from the essay on Blum illustrates both its quality and its limitations:
He was the one man who, from a dismal continent, with Hitler creating a new barbarism in Germany, with Mussolini grooming Italy for the role of predatory auxiliary, with Spain on the verge of eruption into the cruellest and most international of civil wars, with power in England about to pass from the fading benignity of Baldwin to the harsher defeatism of Chamberlain, might have sent back an answering light to the uncertain signals of encouragement which came across the Atlantic from Roosevelt.21