Roy Jenkins

by John Campbell

  Released from frontbench duties, Jenkins had more time for writing: he got on with his biographical essays which appeared at regular intervals in The Times. He also travelled a good deal, making several longer journeys as well as his regular jaunts to America and Europe. He spent the whole of August 1972, unusually and not very happily, at Aspen, Colorado, enjoying the company of a large gathering of the Democratic great and good, including such pillars of the Kennedy White House as Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy and Arthur Schlesinger, but oppressed by both the rainy weather and the high altitude: the effect of the latter was that he could not consume his usual quantity of alcohol without getting a hangover. In January 1973 he and Jennifer, accompanied by Matthew Oakeshott, visited Africa (not his favourite continent), moving rapidly through Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya, Zambia and Tanzania in two and a half weeks. That summer they spent August in Italy as usual. Then in September Jenkins was invited to give a lecture in Australia and managed to tack onto it two weeks in China on the way. This was only a year after President Nixon’s historic visit; Roy and Jennifer were given the full tour of approved sites – the Great Wall and the Forbidden City – but also schools, factories, exhibitions and performances of revolutionary opera. Roy met the recently rehabilitated Deng Xiaoping (by whom he was not particularly impressed) for a formal exchange of geopolitical perspectives: the Chinese were keen on a united Europe as a counterweight to both the Americans and the Russians. China was then sufficiently unknown that he kept (and later circulated privately) a journal of the trip, recording in somewhat dutiful detail not only their impressions of the country and its inhabitants, but what they had to eat and the difficulty of getting decent wine. (On the train to Nanking, they ‘secured a Moselle-like bottle of Chinese wine. Tasted like a mixture of sherry and Orvieto.’) Characteristically Jenkins tried to classify every town and landscape they saw by comparison with places they reminded him of in Europe or America. Thus Peking resembled working-class Paris in the 1930s; apartment blocks in Shanghai were like Glasgow tenements; the Yangtze was ‘not unlike the Thames between Tower Bridge and Tilbury’; while the Pearl River at Canton was ‘about the size of the Rhone at Lyon’. Best of all, they stayed in a wonderful old pre-Communist hotel in Shanghai, which made their hotel in Peking ‘seem like a dour Mongolian barracks’:

  The lifts have clock-face floor indicators outside exactly like the ones I remember in Selfridges in my childhood, the corridor carpets are the height of 1934 fashion, the windows are Crittall leaded casements, the doors dark-stained, the bedroom reminiscent of a very good Cunard state room . . . and the 11th floor dining room exactly like the restaurant in the departed Queen Mary.

  He did like his comforts. On arriving in Hong Kong he noted: ‘I had been looking forward to pre-luncheon Martini (there is no ice or gin in China, and we had even run out of whisky for previous 36 hours) but alas it was over-vermouthed.’18

  In his memoirs Jenkins claimed that ‘China made a deep impact on me’; but what that impact was is far from clear, since he rarely referred to the experience again and signally failed to foresee the rise of the ‘sleeping dragon’ in the next century. From Hong Kong (‘brash’) he went on to Australia (‘provincial’) to deliver his lecture in Melbourne, plus a number of other speeches, and flew home via Singapore (Lee Kuan Yew again), arriving back on 24 September, a week before the Labour party conference (once again in Blackpool).19

  There he made a five-minute speech from the floor, which as an ordinary backbencher was all he was allowed, and another vain appeal for realism. There was a case for a significant extension of public ownership, he conceded. But it was ‘no good taking over a vast number of industries without a clear plan as to how and by whom they are going to be run’. More to the point, you could not do it without clear public support:

  It is not much good talking about fundamental and irreversible changes in our society and being content with a 38 per cent Labour voting intention . . . Democracy means that you need a substantially stronger moral position than this to govern effectively at all, let alone effect a peaceful social revolution.20

  For this heretical suggestion he was rebuked by the next speaker, an USDAW-sponsored MP named Charles Loughlin, who had been a junior minister in various departments in 1967–70:

  I regret that Roy Jenkins came to this rostrum to resuscitate the outmoded idea that this party can cater for the middle-class, that we ought to fashion our policies to cater for the mythical floating voter . . . If I may say so . . . one of the difficulties of those of us who were members of the Government was with the Treasury, and he was in charge of the Treasury.21

  This was the tribal mindset he was now up against.

  Sooner or later he had to decide what to do. Should he stand boldly for the leadership, at the risk of splitting or even breaking up the party? Or continue to bide his time, swallow his dissent from most of its current policies and stand again for the Shadow Cabinet? ‘One couldn’t stay out indefinitely on the back benches.’22 Though he still floated the possibility with friendly journalists like Tony Howard and John Cole, and his lieutenants were still keeping lists of definite and possible supporters who might back him if he stood, it was fairly clear that he was not going to challenge Wilson this side of an election. Wilson was belatedly showing signs of standing up to the left, first by vetoing the NEC’s call to nationalise twenty-five top companies and then by persuading conference not to commit the party to withdrawal from the EEC, but merely to ‘renegotiate’ the Tory terms and submit the result to either a referendum or a General Election. Jenkins thought renegotiation was nonsense, but realised that it could provide a fig leaf for staying in. The idea of rejoining the Shadow Cabinet was not appealing – particularly if it committed him to joining another Wilson government if Labour won. Friends outside the party, including significantly David Steel, with whom he lunched in July, and Nicko Henderson, now ambassador in Bonn, urged him to keep his distance. But his allies inside the party all urged that only by coming back could he regain his position in the hierarchy and be a candidate for the leadership after the election, if Labour lost. The Jenkinsites needed their man back at the Cabinet table. And Jennifer agreed. So a week after conference he announced his intention to stand; and he did remarkably well.

  He came fifth, with 143 votes, behind Callaghan, Foot, Reg Prentice (then still a party favourite, as a robust right-winger who was anti-Common Market) and Tony Crosland. But they were all closely bunched and he was only seven votes behind Callaghan; with just a few more he could have topped the poll, which would have been a triumph. As it was, his vote indicated a clear willingness among Labour MPs to close ranks and present the strongest possible team to the electorate. On this ground at least Wilson appeared pleased to have him back. But what was he to do with him? With Healey and Callaghan established as Shadow Chancellor and Shadow Foreign Secretary respectively, the only appropriately senior job left was Shadow Home Secretary, which meant displacing Shirley Williams. Jenkins felt bad about this, but she took it well, stepping down without complaint to Shadow Consumer Protection.

  Jenkins’ return in a diminished role was not easy. The minutes show that he attended all sixteen Shadow Cabinet meetings between November 1973 and March 1974, but he could not hope to overturn the party’s settled policies and did not seriously try. In late November, however, he got embroiled in support of Prentice, who was the one prominent right-winger to call publicly on Labour moderates to ‘stand up and be counted’ against the domination of the ‘Marxist’ left. He was answered in kind by Tony Benn, at which point Wilson called a special meeting of the Shadow Cabinet to demand that colleagues should clear their speeches in future with Transport House. When Jenkins declared that this was ‘unacceptable to him’, Wilson complained about leaks and briefings – an old obsession of his – implying that they had only started up again since Jenkins’ return. Jenkins in turn objected to inaccurate briefings about what he had said. He got some support from Shirley Williams; but Crosland characte
ristically thought his intervention ‘pompous and bumbling’.23, fn3

  His better stage, however, was the House of Commons, and here he soon scored another debating triumph. At the end of 1973 the Heath government ran into the combination of crises which sank it. First, the Arab–Israeli war led to the quadrupling of the price of oil, on top of already soaring prices for imported food and other commodities (copper, rubber, zinc and so on), giving a powerful external boost to inflation, which Heath and Barber had already racked up by their reckless dash for growth (the so-called ‘Barber boom’). Then the National Union of Mineworkers, having already humiliated the government once by extorting a 30 per cent pay rise by strike action in 1972, realised that the oil price hike gave them increased bargaining power to demand a further massive increase in 1973, threatening to smash the elaborately detailed statutory incomes policy which was the heart of the government’s economic strategy. On 12 November they announced an overtime ban, which immediately cut the output of coal by 40 per cent. On 3 December, after intensive talks had failed to reach a settlement, Heath put the country on a three-day working week to save energy; and on 13 December Barber introduced a drastic package of spending cuts, which brought the boom to a grinding halt. The following week there was a two-day debate on the crisis. Wilson opened for Labour on the first day and Healey on the second. Jenkins – despite no longer holding an economic portfolio – was allowed to wind up, and comprehensively upstaged them both.

  ‘I did not attempt to dine,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘but I can remember sitting and fortifying myself in the smoking room with Bob Maclennan and one or two others until about 8.15, when I returned to the chamber in as great a state of neurosis intermingled with terror as I have ever managed to produce before a speech.’25 Shirley Williams wrote him an encouraging note: ‘Dear Roy, You will have to “speak for England” – no-one else has yet! Or will –.’26 But nervous tension always fired his best performances. Once on his feet, he lambasted Barber first for his entire economic record – for ‘having taken over an economy with a £1000m surplus and running it into a £2000m deficit’; for having conducted the national finances ‘with such profligacy that the accounts are out of balance as never before’; for having ‘presided over the greatest depreciation of the currency at home and abroad in history’; and for leaving the country ‘at the moment of test far weaker than most of its neighbours’ – and then for his ‘trivial and irrelevant’ measures to deal with the current crisis, which he described as ‘a mixture of economic lunacy and fiscal inequity’. Jenkins did not deny that it was a real crisis, but warned – with an eye to some in his own party – that it was not just an economic but a social crisis, which posed ‘a greater threat to the effective workings of our democratic institutions than most of us have seen in our adult lifetimes’. Heath, he suggested, lacked the imagination and persuasiveness that the situation demanded. What was required to resolve the miners’ dispute was ‘neither an imposed solution nor an open hand at the till’. As a Labour spokesman seeking to restore his credit with the party, he could not be seen to criticise the NUM. So ‘the task of statesmanship’, he concluded, ‘was to reach a settlement as quickly as possible, but to do it in a way that opens no floodgates’, somehow securing ‘the differentials which the miners need and deserve and the nation needs them to have’.27

  How this miracle was to be achieved he did not reveal: in fact the whole speech was a fairly standard piece of Opposition posturing, condemning the government without saying what he would do instead. But it delighted the Labour benches, as The Times reported:

  Mr Roy Jenkins came back with a thunderclap into the front rank of the leadership tonight . . . Where Mr Healey . . . had uttered mainly party political bombast and Mr Wilson . . . had been full of recrimination and bickering, here was the voice of authority and leadership that the Labour Party has so sadly lacked in the long months since Mr Jenkins retired to the back benches over the European issue.28

  Shirley Williams was one of many Labour MPs to congratulate him. ‘Thanks – that was a truly magnificent speech.’29 ‘Your winding up speech,’ Betty Boothroyd wrote, ‘sent me through the Division Lobby with head held high – what a splendid tonic it was’; and Andrew Faulds – the bearded ex-actor who was one of the most colourful characters on the Labour benches: ‘That was one of the best speeches I have heard in the House – and the closing minutes certainly the greatest. How rarely politicians rise to the occasion. Thankyou. There is a sort of wholesomeness about the place tonight.’30

  While this was exactly the sort of response he needed to confirm his comeback – even Dennis Skinner was said to have declared that Jenkins would now ‘certainly’ be the next leader31 – his situation at the turn of the year remained uncomfortable. As the government’s emergency measures took effect, with industry on a three-day week, reduced street lighting, a 50 m.p.h. speed limit and television shutting down at 10.30 p.m., Heath hesitated about whether to call an election to try to resolve the deadlock. Jenkins was not sure whether he wanted an early election or, if one came, that he wanted Labour to win it. In his memoirs he was quite frank that his personal interest required Labour to lose, triggering an immediate leadership election and an opportunity to challenge those whose policies had led it to defeat.32 Failing that, it was better for him that Labour should win well, allowing Wilson to form a government strong enough to deal with the crisis and keep Britain in the EEC, then hand over in a couple of years, by which time he might have re-established his position as the heir apparent. What he most feared was the sort of result he had been warning of in recent speeches: a hung Parliament or a narrow Labour victory on a minority vote which would give it no authority to deal with the crisis, while perpetuating divisions within the party.

  In the Shadow Cabinet he counselled moderation, warning that the Tories might try to hold a scare election, as in 1931, and pleading that Labour’s response should be responsible, not opportunist. People were ‘bewildered and apprehensive and the Party must be realistic in assuaging their fears. We had to be careful in seeing that what was promised was capable of being fulfilled.’33 Labour should seek to cool the situation, not inflame it. ‘The Party had to battle for the marginal voter who would be lost if things were “stirred up” at Westminster.’34 By 19 January 1974 he thought that Heath had missed his best moment and the danger of an early election had passed.35 But then on 4 February – following the breakdown of all attempts to find a formula that would buy off the miners without allowing every other union to demand the same treatment – the NUM escalated its dispute by voting for a full-scale strike; and Heath felt he had no remaining option but to call an election to be held on 28 February.

  Though it was not clear what an election would achieve, all the polls suggested that he would win. In this expectation, Jenkins rallied to the Labour cause like a professional, submerging his doubts about the wider implications of the contest in the argument that it was Heath’s mismanagement that had landed the country in an unnecessary crisis. His appeal to middle opinion was recognised with a role in Labour’s campaign almost as prominent as in 1970. He featured alongside Wilson in several of the party’s morning press conferences and – at Wilson’s insistence – in one of its television broadcasts, and toured a number of marginal seats in Yorkshire and Lancashire as well as speaking for several of his personal supporters, like David Owen in Plymouth and Bob Maclennan in Caithness and Sutherland. ‘As in previous campaigns,’ David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh wrote, ‘Roy Jenkins was brought in to sound a note of civilised idealism and to recognise, unlike anyone else on television, a responsibility to the outside world.’36 Generally he tried to strike a moderate note, following Wilson’s line that Heath’s ‘confrontational’ policies had divided the country and it was Labour’s job to heal it; on the central issue of the miners’ strike he repeated his loftily vague formula that ‘Statesmanship demands a solution which recognises that the country has a special need for the miners and that others must not seek to
exploit it so that we are all damaged in the process.’37 Asked at a press conference what he thought of Heath, he replied diplomatically:

  According to which way you look at it, Mr Heath has stubbornness or determination. Nobody becomes Prime Minister of this country without qualities. The tragedy is that he doesn’t accompany those qualities with judgement, persuasiveness or the imagination to see across a chasm of disagreement and into the minds of others whose experience of life is different.38

  But the adrenalin of the hustings brought out more partisanship than he really felt. He nursed a particular animus against Barber for dissipating the hard-won balance-of-payments surplus he had bequeathed him. At Plymouth on 18 February he described his successor in uncharacteristically personal terms as ‘a dated disaster shot through with political viciousness’.39 Barber may have been a bad Chancellor, but he was scarcely a vicious one. Remembering the fuss the Tories had made in 1970 about his one unlucky monthly deficit of £31 million, however, Jenkins felt entitled to attack the record deficit of £383 million that Barber had to announce for January. When the Tories claimed that they were better able than Labour to deal with the problem he commented sarcastically that ‘the Government appeared to regard each fresh disaster as a reason for voting for it’.40