Roy Jenkins

by John Campbell

  On the wider issue of Northern Ireland, however, Jenkins nursed private doubts about whether Britain should be there at all. He had in fact once ventured this view in print. In his 1972 Yale lectures, published as Afternoon on the Potomac?, he told his American audience that he had ‘long regarded it as a clear lesson of history that the British political genius, great though it may be in certain fields, does not extend to a peculiar talent for settling the affairs of Ireland’.23 (His point had been to suggest delicately that the same applied to the Americans in South-East Asia.) Now, after Guildford and Birmingham, he told the Cabinet committee on Northern Ireland on 4 December that ‘everything he heard made him more convinced that Northern Ireland had nothing to do with the rest of the UK. He said that although the whole discussion was about how to impose the civilised standards of Britain on Northern Ireland, the real prospect and danger was of the barbaric standards of Northern Ireland spreading to the rest of us.’24 This view hardened during 1975 as the IRA campaign continued. According to Bernard Donoughue (who as a member of the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit sat in on Cabinet committees), quite a few ministers supported the withdrawal of troops; but Jenkins and (perhaps surprisingly) Wilson were the only two looking for complete separation of Northern Ireland from Britain in the long term.25 Publicly, however, Jenkins never did more than hint at this heresy.fn3 For the moment he was stuck with dealing with the violent consequences of the union.

  These included several more bombings in London – at Selfridges, Harrods and Ted Heath’s house in Belgravia – in December 1974 and a further twenty-nine incidents, which killed another ten people, in 1975. One failed attack on a Mayfair restaurant in December led to a dramatic siege, when four fleeing IRA men holed themselves up in a flat in Marylebone with two elderly hostages. By chance the police had recently faced a very similar siege (nothing to do with the IRA) resulting from a bungled robbery at an Italian restaurant in Knightsbridge. On that occasion, Jenkins wrote in his draft memoirs, the Metropolitan Commissioner, Sir Robert Mark, was ‘jumpy in the first 24 hours and might easily have done some foolish shooting without a firm political lead. Once given it, he accepted it and carried the thing out very skilfully.’27 Through patience, the latest surveillance techniques and good psychology, the hostage-takers were persuaded to give themselves up without bloodshed after six days. The lessons learned at the Spaghetti House were successfully applied in Balcombe Street three months later with the same result, and the four men – the right ones this time – were taken out of circulation until released as part of the Good Friday Agreement in 1999.fn4

  There were other threats to order, unrelated to Ireland, which added to the sense that the country was becoming ungovernable: anti-American riots in Grosvenor Square; an anti-National Front rally, which resulted in the death of a student in Red Lion Square; the attempted kidnapping of Princess Anne in the Mall. Against this unpromising background, Jenkins nevertheless tried to press on with some constructive legislation, prompted by Anthony Lester. By contrast with his liberal agenda in the 1960s, Jenkins was frankly much less interested in either the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act, which legislated for the first time for gender equality and set up the Equal Opportunities Commission to enforce it, or the 1976 Race Relations Act, which closed some major gaps in the two previous Acts, notably by extending their application to private clubs. But he strongly supported them in principle; he lent his authority to Lester to get on with them, so long as he worked through the Home Office officials; and he pushed them through the Cabinet and the Commons with his usual lucidity. There was in truth not much opposition to the Sex Discrimination Act – except within the department from one ‘dedicated Under-Secretary’ (ironically a woman) who ‘did try to sabotage it. I had to come down with firm Secretary of State authority on her.’ (This, Jenkins claimed, was the only issue in either of his two spells at the Home Office on which he encountered any official obstruction.)28 The Bill was approved by the Cabinet in July 1974 and given its Second Reading in March 1975 with Opposition support – Ian Gilmour was now Jenkins’ Tory shadow – and just a handful of unreconstructed mavericks like Enoch Powell voting against.

  The Race Relations Bill was more contentious. In order to minimise opposition, Jenkins and Lester made a deliberate decision to introduce the gender Bill first in 1974–5, and then model the new race Bill on it the following year. Within the race relations industry the most controversial decision was to merge the quasi-judicial function of the Race Relations Board with the campaigning role of the Community Relations Commission, to create a new Commission for Racial Equality (to be chaired by the Conservative MP David Lane) on the model of the Equal Opportunities Commission. On this Jenkins chose to follow the advice of Mark Bonham Carter rather than of Lester, who argued that this would weaken the Board’s powers of enforcement.29 Lester was probably right. The CRE was never a wholly successful organisation before it was merged into the new all-encompassing Equality and Human Rights Commission in 2006. In Parliament the Bill was supported by the official Opposition, but faced determined obstruction from a small group of Tories led by Enoch Powell (again) and Norman Tebbit. Powell, still pursuing his furious campaign against non-white immigration, insisted that the real threat to good race relations arose from the birth rate of the immigrant population; while Tebbit earned his reputation as a political skinhead with a lot of crude ad hominem sniping at Jenkins as the claret-swilling godfather of the permissive society. ‘There is nothing permissive in our society now,’ he complained ironically. ‘We are not permitted to decide whom we want to work with and whom we want in our own clubs.’30 It took an all-night sitting on 8–9 July 1976 to force the Bill through its committee stage. Stoutly supported once again by his latest shadow, Willie Whitelaw, Jenkins had to see off a whole series of filibustering divisions, though the opponents never mustered more than thirteen votes. The Third Reading was finally carried at lunchtime the following day by eighty-two votes to three. These turned out to be Jenkins’ last speeches in the Commons as a minister.

  Ever since Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech in 1968 the question of immigrant numbers had been an explosive issue. Jenkins had been lucky to leave the Home Office just before the influx of Kenyan Asians which Callaghan had to deal with. In 1971 the Heath government had tried to buy off Powell by introducing tighter restrictions on those without a ‘patrial’ connection with Britain – though it did honour Britain’s obligation to the expelled Ugandan Asians with British passports. Coming back to the Home Office in 1974, Jenkins knew there could be no question of restoring an ‘open door’ policy; but he was determined to apply the existing legislation as humanely as possible. First he implemented a pledge given by Shirley Williams in opposition to grant an amnesty to illegal entrants who had arrived before 1973. Second, he allowed women already settled the same right to bring in their husbands as men had to bring in wives. On the former, he brushed aside objections from the Foreign Office (represented in Cabinet committee by David Ennals), saying that ‘he really couldn’t have his policy dictated by the fact that the FO had failed to man its posts adequately’. (‘Roy’s drawl always lengthens when he is angry,’ Barbara Castle noted, ‘which heightens the effect of contempt.’)31 The latter concession raised a storm in the Commons, with the Tories claiming that it would be abused by thousands of young men from the Indian sub-continent taking advantage of arranged marriages. Meanwhile Powell kept up a stream of allegations that the government was fiddling the statistics to disguise the projected growth of the ethnic minority population: he was triumphant when the Home Office was obliged to correct some of its figures. Jenkins managed to explain this as a clerical error rather than a conspiracy; but in this climate he had constantly to hold a balance between his own liberal instincts and public opinion, of which as a Birmingham MP he was only too well aware.

  This led to mounting friction with his Minister of State with responsibility for immigration and race, Alex Lyon, whom he characterised privately as ‘Cromwellian, dogma
tic, Quakerish and well-meaning’. Egged on by his private secretary Clare Short, whom he later married – she went on to become a notably feisty Labour MP and Cabinet minister herself – Lyon saw himself as the immigrants’ champion whose job, in every disputed case, was to take the individual’s side against the bureaucracy. After eighteen months Jenkins had to tell Lyon bluntly that he was ‘the worst of all the 14 junior ministers I had ever had’.32 He had already asked Wilson to move him, before Callaghan finally did so in March 1976. Lyon then gave a number of bitter interviews claiming that he had started out as a Jenkinsite, but had become disillusioned when he realised that Jenkins ‘wasn’t remotely interested in socialism but only in himself’.33 He subsequently found his niche as chairman of the UK Immigrants Advisory Service.

  The police and the prison service still bulked large among the Home Secretary’s responsibilities. Prisons were one subject on which Jenkins frankly failed. Visiting them visibly distressed him. Like other Home Secretaries since, he would have liked to cut the prison population, then around 40,000 (in England and Wales) – up from 35,000 when he was last responsible for it. He warned in July 1975 that if it reached 42,000, ‘conditions in the system would approach the intolerable and drastic action to relieve the position will be inescapable’.34 The following year he told the Police Federation conference bluntly that, for many prisoners, prison did not ‘work’: he urged them to ‘look at the evidence and to recognise how little the widespread use of prison reduces crime or deals effectively with the individuals concerned’. Faced with concerted booing, he gave his hostile audience a lecture on democracy. The rule of law in a democratic society did not mean ‘our pet prejudices’, but the rule of Parliament as applied by the courts:

  You cannot have a rule of law while dismissing with disparagement Parliament, the courts and those who practise in them. That is not the rule of law. It is exactly what the pressure groups you complain about seek to achieve by demonstration. Your job, and mine, is to apply the law as it is, not to decry it.

  He respected their right to put their views to him. ‘You will no doubt respect my right to tell you that I do not think all the points in sum amount to a basis for a rational penal policy.’35

  He did what he could to encourage community service and other alternatives to prison and encouraged judges to pass shorter sentences. But nothing had much effect; the population passed 42,000 in October 1976 and went on rising. Thirty-eight years later it has more than doubled, to 87,000. Despite Lester’s urging, Jenkins also failed to do anything about squalid conditions in many prisons. But in his second spell at the Home Office he did make another long-overdue reform of the criminal justice system by introducing for the first time an independent element into the system for investigating complaints against the police, against the determined opposition of the Commissioner of the Met, Sir Robert Mark. Mark was Jenkins’ favourite policeman whom he had appointed Assistant Commissioner in 1966: since becoming Commissioner he had made a big impact by rooting out corruption – with the memorable remark that ‘a good police force is one that catches more crooks than it employs’ – and generally he and Jenkins had a high regard for one another.36 But Mark took a strictly ‘military’ view of policing and believed that independent investigation of complaints would undermine the authority of chief constables. Jenkins was not deterred and introduced his Police (Complaints) Bill to the House in December 1975. Typically he managed to persuade the eminent former Treasury mandarin Sir Edwin Plowden – whom he had previously used to chair his inquiry into the aviation industry in 1964 – to chair his new investigative board. The Bill was condemned by the Tories (echoing the Police Federation) for damaging police morale, and by the left for not being independent enough.37 Jenkins stuck to his guns – while leaving most of the piloting of the Bill to his third junior minister, Shirley Summerskill – and it eventually passed in June 1976. Mark carried his opposition to the point of resigning when the new system came into effect in January 1977. Since then, of course, the complaints procedure has been repeatedly strengthened as public trust in the police has steadily declined.

  The Home Secretary, as Jenkins told the Police Federation, was the guardian of the rule of law. But in a Labour government concerned as never before to please its trade union masters, he found himself exposed to pressure from the party and even his colleagues to bend the law in their favour. First Michael Foot, as Employment Secretary, wanted to give pickets in industrial disputes the right to stop the movement of lorries: this was vehemently opposed by the police and Jenkins, with the support of the Lord Chancellor, Lord Elwyn-Jones, eventually succeeded in blocking it. Second – though this was not a Home Office matter – he was sickened by Tony Crosland’s readiness (as Environment Secretary) to grant an amnesty to eleven Labour councillors in Clay Cross, Nottinghamshire, who had been surcharged in 1973 for refusing to raise council house rents in accordance with the Tory government’s Housing Finance Act and had in consequence become heroes of the Labour movement to rank with the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Susan Crosland’s biography of her husband makes it clear that Crosland knew perfectly well that retrospectively validating law-breaking was wrong: the difference between him and Jenkins was that Crosland was prepared to prostitute his integrity to appease the left, whereas Jenkins would not have done – as was demonstrated by a third related issue that was firmly on the Home Secretary’s plate.38

  The case concerned two men, Des Warren and Eric Tomlinson, convicted in December 1973 for intimidation and affray in connection with an industrial dispute in Shrewsbury and sentenced to three and two years respectively. They were released in June 1974 pending an appeal; but when their appeal was dismissed (in October) they were sent back to prison. Once again the left hailed the ‘Shrewsbury Two’ as ‘political prisoners’ unjustly jailed for defying an oppressive Tory government, and confidently expected a Labour Home Secretary to quash their convictions. Several delegations of MPs and the entire Finance and General Purposes Committee of the TUC called on Jenkins in person to press their cause. He listened politely, but having reviewed the case decided that there were no grounds for early release: Warren and Tomlinson, he later wrote, were ‘rough thugs who in my view deserved their sentences’ and he declined to intervene. ‘I had the impression that the bulk of the deputation was not so much angry as amazed that I would not accede.’39 An unnamed minister commented admiringly that this was ‘the first time that this Government had told the Labour Conference and the TUC where to go’.40 For months afterwards Jenkins was hounded wherever he went by demonstrators chanting ‘Free the Two’. There were suggestions that he should have been sympathetic because of his father’s wrongful imprisonment in 1926; but he saw no comparison and refused to budge. The episode underlined not only the growing gulf between Jenkins and a large part of the labour movement, but how much the movement had changed since his father’s day.fn5

  Wilson had suggested, in appointing him, that the Home Office was a department in which it was possible to remain semi-detached from the rest of the government; and this was very much Jenkins’ position in 1974–6, particularly in the first few months. Bernard Donoughue, from his ringside seat in Number Ten, regretted his passivity. ‘What a pity Roy Jenkins has completely disappeared from the Labour political scene,’ he wrote in July 1974:

  He has completely dropped out of the government, never speaking, never appearing anywhere to defend the government. He is just a sleeping partner. Yet he could have worked at it, distinct from HW and disagreeing with the left, but working as a member of the team to earn his passage. Instead he stands aloof, disdainful, unhappy, trying to avoid contamination from his own party. Maybe he is proving himself a worthy coalition leader, as Joe [Haines] suggests. What is certain is that his Labour support is dwindling.41

  One former admirer whom he alienated at this time was the future leader, John Smith. ‘As a junior minister in that administration,’ Smith wrote much later, ‘I recall him chairing Cabinet sub-committees with a lack of interest [am
ounting] almost to disdain which was disagreeably unattractive to his junior colleagues.’42

  Joe Haines’ suspicion was not entirely unfounded. Jenkins always denied hankering for a coalition and he was certainly not actively working for one; but he was becoming increasingly disillusioned not only with the Labour party, but with the party system itself. In June he told his old Balliol friend Ronnie McIntosh – still director of the NEDC (the National Economic Development Council, known as ‘Neddy’) – that if Labour won a second General Election in the autumn he would not join the new government. This would get him free of ‘people he didn’t agree with’ and give him room for manoeuvre. He was, he confessed in confidence, ‘thinking increasingly in terms of a government of national unity’. When McIntosh objected that such a government would only drive the unions further to the left, Jenkins said this was ‘a risk he was very conscious of’. But McIntosh concluded that ‘I don’t think that in his heart of hearts he cares – or knows – much about the trade union movement.’43