Roy Jenkins

by John Campbell

  Very early in the life of the new government, believing that the patently inequitable result of the February election had made the subject unavoidable, he raised in Cabinet the idea of electoral reform, suggesting that it would be better to refer it to a Speaker’s Conference ‘in a low pressure way’ before the Liberals did so. He immediately ran into furious opposition led by Foot, Bob Mellish and Willie Ross, who warned that ‘If we were not careful we could see the end of any possibility of a Labour Government.’ Wilson thought it ‘obviously best to let this sleeping dog lie as long as possible’. So, Barbara Castle wrote happily, ‘We sent Roy away with a flea in his coalition ear.’44 But he did not give up. Eighteen months later in November 1975 – now with some encouragement from Wilson, who had decided that a Speaker’s Conference might after all be the best way to kill the issue – he tried again, proposing not just a Speaker’s Conference but, ‘as a sweetener’, an independent inquiry to consider the various systems of proportional representation. Again he was ‘slapped down’. Most of the Cabinet thought PR ‘totally unacceptable’ and believed that, if ignored, the demand would blow itself out.45 He was supported only by those Mrs Castle called ‘the hard-core coalitionists’: Shirley Williams, Harold Lever and Reg Prentice. ‘But these rightists will go on beavering away . . . until they have finally destroyed the Labour Party’s independence and power to govern single-handedly.’46 This, Donoughue wrote, was ‘a bad defeat for Jenkins’.47

  He met similarly entrenched opposition when he tried to reform the notoriously catch-all nature of the 1911 Official Secrets Act, under which any information down to the colour of the toilet paper in the Welsh Office could be classified as secret. ‘Unlike most in Whitehall,’ Anthony Lester wrote, Jenkins ‘really did believe in the need for more open government’.48 In January 1975 he visited the United States to study the effect of freedom of information legislation (taking the chance while there to fit in a busy diary of lunches and dinners with Henry Kissinger, Nelson Rockefeller and other old friends); and later that year he took to Cabinet committee a package of proposals based on the recommendations of Lord Franks. But again he was shot down by his senior colleagues, led this time by Callaghan and Elwyn Jones, tacitly supported by the Prime Minister, on grounds of protecting national security. Afterwards, Donoughue recorded, Wilson ‘was chuckling away at the opposition to Jenkins and seemed delighted there would be no progress on Official Secrets’. Jenkins found this reactionary attitude ‘shocking’.49 But it soon emerged that the Cabinet Office and the Lord Chancellor’s department – backed again by Wilson – actually wanted a more restrictive Act:

  It was quite clear that the majority of the committee – led by HW, Callaghan, Elwyn Jones, [Roy] Mason and [Peter] Shore – were for tightening everything up. Roy Jenkins would not have that and lost his temper several times. He said if we were not going to keep our promise of liberalisation then he would rather do nothing.50

  He got some support from Denis Healey and Ted Short, but could not prevail against the overwhelming culture of secrecy. Not until 1989 was the discredited Section Two of the 1911 Act finally scrapped and then – following the Clive Ponting case – it was replaced by even tighter restrictions on information relating to defence, international relations, the security services and the police. Only in 2000 did the Blair government bring in the Freedom of Information Act, which implemented some of what Jenkins had wanted a quarter of a century earlier.

  For the first five months of the new government’s life, as Bernard Donoughue noted, Jenkins kept his doubts about the central thrust of the administration’s policy largely to himself. Wilson was in any case primarily concerned with treading water until he could go to the country again in the hope of winning a working majority. But in July he broke cover with an uncompromising speech at Haverfordwest, in deepest Pembrokeshire. He was actually encouraged to range beyond his departmental brief by the Prime Minister, who doubtless calculated that Labour-voting moderates needed some reassurance. But Wilson got rather more than he bargained for. Jenkins took the chance to lay down four fundamental principles which he believed were under insidious attack and on which Labour’s commitment needed to be made ‘crystal clear’. Europe, for once, was not among them.

  The first, in the light of Clay Cross and the campaign for the Shrewsbury pickets, was the rule of law. ‘No-one,’ Jenkins insisted, ‘is entitled to be above the law. If we weaken on that principle, we can say goodbye to democratic socialism, because what is sauce for the goose will be sauce for the gander.’ Second, Britain’s commitment to NATO. ‘If anyone wants a Britain poised uneasily between the Western alliance and the Communist block they can, in the immortal words of Mr Sam Goldwyn, “include me out”.’ With this he coupled belief in an open trading economy, not a siege economy – the left’s pet solution to economic difficulties. His third fundamental principle was the mixed economy, though he conceded that the mix might change. He still claimed to support ‘sensible and well-argued extensions of public ownership . . . But I am also in favour of a healthy, vigorous and profitable private sector.’

  Finally he stressed the absolute priority of fighting inflation, currently running at 16.5 per cent. He had been privately appalled by Healey’s electioneering mini-budget, just four days earlier, which had cut VAT and introduced various subsidies to try to cut the cost of living. ‘This,’ Jenkins wrote in his memoirs, ‘seemed to me a frivolous way of proceeding . . . like throwing stones at a potential avalanche.’51 Without explicitly criticising the Chancellor, he warned that ‘the greatest threat to the cohesion of our society today is the still increasing rate of inflation’. He was still enough of a party politician to lay the blame on Tony Barber, though partly also on world conditions, which made the problems he had had to deal with in 1967–9 look small by comparison. It was not of course his own or Labour’s fault: ‘We left a relatively healthy situation, and we came back to desolation and decay.’ But the country was now facing ‘an economic crisis without precedent since the growth of post-war prosperity’:

  The country will not for long put up with it. If we cannot solve it by tolerable and civilised methods, then someone within a few years will solve it by intolerable and uncivilised ones. And we shall all – Government and Opposition and other parties alike – look irrelevant and ineffective.

  He was not, he insisted, calling for a coalition. He still wanted Labour to form a majority government. But in order to win a majority, he reminded the party once again that it needed to attract ‘the great body of moderate, rather uncommitted opinion . . . It cannot be done upon the basis of ignoring middle opinion and telling everyone who does not agree with you to go to hell.’52 This might be thought obvious – he received another huge postbag from ordinary members of the public, 90 per cent of it supportive – but it was heresy to the left, who accused him once again of ‘anti-socialist claptrap’ (Sidney Bidwell) and splitting the party (Neil Kinnock). ‘Everyone was talking about Roy Jenkins’ disastrous speech on Friday,’ Barbara Castle wrote. ‘When Ted and I saw him on TV I said, “That has cost us the election.”’53 Nevertheless she criticised Bidwell, Mikardo and others for attacking him in public. She preferred to speak to him privately and did so the next day.

  ‘Roy,’ she began, ‘I wanted to have a word with you in the greatest friendliness because I am very fond of you. I think that once again you have listened to very bad advice . . . Of course the press is waiting to egg you on: you are their mouthpiece for Europe and they are using you. But your friends ought to know better. They are driving you into a course that can only ruin your political career.’

  At this point, red in the face with sudden emotion, Roy said violently, ‘What makes you think I care about my political career? All that matters to me is what is happening in the world, which I think is heading for disaster. I can’t stand by and see us pretend everything is all right when I know we are heading for catastrophe.’ More calmly he added, ‘It isn’t only Europe. It is a question of whether this country is g
oing to cut itself off from the Western Alliance and go isolationist.’

  Mrs Castle was uncomprehending. ‘“I simply don’t see where you get that fear from. Are you suggesting we are going Communist?” No, he said, it was not as crude as that.’ But at this point they were interrupted by a division bell. ‘We stood up and Roy said, smiling affectionately, “But I repeat what I told you in the corridor the other day. I think you are a very good Minister and 70 per cent of the time I agree with you in Cabinet. I appreciate that you have spoken in friendliness.”’

  He squeezed my hand. As we made our way downstairs I persisted: ‘But what exactly do you want the Government to do that it isn’t doing? What is your remedy for our troubles?’ . . . He had no answer. Awkwardly he said, ‘Let us have a talk some time,’ and disappeared thankfully.54

  Barbara Castle was not alone in thinking that Jenkins’ speech lacked positive content. ‘His remarks were variously interpreted as an attack on Mr Wilson, a call for coalition, a rallying-cry to pro-Europeans and a warning on the dangers to parliamentary democracy,’ The Times commented; but apart from a professed openness to nationalisation there was nothing specifically Labour about it at all – no mention of equality, for instance, ‘which to the mind of Hugh Gaitskell was what the whole thing was about’: in fact nothing with which a Liberal or moderate Tory would disagree.55 Jenkins would not have disputed this. To escape the furore that his speech had caused he and Jennifer went to the cinema with Ronnie and Doreen McIntosh. (The film was The Sting.) Over supper beforehand Jenkins said that he was becoming ‘an extreme moderate’ and was ‘thoroughly fed up with the party system, which he regarded as a conspiracy against the people’.56 It was in Italy that summer, he wrote later, that he first began seriously to question the two-party mould. Tuscany, however, worked its balm. On his return he told McIntosh that he was now feeling ‘much more cheerful about the government and the election’. He believed Wilson had finally stirred himself to curb Benn’s influence and that the manifesto would be all right, so he would after all be willing to carry on if the government was re-elected. There would still probably be ‘a great bust-up after six months or so, but he might as well wait till then before doing anything drastic’.57

  Once again it could be said that Jenkins had issued a challenge but then shrunk from following it up. Contrary to what Barbara Castle imagined, however, most of his friends were urging him to work for a Labour victory. Unlike in February, Lester told him, he could fight the coming election genuinely wanting Labour to win, since his only remaining chance of winning the leadership when Wilson stepped down was as a loyal member of a government with a mandate to tackle the economic crisis: in that situation his record as the Chancellor who had righted the ship after devaluation would give him a strong platform.58 On 12 September Donoughue – a closet Jenkinsite even while working for Wilson – went with Lester to press this course on him:

  We went into Roy’s enormous room . . . and had several large gin and tonics . . . I said what I thought – that Roy should take a more active part leading the Right, and also in the campaign showing his loyalty to the party, including knocking any idea of joining a coalition; that I thought HW thought more of Roy than vice-versa; that HW was a much improved figure. (Here Roy agreed strongly, saying that in 1964–70 most of their time was spent discussing plots and press smears) . . . After two hours . . . Roy summed up . . . by saying in future he would ‘try to love HW more’.

  Donoughue went home ‘feeling drunk but cheered’.59

  Jenkins made a reasonable stab at fighting the October election with conviction. His election address in Stechford featured a picture of him looking exceptionally grim. ‘Whereas in the past twenty-five years we have been arguing about how fast the standard of living could increase, we now face a real struggle to prevent it being cut.’ Inflation, he warned, could destroy ‘not merely our money but our society’. But at the same time he asked for renewed trust in the Labour government, which had been ‘remarkably faithful to the limited number of promises it made in February’, and insisted that Labour’s ‘Social Contract’ – the government’s supposed bargain with the unions, about which he was in fact deeply sceptical – offered the best hope of beating inflation.60 He spoke widely around the country in a number of key marginals (Stockport, Bosworth, Carmarthen, Peterborough and North-West Norfolk) as well as for friends and supporters (John Mackintosh in Berwick, Bob Maclennan in Caithness, Tom Bradley in Leicester) and his two junior ministers, Shirley Summerskill in Halifax and Alex Lyon – despite their differences – in York (another marginal), as well as for Matthew Oakeshott who was standing in Horsham and Crawley. In his dictated notes he glumly remembered only ‘an endless series of breakfasts – quite good breakfasts – in British Rail restaurant cars, looking out at a sodden countryside in the early morning just after dawn’.61 But Lester – who accompanied Jenkins on some of these trips – told Donoughue that he was ‘enjoying his canvassing tour and was very good at it’.62 He also appeared at two of Labour’s press conferences – the first alongside Wilson and Healey, the second with Wilson and Barbara Castle – and in one television broadcast, in which he highlighted Labour’s commitment to equality for women by plugging his Sex Discrimination Bill. He rejected with scorn Ted Heath’s half-hearted overtures for a government of national unity; at his second press conference, two days before polling day, Donoughue thought him ‘superb, hammering the coalition idea out of sight’.63 Generally, The Times commented, ‘Mr Jenkins has pitched his campaign at a high level, speaking with almost religious zeal about political morality and the broad-based conscience and reform approach for which the Labour Party “does and must stand”.’64 After Wilson, he was the second most-quoted figure on the Labour side in the television news bulletins, just one mention behind Michael Foot and ahead of Healey.65

  He did his best to say nothing contentious about Europe. He swallowed a certain amount of humble pie by admitting that there was after all ‘substantial scope’ for renegotiation of the terms of entry and claiming to be ‘optimistic . . . that a position will come out which will be more favourable to this country and more helpful to the Community generally’. And in return for Wilson agreeing to keep open the option of another General Election, rather than a referendum, he declared that he accepted, by one means or another, ‘the desirability of reconciling British public opinion to membership of the EEC’.66 But his hand was forced by Shirley Williams, who unguardedly blurted out at a press conference that if the public voted against staying in Europe, she would resign from the government, resign her seat and leave politics. Jenkins was immediately pressed to say whether he agreed. He initially tried not to comment, but eventually issued a rather more qualified statement to the effect that he would ‘naturally’ not be able to serve in a Cabinet that was obliged to withdraw, but not that he would leave politics altogether; he hoped the renegotiation would succeed so that the question would not arise.67 This successfully defused the issue. In any case Europe by now came well down the list of the voters’ concerns.

  On the last weekend his campaign was disrupted by a different sort of explosion: the IRA bombing of Guildford. Hayden Phillips arranged with Number Ten for a private plane to fly him from Norfolk – where he had been staying with Solly and Joan Zuckerman – to Guildford on Sunday morning to inspect the damage and visit the victims, then on to Birmingham in the afternoon to join Wilson – dramatically late – at his regular final weekend rally with all the local candidates in the town hall. Despite this, Jenkins judged it ‘the dullest election since 1955’.68 Both Wilson and Heath were tired and shop-soiled leaders; but Wilson managed to keep a lid on the left while projecting an air of hard-won experience and making a virtue of Labour’s close relations with the unions, while the Tories were still fatally damaged by the memory of the three-day week, and the Liberals were unable to build on their advance in February. The electorate, unimpressed by a second election in eight months, showed no enthusiasm for any party and turnout fell to 72
per cent. Labour gained eighteen seats, giving a lead of forty-two over the Tories, but with the Liberals, Scottish and Welsh nationalists and Ulster Unionists between them picking up a total of thirty-nine seats, it had an overall majority of just three. It was very far from the repeat of 1966 that Wilson had been looking for, but another inconclusive result, which confirmed Jenkins’ belief that the winner-take-all electoral system no longer reflected the national will. The government was returned with just 39 per cent public support.

  In Stechford – where the turnout fell to 64 per cent – Jenkins’ personal vote held up well, while both the Tory and the Liberal votes fell back, giving him a slightly increased majority:

  Roy Jenkins (Lab) 23,075

  D.J. Wedgwood (Con) 11,152

  G.A. Gopsill (Lib) 5,860

  Labour majority

  11,92369

  The following September the local party held a dinner dance to mark Jenkins’ twenty-five years as their MP. But this election turned out to be his last in Stechford.

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  fn1 Norris was hurt by Jenkins’ description in his memoirs and wrote to protest, leading Jenkins to apologise. All he had meant, he explained tactfully, was that ‘at that stage my interest was much more on general Cabinet politics than on the Home Office, and that yours was the reverse . . . I must have been very difficult to work for in the spring and summer of 1974, owing to my generally downbeat mood and the fact that, for the first few months at least, I did not do my job at all well.’ Norris thanked him for the clarification, insisting that he had enjoyed working for him and did not share Jenkins’ recollection of his own performance.2 He retired in 1997 as Director of Finance in the Prison Service.