Roy Jenkins

by John Campbell

  Shortly before he left Brussels he asked her out to dinner, when they reminisced together over three bottles of wine. She felt he regretted leaving his old colleagues.130 He had been reading her just-published diary of the 1974–6 government and enjoyed his evening with her. ‘She was very talkative, slightly tipsy I think is the right word . . . as self-obsessed as ever . . . half sensible and half incorrigible.’131

  20

  The Gang of Four

  AFTER THE DIMBLEBY Lecture, Jenkins still had thirteen months more to serve in Brussels. It was an anxious year. While the public response to Dimbleby had been encouraging, confirming his sense that there was a large untapped reservoir of support for some sort of middle way between the extremes of Thatcherism and Bennery, it was not at all clear how or whether he could channel it into an effective political movement. On the one hand he had aroused a considerable sense of anticipation which his potential followers now expected him to follow up. ‘Until now,’ one correspondent wrote to The Times, ‘I believed that Roy Jenkins was the best Prime Minister we never had. Now, I believe that he is the best Prime Minister we will have.’1 Opinion polls still suggested – as they had done since the early Seventies – that a hypothetical alliance of Labour moderates and Liberals would attract substantial support. On the other hand there was widespread scepticism at Westminster and in Fleet Street first about whether such an opportunity really existed outside the fantasies of naive herbivores; and, second, about whether Jenkins, a notoriously pleasure-loving Brussels fat cat who had retired hurt from the domestic dogfight four years earlier, had the stomach or the stamina to re-enter it when a more comfortable life in academia or the City beckoned. He sometimes doubted it himself. While still heavily preoccupied in Brussels with the wretched British budget problem, therefore, he devoted much attention on his regular visits back to Britain during 1980 to sounding out potential allies, testing the water and weighing up his options.

  There were four or five separate groups of possible supporters whose different agendas he somehow needed to hold in balance. First, he kept in close touch with David Steel, who he hoped would be able to deliver some sort of arrangement with the Liberals. Jenkins always recognised that the Liberals already occupied a substantial bridgehead in the centre ground – up to 19 per cent in 1974, still nearly 14 per cent in 1979 – and, unlike most Labour people, he was personally well-disposed to them: some of his best friends were Liberals and he had always been happy to call himself a liberal. Second, there was a core of long-standing Jenkinsites from the Wilson years – Dick Taverne, David Marquand, Michael Barnes and others, now out of Parliament but still loyal to him as their unquestioned leader: to these could be added Anthony Lester, John Harris (now President of the Parole Board, but still Jenkins’ most trusted adviser) and Matthew Oakeshott. The third group was a somewhat maverick collection of virulently anti-left Labour councillors and failed parliamentary candidates who had already broken with Labour and were impatient for him to raise the standard of a new democratic party of the centre-left. Fourth, he knew that no new party would have a serious chance of success without a significant defection of sitting Labour MPs, including one or two frontbenchers – specifically Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers. Finally Jenkins also hoped to attract some ‘one nation’ Tories unhappy with the direction in which Mrs Thatcher was leading their party.

  He had already established a basis of understanding with Steel four months before the Dimbleby Lecture, when Steel came to dinner in Brussels in July. Now they had another long meeting at East Hendred at the beginning of January 1980. ‘He is very agreeable, sensible and curiously mature,’ Jenkins recorded in his diary. (He was also struck by the fact that Steel looked remarkably like Hayden Phillips.) It was at this meeting, according to Jenkins, that they agreed that there was ‘no question of me or anybody else joining the Liberal Party’. There would be more chance of securing a significant number of Labour defectors, and Labour voters, by forming a new social democratic party, working in alliance with but separate from the Liberals – but with the option, if things went well, of ‘an amalgamation after a general election’. This diary entry makes it clear that more than a year before the formation of the SDP Jenkins already anticipated a merger at quite an early date. For his part, Steel claimed to have ‘overwhelming’ Liberal support for this strategy.2 Thanking Jenkins for a ‘splendid lunch’, he wrote that he was planning an article for the Sunday Times outlining ‘the broad agenda for a Government of National Reform’, which should help to ‘keep nervous Liberals happy, since most of it will flow from established Liberal policies’. He conceded that there were ‘a number of anti-social democrat noises coming from Liberals, but I hope to deal with the appropriate bodies in the spring’.3 Discounting Jo Grimond’s sour comments about Dimbleby, he said that Grimond was just jealous because Jenkins looked as if he might succeed in doing what he had been urging unsuccessfully for the past twenty years.4 Jenkins and Steel kept in touch during 1980, but they did not need to meet very often because they both knew exactly the outcome they were hoping to achieve.

  Jenkins met his ‘Jenkinsite’ supporters for what he called ‘a plotting meeting’ followed by dinner at Brooks’s a few days before Christmas 1979: Taverne, Marquand, Barnes and Lester were joined by two still-sitting MPs, Bob Maclennan and, ‘unexpectedly but extremely agreeably’, John Horam (MP for Gateshead West). They were all more or less enthusiastic, Jenkins recorded, and all thought a split ‘inevitable and desirable’; but there was already some difference of emphasis about whether they should be appealing simply to disaffected Labour supporters or trying to cast their net more widely.5 The least enthusiastic at this stage was Lester, who wrote to Jenkins a few days later pressing the case for ‘a new centre-left party led by you and Shirley and Bill, not a new centre-right party led by you alone’: the latter, he warned, would lead nowhere ‘beyond a successful by-election and the Liberal Party’.6

  The immediate shock troops for a breakaway from Labour seemed to be offered by a prickly pair of Greater London councillors, Douglas Eden and Stephen Haseler, both polytechnic lecturers, who in 1975 had founded an outfit called the Social Democratic Alliance to fight the influence of the hard left. (Haseler had earlier written a book about Gaitskell’s battle with the left in the early Sixties.) After the Dimbleby Lecture they were joined by Jim Daly, a former chairman of the GLC transport committee; Clive Lindley, a wealthy businessman who had made his money in motorway catering; and Colin Phipps, an oil geologist who had been MP for Dudley for five years before losing his seat in 1979. Jenkins met these ‘conspirators’ in different combinations over some months for exploratory talks. ‘They were all quite sensible and I hope they are all right,’ he noted slightly nervously after one such meeting in January 1980. ‘It is going to be very difficult to manoeuvre everyone into position.’7 During the year the two groups came together to form a Centre Party Preparation Committee (CPPC) to prepare the ground before Jenkins’ return from Brussels at the beginning of 1981.8 But a clear division soon emerged between those who wanted to move quickly and those who wanted to wait for the optimum moment to attract a significant number of heavyweight defectors; in the first camp were Haseler, Eden, Phipps and Barnes, in the second Marquand, Daly, Lindley and John Harris, with Taverne somewhere between the two. Marquand warned in August that a preparing committee would only scare away potential defectors, forcing Rodgers and Williams to distance themselves, while Eden and Haseler were distrusted by the Liberals. Apart from his own natural caution, Jenkins was always more likely to be influenced by those he liked. Phipps he found ‘opinionated’ and ‘tiresome’;9 while Haseler and Eden looked like ‘hard-faced men who have done badly out of the Labour Party. The difficulty is that they are interested in spoiling tactics, which I am not.’ At a difficult meeting that he and Jennifer attended at Phipps’ flat in July, it was agreed to make no overt move till after the Labour conference. ‘In the meantime,’ he wrote, ‘the SDA could do what they liked as long as they d
id not implicate me, and those who are longing for action, like Mickey Barnes and Colin Phipps and maybe Dick, could associate themselves with them to the extent that they liked.’10, fn1 He agreed with Marquand and Harris that he should wait for Rodgers and Shirley Williams to reach their personal breaking points.

  Jenkins knew from the outset that he needed Bill and Shirley, though his relationship with the two of them was very different. Bill Rodgers had been his most faithful lieutenant since Gaitskellite days – secretary of the Fabian Society when Jenkins was its chairman, organiser of CDS in the early 1960s, one of his junior ministers at the Treasury in 1969–70, unofficial whip of the pro-European rebels in 1971, organiser of his leadership campaign in 1976. It was as difficult to imagine Jenkins launching any major initiative without Rodgers’ support as it was to imagine Rodgers ultimately failing to follow Jenkins wherever he led. Rodgers looked up to Jenkins as his ‘elder brother’ in politics;12 while Jenkins characterised Rodgers somewhat unfairly in his diary as ‘above all a fighting colonel . . . He is a very good short-term operator, but very much needs somebody to give him the orders and tell him what is the overall objective.’13 (It should be said that he soon revised this view and came to consult Rodgers almost daily, paying close attention to his advice.) While Jenkins had been in Brussels, however, Rodgers had become a Cabinet minister in his own right (as Transport Secretary) and increasingly sceptical as to whether Jenkins was ‘a big enough risk-taker’ or had the stomach for ‘the massive job which would be entailed in trying to mobilise a centre consensus’.14 With a five-figure majority in Stockton-on-Tees he was deeply rooted in the Labour Party and had no intention of being driven out of it. In an important speech in South Wales a week after Jenkins’ Dimbleby Lecture, however, he warned that Labour had ‘a year, not much longer, in which to save itself’.15 On his way back to London he stopped off at East Hendred, where Shirley Williams also came, and the three of them established ‘a fairly good identity of view’.16 But neither Rodgers nor Williams was yet ready to break with Labour, and Jenkins was careful not to push them. On 3 January 1980 Rodgers wrote one of his long letters to Jenkins stressing that his hope was still to save the Labour party, not to found a fourth party.

  ‘This may prove impossible,’ he conceded, ‘and my own optimism continues to diminish. But unless some of us can say – and show – that we have tried and failed, we shall not carry with us the troops that we shall need if the break should come.’ He was afraid that people like Dick Taverne risked discrediting the idea by jumping the gun. He was also wary of the Liberals: he recognised that an electoral pact would be essential, but wanted only ‘an arms-length relationship’ with them, and ultimately to absorb them. To succeed, a fourth party must be unambiguously a party of the left and aim to take ‘over 90% of the existing Labour vote’. ‘I’m not sure whether we agree about this,’ he concluded. ‘But I have no confidence in (and no great warmth towards) a party of the Centre. It would not work . . . A Fourth Party will only succeed if it sets out to usurp the traditional Labour vote.’ Otherwise it would only split the left, to the benefit the Tories.17 A few days later he assured Giles Radice that he had no interest in a centre party: ‘A breakaway party would not get anywhere unless it could take people like me [that is, Radice] and Phillip Whitehead with it.’18

  Shirley Williams had never been so close to Jenkins. She felt great respect for him, had fought for many of the same causes in Cabinet and on the NEC, but was never a fully paid-up Jenkinsite: an archetypal bluestocking, she moved in quite different circles and rather disapproved of his chummy male dining clubs and country house weekends. He in turn admired her courage, her passion and her common touch, but found her disorganisation and chronic lack of punctuality maddening. In March she came to Brussels to make a speech and stayed the night at the rue de Praetère, where she and Jenkins sat up talking – ‘unbelievably’ – till four in the morning (Jenkins normally disliked going to bed much after midnight). He felt she was ‘in a sense lonely, not that she does not have plenty of people around, but perhaps people she can’t talk to very easily’. She had been half-persuaded by Denis Healey that if he won the Labour leadership when Callaghan retired he was ready to be ‘an absolutely ruthless social democratic leader’ and take on the left; but having lost her seat in May she was not sure she wanted to stay in politics – she might be more tempted by something like the chairmanship of the BBC or a visiting professorship at Harvard.19, fn2 Of this meeting Jenkins wrote in his memoirs: ‘I never came away from an encounter with her without being encouraged, bewitched and inspirited, yet also totally mystified about what she was going to do next.’21 Later in the year, however, when she was still undecided about what to do, he wrote less kindly that ‘She was as engaging and muddled as ever . . . but as is always the case with Shirley one never knows quite where she is, not because of any dishonesty on her part but because she does not think things out schematically and is almost incapable of making up her mind.’22 Nevertheless she had such a following in the Labour Party that she was the recruit Jenkins was keenest to secure.

  Finally, in pursuit of his broader view of what the new party should aim to be, Jenkins was anxious to try to recruit some of the Tory ‘wets’ who were most unhappy with Mrs Thatcher’s policies – above all Ian Gilmour, with whom he lunched at Brooks’s on 3 January. Gilmour was in principle sceptical about a centre party, yet thought it ‘well within the bounds of possibility that we might achieve success more quickly than is within the bounds of my imagination’. If Conservative support collapsed, they might even win the next election:

  He would obviously be very torn in these circumstances, though I didn’t raise this with him in any way and wouldn’t have dreamed of doing so. He thought we would get no Tory members of the H of C in the short run while the Government was in, but would get an awful lot of Tory votes and probably a lot of Tory members after a successful breakthrough and after the Government had collapsed.23

  Gilmour was letting his loathing of his leader run away with his judgement. When he and Caroline came to lunch at East Hendred three months later he still confidently expected Mrs Thatcher’s government to collapse. In that event he hoped to see Jenkins join forces with Ted Heath: ‘You and Ted would be a formidable combination.’ ‘He also indicated that while he probably could not do anything until after the election he would be very pulled towards it.’24 In June Heath too came to lunch at East Hendred on his way to his boat in the Solent; but he was full of the report of the Brandt Commission (on Third World development) on which he had sat, and showed very little interest in Jenkins’ plans. The truth was that Tories like Heath and Gilmour were so sure that Mrs Thatcher was a temporary aberration who could not last long that they never thought seriously of jumping ship. The SDP did eventually draw a lot of its members from disillusioned Tories; but it was one of the weaknesses of Jenkins’ social approach to politics that he only really thought of recruiting his friends at the top of the Tory party who – unlike their Labour equivalents – were not going to leave a party which they were confident would in time come back to them. Though several others had serious talks about the possibility of joining, both before and after the party was launched in 1981, only one Tory MP – the member for North-West Norfolk, Christopher Brocklebank-Fowler – actually did so, and he was a lone maverick who brought no followers with him.

  In much the same way Jenkins failed to see the importance of attracting some serious trade union support. John Grigg – one ‘wet’ Tory who did join the SDP – wrote to him the day after Dimbleby warning shrewdly that ‘Unless a Labour split involves the industrial as well as the political wing of the movement it will be doomed, as in 1931 . . . So long as the trade unions remain politically monolithic, there is no hope of making any change in the system effective.’25 This was absolutely right. In practice, however, Jenkins’ chances of winning trade union support were pretty minimal, as was exemplified by the one possible recruit he did attempt to woo: the robustly right-wing elec
tricians’ leader, Frank Chapple, with whom he lunched at Brooks’s in September. ‘He had recently been excluded from key committees of the TUC,’ Jenkins recorded, ‘but was nevertheless in a cocky, aggressive, agreeable mood’:

  He agrees with me on absolutely every aspect of policy, but still does not want to contemplate a break . . . He believes that everything can be won by a tough battle from within, including committing the Labour Party to a nuclear missile in everybody’s back garden almost. Curious that he should have this element of political unrealism. It was nonetheless well worth seeing him, probably a pity I did not do so earlier.26

  After six months of these private soundings Jenkins put up another trial balloon in a speech to the Parliamentary Press Gallery on 9 June. This was a less friendly audience than the BBC’s invited guest list in November, mainly composed of ‘hard-boiled journalists seasoned by a few parliamentary guests like Neil Kinnock’.27 He gave them a more sharply political but somewhat muddled speech, which went a good deal closer to announcing his intention to form a new party, but was, as a result, less well received than his more elegant Dimbleby tour d’horizon seven months earlier. Broadly it repeated his previous analysis that the existing two-party structure, rooted in outdated class allegiance and entrenched by the first-past-the-post voting system, not only militated against sensible and consistent policies but no longer represented the aspirations of a more sophisticated and less tribal electorate. He began by describing the weight and quality of the mail he had received from members of the public after his Dimbleby Lecture, which had convinced him of the need to see the political battlefield in much more fluid terms than hitherto, expressed in a characteristic metaphor: