It is inadequate to see British politics as two and a half bottles, one labelled Conservative, the next Labour, the third Liberal, and then to think in the fixed quantities of exactly how much you could pour out of each of the first two bottles and put alongside the third. We must think much more in terms of untapped and unlabelled quantities – and when you look at the low level of participation today . . . there is no reason to doubt that they exist.
But then the bulk of the speech was aimed squarely at Labour’s further ‘lurch to the left’ since leaving office. The NEC’s latest policy document, entitled Peace, Jobs, Freedom, adopted at a special conference at Wembley at the end of May, had saddled Labour with what Jenkins called ‘a near neutralist and unilateralist’ defence posture which would ‘make meaningless our continued membership of NATO’, and ‘a commitment to practical non-cooperation with the European Community leading in all likelihood to a firm proposal for complete withdrawal in the near future’, which together amounted to ‘the total reversal . . . of the carefully-built and democratically endorsed long-term direction of our economic and foreign policy’. With plans for ‘a massive further extension of the public sector’ and a squeeze on private enterprise unmatched in any other democratic country, this was not ‘by any stretch of the imagination a social democratic programme’, nor did it ‘represent the views of the great majority of moderate left voters’.
This analysis was clearly directed at Rodgers, Williams and the others still hesitating about breaking with Labour. But if this emphasis could be taken to imply that Jenkins’ aim was merely to woo disenchanted Labour voters by re-creating a more Atlanticist, pro-European and enterprise-friendly Labour party, his concluding paragraphs reverted to his more ambitious vision, couched in another graphic metaphor, which over the coming months was a gift to the cartoonists. Likening his proposed new party to an experimental aeroplane, he admitted that the forces of political inertia might be too strong:
The likelihood before the start of most adventures is that of failure. The experimental plane may finish up a few fields from the end of the runway . . . But the reverse could occur and the experimental plane could soar in the sky. If that is so, it could go further and more quickly than few now imagine [sic], for it would carry with it great and now untapped reserves of political energy and commitment.
He ended with a historical flourish by recalling George Dangerfield’s once-famous book about the political crises of 1910–14, The Strange Death of Liberal England. ‘That death,’ he suggested, ‘caught people rather unawares’:
Do not discount the possibility that in a few years’ time someone may be able to write at least equally convincingly of the strange and rapid revival of liberal social democratic Britain.28
Jenkins had originally written ‘Liberal and Social Democratic Britain’, with capital letters and a connecting conjunction, which would have emphasised cooperation between the existing third party and his hypothetical fourth party, which in his diary he invariably called a ‘centre’ party. But this was too explicit for Shirley Williams, on whom he had tried out the speech over the phone the day before. That very day, protesting too vehemently her determination not to leave the Labour party, Williams had declared in a radio interview that a centre party would have ‘no roots, no principles, no philosophy and no values’ – a foolish statement, which it was instantly predictable she would live to regret.29 But Jenkins – ‘thinking that if Paris was worth a mass, Shirley was certainly worth an “and” (and a lower case)’ – accepted her amendment, ‘after which we rang off on terms of great amity. She said she was sure we would all be together in six months or so.’30
As it turned out, they were. But in the short term Jenkins’ latest feeler was a damp squib. On television that evening Denis Healey – still seen by most wavering social democrats as the last best hope of saving Labour – dismissed it robustly as ‘absolute bunk’, quoting Shirley Williams’ rash words effectively in support. Most commentators still believed that the stand against the left had to be made within the Labour party; few believed that Labour would actually split or, if it did, that the right would rally to Jenkins’ centrist standard. Over the weekend Shirley Williams, Bill Rodgers and David Owen had responded jointly to a move to commit Labour definitely to leaving the EEC by insisting that ‘there are some of us who will not accept a choice between socialism and Europe. We will choose both.’ Without these three, The Times mocked, the new venture would appear simply as ‘Mr Jenkins’ dining club going public’.31 There was still a general refusal to take his musings seriously. ‘Almost everything Mr Jenkins says is true,’ The Economist conceded. ‘It is all magnificent, but it is not war.’32 The rudest comment came from the Spectator:
The residual image Mr Jenkins conveys is that of a fat, flabby and nearly-extinct bird endeavouring to fly but lacking the muscle and momentum to take flight. Mr Jenkins might soar: he is altogether more likely to crash.
A fourth party, the writer concluded, could only fragment the centre. If Jenkins really wanted to strengthen it, he should join the Liberals ‘and give them the helping hand they need. It can only be ambition and self-conceit which prevent him from volunteering to serve under Mr Steel.’33 Amid the general ridicule just one voice came to his defence – David Steel himself, who wrote calmly: ‘Roy Jenkins is simply ahead of his time.’34, fn3
Thrown by this response, Jenkins fell into ‘a thorough gloom’, feeling that the speech had been ‘a grave mistake’. Unlike the Dimbleby Lecture, he wrote later, he felt he had misjudged the moment and left himself ‘stranded halfway up a cliff, committed to some dramatic political action, but lacking the strength and resources single-handedly to launch a new political movement’.36 If no major allies would join him he began to wonder if he should not just quietly join the Liberals after all. This mood lasted the rest of the summer, exacerbated by ill health – the colon pain which affected him from June to September – and miserable weather. Jennifer remembered this as the one time in his life when he was seriously depressed.
But then from the late summer things began to move again in his direction. First David Owen, who had hitherto been some way behind the other two, joined again with Bill Rodgers and Shirley Williams to write a letter published in the Guardian on 1 August warning that, while they did not support a centre party, they might, if Labour continued on its present course, be forced to consider setting up ‘a new democratic socialist party’.37 From now on they were dubbed in the press the ‘Gang of Three’. The tipping point for Owen had been the experience of being shouted down when he tried to make an anti-unilateralist speech at the special conference in May. He had shallower roots in Labour than the other two, and was now the most impatient to make a break. When he and Debbie came to lunch at East Hendred on 31 August, Jenkins noted ‘a remarkable change in him since the last time I had talked to him’ the year before: Owen had not only ‘stiffened and toughened a lot’ vis-à-vis Labour, but was personally ‘a great deal more agreeable’ than he had been since before he became Foreign Secretary.38 The first was undoubtedly true, but the second was a misjudgement.
Labour’s annual conference at Blackpool at the end of September pushed the ‘Gang of Three’ closer to the exit by definitely adopting the unilateralist, anti-European and nationalisation policies proposed in Peace, Jobs, Freedom plus the full Bennite agenda of constitutional changes to require mandatory reselection of MPs and an electoral college to elect the leader – measures designed to ensure the left’s control of the party in perpetuity, while their senior Shadow Cabinet colleagues who should have led the fightback (Denis Healey, Roy Hattersley, Eric Varley, Gerald Kaufman, Merlyn Rees) all kept their heads down. Jenkins watched the first day on television in Kensington Park Gardens with satisfaction:
Benn madder than ever, the conference in an ugly mood, Shirley in a great fighting mood [at a fringe rally] . . . No great tugs upon the heart strings, but great interest and things look as though they are going worse even than I thought they woul
d.39
The day after the conference ended Bill and Sylvia Rodgers invited themselves to lunch at East Hendred. Jenkins had spent the intervening days in Brussels with a flying visit to Madrid, but as the pace increased he was now spending more weekends in Britain. He was still not confident that Rodgers was ready to give up on Labour, but thought him ‘certainly a lot nearer to it than nine months ago’, which reassured him that his strategy of waiting for the ‘Gang of Three’ had been the right one. ‘I certainly feel much easier about the political situation and whatever it may hold. I do not feel myself boxed in, in the way that I did in June and July and early August.’40 His health was better too. Back in Brussels he revealed his returning confidence over lunch at the Berlaymont with a group of British lobby correspondents, one of whom – Fred Emery of The Times – wrote it up as a front-page story (‘Mr Jenkins Paves Way for a Political Comeback’), reporting that he believed that events had vindicated his Dimbleby Lecture and now planned a further series of speeches:
Mr Jenkins . . . intends to set out his view of a true and sensible alternative to both Mrs Margaret Thatcher’s monetarism and the mass nationalisation policies embraced by the Labour Party Conference before deciding whether to form a new political grouping in alliance with the Liberal Party.41
This, Jenkins wrote in his diary, was ‘quite satisfactorily put from my point of view’.42
The next day – seventeen months after losing office – Callaghan finally announced his resignation, launching a critical leadership election. For most of that time the wavering social democrats had seen Healey’s succession as the moment when the fight to regain control of the party would begin. Healey was seen as a tough right-winger, a former Defence Secretary and former Chancellor of undoubted prime-ministerial calibre, who would bring the party back to its traditional values. In his letter to Jenkins after Dimbleby, Rodgers had confessed to a sneaking hope that Healey might make him Shadow Chancellor.43 Shirley Williams had come to Brussels in March with an olive branch from Healey offering Jenkins the Foreign Office in a future government. Owen had been a junior minister under Healey at the MoD and was personally closer to him than either of the others. By October, however, they had all lost any belief that Healey would take on the left: behind his bluff image he had already compromised too much and still seemed more concerned with appeasing the left in order to secure the leadership. When a delegation of MPs from the Manifesto Group of moderate MPs went to see him, he told them bluntly that they had nowhere else to go. He was wrong. By his failure at this moment to give the leadership they were looking for, Healey was, as Peter Jenkins later wrote, ‘effectively one of the founders of the SDP’.44 Briefly Rodgers thought of standing against him.45 Owen talked of abstaining.46 So long as Healey was the probable next leader, however, they felt obliged to stick with Labour and give him the chance to prove them wrong. Opposed only by Peter Shore and John Silkin, he would probably have won. But then Michael Foot was persuaded to throw his hat into the ring. A romantic veteran of the Bevanite left, loved even by the right, Foot was seen as the one man who could unite the divided party – even though scarcely anyone saw him as a credible Prime Minister. On the first ballot on 4 November he took eighty-three votes to Healey’s 112. Silkin with thirty-eight votes and Shore with thirty-two both dropped out, switching their support to Foot, which raised – Jenkins noted from Brussels – ‘a perfectly good possibility’ of Foot beating Healey in the second ballot: ‘A rather exciting prospect.’47 A week later he rushed back to the rue de Praetère after entertaining the Norwegian Prime Minister to hear the result – Foot 139, Healey 129 – with undisguised delight:
Sensational result: Foot elected by ten votes. I cannot pretend that I was other than elated, as it clearly opened up a much greater prospect of political realignment. Dined with Jennifer at home, discussing this urgently and excitedly.48
This was a turning point. It was suspected (and later admitted) that at least six MPs who had already decided to abandon Labour voted for Foot to give themselves a pretext for what they were going to do anyway, deliberately saddling Labour with a weak and unelectable leader as a cynical parting gift. It is just possible that Healey, had he been narrowly elected, would have changed his tune sufficiently to prevent the SDP defection. But it is equally arguable that he had already sold the pass. What is certain is that Foot’s election made it much easier for the Gang of Three to conclude that Labour was beyond salvation and start firming up their plans accordingly. Foot’s election was not quite, as David Owen called it, ‘the final straw’: that did not come till January 1981.49 But in the meantime they all signalled their disaffection in different ways. Owen declined to stand again for the Shadow Cabinet and started actively gathering a group of potential defectors. Rodgers did stand and was re-elected, but then declined the uncongenial portfolios (Northern Ireland and Health) that Foot offered him. Shirley Williams stayed on the NEC for the moment, but announced that she would not stand again for her former seat in Stevenage. Meanwhile Jenkins watched and waited, like a fat spider, for them to fall into his web.
He was prepared to wait for them; but they were much less sure that they wanted to join him. The problem which blighted the SDP from the outset was that the two streams which eventually came together to form it – Jenkins and his friends on the one hand, none of them any longer in Parliament; the Gang of Three and their handful of embattled MPs on the other – had different ideas about the sort of party they were trying to set up. Jenkins, effectively out of the Labour party for the past four years and impressed by the vague public yearning revealed by his Dimbleby Lecture – frankly wanted a centre party that, in alliance with the Liberals, would tap new reservoirs of support from those who felt unrepresented by either of the old class-based parties. Rodgers, Owen and Williams, however – still constrained by emotional loyalty to Labour and obligations to their constituency parties – needed to believe that they were not betraying their Labour allegiance, merely seeking to preserve it in a new form: they wanted nothing to do with a centre party, but insisted that they were in the business of creating a new Labour party, purged of the dogmatism, utopianism and intolerance of the Bennites. Jenkins knew that he needed a substantial breakaway from Labour to make his venture credible; but he did not want them to define it. They equally did not want to be seen to be merely joining him: they welcomed Jenkins’ somewhat lofty blessing, but they had all regarded him since 1976 as a bit of a spent force. They did not share his belief in untapped reservoirs of uncommitted support or his enthusiasm for the Liberals. They were still fighting inside the Labour Party and – if they were eventually driven to leave it – for the soul of the Labour party.
David Owen in particular thought Jenkins a liability to any new venture they might found. ‘The essential,’ he told a friend in America, ‘is that a new party is not cast in Roy Jenkins’ image.’50 But image rather than policy was what his objection to Jenkins was all about. Owen liked to see himself as more ‘radical’ than Jenkins; but on any normal left–right scale he was actually more right-wing – as the evolution of his thinking after 1983 rapidly confirmed. With the shallowest Labour roots of any of the Gang of Four and even less connection with the unions than Jenkins, it was nonsense for Owen to pretend to be any sort of socialist: ideologically rootless but temperamentally impatient, seeking a reforming, egalitarian, democratic party that would be strong on defence and not in hock to the unions, he should really have been a prime candidate for a centre party.fn4 But what mattered more to him than any policy was that the new party should appear young, fresh, dynamic, modern and decisive, with none of the ‘fudging and mudging’ he had despised in the Labour party; in other words, a party formed in his own brash image. He frankly thought Jenkins by 1980 an old, lazy, sybaritic has-been, while under the influence of his American wife he saw himself – in Bill Rodgers’ later view – as ‘J.F. Kennedy reincarnated’.53 ‘David’s unease at Roy’s re-emergence onto the political stage,’ Rodgers wrote shrewdly, ‘was rather lik
e the resentment of an adolescent boy on discovering that his rejected father is dangerously attractive to his girlfriend and still a fast mover on the football field.’54 In December, Owen circulated to Williams and Rodgers a ten-page memorandum on how they must try to prevent Jenkins becoming leader by default. ‘The whole key to success for any initiative,’ he insisted, ‘is that it is new, different, young and fresh-looking.’55 ‘From the beginning,’ he claimed in 1984, ‘I knew it would have been better without involving Roy . . . In the beginning it was truly a Gang of Three and we should have kept it that way.’56
On 29 November he went to East Hendred to tell Jenkins this to his face:
He told me firmly for the first time that he was prepared to form a new party, and that he thought Shirley would come too, though he was curiously less sure about Bill. He was also . . . very firmly geared up to tell me that he thought that Shirley should be leader . . . because of her great popularity etc. And it was made clear that it was in his view to be not a centre party but a ‘Socialist International’ party, in other words to some extent my joining them rather than vice-versa.
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