Roy Jenkins

by John Campbell

  The main pitch of his campaign was to blame Mrs Thatcher’s ‘stubborn theories’ for increased unemployment – ‘the worst fall in industrial output suffered by any major industrial country since the war’ – while condemning the irrelevant extremism of Labour’s siege-economy alternative and promoting his own record as a prudent and successful Chancellor. (Adult unemployment in Warrington had been only 995 when he left office in 1970, he boasted, but 3,124 when Denis Healey left in 1979.) Mrs Thatcher claimed credit for sticking to her guns, he charged in one of his relatively few set-piece speeches on 18 June, but the guns were ‘often trained on our own people’ and were reducing ‘whole regions’ of the country, including Merseyside, to ‘industrial wastelands’.134 Jenkins’ unashamedly Keynesian alternative was a six-point programme of infrastructural investment backed by incentives to employers and wage control, which was designed to take one million people off the dole within two years: the £2–3 billion annual cost was said to be substantially self-financing, but in any case, he claimed, was less than Geoffrey Howe’s margin of error. ‘These are positive proposals,’ one of his leaflets boasted, ‘which offer a workable alternative both to the heartless job destruction of Mrs Thatcher and to the wildly spendthrift policies of Mr Foot.’ His formal election address featured a spread of pictures of Jenkins talking earnestly with local people – and one with Willy Brandt, to emphasise his international statesmanship – and a message from Jennifer regretting how Labour had changed. ‘We are fighting to change the old party system,’ it concluded. ‘Warrington can change the political map of Britain.’135

  His message was helpfully reinforced first by the bitter battle between Healey and Benn for the Labour deputy leadership, which was unfolding that summer, and then by the wave of riots and looting which began in nearby Liverpool on 3 July and quickly spread to Manchester, Birmingham and a dozen other cities, which seemed to vindicate the warnings her opponents had sounded about the damage Mrs Thatcher’s policies were doing to the social fabric. On the one hand, Jenkins naturally condemned ‘the dark forces of violence and irrationalism’ sweeping the country and, as a former Home Secretary, called on the police to uphold the law. But at the same time, in a speech on 10 July, he seized on the need to ameliorate the conditions that led to rioting and tried to promote Warrington, which was so far ‘an oasis of relative peace with violence on both sides of it’, as a model:

  It has civic pride and industrial versatility. It can send to the nation a message of reconciliation and hope, a message at once of fairness and understanding. Britain needs a new deal, and it can start here in Warrington, next Thursday.136

  Labour tried to repel the SDP challenge in one of its heartlands by personal ridicule and abuse. Their candidate Doug Hoyle, a Bennite member of the NEC with a record of admiration for the Soviet Union, dismissed Jenkins as ‘a retired pensioner from the EEC’, a merchant banker and a class traitor;137 while Peter Shore, now Shadow Chancellor, targeted him as ‘the most articulate exponent of all that they [the SDP] stand for – from the sick, overriding passion for the Common Market, through the obsession with proportional representation and the so-called restructuring of British politics, to the specious and dangerous dependence, not on the support of individual men and women, but upon the good opinion of the media’ – and called on the voters of Warrington to ‘strangle the monster at birth’.138 Meanwhile the Conservative candidate, an amiable London bus driver whom the Tories had put up almost as a sacrificial victim, called him a socialist. Between them his two principal opponents did Jenkins one big favour by supporting the 1967 Abortion Act, which might otherwise have been a difficult issue for him with the large number of Catholic voters.fn14 On one other issue Jenkins made a slightly surprising but little-noticed shift of position. While still firmly opposed to unilateral nuclear disarmament, he questioned Mrs Thatcher’s decision to buy from the Americans the new Trident missile system. Britain should retain her independent deterrent, he suggested, so long as Polaris lasted, ‘but not necessarily renew it at limitless cost in the future’.139 This would become a clear point of difference between him and David Owen.

  In one respect the SDP/Liberal campaign was disappointing. The polls persistently failed to reflect the enthusiasm they felt they were arousing on the ground, barely moving from 29 per cent at the beginning to 31 per cent at the end. In an internal SDP memo entitled ‘What Counts as a Good Result in Warrington?’ Mike Thomas was at pains to manage expectations so that the media did not write off a good result as a disappointment. It was important to get across that ‘25% of the vote in Warrington is a very creditable performance. 30% or over . . . is an excellent performance. This would not only be good public relations, but the plain electoral truth.’140 By the last weekend of the campaign they had created something of a carnival atmosphere, with Jenkins ‘cavalcading’ around the streets on the back of an open truck, waving at what he called ‘nodal points’, and Bill Rodgers providing a running commentary over a loudhailer, interspersed with the theme music from Chariots of Fire and Aaron Copland’s ‘Fanfare for the Common Man’; and they were confident of at least a respectable result. Jenkins, always cautious, hoped for 35 per cent. In fact he won 42 per cent and, by squeezing three-quarters of the Tory vote (from 9,000 in 1979 down to just over 2,000), cut Hoyle’s 10,000 majority to just 1,759. The eight fringe candidates took just over 200 votes between them.

  E.D.J. Hoyle (Labour) 14,280

  R.H. Jenkins (SDP with Liberal support) 12,521

  S.J. Sorrell (Conservative) 2,102

  + eight others 219

  Labour majority

  1,759141

  After the declaration Hoyle made a ‘sour and truculent’ speech in which he claimed a ‘magnificent victory’ against an unprecedented media campaign, which had sold the SDP ‘like soapflakes’. In response – discarding his prepared speech – Jenkins congratulated Hoyle on achieving ‘the lowest Labour vote in this constituency for fifty years’ and described the result as at once the first parliamentary election he had lost since 1945 and ‘by far the greatest victory in which I have ever participated’.142 ‘What a marvellous result and what a speech!’ John Grigg wrote the next day. ‘If you had paid the horrific Hoyle to set the thing up for you he could hardly have done the job better. But you turned the situation to electrifying account, and with a vast unseen audience.’143 (The polls closed at nine o’clock in those days and the declaration was broadcast live on television soon after eleven.) Another who admired Jenkins’ ‘perfectly-judged’ reply to Hoyle’s ‘deplorably ungracious and offensive speech’ was the rector of Warrington, who thanked him for putting Warrington on the map. ‘I have never known anything remotely like the excitement and intensity of feeling generated by the campaign . . . The whole community of Warrington seemed to come alive.’144

  The next day’s headlines were all the mould-breakers could have wished for, from The Times (‘A Triumph that May Change the Course of British Politics’) to the Sun (‘A New Age of Politics is Dawning in Britain’), reflecting a sudden realisation that the SDP must be taken seriously.145 ‘There have been false dawns before,’ the Guardian cautioned, ‘but there has been no time when a fundamental change in the pattern of British politics looked more likely to come than it does this morning.’146 Jenkins himself – discounting the most extravagant projections, which would have given an SDP/Liberal combination practically all the seats in the House of Commons – declared that the ‘experimental plane’ that he had dared to imagine just thirteen months earlier was now ‘cruising high. We have to accomplish the passage and landing, but the take-off has been securely achieved.’ Warrington, he predicted, might mark the beginning of ‘a change in British politics such as we have not seen since the First World War’.147 One Labour moderate who had declined to join the breakaway, Giles Radice, acknowledged in his diary that Jenkins’ ‘astonishing 42% of the vote’ was ‘a splendid result for the Social Democrats and a sombre warning to the Labour Party that it cannot go on
like it has without substantial working class defections’.148

  Another result of Warrington was that Jenkins – though still lacking a seat in Parliament – was now firmly installed as the favourite for the leadership. Both the way he had risen to the challenge and the unexpectedly close result put an end to the caricature of a lazy fat cat who would never fight for anything except a restaurant table. With the sudden possibility that the SDP might really form at least a part of the next government, a poll of members found that 49 per cent now wanted him as leader compared with 29 per cent for Shirley Williams and 19 per cent for David Owen.149 Even Owen was impressed by his ‘campaigning spirit’ and temporarily reconciled to Jenkins becoming leader.150

  A third consequence of Warrington was the consolidation of the SDP–Liberal Alliance on the ground. The Liverpool Liberals’ energetic contribution to Jenkins’ campaign swept aside the reservations of many of those in the SDP who had wanted to preserve a distinct identity. ‘There was no inter-party friction,’ Jenkins wrote in his memoirs, ‘and everybody got along together very well.’151 The burgeoning love affair was consummated two months later when he and Shirley Williams, with David Steel and Jo Grimond, addressed a packed fringe meeting at the Liberal Assembly in Llandudno in September. (Bill Rodgers was also there but did not speak.) There had been apprehension that some Liberal purists might reject Steel’s strategy of working together; in fact they gave Jenkins and Shirley Williams a rapturous welcome and endorsed the Alliance the next day by the overwhelming margin of 1,600:112. This was the famous and subsequently much-mocked occasion when Steel told his troops to ‘go back to your constituencies and prepare for government’.152 In his brief speech at the fringe meeting Jenkins went beyond the ‘partnership of principle’ that he had proclaimed in March and – reviving ‘an old Gladstonian phrase’ – called for ‘a union of hearts’ to make a reality of the prospect of a Liberal/Social Democrat government after the next election: ‘a reality which breaks the stultifying monopoly of power which the two big parties have for too long enjoyed; a reality which means full scale electoral reform at the earliest possible moment so that the unfair and damaging monopoly cannot remain; a reality which frees the electorate from the false choice between the equally unwelcome extremes of Mrs Thatcher and Mr Benn; a reality which offers a new and widely sought-after hope to the British people’.

  We can of course let all this slip. You can fall back on your ancient purity and we can console ourselves with our exciting novelty. But what fools we would be if we did! Mrs Thatcher and Mr Foot would heave sighs of relief. Still more important, a great part of public opinion would experience a sense of disappointment and let-down. The monopoly would survive, unloved, uncreative and almost unscarred. This will not happen. We have jointly made an unprecedented opportunity. Let us seize it together in an alliance of mutual respect and mutual trust.153

  In his memoirs Jenkins regretted that David Owen was absent from this love feast, and wondered if his subsequent attitude to the Alliance might have been warmer had he been there. ‘It is, I suppose, more likely that his absence was due to his coolness rather than the other way round.’ But he believed that Llandudno shaped the future attitudes of all of them to the Alliance:

  The three of us who were there henceforth regarded it, even in moments of occasional exasperation, con amore, as a union of hearts as well as a partnership of principle. The one who was not there regarded it as a marriage of convenience, necessary and requiring the respectful observance of forms in public, but not to be confused with affection.154

  There was a minor tiff between the two parties over who should fight the next by-election that came up: Croydon North-West. It was a Tory seat where the same Liberal candidate had already stood three times with conspicuous lack of success – indeed, his vote had fallen at each of the last three General Elections, in 1979 to just 10 per cent. After Jenkins’ near-miss at Warrington there was strong pressure from the SDP for Shirley Williams to fight Croydon. Steel and other leading Liberals would have been happy with this, and this time she was willing. But the agreement made before Warrington gave the Liberals first stab at the next by-election; and the local Liberals stubbornly refused to jettison Bill Pitt.fn15 Owen and others in the SDP who thought like him argued that Shirley should stand anyway. ‘I did not leave the Labour Party after 43 years . . . so I could support . . . the Liberal Party,’ one ex-MP wrote furiously to Bill Rodgers. ‘The Liberal Party is dying – let it die in peace.’ Rodgers replied that this would be electoral suicide. ‘We are playing for very high stakes and to elbow the Liberals out of the way is not, in my view, consistent with our long term interests.’157 In the end Pitt stood for a fourth time with SDP support – all four of the Gang of Four went to speak for him – and such was the tide now flowing behind the Alliance that he romped home in October with 40 per cent of the vote in a three-way contest, with 13,800 votes to the Tories’ 10,546 and Labour’s 8,967. This was in many ways a more striking result than Warrington because it was achieved without a star candidate.

  Meanwhile the SDP had held its first conference – or rather (to break away from the stale seaside venues of the old parties) a ‘rolling’ conference, which started in Perth, moved on to Bradford and finished up at the Central Hall, Westminster, with two days in each. At Perth, Jenkins – now very much the leader presumptive – gave the opening speech reminding the party how far it had come in just six months and fixing its eyes on the General Election perhaps less than two years ahead. In London he gave a more substantial speech on the economy, once again lambasting the government for its ‘uncomprehending and misdirected’ monetarism, which was creating unemployment worse than the 1930s, and Labour for its utopian mix of nationalisation, protectionism and withdrawal from Europe, which would debase the currency and snuff out the last vestiges of confidence in the private sector. As a positive programme he repeated his Warrington plan to cut unemployment in the short term, whose arithmetic, he claimed, had never been challenged – ‘not even by our complacent Chancellor, who came to Warrington just a few days later, exactly when he would, if they could have worked one out, have tried to present a counter-attacking Treasury brief’. Second, he proposed an ‘inflation tax’ on excessive pay rises, which would be ‘relatively straightforward to collect’ and would damp down ‘the vicious process of wages following prices and prices following wages’, allowing an SDP/Liberal government to ‘revive expansionary forces in the economy and set unemployment on a permanently downward path’. Third, for the long term, he repeated his advocacy of a North Sea Oil fund to invest the temporary windfall constructively for the future. All this, he concluded – never shying away from words beginning with ‘r’ – was in line with ‘the great tradition of radical responsible reform, which has been dead for too long and to which we are the true heirs’.158

  ‘That was, quite simply, the finest speech that you have ever made,’ Anthony Lester congratulated him. ‘No-one who heard or reads it could doubt your future. I wish you health and strength for what lies ahead.’159 Six weeks later the apparently unstoppable momentum of the Alliance bandwagon was demonstrated by another smashing by-election victory in the formerly rock-solid Tory seat of Crosby on the Lancashire coast. This time Shirley Williams announced her candidacy unilaterally, without consulting anyone, during the Bradford leg of the rolling conference. It was, on the face of it, a most unsuitable seat for her (and winning it tied her to a constituency she would be unable to hold in 1983). But the now road-tested Alliance machine moved into the sleepy Victorian suburb, taking 49 per cent of the vote and turning a Tory majority of nearly 20,000 into an SDP/Liberal one of more than 5,000. This was a staggering swing, which appeared to leave no constituency in the country beyond the reach of the Alliance’s ambition. The next Gallup poll in December gave the Alliance 51 per cent, with 24 per cent for Labour and 23 per cent for the Conservatives.160 At that moment nothing seemed impossible. But Crosby turned out, for various reasons, to be the zenith.

 
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  fn1 In an addition to Colin Phipps’ Times obituary in 2009, Douglas Eden gave the SDA version of these tensions. At what turned out to be the last meeting of the group, Eden wrote, Phipps attacked Jenkins’ reluctance to found a new party. ‘It turned out that Roy preferred a Parliamentary realignment under his leadership that could take power quickly, rather than lead a movement in the country that could replace Labour. Colin pressed him so much that he lost his temper (the only occasion I ever saw this happen), informed the group that he would not meet them again and stormed out of the house. Thanks to Colin at least we all knew where we stood.’11 But Jenkins’ diary makes no mention of this episode.

  fn2 She came bearing ‘some sort of message’ from Denis Healey offering Jenkins the Foreign Office in a future Labour government. He told her that ‘apart from my having burnt too many Labour Party boats, I really could not stand being Foreign Secretary under Denis. He would lecture one every day on every subject under the sun.’ This did not mean, he added in his diary, that he would not serve under anyone. ‘I could serve under David Steel or under Shirley herself, I think, but not with somebody quite as pedagogic and know-all and lecturing as Denis.’20

  fn3 The extent to which Jenkins had been written off even by some who had once admired him is illustrated by the scornful comments of Bernard Donoughue, who told the Sunday Times journalist Hugo Young that he was ‘a pretty well dead duck. Just unwilling to do the necessary. Always has been. A fatal flaw of social aspiration, elitism etc. Thought the brilliant Roy Jenkins could get anywhere on his own while still preferring Covent Garden to the National Union of Railwaymen . . . He is a 60-year-old failure who no-one wants to get committed to. Whereas he could have been the best Prime Minister we ever had, if he had any real idea of political seriousness.’ He might possibly win a by-election as a Liberal. ‘But there is no serious chance for a man so cut off from all roots and organisation.’35