fn4 During 1980, when he was still hoping to save the Labour party, Owen wrote a big rambling book entitled Face the Future in which he tried to formulate his ideas. Published in January 1981, three days after the Limehouse Declaration, it was still studded with references to ‘socialism’. For the second edition later that year these were all changed to ‘social democracy’. In his memoirs he claimed that Face the Future foreshadowed his later ideas on competition and internal markets.51 But Bill Rodgers thought it ‘confused and almost unreadable’.52
fn5 Each of them was accompanied on this occasion by a trusted political adviser: Matthew Oakeshott (for Jenkins), John Lyttle (Shirley Williams), Alec McGivan (Owen) and Roger Liddle (Rodgers). All four continued to play active roles in the early days of the SDP, with McGivan as the party’s national agent and Oakeshott and Liddle on the steering committee.
fn6 The other five were Tom Bradley, Tom Ellis, John Horam, Neville Sandelson and Richard Crawshaw.
fn7 There had actually been an earlier Social Democratic party in British politics: the Social Democratic Federation founded by the Victorian Marxist H.M. Hyndman in 1881, which Jenkins described in his biography of Attlee as preaching ‘a rigid doctrine of class war and economic determinism’.79 But if he remembered this he prudently never mentioned it.
fn8 If he felt any hesitation about this he was encouraged by letters from friends and admirers like Jack Diamond, who wrote to him a week before the launch: ‘I want you to have no shred of a doubt about your being the man of the hour, the one – and the only one – who will be able to lead and to stimulate our people into their near-maximum achievement.’ He should have no doubt that he was ‘peculiarly fitted and indeed called to this great task’.82 With unusual bluntness Jenkins himself told an American academic who wrote an early book about the SDP: ‘I was the founder . . . The others could never have done it without me.’83
fn9 Such was the optimism generated by the huge public support at this time that in another speech a few days later he confidently predicted: ‘We can and shall achieve proportional representation in the ’eighties and very likely before the middle of the decade. It is not a panacea, but it is an essential step to the regeneration of Britain.’85
fn10 Typically, perhaps, they concentrated their attention almost entirely on the ‘quality’ press. But Jenkins did write – or at least put his name to – an article in the Sun on 24 March proclaiming that Britain was ‘on the brink of . . . a peaceful revolution’.87
fn11 Thorneycroft was a throwback to an earlier generation: Macmillan’s Chancellor for twelve months in 1957–8 until he resigned in protest at the level of public spending, he was surprisingly brought back into front-line politics by Mrs Thatcher in 1975.
fn12 In several interviews and newspaper profiles at this time – for instance, with John Mortimer in the Sunday Times – Jenkins was careful to claim that he liked ‘very simple food’ like shepherd’s pie and fishcakes and mostly drank ‘rather cheap wine’.129 This clearly depended on how one defined ‘rather cheap’.
fn13 His visit to the Vladivar factory, where he sampled the product, was seized on gleefully by the cartoonists with jokes about vodka and claret, and fully exploited by the company, which published its own by-election newsletter reprinting several of the best cartoons and promoting its own fictional candidate, a leggy stripper named Fiona Vladivar.130
fn14 There were eight other candidates, ranging from the Ecology party to Commander Bill Boaks’ ever-hopeful Democratic Monarchist/Public Safety/White Resident Party. Two spoilers who changed their names to Roy Jenkins also attempted to stand, but were debarred by the Returning Officer.
fn15 ‘We tried to kill him with flattery, food and drink,’ Steel wrote, but Pitt refused to budge.155 Sharing the widespread frustration that his candidacy would deny the Alliance a victory that Shirley Williams could win, Laura Grimond suggested that ‘Mr William Pitt is really a case for Andrew Gino Newton or rather some more capable hit-man!’156 Andrew Newton was the man allegedly hired by the former Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe to kill his blackmailer Norman Scott, but who only shot his dog.
21
‘Prime Minister Designate’
WHEREAS 1981 HAD been a year of almost unimaginable success for the SDP, 1982 turned out to be one of increasing difficulty, frustration and disillusion. First, there were already signs by the turn of the year that the government’s harsh economic medicine was beginning to show some results: unemployment was still rising, but inflation was falling and the economy was showing signs of recovery. The summer riots had petered out in the ‘fairytale’ royal wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, and Mrs Thatcher had reasserted her authority by sacking or demoting several of the ‘wets’ from her Cabinet, while at the same time quietly abandoning the strict interpretation of monetarism. For her the worst was over and her poll rating was beginning to recover, even before the Falklands war transformed her standing. Then Labour too, once Healey had narrowly defeated Benn for the deputy leadership, was presenting a slightly more moderate face to the electorate. Over the summer and autumn another dozen Labour MPs defected to the SDP, but none of them was very high-profile and there were to be only two more. Had Benn beaten Healey and maintained the momentum of the left’s advance, many more substantial figures and even some right-wing unions like the engineers (AEU) might have switched allegiance, which would have transformed the political dynamic. Third, visible strains were beginning to appear between the Gang of Four as the euphoria of the launch was replaced by the serious prospect of power and Owen felt himself consistently outvoted by the other three. ‘I don’t look forward to lunches where David behaves like an arched cat,’ Jenkins told Rodgers;1 and after Warrington the weekly lunches at L’Amico dwindled to monthly. A serious policy difference also began to emerge within the parliamentary party over Norman Tebbit’s abolition of the trade union ‘closed shop’: some of the MPs still closest to their Labour roots were determined to oppose what they saw as typical Tory union-bashing, while others – notably Owen – wanted to support the government. Jenkins thought Tebbit’s Bill negative and bigoted, but nevertheless thought the SDP right to vote for it in the hope of amending it in committee, believing that ordinary trade unionists deserved better than ‘a choice between unelected extremists who pervert these values and uncaring Conservatives who despise them’.2 In the key division in February 1982 seventeen of the twenty-seven SDP MPs voted for the bill, five against and five abstained.3 This was the first real test of the party’s coherence in the division lobby and a three-way split was not impressive.
Finally, all the camaraderie of Warrington, Croydon and Crosby could not prevent, but rather exacerbated, conflict between the two Alliance parties over which one was to fight which seats at the General Election. Jenkins and Steel might agree over their fortnightly lunches that they should fight roughly equal numbers of winnable seats; but the fact that they were expecting to win far more seats than the Liberals had ever won on their own made the argument in constituencies up and down the country anything but academic.fn1 The Liberals were a famously decentralised party (or, in some SDP eyes, an undisciplined rabble). After Bill Pitt’s fourth-attempt victory in Croydon, seasoned Liberal candidates were not lightly going to hand over their chance of emulating him to one of the SDP’s political virgins or ex-Labour retreads on the say-so of their leader. Bill Rodgers led the negotiations for the SDP, region by region and seat by seat; but he found it hard to make any broad agreement stick in the face of Liberal localism. Eventually at the end of December he decided to go public, leaking his exasperation to the Observer, which made the breakdown of the negotiations its front-page story on 3 January. The revelation that the two supposedly ‘nice’ parties could not agree was extraordinarily damaging to the image of the Alliance. And it came just as Jenkins faced a second – but almost certainly his last – opportunity to claim the leadership by winning a by-election.
Once again the vacancy occurred in a seat that he woul
d not have chosen: Glasgow, Hillhead – the one Tory-held division in that overwhelmingly Labour city. The Alliance had long had its eye on it, since the sitting Member, Tam Galbraith, was heir to a hereditary peerage and his father was ninety; but in fact it was the son who died on 2 January. Jenkins’ story was that Tom Bradley rang him at East Hendred early on the Sunday morning to tell him cryptically that ‘Galbraith is dead’ before ringing off, leaving Roy and Jennifer under the sad misapprehension that their good friend, the economist J.K. Galbraith, had died in America until they learned the truth much later in the day.5 This is contradicted, however, by Bill Rodgers’ recollection that Jenkins rang him early that morning when the row over seat allocation was splashed in the Observer to tell him, ‘You have just lost me Hillhead.’ It was the only time in their long association that he saw Jenkins so angry.6 Whatever the timing, the row over seats made an awkward backdrop against which Jenkins had to decide whether to go for a constituency where once again the Liberals already had a candidate in place.
The biggest difficulty was that it was in Scotland. Once upon a time thoroughly English figures like Asquith and Churchill had thought nothing of sitting for Scottish seats in East Fife and Dundee respectively; but that was in less nationalistic days. Now it could be tricky for an anglicised Welshman with no Scottish connections who would inevitably be painted as a carpetbagger. Hillhead was also a marginal constituency, where Galbraith had a majority of just 2,000 over Labour: instead of being able to squeeze the Tory vote (as in Warrington) or the Labour vote (as in Croydon and Crosby) there was a danger that the Alliance, building on quite a small Liberal base, might itself be squeezed. There would also be an SNP candidate, making it a four-way fight. Against this, the character of the constituency was very unusual and, on closer inspection, tailor-made for the SDP and Jenkins in particular. Comprising most of the West End of central Glasgow, it contained not only Glasgow University, but the Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow High School, Jordanhill College of Education, the Western Infirmary (and two other teaching hospitals), two major art galleries (Kelvingrove and the Hunterian) and several other artistic and educational institutions, a high proportion of whose staff – including no fewer than 1,300 doctors – lived in the constituency. It was in fact the most highly educated constituency in Scotland and arguably in Britain, filled with just the sort of intelligent professionals who had flocked to the SDP banner. It did also have its share of solidly working-class Labour voters concentrated along the Clyde. As he got to know the constituency Jenkins liked to describe it as divided between ‘the river and the hill’: his potential voters comprised ‘the hill’ and there seemed to be enough of them to warrant him taking the gamble.
But unlike Warrington it really was a gamble, since this time he absolutely had to win. ‘Another good second place,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘would be no use to me at all.’ If he lost he would have to give up trying to get back into Parliament, and with it any claim on the leadership. ‘To fight two bye-elections had elements of valour. To fight three would have been ridiculous.’7 Also he confessed to feeling nervous of Glasgow itself, which he had visited less frequently than most British cities – that is, only about ten times since 1959 – and still saw as strange and ‘slightly sinister’;8, fn2 and on top of this there was the complication of relations with the Liberals.
One of the most intractable constituency disputes was over Greenock, where the Scottish Liberals were refusing to stand aside for the sitting MP, Dickson Mabon, who had joined the SDP only in October. A Scottish Office minister in 1964–70, then responsible for North Sea oil under Callaghan, Mabon was the most senior figure to defect from Labour after the Gang of Four. He had been one of the sixty-nine EEC rebels in 1971 and resigned with Jenkins from his frontbench spokesmanship in 1972: Jenkins was reluctant to queer his pitch by insisting on fighting Hillhead, and very nearly pulled out, especially since Steel was doubtful about his chances in a Scottish seat. Bob Maclennan, however, who had grown up in the constituency, knew better than anyone that Hillhead was perfect for him and worked hard to persuade the Scottish Liberals to withdraw their candidate, a young computer engineer called ‘Chick’ Brodie (Maclennan wrote later of ‘the horrendous row I had with the Liberals to prise the seat from the sainted Chick Brodie’).10 Eventually Brodie and his constituency chairman travelled down to Kensington Park Gardens on Sunday 10 January and after three hours agreed to stand down in Jenkins’ favour. In his memoirs Jenkins gratefully acknowledged him as ‘a major artificer of the Alliance’.11, fn3
Jenkins was formally adopted by both parties the following Thursday. He was still unsure that he was wise to stand. To Edward Lyons he explained that he ‘rather reluctantly decided to do Hillhead in order to prevent the Alliance falling apart in Scotland’;13 and to another former MP who urged him not to stand for a Scottish seat, he replied, ‘You may be right about standing for a Scottish constituency, but events have rather taken over and I am now committed. Let us hope it will be for the best.’14 In his adoption speech, however, he promised to fight ‘a memorable Hillhead campaign and I believe secure a famous victory’. He invoked the example of one of his political heroes, Franklin Roosevelt, promising to ‘substitute hope for fear’ and show the country that ‘there is an alternative’:
A hundred years ago this month Franklin Roosevelt was born. Fifty-one years later he started to give a depressed America a new deal, a new confidence, a new freedom from fear. He did it without doctrinaire ideological baggage, without out-of-date class dogma, but with a determination to make things work better and give his great nation an opportunity to escape from its head down attitude and restore its verve and its greatness. We need a touch of that in the heart of Scotland and in Britain as a whole today. Let us try to infuse this campaign with such a message of unifying hope.15
Then he set about getting to know the constituency and the city. The next day he held a press conference and gave a lot of interviews, then spent the rest of the weekend quietly exploring on foot and by car, before flying back to London on Monday morning. After Crosby the Tories were in no hurry to call another by-election sooner than they had to, so it was going to be a long campaign: not until late February was polling day fixed for 25 March. So for the first month he went back to Glasgow only one or two days a week. But he used his visits well, concentrating initially on meeting ‘opinion formers’ – the editors of local papers, the principals of the colleges and heads of professional organisations, medical professors and religious leaders. Then from 1 February he started holding unofficial advice bureaux as if he was already the MP; and from 19 February he began meeting small groups of voters at informal coffee mornings in the houses of local supporters. This, he wrote, was an effective way of ‘penetrating the gentility of Kelvinside, Dowanhill, Broomhill and Jordanhill [which] could have worked only in the relatively large sitting rooms of the hill’.16 The ladies of Hillhead were charmed and flattered to have the great man in their homes and duly spread the word to their neighbours. Once the election was called he established himself permanently in the Pond Hotel on the Great Western Road and started serious canvassing in shopping centres and door-to-door, slogging up and down the solid sandstone tenements; only after several weeks of this did he start holding public meetings. Even more than in Warrington a lot of his grand friends as well as the whole of the SDP and Liberal top brass poured in to help, to the extent that David Steel worried that his campaign was far too English – and posh southern English at that.17 One quintessentially Kensington lady drew satirical attention for running up and down some of the poorest tower blocks in shocking lilac tights. Steel cringed when Jenkins initially ducked the question of whether he would undertake to live in the constituency by saying that he owned two houses already, but would acquire ‘a wesidence’ – that difficult consonant again – in Hillhead.
Garland, Daily Telegraph, 12.1.82 (British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent)
He focused on three main issues: unemployment again – a national is
sue, renewing and expanding the plan he had unveiled at Warrington; education, particularly the government’s cuts in higher education – an issue specifically tailored to Hillhead’s particular electorate; and devolution – an unavoidable issue in Scotland. On this, somewhat fortunately, Jenkins was able to point to the speech he had made in March 1976 declaring his conversion to the case for a Scottish assembly with revenue-raising powers to prove that he had not embraced the subject just because he found himself standing for a Scottish seat. But undeniably devolution henceforth took a rather higher place in his programme for the renewal of British democracy, and he set out his view both of the principle and of the necessary safeguards in a major speech on 10 March.18 In addition he made targeted appeals to all sorts of specific interest groups: at an Indian Association of Strathclyde dinner he recalled his record of race relations legislation at the Home Office and talked about Third World aid;19 to a Hillhead businessmen’s lunch he talked about Keynesian economic management;20 his diary was packed with daytime meetings in schools and hospitals, with the Scottish Development Agency, the Glasgow Housing Association and similar organisations.
While addressing local issues, however, he fought unashamedly on his record as a national and international statesman. As well as harping on Labour’s links with the far left – particularly the fellow-travelling utterances of that year’s Scottish Labour chairman, George Galloway – his leaflets made much of the anonymity of most of Glasgow’s thirteen other MPs (all Labour, none of them, with the exception of Donald Dewar, at all distinguished). ‘Do you really want another member of this losing team as your MP?’ . . . ‘Hillhead Needs a Voice that will be Heard . . . Scotland needs a real alternative to Mrs Thatcher’s Conservatism.’21 His opponents were of nowhere near the same stature. Labour’s candidate was a nineteen-stone community worker, bearded and sporting an earring, lacking the personality or eloquence to convince any but the most committed loyalist. The Tories selected a young Catholic lawyer, Gerald Malone (later MP for Aberdeen South and later still for Winchester). He was articulate and personable, and had been born and bred in the constituency; but sectarian feeling still ran strongly in Glasgow and the militant Protestant pastor Jack Glass ran a virulent anti-Catholic campaign against him which probably siphoned off more of the Protestant vote than the 388 he actually received. Another Tory without that handicap might well have held the seat.22 In addition to the SNP and Pastor Glass, the by-election circus again attracted several fringe candidates, including another spoiler who changed his name to ‘Roy Jenkins’: this time he was allowed to stand, so that volunteers had to be posted outside every polling station to remind voters that ‘The Real Roy Jenkins is No. 5.’ The counterfeit polled nearly 300 votes, which might easily have been crucial.
Roy Jenkins Page 78