Roy Jenkins

by John Campbell

  But it was also a striking example of the self-indulgence of oratory. Both I and the audience of party faithful thought that we had accomplished something because I had made a good speech and they had cheered vociferously. But we had only given each other a good evening out. There was no evidence that we had lifted the Alliance off its temporary floor.90

  The event which did temporarily lift the Alliance off the floor was Simon Hughes’ by-election victory in the London Docklands constituency of Bermondsey, caused by the resignation of the former Labour Chief Whip, Bob Mellish. After a sequence of disappointing by-elections since Hillhead – even Dick Taverne had been unable to make much impression in Peckham in October, though he came a decent second behind Harriet Harman, pushing the Tory, John Redwood, into a poor third – Bermondsey was a huge boost for Alliance morale. But it was a slightly fortunate result, since Labour shot itself in the foot by selecting a young, left-wing community worker, Peter Tatchell, whom Michael Foot had initially declared he would never accept before having to turn round and endorse him after all. Tatchell was also fairly obviously (though not in those days openly) gay, which recommended him still less to traditional Labour voters. The Alliance campaign did not scruple to exploit this homophobic prejudice, despite the fact that Hughes himself turned out years later to be gay himself: so it was a morally flawed victory. Nevertheless it seemed to show that Labour was still intent on alienating its old working-class base – though from a narrowly SDP point of view it was annoying that it was a Liberal who had reaped the benefit, while the SDP had so far only managed to capture Tory seats.

  The SDP had its chance at the next by-election a month later in Darlington, a Labour marginal where the adopted Alliance candidate was one of their own. Unfortunately Tony Cook, a popular local television presenter, illustrated the downside of the party’s appeal to ‘political virgins’. He might have been an adequate candidate at a General Election, but under the spotlight of a by-election he was cruelly exposed as ‘a lightweight, with neither ideas nor passion’ (Bill Rodgers’ rueful description),91 whereas Labour this time had the sense to field an experienced local councillor who successfully kept the left out of sight. Having started with a lead in the polls and a wonderful opportunity to project the Alliance as the real opposition to the Tory government, Cook finished the campaign a poor third with just a quarter of the vote, while Labour’s Ossie O’Brien held off the Conservative with a majority of 2,400.fn10 Darlington was a salutary reminder that, in a by-election at least, the quality of the candidates still mattered. But Tony Cook’s unravelling prompted angry recriminations within the Alliance. David Owen thought him ‘a flabby centrist’ (code for Jenkinsite) and ‘a typical left-wing Liberal community politician’ (and a unilateralist to boot) who should never have been selected;92 while senior Liberals blamed the SDP, saying Cook was no worse than Bill Pitt at Croydon, but had not been properly coached.93 In his memoirs Jenkins blamed himself for not imposing an experienced national figure like Dick Taverne, but claimed that had he tried, ‘the still resentful Owen faction’ would have objected on grounds of party democracy. (‘I ought to have been tougher’.)94 Publicly he put a bold face on the setback, calling it ‘a disappointment but not a disaster’, from which the Alliance would bounce back at the next by-election, due in Cardiff North-West (but actually pre-empted by the General Election).95 But it was too late. As the last by-election before the General Election, Darlington remained seared on all their hearts as the single moment when the SDP blew its chance to break the mould. ‘It remains tragically the case,’ Rodgers wrote to Jenkins in 1990, ‘that, with a good candidate, we would probably have won and then pushed Labour into third place in the General Election’. And he might have held his own seat in nearby Stockton.96

  When Mrs Thatcher called the election for 9 June – a year earlier than it need have been, taking advantage of her Falklands ‘bounce’ – the Alliance was back at 20 per cent or less in the polls, way behind Labour which in turn was way behind the Tories. Yet Jenkins was still committed to his proclaimed strategy of aiming for a major breakthrough, not a bridgehead. ‘We are going in with victory as our aim,’ he insisted at his opening press conference.97 This meant directing most of their fire at the Tories, presenting the Alliance as the only serious alternative government while trying to dismiss Labour as irrelevant because no longer fit to govern. It would have been more realistic – and therefore more credible – to have accepted that they were in a life-or-death battle with Labour for second place and concentrate on trying to knock Labour out of the ring. This would have been Owen’s preferred strategy. Alternatively they should have aimed to hold the balance in a hung Parliament, stated their terms for supporting either a Labour or a Tory government, possibly without Michael Foot or Mrs Thatcher, and tried to secure proportional representation that way. But Jenkins as leader was still absolutely committed to his all-or-nothing strategy – frankly, in Owen’s view, because at the age of sixty-two it represented his one remaining shot at becoming Prime Minister.98

  The agreement between Jenkins and Steel the year before, that Jenkins should be put forward as the Alliance’s ‘Prime Minister Designate’ – a title Jenkins later dismissed defensively as ‘a bit of portentous nonsense’99 – was actually a perfectly sensible way of meeting the media’s demand for a single leader at a time when an Alliance government seemed a real possibility and Steel naturally deferred to Jenkins’ superior credentials to lead it.fn11 By 1983, however, when 87 per cent of respondents, according to Gallup, expected a Tory victory, the decision to promote Jenkins as the alternative to a now-rampant Mrs Thatcher invited only derision, most of it heaped on Jenkins personally, while concentrating the media spotlight on him at the expense of Steel, who was a far better performer, especially on television, and far more popular: one poll found that voters would have preferred Steel by a margin of 61:25 per cent, and even SDP supporters preferred Steel by 49:47 per cent. ‘Rightly or wrongly,’ Ivor Crewe and Anthony King concluded, ‘voters appeared to give less weight to ministerial experience than to television images when judging potential prime ministers.’102 It was a cruel reality that politics was now a television game and Jenkins appeared to belong to a pre-television age.

  The Alliance campaign was fought very much on Jenkins’ agenda. Despite all the earnest policy work that had been done by innumerable party committees over the past two years, the manifesto was hastily drawn up by the SDP’s director of policy, Christopher Smallwood, and approved by the two leaders plus Alan Beith (for the Liberals) and John Roper (for the SDP). It comprised all Jenkins’ now-familiar themes – an unashamedly Keynesian attack on unemployment; some form of prices and incomes policy (with a vague commitment to industrial democracy); neither more nationalisation nor privatisation; proportional representation (presented as the key to simultaneously rejuvenating and stabilising politics); and a renewed commitment to the EEC and NATO.103 It was all thoroughly sensible, but it lacked anything to fire the electorate’s enthusiasm: it was well described – in a phrase that stuck because it was so accurate – as offering ‘a better yesterday’.104 While rightly condemning the harsh consequences of Mrs Thatcher’s economic and social policies, it failed to recognise the extent to which she had a global wind of free market liberalisation and deregulation behind her and had already torn up many of the statist assumptions with which Jenkins had grown up. Back in 1972, in his essay on Keynes in Nine Men of Power, he had written that so-called ‘crude Keynesianism’ had its limitations, ‘but it is a great advance on crude pre-Keynesianism’.105 That unswerving view still underpinned his almost visceral contempt for Thatcherism in the 1980s. From the perspective of 2014, following the financial crash of 2008, his scepticism about the benefits of the unregulated market begins to look prescient again; but in 1983 it was spitting in the wind. Keynesianism as an economic panacea had been badly discredited by its perceived failure over the past twenty years.

  In the four weeks of the campaign Jenkins made fifteen major s
peeches at public meetings up and down the country, mainly written for him by Christopher Smallwood, many of them in support of sitting SDP Members defending their seats: Bill Rodgers in Stockton, Tom Bradley in Leicester, Christopher Brocklebank-Fowler in Norwich, John Roper in Worsley (Manchester) and Shirley Williams in Crosby. (It was noticeable that he did not speak in Plymouth.) He also appeared with David Steel at ‘Ask the Alliance’ meetings in Birmingham and London, a television-style format chaired by friendly celebrity interviewers, Magnus Magnusson and Ludovic Kennedy. He visited more than sixty constituencies – characteristically he made a handwritten list of them – doing the sort of street canvassing he had perfected in Warrington and Hillhead. Defending a marginal seat, however, he also had to spend more time than as party leader he would have liked in Hillhead: five visits involving part of seven days, more street canvassing and several meetings, one of them with Shirley Williams. The rest of the time, while he toured the country, Jennifer bore the brunt of holding the seat for him, which she did heroically.

  All this was good old-fashioned politics, trying to re-create the extraordinary excitement which the SDP and the Alliance had aroused by direct contact with the voters in individual constituencies in 1981. But in a General Election what mattered was national television. Unfortunately the focus on Jenkins as ‘Prime Minister Designate’ resulted in him doing the first two big television interviews for the Alliance: Weekend World with Brian Walden on Sunday 22 May and Panorama with Robin Day the next day. On both programmes he came over as ‘ponderous and ill at ease’, hesitant and defensive where he needed to be clear and positive. ‘His two performances . . . were generally thought to have been unhelpful at best, ghastly at worst.’106 He also featured prominently in two of the Alliance’s four election broadcasts, to the despair of the advertising agencies engaged to handle the campaign, which thought his personality hopelessly at odds with the modern classless image they were trying to project. ‘Jenkins,’ one professional complained, ‘was like a rhinoceros in the corner, a huge ugly problem that everyone tried to ignore.’107 There was also friction between different agencies reflecting the rivalries at the top of the Alliance. Shirley Williams (as SDP President) had hired Gold Greenlees Trott to handle the campaign; but Jenkins additionally involved Charles Guggenheim, an American who had directed the ‘Yes’ campaign in the 1975 referendum, while Steel had his own PR consultant, Justin Cartwright (later a successful novelist), and they all got in each other’s way. Trying to project Jenkins and Steel as joint leaders, Cartwright found Roy ‘extremely uncooperative’, insisting on using his man, Guggenheim.108 Steel and Jenkins also had separate press officers (John Lyttle for Jenkins and Paul Medlicott for Steel), which made for a lack of coordination compounded at every level by an overall lack of direction. Under the pressure of a joint campaign that was clearly not going well tensions spilled over: when it seemed that the SDP big guns were adding nothing to the sort of results the Liberals had achieved at previous elections on their own, even such a key architect of the Alliance as Richard Holme complained to David Butler that he found Shirley Williams ‘silly and random’, Bill Rodgers ‘lazy and arrogant’ and David Owen ‘independent and difficult’: Jenkins, he judged, ‘had the best mind in the Alliance, but he was not always tactful at putting his point’ and Steel chaired meetings much better.109

  Hence there was mounting pressure, particularly – but not only – from the Liberal side of the Alliance to replace Jenkins with Steel as Alliance leader. This was brought to a head on 24 May by an opinion poll which suggested that while the Alliance still trailed badly with Jenkins as leader (Conservatives 45 per cent, Labour 32 per cent, Alliance 20 per cent), it would do dramatically better – almost neck-and-neck with Labour – if Steel were to replace him: Conservatives 42 per cent, Labour 29 per cent, Alliance 28 per cent.110 The next day, with some embarrassment, Steel put the idea to Jenkins over breakfast following a joint press conference in London. Jenkins then set off for a day’s campaigning on his battle-bus through Kent (‘one of the prettier days of the campaign’) promising to think about it. In his memoirs he wrote that ‘the last thing I wanted was to be an incubus to the Alliance for the sake of clinging to a position which had abruptly ceased to give me any satisfaction’. Nevertheless, considering Steel’s proposal ‘in the interstices between Sittingbourne High Street, the Ashford railway workshops and the Tonbridge shopping enclave’, he concluded that changing horses in mid-stream would do neither the Alliance nor Steel himself any good. This was not an entirely selfless calculation: he also feared that ‘abdication . . . would destroy my position with press and public, not least in Hillhead’.111 But he was stiffened in his view by a supportive letter from Jack Diamond, who was supposed to be coordinating the Alliance campaign from Cowley Street, who warned firmly that any such change in mid-campaign would be disastrous. This, he wrote, was not just the advice of friendship and loyalty – ‘albeit a little of those qualities would not come amiss in this sea of gutless foolishness in which I am swimming’. Steel, he believed, must hold to ‘his present firm honourable line’ and Jenkins to his ‘good-humoured and dismissive line’, and the Liberals should get on with talking up Jenkins’ irreplaceable experience.112 Thus encouraged, Jenkins sent a negative reply to Steel and hoped that was the end of the matter.

  The following Sunday, however, the Alliance leaders were due to hold a photogenic ‘summit’ – planned partly to draw publicity from Mrs Thatcher attending a G7 summit in the United States – at Steel’s house at Ettrick Bridge in the Scottish Borders. They were supposed to converge by helicopter, but bad weather prevented that, so they all arrived late from various directions by car: Jenkins, with Jennifer, came from Glasgow. The main participants have all given slightly conflicting accounts of what happened at Ettrick Bridge, but piecing them together the basic facts are clear. As soon as they had all arrived John Pardoe, the pugnacious Liberal MP for North Cornwall (whom Steel had beaten to the party leadership in 1976), surprised three of the Gang of Four (but not Owen, whom he had warned in advance) by reopening the question of the leadership. ‘His denunciation of Roy’s role in the campaign was brutal,’ Shirley Williams wrote. ‘He told him in short order to relinquish the leadership position.’113 Rodgers and Williams furiously rejected any change, though Shirley conceded that Roy was not good on television and suggested that more of that could be done by ‘David, David and me’.114 They then moved on to other matters until Pardoe raised the leadership again, this time backed by Steel, who actually produced a draft statement for Jenkins to agree. Rodgers and Williams again opposed, strongly supported by Jack Diamond; and Williams went so far as to say that she would withdraw from the campaign if Jenkins was dumped. According to Jenkins’ account, this ‘killed it dead’.115 But others are not so clear-cut. According to Williams, Jenkins himself sat silent, ‘shaking’ and ‘absolutely shattered’ to be so betrayed by Steel. Afraid he might yield to ‘this extraordinary battering’, she mouthed ‘no, no, no’ to him across the table, until he nodded.116 Whereas Richard Holme’s memory was that ‘On the whole, Roy just kept quiet and let others defend him’,117 others suggest that he offered to stand aside if it would help, but repeated his view that it would be ‘counterproductive’; while Steel’s version, slightly different again, is that ‘After frank discussion it became clear that he would not be budged.’118 Pardoe still wanted to pursue it, but Steel said they had better drop it. It was agreed that they should try to give Steel a higher profile for the remainder of the campaign – which in fact was due to happen anyway – without explicitly demoting Jenkins.

  After lunch – a strained occasion at which Jennifer was even angrier than Roy and had to be restrained by John Lyttle – Jenkins and Steel gave a blandly upbeat joint conference to the press assembled outside.fn12 Amazingly, no word of what had really gone on inside leaked out. The BBC news that evening reported that ‘Mr Jenkins is not being written out of the Alliance election show, but Mr Steel is to take the starring role, especia
lly on television’; while the next day’s papers likewise got the message of an enhanced role for Steel – ‘Alliance to Move Jenkins out of the Limelight’ (The Times); ‘Steel takes over from Jenkins as Front Runner for the Alliance’ (Guardian) – without presenting it as a humiliation of Jenkins.120 In fact the summit made a positive news story for the Alliance. Paddy Ashdown thought it a brilliant success, which essentially achieved what the Liberals wanted without the bad publicity that would have attended an open coup.121 And in fact the Alliance did begin to rise in the polls from around this point.

  But a good deal of bitterness remained, not least surrounding the role of David Owen, who was noticeably silent at the meeting. It was clear that he tacitly agreed with the Liberal criticism of Jenkins’ leadership, but did not want to be seen to wield the knife. He claimed soon after the election that if Jenkins could have been persuaded to stand down it would have added 4 or 5 per cent to the Alliance vote (in his memoirs he put it at ‘ten to fifteen extra seats’); but he ‘would not be the Brutus’.122 ‘At Ettrick Bridge,’ he told an American academic, ‘Steel tried to dump the whole thing in my lap. I would have none of it.’123 His line, then and in his memoirs, was that Steel had got himself into a mess, first by backing Jenkins for the leadership of the SDP and then by yielding him the leadership of the Alliance, so he must get himself out of it. ‘If there was to be a change it had to be done absolutely voluntarily with a good grace by Roy Jenkins. Even then it was a high risk game and must be presented in an utterly convincing way.’124 In 1987 he claimed that ‘In all my years in the Labour Party I had never seen such a ruthless and savage deed’ as Steel’s attempted coup;125 but at the time he was rather less squeamish. As Bill Rodgers drove Owen and Shirley Williams back to Edinburgh airport Owen let slip, of Steel, ‘I never knew he had it in him!’126 ‘I glanced at David in the passenger seat beside me and caught a half-smile of genuine admiration, perhaps his first and last for David Steel in the six years of Alliance.’127 It is clear that Owen felt that Jenkins’ poor performance as leader vindicated his decision to stand against him the year before; and that he was poised to stage his own coup the moment the election was over.