Roy Jenkins

by John Campbell

  David Steel, on the other hand, was rather ashamed of the part he had played at Ettrick Bridge. To be fair, he was under such pressure from Liberal candidates and colleagues that he had to say something, but after Jenkins’ initial rejection he felt he should not have raised it a second time. ‘This time,’ he acknowledged in his memoirs, ‘Roy did resent my pressure’, and the episode ‘nearly led to a break between me and Roy which would have been my fault had it happened’.128 But Jenkins bore no lasting grudge; he retained a high regard for Steel, and treated his action as ‘an error of judgement rather than of motive’ in the stress of an election campaign. Ten days after polling day they dined together at Brooks’s, where Steel apologised and was forgiven.129 But Steel still felt a need to put his apology on paper and wrote to Jenkins the next day, thanking him for dinner:

  Having considered what you said, I think I owe you a rather more formal apology for my piece of paper at Ettrick Bridge. You can attach this to it. No-one else saw it, but it was a lapse of judgement on my part not to show it to you privately, and I am deeply grateful that you are not allowing it to spoil our excellent personal relations.

  ‘This’ was his handwritten draft of a statement to be read out by Jenkins saying that he was dropping the title of Prime Minister Designate, which he had never wanted, so that Steel would be seen unambiguously as leader of the Alliance campaign. In the event of the Alliance winning the election it would be up to the MPs of both parties to choose the Prime Minister, but Steel undertook that he would not be a candidate.130 Of course this was now academic. At the time Jenkins was undoubtedly hurt by Steel’s support for Pardoe’s attempted coup, but he found Steel’s uncharacteristic behaviour easier to forgive than Owen’s persistent hostility.

  Despite or because of Ettrick Bridge, the Alliance did start to close the gap on Labour in the last ten days of the campaign. They had more enthusiastic meetings and better press coverage, and Jenkins was widely felt to have become more forceful; while both Denis Healey and Neil Kinnock scored own goals by clumsily accusing Mrs Thatcher of exploiting the Falklands for her own glory. While still far from looking like an alternative government, the Alliance did begin to look like an alternative Opposition. By election night they had come within touching distance of matching Labour’s share of the vote – 25.4 per cent against 27.6 per cent.fn13 On the criterion that the Alliance was the only party to increase its vote over the course of the campaign, it could be said to have achieved a considerable success. But in reality it was a crushing failure. The SDP held on to only five seats (Jenkins in Hillhead, Owen in Plymouth, Bob Maclennan in Caithness, John Cartwright in Woolwich and Ian Wrigglesworth, by a whisker, in Stockton South) and unexpectedly gained one (the twenty-four-year-old Charles Kennedy in Ross, Cromarty and Skye), while the Liberals gained just six, giving them seventeen MPs and the Alliance twenty-three in all: a scandalously poor return for 7.7 million votes. By comparison Labour – while dropping sixty seats and more than three million votes – still won 209 seats with 8.4 million votes.131 If the Alliance had won just fractionally more of the national vote than Labour it would have gained a moral victory, which would have made its tally of seats indefensible and the demand for proportional representation irresistible. As it was, the rough justice of first-past-the-post left them a distant third, with an insignificant representation in the new House. In reality it was the best performance by a third party since the days of Asquith and Lloyd George in 1923, right at the beginning of the Liberal party’s post-First World War decline, a comfortable improvement on the modern Liberal party’s high-water mark – 19.3 per cent in February 1974 – and nearly double the 13.8 per cent they had achieved on their own in 1979. In comments after the result Jenkins called it ‘a tantalising triumph’, claiming that the Alliance had lost a battle but ‘begun to win a war’ because of the obvious unfairness of the result. The Alliance, he predicted, would now become the real opposition to the government, leading to ‘still greater success at the next election’.132 In reality it was a cruel disappointment after the soaring hopes of 1981 – salved for Jenkins only by his successfully hanging on to Hillhead.

  The constituency had been significantly redrawn since the by-election fifteen months earlier, tipping the social balance towards ‘the river’ at the expense of ‘the hill’ by adding about 18,000 mainly working-class electors down by the Clyde. (Jenkins could have contested this, but only at the cost of renaming the seat Kelvin. Already sentimentally attached to the name Hillhead, he admitted, ‘I attached too much importance to the label rather than the contents of the bottle.’)133 As a result it was a much tougher proposition to retain the seat and in the circumstances, largely thanks to Jennifer making up for his necessarily limited appearances, a considerable triumph that he did so. Contrary to his lordly English image he had actually worked hard at being a good constituency Member: his leaflets stressed that he had bought a flat in the constituency, held regular surgeries and had – with the help of an enthusiastic local organisation – dealt with more than 1,000 individual cases in fifteen months and helped to get important projects moving. ‘I believe,’ he claimed, ‘that the constituency has seen more of its MP than it had for a long time past.’134 This time he faced a challenge from a strong Labour candidate, Neil Carmichael, a former minister who had lost his neighbouring seat in the redistribution. But the combination of national exposure and local effort was just enough. In a substantially enlarged electorate his majority was roughly halved:

  Roy Jenkins (SDP/Alliance) 14,856

  Neil Carmichael (Labour) 13,692

  Murray Tosh (Conservative) 9,678

  George Leslie (SNP) 2,203

  + three others 627

  SDP/Alliance majority

  1,164135

  Retaining Hillhead was a relief. But the prospect of continuing as leader of a tiny, divided parliamentary party, exposed to the taunts of Dennis Skinner in the Commons and with David Owen breathing down his neck in the national committee, was not attractive. Bill Rodgers, Shirley Williams and most of the other colleagues who had made parliamentary life tolerable had lost their seats. By the time of the next election he would be sixty-six or sixty-seven. He had already decided before the election that if the Alliance did not make a substantial breakthrough he would not carry on. So the only question was when to go. He could have stayed on over the summer and bowed out at the party conference in September. But Owen wasted no time in telephoning him on the Saturday morning to tell him that unless he stepped down immediately he (Owen) would force a leadership ballot in July. Jenkins thought his demand ‘somewhat incontinent’, but had no will to fight him.136 So he summoned the Gang of Four plus John Roper and Jack Diamond to East Hendred on the Monday and announced his intention to resign at once. Shirley Williams, Roper and Diamond tried to persuade him to change his mind; but he had already discussed the timing with Bill Rodgers, who had advised him to ‘go at once, given D. Owen’s attitude: life would be intolerable if you did not’. Owen, as Rodgers recalled, ‘grudgingly conceded that you could go on until July if you wished. That was as good as settling the matter the other way. Yes, we were bullied,’ he concluded, ‘but I don’t think that you could have hung on, especially if your illness was already casting its shadow before.’137 He did not believe Jenkins could have beaten Owen in a second leadership ballot.

  Steel was shocked when told – not by Jenkins, but by Rodgers – and thought he should have been consulted; but when he remonstrated with Jenkins (this was before their reconciliatory dinner) he got ‘a pretty sharp answer’.138 He had no idea that Jenkins was suffering from thyroid problems and doubtless did not look forward to having to work with Owen. Others too were disappointed by Jenkins’ decision. Jo Grimond declared himself ‘bewildered’ by the news. He had – from a slightly detached perspective – thought the election campaign a great success, until he heard ‘horrifying stories’ about Ettrick Bridge. He was not surprised that Jenkins had had enough, but his resigning was ‘a severe blow to ma
ny of us’.139 This was just one letter among a huge postbag, mainly from ordinary SDP and Liberal members, expressing regret, commiseration and thanks for Jenkins’ role over the past three years. At the next meeting of the national committee – not preceded by the usual lunch – on Monday 20 June, Shirley Williams paid tribute and added the party’s thanks:

  The Party owed a great deal to him: he was the first to see the need to break the mould of British politics. Few British Prime Ministers in this century would have contributed as much to Britain, Europe and the world as he had.

  In reply Jenkins said that he had always intended to relinquish the leadership if the Tories won a clear majority, but put as positive a gloss as he could manage on the election:

  The campaign had been well fought with no own goals by the Alliance. The morale in the Party had been good . . . and he was convinced that the Alliance would form at least part of the next Government.140

  The next day Owen was elected to the leadership unopposed. Jenkins professed himself delighted that he had succeeded smoothly, ‘without fraying speculation or hint of disunity’.141 But he knew that Owen’s election spelled trouble ahead. In a Sunday newspaper article he voiced his fear that Owen’s leadership could jeopardise the Alliance and gave unmistakable notice of his intention to defend it:

  Anyone who seeks to destroy it . . . will be betraying the wishes of many who voted . . . They will also be destroying everything I have endeavoured to build over the past 30 months. But this will not happen. The Alliance is secure because our joint campaigns have established deep loyalties in the hearts of our supporters.142

  In his new role as the party’s elder statesman he set himself to fight for his vision of the SDP against David Owen’s.

  * * *

  fn1 Jenkins usually took Steel to lunch at Brooks’s, but Steel felt unable to reciprocate by inviting Jenkins to the National Liberal Club because the food there was so bad, so he had to find alternatives. He once took Jenkins to a Chinese restaurant that he knew had taken over a well-stocked cellar. Jenkins was initially doubtful but then delighted, declaring that the wine was ‘spectacular’. Steel was always amazed by the amount he drank at lunch while remaining apparently unaffected by it.4

  fn2 He had in fact recently had a foretaste of what he would come to love about Glasgow when he gave a lecture at Strathclyde University in 1979. ‘After the lecture I dined agreeably . . . with the academic weight of Strathclyde, and then returned to the Central Hotel. It really is a rather magnificent hotel, old railway style at its best, expressing all the weight, solidity and splendour of 1890 Glasgow: tremendously good woodwork . . . not at all rundown.’9

  fn3 After the by-election Jenkins took Brodie to lunch at Brooks’s and offered to help him in any way he could. Twenty years later Brodie did approach him for help in finding a business opening in Europe. Jenkins promised to try, but nothing came of it.12 Brodie stood three times as a Lib Dem candidate in 1992, 1997 and 2001, but then joined the SNP and is now a member of the Scottish Parliament.

  fn4 The result was in such doubt up to the last minute, however, that the Times pocket cartoonist Mel Calman drew two alternative frames, according to whether Jenkins won or lost. In the first, passing a placard announcing ‘Roy loses’, his little man thinks: ‘Perhaps he’s too civilised for politics.’ In the second (‘Roy wins’) he thinks: ‘Hooway!’28

  fn5 He also kept in touch with several of his Hillhead party workers, even after he lost the seat: for instance, he used to telephone one, Les Goodall, every Christmas right up till his death. ‘How many politicians of Roy’s stature,’ Goodall’s daughter wondered, ‘would have bothered over all those years to telephone an aged and confused retired party worker of no importance whatsoever?’37 It should be said that he did the same with some of his old Stechford supporters.

  fn6 According to Bill Rodgers, however, Owen’s first instinct was to oppose sending the task force, until persuaded by Rodgers that they must support it. Shirley Williams, on the other hand, shared Jenkins’ uneasiness about the war.48

  fn7 In a sentence cut from his draft, Jenkins questioned whether a ‘radical’ party in his sense of the word would in fact attract Labour votes: ‘Apart from anything else, I am not convinced of the radicalism of the right-wing Labour working-class vote.’65

  fn8 To David Butler he admitted that he ‘had come to regard Tuesdays and Thursdays as a source of misery’. In a typically shrewd piece of self-analysis he reckoned that he had been successful in the House of Commons as a batsman, but was no good as a bowler.75

  fn9 Jenkins had first noted this pattern nearly thirty years earlier in an article on ‘The Labour Party Today’ in an unidentified paper in November 1953.88 Did he even then have his long-distance sights set on 1983?

  fn10 O’Brien failed to retain the seat at the general election less than three months later, however, making him one of the shortest-serving MPs on record.

  fn11 There survives among his papers a list of names with the jobs they might fill in a putative Alliance Cabinet, written out in Jenkins’ handwriting. It was probably no more than a mischievous party game, since it assigns David Owen to Northern Ireland! But the other notional appointments probably give an accurate idea of how he regarded his colleagues and how he might have deployed them if he had ever had the chance. David Steel is listed as Home Secretary and Leader of the House, Shirley Williams as Foreign Secretary and Bill Rodgers as Chancellor. Other horses for courses are Dick Taverne (MoD), David Marquand (Education), Tom Bradley (Employment), Ian Wrigglesworth (DHSS), Bob Maclennan (Scotland), Lord Scarman (Lord Chancellor) and Anthony Lester (Attorney-General). The list gives the Liberals only six out of twenty-three places: Steel and Scarman plus John Pardoe, Russell Johnstone, Richard Wainwright and Jo Grimond (as Lord Privy Seal).100 Steel says it can only have been a joke since he and Jenkins never discussed appointments and, as a Scottish Member, he could not have been Home Secretary. In fact John Reid served as Home Secretary in 2006–7 despite sitting for a Scottish seat.101

  fn12 John Pardoe believed that Jennifer’s presence was critical in stiffening Jenkins’ refusal to stand down. ‘Roy was firmly uncooperative, firstly because it would damage his chances at Hillhead, secondly because it would annoy the party regulars, and thirdly, probably much the most important, because of Jennifer Jenkins who was an iron lady.’119

  fn13 The overall result gave Mrs Thatcher 397 seats and a landslide majority of 144, with just 42 per cent of the vote. The Conservatives actually won nearly 700,000 fewer votes in 1983 than in 1979. But clearly the huge majority of the Alliance’s additional three million votes – 7.7 million compared with the 4.3 million the Liberals had won in 1979 – were taken from Labour, thus fulfilling the predictions (and Jenkins’ fear) that the only effect of the SDP would be to split the anti-Conservative opposition.

  22

  Elder Statesman

  AFTER HIS BRUISING experience of the past eleven months, and nineteen years as a fully committed front-rank politician, Jenkins was happy to give up the responsibility of leadership and return to being what he had been in the 1950s and early 1960s, a part-time politician, semi-detached commentator and writer. Despite the disappointment of the election result he thought the Alliance had actually done quite well, building a solid platform for the next election. Suppressing some doubts, he was happy to endorse David Owen as the dynamic young leader to take the SDP forward. ‘I could feel,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘that I had not left the Alliance in a quagmire but put it on a springboard.’1 In the first by-election of the new Parliament (caused by Willie Whitelaw’s immediate elevation to the Lords) the Alliance showed that it was still a force to be reckoned with by cutting Whitelaw’s large personal majority in Penrith and the Border from 15,000 to a bare 500. Jenkins departed for what he regarded as a well-earned summer holiday in France and Italy in good heart.

  He came back to a depressing SDP conference – depressing not least because it was held in Salford – at which Owen los
t no time in imposing his authority by ruling out not only any prospect of an early merger between the Alliance parties, but even any moves towards closer cooperation, such as joint selection of candidates or a single team of frontbench spokesmen. Liberated not just by Jenkins’ semi-withdrawal but by Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers both having lost their seats, the new leader set about redefining his little party of just six MPs in his own image. Jenkins was alarmed both by Owen’s increasingly autocratic style and by his defiantly separatist strategy, which went against the whole purpose of the SDP as he had envisaged it, as a catalyst for a more inclusive style of politics. In his memoirs he described the unpleasantly factional atmosphere which now prevailed in the national committee, which reminded him of the Labour National Executive in the early 1970s. In his speech to the Salford conference he begged the party – and implicitly Owen – to let the Alliance continue to evolve organically as it had done since 1981. Echoing Parnell in reference to Ireland (‘No man has a right to fix the boundary of the march of a nation’) he urged the conference: ‘Do not set a limit to the march of the Alliance.’2 Most of his political energy for the next four years was devoted to trying to keep the idea of cooperation alive without challenging Owen directly, while broadening and deepening his attack on Thatcherism. He also took on the presidency of an all-party campaign for proportional representation, with Ian Gilmour for the Tories and Austin Mitchell from Labour as vice-presidents representing the minorities in their respective parties. Even as a part-time politician in uncertain health he continued to make two or three speeches a week to various audiences all round the country. In the last four months of 1984, for instance, he listed thirty-three engagements, eighteen of which he asterisked as ‘difficult’.3