Inevitably very few letters from his women friends survive. Caroline Gilmour’s diary is still in the family. There are in the Jenkins papers just two letters from Leslie Bonham Carter to ‘Darling Roy’ dating from 1990. They are both quite trivial, but they give a flavour of their relationship – not least Leslie’s easy acceptance of both Caroline and Jennifer. The first teases Roy about the fact that the picture of Lord Young on the cover of his just-published memoirs looked unnervingly like Roy, while Caroline looked like Mrs Thatcher:
Which do you think has the greater cause for worry Caroline or you with your look-a-likes? It’s a nice point. By a narrow margin I think Mrs T. is slightly less frightful.
You are a real gadabout. Let’s try to talk Thursday morning when I gather you are spending an hour in the UK. With my love, Leslie.27
The second, six months later, suggests rather more the loving mistress:
I thought I might have solved the vexed question of your silk handkerchiefs with a selection like the one I enclose. I think it’s beautiful – do you? The only thing that stopped me buying a quantity was a discreet little label which caught my eye at the last moment saying HAND WASH ONLY. I am sure that Jennifer would welcome the chance to round out her day in this way? Let me know. I hope you are feeling svelte and well. Love Leslie.28
Jenkins was in the fortunate position of having no fewer than three discreet and devoted women all dedicated to looking after him.
Over his last four years as a Member of Parliament after giving up the SDP leadership Jenkins made an average of four substantial speeches in the House each session, plus about a dozen questions or shorter interventions. The latter were mainly either questions to Mrs Thatcher after European summits (which she usually batted away with no difficulty or turned tartly back on him) or Scottish questions with an eye on his electorate in Hillhead. Even though the SDP had only six MPs he declined to take an official spokesmanship under Owen, but exercised his right to speak as a senior Privy Councillor as and when he wanted. Thus he always spoke in the budget debate in March and again after the Chancellor’s autumn statement, and once or twice more on other issues of particular interest to him like Europe, the security services or – again for the benefit of the Scottish press – regional policy or the survival of ship-building on the Clyde. His speeches were short, weighty and could be a little pompous, invoking his authority as a former Home Secretary and Chancellor, but they were generally heard with respect. The heckling that had thrown him as SDP leader gradually died away as the Labour awkward squad realised that he was a more powerful critic of Thatcherism than most of their own front bench. In 1986 he was actually awarded the Spectator’s ‘Parliamentarian of the Year’ award – a remarkable accolade on the basis of so few speeches. Over the whole Parliament he steadily refused to be impressed by Nigel Lawson’s hubristic and self-congratulatory management of the economy, partly because of what he called Lawson’s ‘clamant, know-all discourtesy’29 – ‘I wish that I was as certain of anything as the Chancellor is of anything,’ he complained in 198630 – but more seriously on three main grounds of criticism.
First, Jenkins continued to insist that the ‘unending plateau of the highest unemployment in a major country in the industrialised world’ was ‘simply not acceptable’.31 He complimented the ingenuity of some of Lawson’s tax changes, but branded him ‘fundamentally complacent’ for tolerating such a level of unemployment.32 The 1986 budget, he complained, was ‘the Budget of a minister of taxation who accepts the economic weather’, not of a Chancellor who tried to make it.33, fn6 By now he conceded that Lawson was presiding over a partial recovery, but believed that the destruction of manufacturing in 1979–82 had been both disastrous and self-inflicted. ‘Judged by results,’ he declared in November 1984, ‘the Chancellor’s attempt to portray the last four years as a golden economic age looks not merely wrong but ludicrous.’35 He insisted that services alone could not sustain a prosperous economy and repeatedly called for more active government intervention of the type that less ideologically dogmatic competitors like the Americans – even under Reagan – and the Japanese took for granted to support their industries.36 In 1985 he joined with Healey and Hattersley from Labour and sacked Tory wets like Jim Prior and Francis Pym, plus a host of other concerned members of the great and good under the chairmanship of Professor Richard Layard, in a cross-party Employment Institute to call for some reflation – ‘or merely less vicious deflation’;37 and he frequently drew attention to the unprecedented consensus stretching from Ted Heath and the ninety-two-year-old Harold Macmillan (now Lord Stockton), the CBI and an experienced Select Committee of the House of Lords to both main opposition parties and the TUC, all pressing the same case on the government’s deaf ears.fn7 Though unemployment finally peaked – at nearly 3.5 million – in 1986 he predicted correctly that Lawson’s policies would not bring it below three million before the next election.39
Next, he warned the government constantly not to waste the temporary windfall of North Sea oil. ‘The second problem which dominates my mind,’ he declared in his televised response to Lawson’s first budget in 1984 (summarising his speech in the House), ‘is . . . how are we going to earn a living when North Sea oil begins to run out?’ This, he believed, was the most menacing economic challenge the country had faced since 1945. In fact oil extraction did not peak quite as soon as he anticipated; but his essential point was surely right. ‘I believe the primary duty of our Government is to use the remaining period of oil spate to put Britain in the best possible shape for a difficult future’ by rebuilding the national infrastructure – roads, railways, communications and industrial capacity – and educating a skilled workforce. The danger was not, as Lawson maintained, bequeathing a burden of debt to the next generation: by comparison with the post-war years the real level of debt was not particularly high. ‘The real danger is bequeathing a run-down Britain without the skills or the tools to earn its living.’ ‘The Alliance,’ he concluded, ‘wants the Government to launch a major programme of re-equipping Britain.’40 Right up to the 1987 election he kept on berating the Thatcher government, which claimed to believe in thrift and good housekeeping, for frittering away a one-off capital asset in short-term tax cuts and a personal consumption boom. (In November 1985 he even charged the government with ‘improvident financing on a scale which makes . . . General Galtieri almost Gladstonian’.)41 From the perspective of the twenty-first century it is clear that he was right.
Third, he was contemptuous of the government’s incompetence in allowing sterling to yo-yo up and down – from $1.60 to $2.40, down to $1.07, then back to $1.60, all within eighteen months – ‘like lift-dwellers in a department store’,42 instead of pegging it to greater stability by joining the Exchange Rate Mechanism of the EMS. Following a fiasco in January 1985 when Mrs Thatcher appeared to say that she did not mind if the pound fell to parity with the dollar, obliging Lawson hurriedly to raise interest rates to 14 per cent to shore it up, Jenkins wrote a scornful letter to The Times mocking ‘the extraordinary pantomime-horse act of 10 Downing Street and the Treasury over last weekend’:
A large part of the trouble stems from the combination of the present Chancellor’s insensitivity and the Prime Minister’s unamiable tendency always to blame something or someone other than herself. As a result she handles the exchange rate with peculiar ineptitude. It cannot, of course, be commanded by any Government. But it can be considerably influenced by a firm and consistent policy to behave less erratically and more in our national interests.
It could not be achieved by ‘treating market forces as though they were junior ministers, first patted on the head as her own special progeny, then sternly ordered to stop behaving independently and improperly, and finally assailed with a flailing mass of misleading statistics’.43
In January 1986 Jenkins used an SDP Opposition day to open a debate urging immediate entry to the ERM. Since its creation, he claimed, the EMS had been a ‘limited but substantial success’, affor
ding European currencies some stability against the violently fluctuating dollar. He repeated his story of Callaghan and Mrs Thatcher each keeping Britain out for opposite reasons, and urged that so long as Britain remained outside her influence in Europe would inevitably be reduced.44 The Treasury put up a junior minister to answer him; another who spoke against entry in the short debate that followed was the young Tony Blair (first elected in 1983). With both big parties whipped against it, Jenkins’ motion was rejected by 397 votes to twenty-two. But as it became obvious that most of the Prime Minister’s senior colleagues, including both Lawson and his predecessor Geoffrey Howe (now Foreign Secretary), wanted to join, while her excuses for resisting became increasingly threadbare, Jenkins kept up the pressure to wear down her stubborn opposition.
At the same time after every European summit he pressed her to be more positive towards Europe generally. He hoped that the result of the General Election would finally lay to rest any possibility of Labour taking Britain out of the Community and encourage Mrs Thatcher to settle the British Budget Question, which she eventually did at Fontainebleau in 1984. He continued to insist that she could have got much the same deal with far less hassle years earlier and deplored the way other countries had followed her penny-pinching example, ‘turning every successive meeting into an accountants’ wrangle’. A favourite theme was that after several decades of catching up, Europe was again falling behind America and Japan. ‘The combined national income of the Community countries,’ he wrote in The Times, ‘has fallen back to ninety-three per cent of that of the United States.’45 ‘In these circumstances,’ he believed, ‘to spend all our time in Europe quibbling about a few hundreds of millions of pounds is something which in the context of wider issues looks totally disproportionate.’46 As always he was anxious to see Europe moving forward again, without ever spelling out exactly where it should be going. He was keen to see Spain and Portugal admitted as soon as possible (they finally joined in 1986). He wanted to see the proportion of the Community’s resources devoted to agriculture ‘sealed off’ so that more could be spent on other sectors; and as such a rebalancing of the budget would be very much in Britain’s interest, he constantly pressed Mrs Thatcher to agree to more majority voting – what he called ‘rolling back the use of the veto’47 – to make this and other developments possible. Otherwise the Community would stagnate. ‘We must get our head out of the groceries,’ he urged in 1985, ‘and regain the vision, nerve and perspective of those who more than thirty years ago were responsible for the European Community’s creation.’48, fn8
As much as specific policies, Jenkins abhorred the whole style and ethos of Mrs Thatcher’s government: her narrow-minded certainty and moralistic self-righteousness offended him – though of course she and her supporters thought him equally dogmatic in his own way. Distaste for her values dripped from his lofty intervention at Prime Minister’s Questions during the Westland crisis in January 1985, when she got herself into a tangle – and lost two Cabinet ministers – over the sale of a small West Country helicopter company to her preferred (American) buyer rather than a European consortium:
Is the Right Hon. Lady aware that as she and her Government sink deeper into the bog of deceit and chicanery, almost her only remaining memorable words will be that there were commercial decisions involved, and that Governments before hers have been activated by considerations higher than that?49
On this occasion Mrs Thatcher replied defensively that commercial decisions did carry legal obligations. Jenkins also deplored the government’s penny-pinching cuts to the Foreign Office budget, its ‘foolish and short-sighted’ withdrawal from UNESCO and its stingy level of relief for a famine in Ethiopia – all at a time when it was happy to spend billions on buying Trident and defending ‘Fortress Falklands’. Thatcher and Lawson, he charged in November 1984, had ‘little sense of history, proportion or compassion, and the absence of all three qualities in confluence is a devastating weakness’.50 He was severely critical of Mrs Thatcher’s neglect of Parliament (‘The Government treat this House with a discourtesy that I have never seen parallelled in 39 years in the House’);51 her emasculation of the Cabinet by purging anyone who disagreed with her, so that by the middle of the decade there was more rejected talent on the Tory back benches than on the front; and her systematic politicisation of public bodies like the BBC, the Bank of England and the National Coal Board by appointing only Tories who could be relied upon to do her bidding.52 Above all he was withering about the government’s farcically doomed attempt to suppress the memoirs of a rogue MI5 officer, Peter Wright, by sending the Cabinet Secretary – Jenkins’ former private secretary Robert Armstrong – to be humiliated in an Australian courtroom. Once again Jenkins did not scruple to condemn the Prime Minister’s ‘combination of exceptional ill-judgement and exceptional stubbornness’ in the most personal terms. Drawing attention to ‘the peculiarly unacceptable hypocrisy of a Prime Minister whose stock-in-trade is leaks from the top accompanied by prosecutions lower down’, he concluded by questioning her truthfulness:
The Prime Minister, with the possible exception of Anthony Eden for a few unfortunate weeks exactly thirty years ago, is undoubtedly the most self-righteous Prime Minister since Neville Chamberlain, in the wholly relevant sense of despising her opponents . . . and being convinced of her own moral superiority. In these circumstances it is peculiarly unfortunate that whenever attention is focussed on some activity in which she has been involved, as in Westland, as here, there should be a trail of dissimulation left behind.53
This speech was also notable for Jenkins’ refusal to believe the wild suggestions in Peter Wright’s book that Harold Wilson had been a Soviet spy:
Many criticisms can be made of Lord Wilson’s stewardship – I have made some in the past and I have no doubt that I may make some more in future – but the view that he, with his too persistent record of maintaining Britain’s imperial commitments across the world, with his over-loyal lieutenancy to Lyndon Johnson, with his fervent royalism and with his light ideological luggage, was a likely candidate to be a Russian or Communist agent, is one that can be entertained only by someone with a mind diseased by partisanship or unhinged by living for too long in an Alice-Through-The-Looking-Glass world in which falsehood becomes truth, fact becomes fiction and fantasy becomes reality.54
As Home Secretary, Jenkins had always been sceptical of the activities of the spooks, and Wright’s revelations of their dirty tricks confirmed his conviction that it was time to rein them in. In a letter to The Times in 1985 he had already proposed that the security services should be subjected to parliamentary scrutiny by a committee of senior Privy Councillors. He did not believe that phone-tapping was as widespread as some conspiracy addicts alleged – ‘I hope and believe that nothing improper was done in my periods of office . . . Most of those who think themselves to be tapped are suffering from illusions of grandeur’ – but nevertheless considered that MI5 had become ‘more trouble than it is worth’ and concluded that ‘on grounds of utility I would now close down the political side of its activities’.55, fn9 In the debate following the Spycatcher affair – opened by David Owen, but very much on the lines of Jenkins’ letter – he gained the support of one or two maverick Tories like Jonathan Aitken; but the Alliance motion was crushed as usual by 232 votes to twenty-four.
Jenkins’ critique of Thatcherism rested on a wider base than just distaste for her personality. In late 1984, following the collapse of the Johnson Matthey bank and a series of City scandals involving Lloyd’s and other prestigious financial institutions, he wrote for the Sunday Times magazine a remarkably prescient article criticising the increasing dominance of the City of London, the massive salaries now being earned there (‘the greed factor’) and the lack of effective regulation (this was before the deregulation introduced by the so-called ‘Big Bang’ in 1986). He also noted the increasing carelessness of MPs in declaring their outside interests. He acknowledged the difficulty of legislating against greed,
but warned that the ‘exuberance’ of the City made a mockery of the government’s appeals for pay restraint and was drawing too much talent away from industry and public service. Quoting Baldwin’s semi-serious remark that a man who made a quick million ‘ought not to be in the House of Lords but in jail’, he concluded that the City needed more authoritative and more austere leadership if it was to escape ‘a severe financial jolt’.57 The fact that it took another thirty years to come about does not detract from the prescience of the warning. In the Commons that autumn Jenkins also warned of a looming ‘financial catastrophe’ in the form of an international debt crisis, which might force governments to buy up bad debts in order to avert bank failures.58
In one of his last speeches in the House, criticising Lawson’s tax-cutting pre-election budget in March 1987, Jenkins protested against the whole trend of the government’s policies since 1979 – showing that he had moved some way, but not so far as his critics alleged, from the concerns he had first expressed in Fair Shares for the Rich more than thirty years before:
Not only . . . is this no Budget for jobs, but it is no Budget for the growing number of the deprived in our society. I do not believe in the almost mechanical egalitarianism of the right hon. Member for Sparkbrook [Roy Hattersley, now Labour’s Shadow Chancellor], but I believe . . . it is the duty of the state to lean firmly but unvindictively in favour of greater equality – for the natural forces all lean the other way, and, if left untrammelled, produce results that might shock even the Chancellor’s conscience. But, for eight years, the Government has leaned the other way. Two-thirds of the tax concessions have been given to the top 20 per cent. The effect has been accentuated by the splurge of City and some other incomes.
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