Roy Jenkins

by John Campbell

  The government’s apologists argued that ‘if the rich are made rich enough, some wealth will spill over to make the poor less poor’. Unfortunately, he asserted, there was no sign of this so-called ‘trickledown effect’ happening:

  On the contrary, the gap has widened. The number of those below the poverty line and with little hope of rising above it has grown inexorably . . . If I were Chancellor I would be deeply apprehensive for the future cohesion of our society under his policies, even if . . . his luck holds.59

  By this time, as the 1987 election approached, Jenkins had accepted Owen’s invitation to return to the front bench as the Alliance’s Shadow Chancellor – Owen having finally conceded the principle of joint spokesmen in January 1987. Jenkins was probably no keener to take on the role than Owen was to offer it, but neither could deny the enhanced credibility it brought to the Alliance team. Over the previous four years the Alliance had continued to perform remarkably well under the uneasy dual leadership of Owen and David Steel. Contrary to the retrospective myth that this was the high noon of rampant Thatcherism, the government actually suffered a succession of political challenges and embarrassments in these years, ranging from the year-long miners’ strike, the Greenham Common women’s peace camp and the unpopular abolition of Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Council (GLC) to the self-inflicted Westland imbroglio and the Americans’ bombing of Libya from British bases, as a result of which it trailed in the polls about half the time between June 1983 and June 1987. Labour under Neil Kinnock had regained a good deal of credibility, but still never polled above 40 per cent, so that the Alliance was never squeezed out of sight, but fluctuated between a low point of 19 per cent (early in the Parliament) and a high of 39 per cent (briefly in September 1985). It was normally third, but over forty-eight months was six times second behind the Tories, seven times second behind Labour and three times actually led.60 In addition it notched up four more exciting by-election victories, taking Portsmouth South, Brecon and Radnor (in South Wales) and Ryedale (in Yorkshire) from the Tories and – just before the General Election – Greenwich from Labour; the Alliance now controlled or held the balance on more than 100 local councils. Despite the disappointment of 1983, six years after the formation of the SDP three-party politics appeared to be firmly established, with a serious prospect of the Alliance forming at least a part of the next government.

  Nevertheless Jenkins was increasingly alarmed by Owen’s leadership of the SDP, on several counts: first, by his continued determination to maintain the SDP’s separate identity and resist the evolution of the Alliance into a single party; second, by his paradoxically unambitious strategy, aimed only at holding the balance in the next Parliament, not at the complete breakthrough which Jenkins was convinced was still possible; and above all by the increasingly right-wing flavour of some of Owen’s policies and his undisguised admiration for the Prime Minister’s abrasive style. He put down a clear marker against all these tendencies in a lecture in July 1984 in honour of the economist R.H. Tawney (whom the SDP was endeavouring to co-opt as an intellectual forebear). Denying the existence of any major ideological differences to prevent the two parties coming together – ‘I honestly believe the Alliance is ideologically about as cohesive as any decent democratic grouping ought ever to be, substantially more so than either the Labour or Conservative parties’ – he quoted Churchill in the summer of 1940 likening the Anglo-American alliance to the mighty Mississippi: ‘Let it roll on in full flood, inexorable, irresistible, benignant, to broader lands and better days.’ Insisting that if the Alliance held true to its founding principles it could still ‘at the second run, make a reality of the great prospect which opened up before us in 1981’, he explicitly rejected the idea that the SDP was ‘on the way to becoming a sort of junior Thatcherite party’ (‘“Not while I’m alive it ain’t,” as Ernest Bevin said about Aneurin Bevan being his own worst enemy’). ‘The whole spirit and outlook of the SDP,’ he insisted, ‘is and must be profoundly opposed to Thatcherism.’61 The following year – just in time for the party conference in Torquay – he contributed to an SDP magazine, the New Democrat, a warning that the country would not want ‘a sub-Thatcherite alternative’ at the next election, so the Alliance must campaign boldly ‘for power, not balance’. Noting the irony that he had once been considered the most right-wing of the Gang of Four, while the self-declared ‘radical’ of 1982 had then aspired to replace Labour, he concluded pointedly: ‘We must be clear about the political orientation of our party . . . We should keep our radical cutting edge well honed and endeavour to cut as deep in Durham as in Devon.’62 The challenge to Owen could hardly have been more explicit. Though Jenkins did not actually say any of this at the conference, when he spoke only about unemployment, the delegates had read what he had written and gave him a rapturous reception.fn10

  The tensions within the Alliance – and between Owen and the other three members of the Gang of Four – boiled over in 1986 when Owen deliberately provoked a split over what he saw as the Liberals’ ‘softness’ on defence. Admittedly there was a unilateralist minority in the Liberal Party which had succeeded in carrying a vote at the party’s 1984 conference to remove American cruise missiles from British soil. But it was a minority, which was firmly opposed by Steel and the rest of the leadership. Since the SDP was solidly multilateralist there was no danger of the Alliance being committed to unilateralism. Precisely to scotch this possibility, however, a joint commission composed of senior figures from both parties – including Bill Rodgers – was set up to consider an agreed Alliance policy, including the open question of whether Britain should replace its ageing Polaris system with American Trident missiles. Jenkins was, of course, no unilateralist. He accepted that nuclear weapons existed, could not be disinvented and could be a deterrent. ‘To proclaim a local nuclear-free zone and to believe that this gives safety is to erect a bamboo fence against a hurricane,’ he declared in a rare speech on defence in 1984. The only route to nuclear disarmament was multilateral, by NATO negotiating weapons limitation with the Soviets, with the British and French forces included in the mix.63 Nevertheless he was sceptical about replacing Polaris and did not believe that a decision to buy Trident had to be made immediately, while arms-limitation talks were still going on and the accession of Mikhail Gorbachev to power in Moscow raised hopes that they might succeed. This was also the conclusion of the Alliance commission which reported in the summer of 1986. But Owen chose to see this as a cop-out, which, he told an SDP conference at Southport in May, ‘would get and deserve a belly laugh from the British electorate’.64 He was overreacting to a misleading interview David Steel had given to the Scotsman, saying – correctly – that the commission would not commit the Alliance to replacing Polaris. This the paper mischievously headlined as a defeat for Owen (‘Owen’s Nuclear Hopes Dashed’), prompting Owen to decide unilaterally to pre-empt the report before it was even published. This high-handed behaviour was the last straw for the other three members of the Gang of Four, especially since it was quite unnecessary. When told what had provoked Owen to make his intemperate démarche, Jenkins reportedly exploded: ‘In that case the man’s totally unfit to hold public office’;65 and a few weeks later he took the opportunity of running into Owen in the Commons to take him into the smoking room to tell him exactly what he thought of him. ‘I gave him a piece of my mind,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘of which the burden was that he ought to ask himself why he sooner or later quarrelled with everyone with whom he was politically closely associated.’66

  Owen, Jenkins reflected, ‘was something of a nuclear fetishist. He could talk about missiles with a discriminating enthusiasm which some men reserved for horses or women or wine.’ His obsession with nuclear weapons bore out one of Jenkins’ favourite observations – usually illustrated by reference to Joseph Chamberlain’s tariff reform campaign, which split the Tories in 1903, and Labour’s contortions over Europe in the 1970s – that political leaders can never keep away from the subject that wi
ll do them the most damage. ‘Once he [Owen] had decided with some justification that nuclear weaponry was the most dangerous subject for the coherence and success of the Alliance, he came increasingly to talk about little else.’67 His gratuitous exaggeration of a minor difference of emphasis to justify his contempt for the Liberals punctured the Alliance’s momentum just when it was on a roll – two weeks after the Ryedale by-election – knocking its Gallup poll rating from 32 per cent in the spring to 22 per cent by the autumn; and the damage to the parties’ mutual trust was permanent. His action actually played into the hands of the Liberal unilateralists, who managed (by the narrowest of margins) to carry an anti-nuclear resolution at the party’s autumn conference, which was less a vindication of his intransigence than a consequence of it. Steel was just as dismayed by the Eastbourne vote as Owen was. In fact the two leaderships managed to patch up a formula in time for the election, by which they agreed to keep Britain’s independent deterrent until it could be negotiated away as part of a wider deal, as a result of which the Alliance’s poll rating climbed back into the low thirties. The whole row was an unnecessary storm in a hypothetical teacup. But, with sad hindsight, Jenkins believed that ‘the Alliance began to die on that wet Southport Saturday afternoon’.68, fn11

  Garland, Independent, 16.6.87 (British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent)

  At the very end of 1986 Harold Macmillan died, a few weeks short of his ninety-third birthday. Among his other honours the former Prime Minister had been since 1960 Chancellor of Oxford University. This was a largely ceremonial but prestigious position, which Jenkins confessed to having had his eye on since the mid-1970s, though the odds would always have been against him since the titular head of Oxford (unlike Cambridge) was a highly politicised elective post, elected by the resident Fellows and those graduates willing to go to Oxford to vote in person, in which almost any Conservative candidate, however dim, could be expected to defeat any non-Conservative, however distinguished. The classic case was Asquith, in 1925 clearly the most eminent living Oxonian, who was humiliatingly rejected by the Tory dons and country clergy who then still dominated the university in favour of the then Lord Chancellor, Lord Cave – described by Jenkins in his biography of Asquith as ‘the least distinguished occupant of the Woolsack of the first thirty years of this century’.71 In 1960 Macmillan, Tory Prime Minister at the time, defeated the former ambassador Sir Oliver Franks and lived to stamp the office with his style, theatricality and wit for twenty-six years. For most of that time Jenkins assumed that he would have little chance of succeeding: ‘I think I probably saw myself more as a left-of-centre candidate willing to lose’ – probably to Quintin Hailsham – ‘than as a likely winner.’72, fn12 But Macmillan’s longevity worked to Jenkins’ advantage, since the current Tory Prime Minister bitterly divided the university. In 1985 a majority of voting dons, infuriated by her government’s attack on universities in general and science funding in particular, had run a successful campaign to deny Mrs Thatcher the normally uncontested award of an honorary degree, to the equal fury of others who thought such pettiness only dishonoured the university. In the wake of this row the Tory camp was split. Ted Heath was determined to stand and immediately drew a lot of anti-Thatcher support, while the pro-Thatcher loyalists put up Robert Blake, Provost of Queen’s College and the leading historian of the Tory Party, as an internal, academic candidate. Between the two of them and their squabbling supporters Jenkins appeared almost as the non-political candidate, as well as arguably the most distinguished and certainly the most entertaining company at High Table.

  Jenkins’ supporters ran a brilliant campaign, drawing on his wide cross-party fan base among the great and the good, so many of whom had flocked to the SDP. It was publicly fronted by Sir Alec Cairncross (his former economic adviser at the Treasury); the former chief government statistician Sir Claus Moser; the Provost of Worcester College, the historian (and old friend from Bletchley days) Asa Briggs; the economic historian Patrick O’Brien; and the philosopher Isaiah Berlin. Anthony Kenny, the current Master of Balliol, and Michael Brock, Warden of Nuffield, were discreetly active in the background; while Celia Goodhart ran the London end of the campaign like a by-election, chasing up supporters to canvass their friends and persuade them to go to Oxford to vote. They collected and published week by week in the Oxford Gazette an impressive list of nominations drawn from all the colleges and including women – unlike Heath, whose nominators incredibly were all from Balliol and all male. Jenkins’ final tally of 410 included twenty-six present or former heads of college, two Nobel Prize-winners, three holders of the Order of Merit and twenty-seven members of the Royal Society or the British Academy. By contrast, Heath secured only 160 nominations and Blake just sixty-seven.

  Alec Cairncross’s pitch in the Oxford Magazine stressed, in addition to his other achievements, six reasons why Jenkins would make the best Chancellor: he would be immensely proud of the distinction, and would discharge the duties assiduously; he lived nearby and would therefore be readily available for university occasions; he would provide ‘the elegance and wit’ which, after Macmillan, the Chancellor’s speeches were expected to display; he would bring international prestige to the university and speak for the university to the government; and he would ‘oppose the philistinism and short-sightedness which now colour prevailing attitudes towards the universities’.74 It can fairly be said that Jenkins delivered on all these promises.

  The contest was intensely political and excited tremendous interest in the national – and international – press. The two Tory candidates each believed that the other should not have stood, and neatly cancelled one another out. In the absence of a Labour candidate – Healey was sounded out, but declined to stand – most of the ‘left’ voters who still saw Jenkins as a class traitor backed Heath as the strongest anti-Thatcherite; but Heath was equally seen as a traitor by many Tories. ‘The petulance and bitterness he has shown in his sterile campaign against the Prime Minister,’ the Daily Telegraph advised its readers, ‘should disqualify him from the Oxford Chancellorship.’ Jenkins, the paper admitted, was ‘a figure of much grace and dignity’ who would be ‘an ornament to the university’. But Blake had charm and distinction and an undoubted commitment to academic values. ‘If Oxford wishes to give a clear signal of its commitment to restoring its threatened greatness, its members will elect Robert Blake.’75 The Tory whips, however, sent out mixed messages: after seeming initially to back Blake, they switched to Heath at a late stage. Blake subsequently blamed his defeat on ‘the treachery . . . of the Tory Establishment who threw their weight behind Ted Heath . . . solely because they erroneously reckoned that he had a better chance of beating Roy than I had . . . The row in the Tory party,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘is bitter and furious, I am glad to say.’76, fn13 By contrast he had no quarrel with Jenkins and sent him a friendly postcard a few days before the poll, quoting Macmillan’s description of the 1960 contest as a cross between ‘Eatanswill, a gaudy and a two-day cricket match’ and hoping to see him at Grillions or The Club before too long.78 Nor did Jenkins’ now quite warm relations with Heath suffer.

  Polling was on Thursday 12 and Saturday 14 March. Such was the interest aroused that about 6,000 graduates came back to their old colleges to vote on the Saturday, causing traffic jams and long queues in the spring sunshine; most of the colleges laid on lunch for their alumni, creating a jolly reunion atmosphere. These ‘outvoters’ were crucial: whereas in 1960 only 3,673 votes were cast in total, this time there were more than twice as many: 8,307, of whom only about 2,500 were resident in Oxford. These gave Jenkins a clear majority with 3,249 votes to Blake’s 2,674 and Heath’s 2,348 (there was also a fourth candidate who got thirty-eight votes). Some thought it ironic that the great champion of proportional representation should owe his victory to first-past-the-post; but Jenkins dismissed any doubts this cast on the result, reckoning that he would have won enough of Heath’s second-preference votes to win anyway. At any event he was absolu
tely delighted to win. At his installation in June he declared that ‘Nothing in my life has given me greater pleasure than my election as Chancellor.’79 And he meant it.

  It was indeed the best thing that could have happened to him and came at just the right moment, given that he was to lose Hillhead at the General Election just three months later. He lived to enjoy the office for another fifteen years. It was the perfect retirement job for him and he was nearly perfect for it. He loved the ceremonial side – the academic dress, the processions, the speeches in Latin and the formal dinners, representing Oxford all around the world – but he also loved the opportunity to dine informally in the colleges and savour the academic life that he had been too young and too intensely political to take advantage of as an undergraduate. At the same time there was just enough serious content, acting as a sort of constitutional monarch to the Vice-Chancellor, with no power but the right to be consulted, to advise and exercise influence behind the scenes, to keep him intellectually stimulated. Speaking up for Oxford and universities in general gave him in his last decade a new political cause in which he had not hitherto taken much interest. (He had declined Education when offered it in 1965.) And it turned out to be extraordinarily convenient that twenty years earlier he and Jennifer had made their country home just twenty miles south of Oxford: he could be a highly visible Chancellor, attending all sorts of university and college events, and still sleep in his own bed every night. Above all, perhaps, nothing would have given more pleasure to his father, who had been so determined that Roy should go to Oxford, than that he should finish up as Chancellor of the university. In Arthur’s book that probably beat being Prime Minister; while Jenkins himself took great satisfaction from having attained the one coveted prize that Asquith’s glittering career had missed.