He took the honour very seriously and threw himself into it with characteristic thoroughness. He immediately started a programme of dining at all the colleges – Merton in October 1988 was his twenty-fourth in eighteen months – usually making a well-researched little speech with some neatly turned compliments to famous alumni, past and living. At a St Hilda’s gaudy in July 1989 he risked some rather daring comparisons between the changing characteristics of the women’s colleges as they had been in his day and as they were now.80 As early as April 1988 he was telling a dinner in Washington that ‘I sometimes think I do little but respond to toasts at college dinners.’81 But in his first two years he also spoke to every other sort of university audience, some of them beyond his normal range, from the University Church to the University Air Squadron and the pre-match dinner before the Oxford v. Cambridge rugby match. (The last he called his ‘second most difficult Oxonian task’ since becoming Chancellor – the most difficult being A.J. Ayer’s memorial service.)82 In March 1989 he watched the University Boat Race for the first time since 1959, following the crews in the Oxford launch alongside the Duke of Edinburgh, in his capacity as Chancellor of Cambridge, in the Cambridge launch.fn14 Altogether in these first years he reckoned to fulfil forty to fifty engagements a year in Oxford itself and a good many more around the world – for instance, attending the anniversary celebrations of other universities, ranging in age from Bologna (900 years) to Chicago (100) – calculating with typical precision that the job took ‘a good quarter of my time and energy’, but provided ‘something more like half of my interest’.84
In his first year a new Chancellor is allowed to nominate his own choice of distinguished people to receive honorary degrees at his inaugural Encaenia. Jenkins took the opportunity to honour a dozen selected friends and admired contemporaries from different parts of his life – with the notable exception of British politics. His list comprised five resident members of the university, all of whom had certainly voted for him: Isaiah Berlin, Anthony Kenny, the chemist Dorothy Hodgkin, the philosopher/novelist Iris Murdoch and the current Vice-Chancellor, Patrick Neill, plus (a nod to Hillhead) the principal of Glasgow University, Alwyn Williams; two Americans, Robert McNamara and Arthur Schlesinger; from his Brussels years the King of the Belgians; President Cossiga of Italy and the former Irish Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald; and his old friend Nicko Henderson, ambassador successively to Bonn, Paris and Washington. Henderson wrote an amusing account of the accompanying festivities, starting with dinner for the Americans – McNamara and Schlesinger, plus Joseph Alsop, Kay Graham and Marietta Tree – the night before the ceremony at the Berlins’, where Aline Berlin served ‘a sumptuous dinner and a 1945 Château Lafite’. The next day there was lunch in All Souls, then a dinner at Balliol, which was awkward because most of the dons had backed Heath as ‘the more vociferously anti-Maggie’ candidate. Henderson thought Jenkins made a good speech, but got a frosty reception (‘Balliol was not prepared to respond’); while McNamara made a serious speech about the Cuba crisis.85
There were private occasions too. In 1988 Jenkins gave a dinner at Balliol to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his arrival at the college as a not-quite-eighteen-year-old undergraduate. The guests on this occasion were all Balliol contemporaries: Ted Heath, Mark Bonham Carter, Madron Seligman, Ronnie McIntosh, David Ginsburg, Philip Kaiser, Julian Amery, Ian Bancroft, Neil Bruce, Nigel Foulkes, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes and the Bishop of London, Graham Leonard – demonstrating both the ubiquity of Balliol men in public life and the care Jenkins took all his life to keep up with his contemporaries, including those who were not close friends. Thanking him, McIntosh wrote that ‘the food and wine surpassed one’s expectations of Balliol cuisine. You struck just the right note of informality in your speech and it was nice to hear Ted respond so gracefully’;86 while Bancroft (head of the Civil Service until sacked by Mrs Thatcher) called it ‘a memorable evening of such disarming elegance . . . astringent rather than nostalgic: so much energy (still) there too’.87 The last decade of Jenkins’ life was to be punctuated by frequent such dinners to mark significant birthdays and anniversaries.fn15
As Chancellor, he loved showing off Oxford to visiting friends – particularly Americans and particularly American women – much as he had loved showing off Glasgow. Afterwards they wrote him gushing letters of thanks. Marietta Tree, for instance, the wealthy, witty Washington socialite and former mistress of Adlai Stevenson, wrote in 1989 to thank him for a memorable visit and a lunch at East Hendred (with the Donaldsons, Macfarlanes and the President of Magdalen, Anthony Smith), which synthesised ‘all that is best and most delightful about your country. The dramatis personae combined with the delicious lunch and lavish bottle [sic] of wine, could never happen anywhere else save with the unique inspiration and organising genius of R & J Jenkins.’89 Two years later he invited Jackie Kennedy to that year’s Encaenia, along with Marietta Tree again, Jakie Astor, Andrew Devonshire and Solly Zuckerman. Afterwards she wrote to him from the Ritz, clearly star-struck:
Dear Dear Roy,
All the emotions of the last few days, what I’ve seen and what I’ve felt – I feel a bit weakened by it, yet perfectly happy and grateful. It is your great heart that made it all happen . . .
And you at Oxford, the glory of your robes and your Latin and the architecture; the theatre and the great hall and the honored seat from which you let me see it all. And the House of Lords. It will be hard to top for company standing there with you and Solly and the Archbishop of Canterbury . . .
Please tell [Jennifer] how happy it made me to see her again. Going home is sad because I will miss you both and would so love to have more hours together. I hope you will both come to New York.
You deserve every good thing that will ever come your way because you are such a kind and generous man. So many good things have, and that makes me very happy for you.
Dear Roy – I thank you with all my heart. Jackie90
Jenkins loved talking and writing about Oxford, and over the next decade gave countless lectures and wrote innumerable articles celebrating its glories. He particularly enjoyed comparing it with Cambridge – sometimes seriously, more often tongue-in-cheek, but invariably to Oxford’s advantage. For example, in a speech at Brasenose in 1990 he gave Oxford the architectural palm:
The combination of the Clarendon Building, the Sheldonian Theatre, the Bodleian, the Radcliffe Camera and St Mary’s Church is unparalleled anywhere in the world. The grandeur of individual colleges, particularly Trinity and King’s, may be greater in Cambridge, but there is no comparable ensemble of university buildings.91
And in an article for the American Oxonian he claimed that Oxford not only had the better buildings, but also overwhelming political predominance, having educated eleven of the last twenty-one British Prime Ministers plus several overseas ones, though not yet – this was pre-Clinton – a US President. ‘Most unusually,’ he noted, ‘there are more Cambridge than Oxford men in the present Cabinet, although this is perhaps more than outweighed by the predominance of one Oxford woman.’ Oxford could also boast more major novelists (Graham Greene, Anthony Powell, Iris Murdoch, Kingsley Amis and Penelope Lively) and now, he questionably asserted, equalled Cambridge in science. Moreover – the clinching point – Oxford was always listed first: ‘In spite of the alphabet, Cambridge and Oxford simply does not come off the tongue.’92
But he also saw his role as standing up for Oxford in the corridors of power. ‘The University today,’ he declared in his installation speech, ‘needs a voice who will speak out, if necessary, against ruling opinions.’ Oxford was ‘an immensely valuable national asset at a time when this country needs to cling with an iron determination to those few roles which it can pre-eminently perform’ and resist ‘the depredations of the wave of anti-intellectual philistinism which sometimes seems to be sweeping this country and its government’.93 He was particularly exercised by some of the provisions of Kenneth Baker’s 1988 Education Reform Bill which th
reatened both academic freedom and university funding, and immediately went into battle to try to limit the damage. ‘By great good fortune,’ he wrote, ‘my switch from one legislative chamber to another in 1987 proved a great bonus . . . The House of Lords was a much more favourable forum than the House of Commons would have been for putting forward and carrying an amendment which at least limited the evil.’94 In May 1988 he introduced an amendment to the proposed abolition of tenure – that is, job security – for university lecturers:
to ensure that academic staff have freedom within the law to question and test received wisdom, and to put forward new ideas and controversial or unpopular opinions, without placing themselves in jeopardy of losing their jobs or privileges they may have at their institutions.95
It was carried by 152 votes to 126 and subsequently accepted by the government. He also joined with other academic peers – Michael Swann (the former chairman of the BBC, now Provost of Oriel College, Oxford and Chancellor of York University, Max Beloff and Conrad Russell, among others, to oppose both specific provisions and the government’s whole mercenary approach to the universities.
After initially hoping that fund-raising was not part of his job, he quickly recognised that it very definitely was. ‘I note with mild dismay,’ he confessed in a lecture as early as May 1988, ‘that three-quarters of my conversations with the Vice-Chancellor . . . is devoted to this subject . . . Yet I accept that it is inevitable.’96 Or again, two years later: ‘Fundraising is frankly not one of the most enjoyable aspects of being Chancellor. It is not the core of my “idea of a university” . . . But it is absolutely necessary . . . to keep Oxford secure amongst the handful of world-class universities.’97 Jenkins was of the generation that had grown up expecting the state to provide. But he recognised that since the great expansion of universities in the 1960s this was no longer realistic. Without private funding, he warned on another occasion, Oxford would by the end of the century slip ‘quietly but ineluctably out of the small group of six or eight universities, or at most ten, which are indisputably in the world league . . . This would be a major national and indeed international misfortune . . . So I am a resolute fundraiser’ – even though he feared that reliance on private benefaction could only widen the gap between Oxbridge and less-favoured universities.98 As a result much of his time and effort over the next decade was spent in travelling the world seeking to squeeze money from businesses and philanthropists for new buildings, new chairs and new bursaries. He did not mind the travelling, particularly to America, but his ill-concealed distaste for the process and for many of the people to whom he was obliged to go cap-in-hand meant that this was one aspect of the job to which he was not well suited.fn16 His successor, Chris Patten, has been more effective in this role.
As the 1987 election approached, Jenkins still hoped to be able to hold Hillhead – maybe even to return to office as part of a post-election coalition if the Alliance held the balance of power. After its autumn plunge in the polls the Alliance had recovered surprisingly strongly and he could feel the scent of battle once again in his nostrils. Des Wilson – the former director of Shelter, now the Liberals’ campaign director – noted that ‘Jenkins had over the past few months rediscovered his f orm’. After ‘a brilliant speech, witty, incisive and loudly cheered’ at the SDP’s autumn conference, and another (‘heavyweight but spiced with wit’) at the Alliance’s latest ‘re-launch’ at the Barbican in January,100 he took on the role of economic spokesman and unveiled his own ‘alternative budget’ in March, placing the emphasis (not altogether to Owen’s liking) on jobs and ‘fairness’ instead of Lawson’s tax cuts. The victory of the fresh-faced young SDP candidate Rosie Barnes against a hard-left Labour candidate at Greenwich in February, followed by good local election results in May, lifted the Alliance’s poll ratings back to 30 per cent – ahead of Labour for three months running. This was a far better platform than at the equivalent stage in 1983, and Jenkins still believed that if the Alliance pulled together and raised its sights it could yet achieve the sort of breakthrough it had just failed to make four years earlier.
On policy the two parties did actually pull together pretty well: even on defence a formula was found that both could live with – though Owen was too easily provoked by Mrs Thatcher claiming that Alliance policy was effectively unilateralist. The fatal mistake, in Jenkins’ view, was Owen’s insistence on a ‘realistic’ strategy of aiming only for the balance of power, which inevitably drew attention to the different instincts of the two leaders as to what they would do in the event of their achieving it. Steel saw the primary goal of the election as defeating Mrs Thatcher, and found it hard to foresee any circumstances in which the Liberals would be willing to support a minority Tory government or join a coalition while Mrs Thatcher was still Tory leader. His instinct would have been to join with Labour to throw her out. Owen, on the other hand, had no time for Kinnock or Labour and plainly would have had no difficulty taking the SDP into coalition with Mrs Thatcher. When asked on television, as they were endlessly, which party the Alliance would support if put in a position to choose, they struggled to conceal the difference in their approach – which allowed both the other parties to frighten wavering supporters by warning that a vote for the Alliance would let the other in, while making no positive case for the Alliance itself.
The second problem compared with 1983 was that Labour fought a much slicker and more professional campaign. Even though the party still advocated getting rid of Britain’s nuclear weapons and coming out of Europe, while Kinnock was scarcely more plausible as a potential Prime Minister than Michael Foot, he had clearly brought Labour halfway back towards electability, so that it was once again the primary vehicle for anti-Thatcher votes, making nonsense of the Alliance’s claim to be the only real opposition; moreover the novelty of the Alliance’s middle-of-the-road appeal had inevitably worn off when neither Labour nor Conservative seemed as extreme as they had in 1983.
All these factors made it more difficult for Jenkins to retain the seat he had won so spectacularly in 1982, even though he spent most of the four-week campaign in Glasgow. Despite his role as economic spokesman he played only a minor role in the national campaign. He took part in one Alliance broadcast – speaking about unemployment and the government’s waste of North Sea oil – and one press conference, at which Des Wilson thought his performance ‘magisterial but dull’,101 and appeared on a number of TV programmes, where he deplored the parochialism of the election: ‘the most insular campaign I have ever fought’;102 but he was restricted mainly to the role of senior grandee so as not to detract from the youthful appeal of the two Davids, and was very little reported. His only forays outside his own constituency were to support old SDP allies (Ian Wrigglesworth fighting to hold his seat on Teesside; Bill Rodgers and Shirley Williams trying to get back for Milton Keynes and Cambridge respectively), and two of his favourite Liberals (Richard Holme, still trying vainly to win Cheltenham, and Menzies Campbell, who was at last successful in North-East Fife). But his effort in Hillhead came too late. In his memoirs he half-blamed Owen’s neo-Thatcherism for making it harder for him to win in Scotland; but he also admitted that he had done too little over the last four years to counter the changed make-up of the constituency since 1982. He had been lucky to hold on in 1983, when he had been helped by his national exposure as SDP leader. Since then, though he had been assiduous in holding his monthly advice bureaux and chasing constituency problems, he had allowed himself to be identified too much with the affluent residents of ‘the hill’ and neglected the rougher neighbourhoods on ‘the river’. Moreover this time he was up against a formidable Labour opponent in the person of the thirty-two-year-old George Galloway, against whose charismatic militancy his statesmanlike gravitas was peculiarly ill-matched.fn17 His campaign literature stressed his national distinction – ‘The MP whose Voice is Always Heard’ – but this only made him appear more remote from the gritty realities of the Clyde.103
He went into the c
ount still hoping he might pull it off, but soon found that he had lost by more than 3,000 votes. He actually held his own share of the vote, but the Tory vote fell by more than 3,000 while Galloway gained more than 4,000; almost certainly Jenkins picked up a lot of previously Conservative votes, but lost more to Labour:
George Galloway (Labour) 17,958
Roy Jenkins (SDP/Alliance) 14,707
B.D. Cooklin (Conservative) 6,048
W. Kidd (SNP) 2,713
A. Whitelaw (Green) 443
Labour majority
3,251104
So he was out. He was not unduly disappointed. He was sad to lose his connection with Glasgow, which had given him such pleasure, but not at all sorry to leave the House of Commons, which now held very few attractions since the Alliance had come a poor third with just 23 per cent of the vote, down from 25 per cent in 1983, and only twenty-two MPs – seventeen Liberal and five SDP – facing another three-figure Tory majority.fn18 The only immediate prospect was of mutual recrimination between the two parties of the Alliance and arguments over whether and when to merge. He was well out of it. Above all, Jenkins had his triumph at Oxford three months before as a wonderful compensation. ‘By winning in Oxford,’ he consoled himself, ‘I at least avoided an exact emulation of the fate of my favourite biographical subject: Asquith lost both the University election and a Clydeside constituency within the same twelve months.’105 He was free to concentrate on Oxford.
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