Roy Jenkins

by John Campbell

  But he also widened his role beyond Oxford to become a powerful spokesman for the British university sector as a whole (he claimed to have visited every one, including all the converted polytechnics). Having, as he confessed, taken little interest in higher education since 1941, he reckoned that the 1980s had given him an unusual opportunity to appreciate the universities’ difficulties from three very different vantage points: respectively, as he called them in one of his less happy metaphors, ‘the proud peacock of Oxford . . . the 441-year old eagle of Glasgow . . . [and] the enthusiastic young pouter pigeon of Strathclyde’. By 1990 all three were suffering from ‘a decade of debilitating financial restriction’ – driven, he alleged, less by real financial stringency than by a climate of anti-intellectualism, free-market ideology and a desire to curtail critical thought:

  The Government policies of the 1980s towards the universities were, I believe, the most short-sighted that Britain has ever had the misfortune to encounter. Nearly every previous administration of whatever party had been responsible for some major advance . . . in our academic framework. That one alone was distinguished for creating nothing and for inflicting great damage on teaching, research, morale and students.26

  The political scientist Vernon Bogdanor – subsequently famous for having been David Cameron’s tutor – wrote to thank Jenkins for being ‘almost the only politician in Britain to speak out against money-making as the be-all and end-all of life’.27 As the Major government floundered to its end in the mid-1990s, Jenkins hoped for better from the incoming Blair government.

  Jenkins never pretended to be an academic, but he enjoyed talking with scholars and was usually good company at High Table – though he could be rude, if bored by the person he was seated next to. Some dons were snooty about the lack of original research in his books; but most were grateful to have a Chancellor who wrote books at all, who read a lot of books and could talk about books. In 1990 he agreed to give a lecture as part of a series marking the centenary of the death of Cardinal Newman, alongside five distinguished Newman scholars. ‘As the date for the lecture came into the middle distance,’ he confessed, ‘I first thought that I must have taken leave of my senses in accepting and then decided that I had no alternative but to spend a month reading little except books by and about Newman.’28 Thus prepared, he delivered a thoroughly respectable generalist’s appreciation of Newman, whom he found ‘a wholly absorbing even if sometimes provoking subject’;29 and Newman’s 1852 lectures on ‘The Idea of a University’ became a fruitful starting point for his own thoughts about universities over the following years, as well as making a useful preparation for tackling the theological contortions of Gladstone.

  While limbering up for that assault he published another collection of his shorter writings under the title Portraits and Miniatures. The core of this book was another set of six biographical essays which he had written for The Times in 1993 on the same lines as his Nine Men of Power in the early 1970s, but somewhat shorter. His chosen subjects this time were three front-rank British politicians (Rab Butler, Nye Bevan and Iain Macleod) whom he had known, one American (Dean Acheson) and two Europeans (Konrad Adenauer and General de Gaulle). He considered including Henry Kissinger and Helmut Schmidt, but stuck to his rule of not writing about living subjects. These by themselves were not enough to make a book, so he added his Newman lecture and another on ‘Changing Patterns of Leadership’ from Asquith to Mrs Thatcher that he had first given in 1987; a dozen more articles and lectures on a variety of subjects ranging from ‘An Oxford View of Cambridge’, celebrations of Glasgow and the bicentenary of The Times and a round-up of recent political biographies, to slighter pieces on wine and croquet; plus twenty-two of his book reviews, some historical and others – the memoirs of Nigel Lawson and Cecil Parkinson – very recent. This eclectic but entertaining potpourri was published by Macmillan in 1993 (for an advance of £10,000), to generally appreciative reviews and a private tribute from Mollie Butler, who wrote to thank Jenkins not only for his perceptive piece on Rab, but for all the others too, comparing him to ‘a great lepidopterist, pinning your models to the page with the perfect mot juste’.30

  After the success of his memoirs, however, he was ready for another big book. He had not written a full-scale biography since Asquith in 1964. But in 1992 Michael Sissons and Roland Philipps (then at Macmillan) persuaded him (for an advance of £75,000) to take on Gladstone. (Stuart Proffitt tried to get him to do Charles James Fox for HarperCollins, but Jenkins declined that one.) At first, he recalled later, he quailed at the prospect of the Grand Old Man’s immense career, spanning practically the whole of the nineteenth century and encompassing four premierships. ‘I thought Gladstone was too big a subject for me, and in particular I doubted my ability to get to adequate grips with his important but subsidiary pursuits, such as the theological and liturgical disputes of early Victorian England or his attempt to see Homer as part of the headwaters of Christianity.’ But he was fascinated too, and excited by the challenge. ‘He was the highest peak in the mountain chain, and as such the most enticing as well as the most intimidating.’31 There had been no single-volume life since Philip Magnus in 1954 (though Richard Shannon had published the first part of a two-volume project in 1982), so there was a gap in the market. Nevertheless it was, as he wrote in his Preface, ‘by far my rashest literary enterprise . . . like suddenly deciding, at a late state in life and after a sedate middle age, to climb the rougher face of the Matterhorn’.32

  He had frequently, in reviewing other writers, condemned big books that were too heavy to hold up in bed. Gladstone was always going to break his own rule. Yet the research and writing took him only three years, from early 1992 when he started reading intensively, to the end of 1994. Of course his book was based entirely on secondary sources, apart from bits of the Dilke and Asquith papers which he had read thirty-five years earlier. His method now was frankly to synthesise the work of other historians and weld it into a fresh narrative, spiced with his own highly personal commentary. By far his greatest debt – which he fully acknowledged – was to the Oxford historian Colin Matthew, editor of the monumental Gladstone diaries, which had appeared in fourteen volumes between 1968 and 1994. These are not descriptive or reflective diaries in the Pepys or Crossman sense of the word, but an epic engagement diary – what Gladstone himself called ‘an account-book of the all-precious gift of Time’ – accounting to God in abbreviated shorthand for almost every minute of every day for more than seventy years: whom he had seen, whom he had written to, what he had read, how long he spoke for and where he stayed every night. (They are in fact extraordinarily like Jenkins’ own meticulous engagement diaries, though even more detailed.) This amazing resource, mirroring his own obsession, enabled Jenkins to chart Gladstone’s day-to-day activities, and particularly his social life, with a precision that lent his book a somewhat pedantic and antiquarian flavour. Jenkins was in one sense the perfect biographer of Gladstone, because he was almost the last person in England who knew or cared about the minute Trollopian gradations of Victorian society, the correct precedence between a duke and an archbishop and who was related to whom, the great houses, mealtimes, railway timetables, precise journey times and even fashions. (‘There was by 1847 hardly anyone other than the first Marquess of Anglesey who habitually wore a blue coat in London.’)33 But arguably this sort of detail is overdone: it tells the reader more about Jenkins’ own enthusiasms than about Gladstone, and does sometimes obscure the big historical picture.

  At the same time Gladstone was the first of Jenkins’ books in which his prose style – perhaps influenced by Gladstone’s own – became at times almost unreadably convoluted and parenthetical. He could no longer resist including in the narrative extraneous curiosities of information that would have been better relegated to a footnote, while continually showing off his familiarity with the entire cast of nineteenth-century public life and assuming the reader’s equal familiarity and interest.fn4 Of one of Gladstone’s early speech
es he wrote that ‘the subordinate clauses hung like candelabra throughout his oration with few of his sentences containing less than seventy words, and some twice as many’.35 In this respect biographer and subject were almost too well matched. Nor was this the only similarity. Without forcing the parallels, Jenkins brought out in Gladstone innumerable characteristics that were extraordinarily like himself: not only his obsessive diary-keeping and precise accounting for time and distances, but his love of planning journeys, his special love of Italy, his devotion to ‘the God-fearing and God-sustaining University of Oxford’36 and his considerable consumption of wine. Almost the longest quotation from Gladstone in the entire book is a wonderful disquisition in praise of good wine.37 He wrote of Gladstone’s ‘liking for country-house gatherings, the pleasures of which, however, hardly diminished the flow of his writing and reading’;38 and of his fondness, as he grew older, for staying at ‘well-appointed Home Counties residences . . . in which the life of the house and the services of the household revolved around himself’.39 ‘It never occurred to him that they [his hosts] could expect anything in return except for the pleasure of knowing and serving him.’40 He commented ironically on Gladstone’s ‘frequent and dutiful habit of riding in London . . . For the most part it was a solitary and somewhat contrived pursuit . . . Whether riding did his health any good, which was its ostensible purpose, seems more doubtful.’41 Exactly the same could be said of Jenkins’ jogging in Brussels and his walking round his tennis court. He also referred (not disapprovingly) to ‘fragmentary but converging evidence . . . that Gladstone had a sexual drive to match the flash of his eye, the force of his oratory and the vigour of his intellectual and physical energy’.42 He devoted considerable space to the question of Gladstone’s famous ‘rescue work’ with prostitutes, concluding that it was probably not wholly innocent, hence the need to scourge himself to purge his feelings of remorse. Gladstone’s statement at the end of his life that he had never ‘been guilty of the act which is known as that of infidelity to the marriage bed’ was ‘obviously both precise and limited’.43 And when Jenkins wrote of Gladstone’s youthful friendship with Arthur Hallam that there was ‘no evidence of any homosexual behaviour, but it is impossible to believe that there was not the electricity of infatuation and jealousy between them’,44 he cannot have failed to have in mind memories of his own intense undergraduate relationship with Tony Crosland.

  As he wrote, Jenkins became increasingly absorbed and amazed by Gladstone, not so much for his politics, which – though broadly admirable – were in detail often extraordinarily wrong-headed, as for his personal qualities, the inexhaustible variety of his activities and his astonishing physical energy: reading enormously (some 20,000 books in his lifetime), writing, speaking, walking and chopping down innumerable trees. He did not try seriously to engage with Gladstone’s tortuous theology. But by the time he finished he had ‘no doubt that Gladstone was the most remarkable specimen of humanity who ever occupied 10 Downing Street’.45 Gladstone is a tremendous achievement because it fully conveyed to the reader this prodigious energy and variety. As usual, Jenkins sent pre-publication copies to a wide circle of his friends. One, Isaiah Berlin, wrote back admiringly: ‘How you manage to write first-rate books, of immense length and learning, with a degree of rapidity which equals almost that of Trollope and the other great Victorians, I simply cannot imagine. But you do.’46 Another, Jim Callaghan, saw a resemblance not so much to Jenkins himself as to another of their former colleagues:

  Did it strike you that Gladstone & Tony Benn share several characteristics? e.g. both are demagogues, both have inexhaustible energy, both are obsessive diarists, both are convinced that whatever opinion they happen to hold at any one time is the only possible course to follow, both are non-team players & both are a little mad!

  And who knows – perhaps Tony scourges himself!47

  The reviews – once again written mainly by his friends, not by specialists – were overwhelmingly favourable. In The Times Robert Blake (himself the unsurpassed biographer of Disraeli) praised the way in which Jenkins brought the insight of his own experience to bear on the not-so-dissimilar politics of Gladstone’s day. ‘He appreciates from personal knowledge how Budgets are made and changed, how Cabinets and parties are kept together or sundered. He knows how ministers have to be cajoled or persuaded . . . and the importance of oratory.’48 John Grigg in the Sunday Telegraph noted the similarities between author and subject, but also the difference that Jenkins’ sense of irony enabled him to see the comic side of Gladstone;49 and Anthony Howard in the Sunday Times was one of several reviewers to think the book, at Jenkins’ age of nearly seventy-five, a Gladstonian achievement in itself.50 That autumn it won the Whitbread Biography Prize; it failed to win Book of the Year, losing out to Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum, but it sold well and was translated into a large number of languages.fn5 In 2001, amazingly, Jenkins was able to send Václav Havel a copy of the Czech translation.

  All the time he was writing Gladstone Jenkins was still reviewing two or three books a month, now mainly for the Observer and Daily Telegraph, as well as contributing articles on political topics of the day to a whole range of papers, for which he could normally command a four-figure fee. He wrote regularly in The Times, Telegraph, Independent and Observer, occasionally in the Financial Times, Sunday Times and Daily Mail. In fact the only major title for which he practically never wrote was the Guardian, possibly because too many of its readers still regarded him as a traitor for having left the Labour Party, but also because he did not think it paid enough. When Philip Stephens asked him to write occasional comment pieces for the Financial Times he agreed so long as the money was right, insisting, ‘No Guardian fees! The F.T. is not only a respected but a very prosperous paper.’52 While Max Hastings was editor of the Daily Telegraph he deliberately used Jenkins to try to move the paper towards the centre. They became good friends – another example of Jenkins’ ability to keep making new, much younger friends – and when Hastings moved to edit the London Evening Standard in 1996 he continued to commission Jenkins to add weight to that paper for the rest of his life.

  Wearing his literary hat, Jenkins was regularly asked, often by more than one paper, to nominate his book (or books) of the year – usually, but not always, books he had reviewed – or sometimes his holiday reading. His choices for the latter illuminate his compulsion to keep on filling gaps in his knowledge: in 1992, for instance, he named a biography of Goethe and in 1993 Linda Colley’s Britons (‘because my eighteenth century history needs improving’), plus Alan Clark’s Diaries (‘because I do not think I can hold out indefinitely against reading what everyone else finds entertaining even if unadmirable’).53 But his lists also included the latest fiction: Anita Brookner, Sebastian Faulks and in 1992 Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety – even though he generally disliked historical novels – because ‘her Fludd of two years ago was so unforgettable that I am willing to try anything she writes’.54 When the Financial Times asked him in 1999 for his three books of the century, however, he went back to old favourites: his first was Proust, his second Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, but his third, more surprisingly, was not Anthony Powell – on the grounds that he was too similar to Waugh. He would have picked a Thomas Hardy, but he was the wrong century, so he plumped for Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. These, he said, were the books that had given him ‘the most persistent and recurring pleasure’ over his adult lifetime. Paradoxically, he noted, for a writer of non-fiction, they were all fiction, for even the best non-fiction was ‘relatively evanescent’ by comparison.55, fn6

  How did he manage to read so much? His habit was to wake early and read in bed for one and a half or two hours before getting up. ‘It is one of the few benefits of old age,’ he reflected in 1998, ‘that I need less sleep.’58 Jennifer was not disturbed because for some years now they had slept in separate rooms.59 ‘Perhaps inspired by Gladstone,’ he confessed in a lecture at Hawarden, ‘I h
ave taken to keeping a list of what I read, and it comes out remarkably steadily at between 75 and 80 a year.’60 His tally actually varied between sixty-seven in 1992 (seventeen of them for review) and 108 in the last year of his life, 2002, though that included a good deal of rereading: nowhere near Gladstone’s 250-odd a year, but still a remarkable weight of reading.

  And as well as reading and writing he still, in his last decade, maintained an exhausting schedule of speaking to all kinds of audiences, from serious semi-academic lectures at universities at home and abroad to literary lunches and after-dinner speeches to bodies such as the College of Estate Management or the Thames Valley Police – often about Europe, but sometimes on Baldwin or Gladstone or some other aspect of British politics. In 1996, for instance, he listed seventy speaking engagements of all sorts, and in 1999 a hundred. He kept trying to refuse invitations, pleading that he was ‘fighting a constant battle against . . . over-commitment’,61 but then kept finding reasons for accepting. In April 1998, for example, he agreed to speak about Gladstone at Liverpool John Moores University in October, saying he would have refused almost any other request but that Liverpool – Gladstone’s birthplace – must have something in his centenary year (the centenary of his death, that is).62 He would almost always speak for friends. In November 1998 he was in Edinburgh to speak (for Elspeth Campbell) at the annual Patrons’ dinner at the National Gallery of Scotland; and the next day he was back in London to give a London Library lecture on Gladstone’s reading habits (for John Grigg). ‘Your stamina amazes me,’ Grigg wrote to him the next day, ‘but I must impertinently insist that you should perhaps consider taxing it rather less severely. None of my business, of course, but I think Jennifer agrees.’63 Maybe he listened, for the next month he declined to speak to the Society of Bookmen. ‘The plain fact is that I have been accepting far too many speaking engagements. I had four last week and three this week. And I do not do them easily (i.e. without preparation). The result is not only exhaustion but a serious bar to getting on with my own writing work.’64