Roy Jenkins

by John Campbell

  ‘Tony Blair in my view undoubtedly has more instinctive European feeling than any of his predecessors since Edward Heath,’ he wrote in 1998. ‘But I hope that Mr Blair is not deceiving himself about the possibility of achieving a leadership role in Europe without full participation in its central activities . . . There is no getting away from the issue of the Single Currency.’ It was going to happen, and there was no way that Britain could continue to enjoy the benefits of being in Europe while staying outside its defining project.166 By early 1999 he was hopeful that Blair ‘might at last be prepared to take on the tabloids’ and go for it. He cited a poll showing that ‘the overwhelming majority of the public have become convinced of Britain’s inevitable participation in the single currency, and believe that this is already the Government’s firm but unproclaimed intention’. But the government needed to make a positive case in order to win a referendum, which should have been held the previous summer when its public standing was at its highest.167 That spring he travelled to Aachen to see Blair become the third British statesman (after himself and Heath) to be awarded the Charlemagne Prize for services to European unity – though it is far from clear what Blair had done to earn it; and two weeks later he told an audience in Dublin that he now expected the referendum to be held in 2001 or early 2002: with strong cross-party support from senior pro-European Tories like Kenneth Clarke and Michael Heseltine, he was confident it could be won.fn16 Jenkins was still on flatteringly close terms with Blair and still believed he had his ear. In August he and Jennifer stayed with Tony and Cherie in Tuscany – where they were staying courtesy of Silvio Berlusconi – after which he wrote for The Times a characteristically unabashed defence of Blair’s much-criticised acceptance of free holidays, which only followed the excellent precedent of Gladstone and Churchill:

  One of Tony Blair’s wiser attributes is that he likes reasonably long holidays . . . He also has the attribute of liking going to rather sophisticated places. Tuscany and Gascony make a rather good pair of upmarket destinations . . . How much better than Disneyland or the Costa del Sol . . . Do we really want to be governed by pygmies in boarding houses in Bognor?169

  In November he congratulated Blair on becoming a father for the fourth time (at the same age as Churchill).fn17 ‘After your generous hospitality in Italy we clearly owe you a meal’ – maybe over Christmas – ‘either à quatre or with a few other congenial people.’171 But by the turn of the year – the turn of the century – he was becoming worried that Blair was going to let him down again. ‘I have three great interests left in politics,’ he told friends, ‘the single currency, electoral reform and the union of the Liberals with Labour. And all three are languishing.’172 In January 2000, lunching with Giles Radice, he was ‘very depressed about Tony Blair’s excessive caution about the euro’.173 He was also critical of the Guardian for failing to make the case, writing to the editor, Alan Rusbridger, that it should be countering the ‘fanaticism’ of The Times and Telegraph, not wobbling around in the middle. He called himself a ‘fairly dedicated’ Guardian reader, but was now wondering if he should not switch to the Independent as his third paper.174 Writing in the Independent three weeks later he called the decision definitely to postpone joining the euro until Brown’s ‘famous but imprecise five conditions’ were met ‘the worst week for British European enthusiasts since Harold Wilson switched the Labour Party in 1971 against the policy of British entry that he had espoused in government, or even, maybe, since General de Gaulle vetoed Harold Macmillan’s attempt at entry in 1963’. He publicly begged Blair to show some leadership or he would lose a lot of his cross-party liberal support, which was already disillusioned on civil liberties, the environment and electoral reform, but was still clinging to its hopes on Europe; and he gave the Prime Minister four pieces of advice:

  First, stop worrying about the result of the next general election . . . Second, regard popularity and high poll ratings, which you enjoy in rare abundance, as a springboard for resolute action and not as a store of value to be hoarded at all costs . . . Third, remember that the great Prime Ministers . . . are those who make the political weather and not those who skilfully avoid its storms and shelter from its downpours . . . Fourth, great administrations need to be based on a coalition . . . of support.175, fn18

  Doubtless he made all these points forcefully when Blair came to dinner at East Hendred again a few days later.

  In April 2000, in an article comparing Blair’s first three years with previous Labour governments, Jenkins judged it – Straw apart – not a bad record, but was only cautiously optimistic. ‘It is unwise to tip the waiter until the meal is over . . . He has clearly shown himself a competent Prime Minister. Whether he will be a great one remains to be seen. But I am not unhopeful.’177 A few weeks after this, however, there was a minor hiccup in their relations when Jenkins gave a wide-ranging interview to Boris Johnson, then editor of the Spectator, in which Johnson quoted Jenkins saying that Blair had a ‘second-class mind’: an apparent put-down gleefully taken up by the rest of the press. Jenkins immediately wrote to The Times to explain that he had been quoting Walter Lippmann’s ‘once famous remark about Franklin Roosevelt’ – that he had a second-class mind but a first-class temperament, and the latter was more important – but should have known it would be abbreviated and distorted.178 He sent a copy to Blair with a grovelling apology:

  I am sorry for the apparent discourtesy and indeed unfriendliness which, needless to say I hope, I do not feel. The fault was entirely in agreeing to do the interview with the clever and charming, but also bitchy and irresponsible Boris Johnson. Vanity, I fear, was my undoing. I thought that I could handle him (as I could have in a TV interview) but not be controlled the print [sic]. Even at my advanced age, there is much to learn.

  Yours ever, Roy179

  Blair rang to assure him that he had taken no offence. Jenkins’ gaffe was actually intended as high praise. He did not think first-class intellects necessarily made good politicians – Tony Crosland being a prime example – whereas Roosevelt was one of the towering figures of the twentieth century. But he was mortified to be told by a New York Times journalist that it was actually Oliver Wendell Holmes, not Walter Lippmann, who had made the remark about Roosevelt180 – especially as he had once (in a 1973 lecture published in his Gallery of Twentieth Century Portraits) got it right himself: an uncharacteristic lapse of memory.181

  As the 2001 election approached he still hoped for a drawing together of Labour and the Liberal Democrats. That summer two centre-left ‘think-tankers,’ Neal Lawson and Neil Sherlock, edited a book entitled The Progressive Century: The Future of the Centre Left in Britain, which explicitly sought to revive his pre-1997 vision. ‘Roy Jenkins’ famous call for the strengthening of the “radical centre”,’ they wrote in their Introduction, ‘is at the heart of the progressive cause and his historical analysis is the inspiration for this book’:

  The challenge for the centre-left remains the same – how to unite the strands of social democracy and liberalism and give voice to a new social democratic liberalism that can dominate the twenty-first century.182

  The two dozen contributors comprised a mixture of Labour and Lib Dem politicians, including Robin Cook, Peter Mandelson, Ruth Kelly and Stephen Twigg from one side and Paddy Ashdown, Chris Huhne, Ming Campbell and Don Foster from the other, plus a clutch of journalists and commentators including Polly Toynbee, Will Hutton, Steve Richards, Matthew Taylor and David Marquand. Jenkins contributed a Foreword expressing his disappointment that the hopes of 1994–7 had not been fully realised, but still hoping that Blair’s second term might be ‘much more adventurous and historically productive than his first’. Prior to 1997 he had understood that Blair shared his vision to make the twenty-first a ‘progressive century’: ‘I do not believe that Mr Blair has resiled from that intention.’183

  But he played no part in the election. Two years earlier when Charles Kennedy had asked him to undertake a Highland tour, he replied that his
campaigning days were over:

  I think you most flatteringly forget how old I am . . . I do what I can to look after Oxford, get on with my writing, give political advice, but only when asked for, and to keep a benign eye on Bill [Rodgers’] success as my successor in the House of Lords. I also occasionally give a particular talk or lecture. But ground campaigning days – no. I think that in the 1980s and 90s I earned my retirement from that! Let us have lunch one day soon.184

  The result was essentially a repeat of 1997. Labour was returned with its massive majority over the Tories barely dented, while the Lib Dems under Kennedy gained a handful more seats, but not enough to change the balance between the parties. Blair no more needed the Lib Dems than he had in 1997. In the Evening Standard, under the headline ‘Now Blair must take risks and be ready to offend’, Jenkins made one more plea to his erstwhile pupil – now that he had achieved what had often seemed to be his central purpose, to be the first Labour leader ever to be elected for two full terms – to claim his place in history by using his newly confirmed power. Blair was, Jenkins believed, ‘intellectually convinced’ that the euro was the crucial question:

  If he can grasp the nettle, face and win a referendum, take Britain in and by so doing give us for the first time a voice as powerful for the future of Europe as that of Germany or France, then he will on this count alone have earned his place as a commanding statesman. But if he dodges the issue, lets Gordon Brown persist with his largely meaningless conditions (which are really just a front for saying ‘I and the Treasury will decide’) then Mr Blair will be seen as joining the already too long column of fudgers and sludgers.

  The other major issue facing the government was the quality of public services, and here Jenkins was true to his old Labour roots, insisting that they could only be improved not by privatisation and internal markets, but by spending more money, like the French (with their investment in high-speed rail transport) and the Germans (who spent 10.5 per cent of national income on health, compared with Britain’s 7 per cent). He allowed himself a mild complaint that Blair had kicked his ‘much worked upon and substantially unanimous report . . . firmly into the long grass’. But he came back to his central belief that the euro was the critical test of New Labour’s second term.185

  Privately, however, Jenkins had virtually given up on Blair. In July he had lunch with Peter Mandelson – now out of the government again, following his second enforced resignation, but still loyal to the Prime Minister.fn19 Their exchange of letters over the next fortnight reveals that Jenkins’ disillusion went far deeper than he let on in public. Over lunch Mandelson had defended Blair by reference to his problem with Brown, who was too powerful and successful (for the moment) at the Treasury to be overridden. ‘When the economics move,’ Mandelson wrote, ‘so will Tony, and it will not be hard to manage the £ down when the time comes.’ (‘And do not underestimate’, he added, ‘the thoroughly malevolent influence of Ed Balls in all these matters.’) Blair was fighting a mighty battle over public-service reform. ‘It would not be wise (and not necessary) to fight a simultaneous war on both fronts with Gordon.’189

  ‘I am tremendously impressed by your loyalty, in spite of everything,’ Jenkins replied. ‘But . . . I would be even more of a saint than you (which I am not) if I did not feel a deep sense of let-down.’ He listed frankly the four remaining things he cared about in politics:

  Lib-Labery: the project as it was called. Now dead.

  Electoral reform: even deader . . .

  A liberal policy at the Home Office, where Straw is now widely regarded as having been no better than Howard. (To be fair Blunkett does show some signs of being keen to stand up to the police.)

  Europe (which is really top of my list), I would be prepared to bet you a large sum that there will be no referendum this Parliament. So you must excuse my language last week, although you were quite right to say that you would report it to Tony.

  I have so far refrained from mentioning the Tube, which shows every sign of being a stubborn cock-up which will rival the Poll Tax.190

  By the time of his death Jenkins had concluded that Blair had wasted his second landslide, as he had his first, and would not go down as a great Prime Minister. (He now ranked him merely ‘between Wilson and Baldwin’.)191 He did exercise some influence in one area of policy, once more wearing his Oxford Chancellor’s hat. In 1998 the government had introduced means-tested tuition fees for university students, capped at £1,000 a year, replacing maintenance grants with loans. But Jenkins had become convinced – as he told the House of Lords in December 1999 – that the only way Oxford and other leading universities could maintain their standards was by charging higher fees.192 This went against his lifelong belief in state provision; but in a climate of ever-falling government support for higher education he concluded that there was no alternative – there was a limit to how much could be raised from private benefactions – and set about convincing Blair. Here was one area in which Jenkins was reluctantly converted to market forces, and one on which Blair needed little persuading. Labour had gone into the 2001 election still promising no top-up fees; but within eighteen months this pledge was forgotten and a new ceiling of £3,000 was announced in January 2003 – though Jenkins would have liked to see the ceiling allowed to go higher still. But this was small beer compared with the heady vision of the mid to late 1990s when he had seen Blair as the man to carry through all the unfulfilled ambitions of his own career. He thought Blair allowed himself to be dangerously distracted by the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, and he would have hated, had he lived to see it, the disastrous decision to join in America’s ill-conceived and irrelevant war in Iraq on the coat-tails of George W. Bush in 2003. Yet he still could not help liking the man, and he remained determinedly unbitter. He and Jennifer were due to dine with the Blairs over Christmas 2002. But by then Jenkins was too ill to go and they never met again.

  All the while Jenkins never stopped writing. After Gladstone he did not immediately tackle another huge peak, but chose instead to write a collective biography of all the Chancellors of the Exchequer – nineteen of them – from Lord Randolph Churchill in the 1880s to Hugh Dalton in the 1940s. The Chancellors was a quintessential Jenkins project, never likely to excite his publisher, but just the sort of thing he loved doing, tracing what he called ‘the river of British politics as it flowed from Gladstone to Attlee’.193 The book gives full rein to his mania for classification, drawing biographical parallels and contrasts across the whole period from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, as if he knew each of his subjects personally and saw them as his peers: one can imagine him sitting round a dining table with them all, like the members of an exclusive club. The accumulation of a lifetime’s study and experience of British politics, it is packed with shrewd observations and aphorisms, with a lot of sly digs at contemporary politicians and flashes of autobiography along the way – for instance, from the essay on Churchill’s Chancellorship:

  A substantial minority of ministers are essentially supine. They take advice too slavishly . . . Then there is the middle group who sceptically query official advice but who end up [accepting it] . . . Those capable of both overcoming official opinion and of pushing ahead against the caution of colleagues are very rare.194

  Jenkins would undoubtedly have included himself in this third category.

  As in Gladstone, he manages to give the impression of close familiarity with both the gradations of the aristocracy and the topography of different parts of the country, sometimes in the same sentence: Michael Hicks Beach, for example, was ‘the ninth holder of a baronetcy which dated from the first years of James I’s creation of such a rank, and was well established in the triangle of good east Gloucestershire land between Cirencester, Lechlade and Bibury’;195 while Philip Snowden’s Yorkshire birthplace ‘epitomised the ability of Pennine villages, less than a thousand feet up, to give an almost Tibetan impression of being on the roof of the world. Snowden, like them, develop
ed a habit of looking down on softer locations and weaker mortals.’196 If there is an element of showing off in such comparisons, they do help to create vivid portraits of nineteen very different individuals. The book’s limitation is that it was based almost entirely on the existing biographies, concisely summarised with Jenkins’ commentary: where there was no biography, as in the case of Robert Horne – Lloyd George’s Chancellor for eighteen months in 1921–2 – he had nothing to go on, so that essay is the shortest of the set at just nine pages.fn20

  By the time The Chancellors was published in 1998 Jenkins was already planning his last and greatest mountaineering challenge. After Gladstone he wanted another big subject. ‘I got rather hooked on absolutely major figures and I regarded most of the other possibilities . . . as being an anticlimax.’199 The idea of tackling Churchill had probably already planted itself in 1994 when he reviewed Martin Gilbert’s single-volume abridgement of his multi-volume official biography, which he read while attending a three-day Churchill conference in Texas. He complained that – at nearly 1,000 pages – it was too big. ‘To hold it, particularly in bed but also in an armchair, is like trying to read through Who’s Who on a beach picnic. Only a solidly constructed desk can comfortably bear its weight.’ But he also felt that Gilbert’s book had ‘a certain lack of novelty and perspective’, which must have sparked the thought that he could do better.200 Later that year he attended another Churchill conference in Edinburgh, where he criticised ‘this new school of revisionists who are so anxious to denigrate him’ – specifically Clive Ponting (‘dreary obsessional nonsense’), John Charmley (who ‘argues a false case in a way that is nevertheless worth reading’) and Andrew Roberts (whom he thought ‘too keen on getting headlines’ by quoting Churchill out of context). ‘But while I reject, and as time goes on rather contemptuously reject, all these denigrations, I do not believe . . . that Churchill should be treated too reverentially.’201 Here was the starting point for his own book.