Roy Jenkins
Page 99
He died at a good time for maximum coverage. Monday morning’s newspapers did him proud. The Times put an almost quarter-page Gerald Scarfe caricature on the front page and most of the other papers had large photographs and tributes, with more inside from a variety of writers (Anthony Howard, Ben Pimlott, Robert Harris, Roy Hattersley) in addition to the formal full-page obituaries tracing his long career. Both the Telegraph and the Guardian called him ‘the grandfather of New Labour’; even the Daily Mirror mourned ‘a great Liberal, a great European and a truly great man’; and all gave prominence to Tony Blair’s tribute: ‘He was a friend and a support to me and someone I was proud to know as a politician and a human being . . . I will miss him deeply.’ In the Evening Standard Max Hastings confessed frankly: ‘I adored him’; while David Owen wrote warmly of happy times before their differences over the SDP and latterly over Europe, with an ambiguous conclusion:
Roy died a fervent believer in a depth of integration that I continue to question. If he does get his wish posthumously, he will have played, for good or ill, a bigger role in reshaping the fate of Britain than any other Prime Minister or Cabinet Minister in the 20th century.273
The most dissenting note in the general chorus of admiration came from Denis Healey on the front page of the Independent, who praised Jenkins’ first period at the Home Office, but went on to blame him unequivocally for letting Mrs Thatcher dominate the 1980s (‘The SDP did not create New Labour: it delayed it’) and ended with a typical final put-down: ‘The problem . . . was that his judgment was not as sharp as his intellect, and that for him so many issues were matters of principle.’274 Over the following days others recalled the Roy they had known. Alan Watkins in the Observer lamented that ‘We shall not see a luncher of his like again.’275 Ferdinand Mount gave a sharp twist to the same theme:
I too have been lunched by Roy Jenkins . . . There can scarcely be anybody within a hundred miles of Westminster who has not at one time or another passed the hours between one and three in Lord Jenkins’ company, at Brooks’s or the Caprice or the Blue Boar at Chieveley.
But Mount questioned his enduring legacy:
It feels rather like one of those fairy stories in which the hero’s three wishes all come true but none of them delivers the expected delights . . . But Roy Jenkins was never one for the backward glance. As far as second thoughts went, he was irretrievably out to lunch.276
A different verdict was voiced by Vernon Bogdanor in the Observer, noting that ‘the tone of the obituaries . . . has been almost uniformly elegiac, as if the causes for which he stood were those of the past’. On the contrary, Bogdanor asserted, ‘Nothing could be more wrong.’ Behind his Whiggish manner Jenkins was throughout his career ‘both radical and contemporary’:
Roy Jenkins was the first leading politician to appreciate that a liberalised social democracy must be based on two tenets: what Peter Mandelson called an aspirational society (individuals must be allowed to regulate their personal lives without interference from the state); and that a post-imperial country like Britain could only be influential in the world as part of a wider grouping (the EU) . . . Jenkins was the prime mover in a form of social democracy which, being internationalist, is peculiarly suited to the age of globalisation and, being liberal, will prove to have more staying power than the statism of Lionel Jospin or the corporatist socialism of Gerhard Schroeder.277
Nothing in the decade since his death has contradicted that judgement.
The funeral was a low-key, informal occasion on the Friday following his death – ‘a quintessentially English winter day, bone cold and damp’ – at the parish church of East Hendred, barely a hundred yards from St Amand’s House, followed by refreshments (hot soup and sausages, but also, the papers noted, claret) in the village hall.278 The fifty-minute service was conducted by the vicar and the Dean of Christ Church; Charles Jenkins gave an affectionate address emphasising the family man, not the statesman; and Cynthia and Edward both read lessons. Tony and Cherie Blair slipped in unobtrusively, ‘with no handlers, aides or cellphones in sight’, and stayed chatting for an hour; the rest of the congregation of about 300 included most of Jenkins’ closest friends and longtime political allies: Bill and Sylvia Rodgers, Bob Maclennan, Charles Kennedy (Shirley Williams was away). Both Caroline and Leslie were there, of course; Jennifer, bare-headed, seemed to Tina Brown ‘almost preternaturally calm’. The message on her flowers read simply: ‘To Roy, my only love. 62 years and 5 months’.279
Austin, Guardian, 6.1.03 (British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent)
Two days later the Mail on Sunday splashed a large double-page spread headlined ‘Woy, the Gweat Lothawio’, illustrated with colour pictures of Caroline, Leslie, Lee Radziwill and a youthful Roy. ‘Apart from an inability to pronounce his Rs,’ it suggested, Jenkins was best remembered as ‘one of the architects of the Swinging Sixties . . . blamed by some for the increase in promiscuity. But the full story of his own promiscuity has never been told – until today.’ Only Lee Radziwill was actually specified as a lover, with the claim that she preferred ‘portly, bespectacled’ Roy to ‘the young, strutting Mick Jagger at the peak of his sexual allure’. Caroline was quoted insisting that ‘we were just good friends, no more’. But Leslie, Ann Fleming, Marie-Alice de Beaumarchais, Marietta Tree and even Shirley Maclaine were all named – most of them wrongly – in the context of his ‘string of affairs’ over three decades. ‘He liked them to be beautiful, well bred, wealthy and intelligent – and had a special fondness for Americans. Some met all five requirements.’ The article quoted Jenkins’ evasive responses to Michael Cockerell’s questioning on television in 1996; and finally suggested that he was ‘fascinated by the sex lives of politicians of past ages’ and in his books ‘went into great detail’ about Dilke’s ‘three-in-a-bed romp’, Asquith’s love letters to Venetia Stanley and Gladstone’s picking up of prostitutes.280 A few days later the Daily Mail’s gossip columnist, Nigel Dempster, tracked down Lee Radziwill and quoted her – under the headline ‘Why Women Wanted Woy’ – saying that it was his ‘fascinating mind’ that attracted her. (‘He could talk about anything with authority and could quote nearly anyone. Men like that are rare and such a pleasure to spend time with.’) But she too denied that there was anything more than that.281 After this flurry, however, the story died away and has scarcely been revived. Scandals usually flourish only when an aggrieved party spills the beans or seeks revenge. Jenkins conducted his affairs within a close circle of mutual friends. He adhered to two principles: first, that one should conduct affairs only within strong marriages; and second, that he could never love anyone who was not also very fond of Jennifer.282 As a result, he did not leave a trail of broken hearts or broken marriages behind him and neither his lovers nor their husbands had any interest in talking to the press. He was not ashamed of his amitiés amoureuses, and would not have wanted his biographer to omit them. They were a very important part of his life. But as there was no scandal in his lifetime, neither should there be in death.
There was a memorial service at Westminster Abbey in March. Tony Blair asked to give the address, but to the relief of some family members he was in Washington for a meeting with George Bush, seven days after launching the assault on Iraq. Had he done it, he might have had to speak positively about electoral reform and the euro from the pulpit. But at short notice Shirley Williams spoke instead. It was a solemn state occasion, as Tony Benn characteristically described in his diary:
It was the British establishment en masse. I cannot think of a better description. Ted Heath was there. Jim Callaghan was there. The Dean of Westminster conducted the service. There was a choir of course. Bill Rodgers read something. Nicholas Henderson . . . read something. Shirley Williams delivered the address, which was a perfect account of Roy’s life . . .
It was the memorial service of a Roman emperor, a man who had great talent, a great capacity for friendship, great charm, wildly ambitious, and who believed in maintaining the Establishment and
the power of the Establishment, first in Britain and then in Europe. He split the Labour Party, which had made him what he was, and deserted it for the SDP. But he was friendly to me, liked the Diaries, was fond of Caroline [Benn’s wife] and I knew him a long time, so I’m glad I went.283
The last few pages of Roosevelt were finished by the American professor Richard Neustadt – Shirley Williams’ second husband – and published first in New York that autumn and then in Britain by Macmillan in 2004. It was Jenkins’ twenty-second published title over a writing life of fifty-five years. He did a lot else besides, and left an enduring mark on British life and politics; and yet the best of his books – Asquith, Gladstone, Churchill, possibly Mr Balfour’s Poodle and Nine Men of Power – may still be read long after his political achievements are forgotten or taken for granted.
He was buried in the village graveyard in East Hendred. On his gravestone Jennifer chose the simple epitaph:
ROY JENKINS
1920–2003
WRITER AND STATESMAN
In the end he would probably have been happy with that order of words.
* * *
fn1 In 1978, in a letter condoling with Quintin Hailsham on the death of his wife in a riding accident, Jenkins wrote: ‘You, more than almost anyone else I know, deserved different chapters in the latter part of the book’ – a perfect statement of his belief that life was a lived biography.2 Hailsham was a political opponent with whom Jenkins maintained an ambivalent relationship over the years. They had a particularly sharp exchange of feline courtesies in 1988 when Hailsham asserted that it would be unconstitutional for the House of Lords to amend the poll tax. ‘Throughout a long career,’ Jenkins wrote to The Times, ‘Lord Hailsham has whirred with the noise of impartial statesmanship while almost invariably alighting on the bough most convenient for the Conservative leadership of the day.’ ‘Despite his undoubted brilliance, courtesy and charm,’ Hailsham retorted, ‘Lord Jenkins of Hillhead is rather out of his depth on constitutional matters.’3
fn2 A few months later, when the former Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie complained that his biographer Humphrey Carpenter had betrayed his trust by publishing material that he had thought off-the-record, Jenkins wrote to him sympathetically in the light of his own experience with A Very Social Democrat:
Both Jennifer and I devoted a great deal of time to it, and Cockerell very successfully worked his way into our confidence. Then we felt rather let down by some at least of what appeared, and had a miserable week when we first saw the video before its public showing. But then, a further twist, we discovered that about 70% of people, friends and others, thought that both of us . . . came out of it well, and that it had enhanced our reputations.14
fn3 In conferring an honorary degree on Gorbachev in 1996, however, Jenkins – having perhaps lunched too well with Robert Harris – embarrassingly referred to him throughout as ‘Mr Brezhnev’!25
fn4 But much of the incidental detail is unquestionably fascinating, such as Gladstone’s comment on Queen Victoria’s habit of drinking claret ‘strengthened, I should have thought spoiled, with whisky’.34
fn5 In 1999 the second volume of Richard Shannon’s biography presented a very different view of Gladstone. Reviewing it in the TLS, Jenkins wrote that while he himself might have underestimated Gladstone’s near-lunacy, he thought Shannon exaggerated it. He also thought Shannon’s writing so dense that it was hard to read. (‘Indeed it could be said that one of Shannon’s major qualifications for getting inside Gladstone’s mind is that he almost rivals the Grand Old Man in opacity.’) Jenkins was sorry that, after devoting his life to Gladstone, Shannon did not seem really to admire him, ‘and this leads him to write about him, often brilliantly, but also constantly on the verge of bad temper’. This was not, in Jenkins’ view, the way to write good biography.51
fn6 His choices were admirably consistent. In a previous, slightly longer list in 1991 he had named Proust, Waugh, Powell and Mrs Dalloway, plus George Eliot (Middlemarch), Trollope (The Duke’s Children), Scott Fitzgerald (Tender is the Night) and Hardy (The Trumpet Major). Of Proust he said that he had ‘read the whole four times, twice in Scott Moncrieff, once in French and once in Kilmartin . . . I still hope to read it once or twice more.’56 Some years later he called Proust ‘by a long head the greatest novelist of the twentieth century . . . a richly comic writer, with an unique gift for the evocation of landscape and for the meticulous cartography of social nuance as well as for the minute analysis of human emotions, particularly those of love and jealousy’. ‘The meticulous cartography of social nuance’ is a quintessential Jenkins phrase, which perfectly encapsulates what he loved in Proust.57
fn7 Two months after ‘Black Wednesday’ Jenkins appeared with Lamont on Question Time and dismissed him to his face as ‘not up to the job’. When Lamont retorted that he did not think anyone was, apart from himself, Jenkins drawled that ‘Stafford Cripps wasn’t bad’.70 After the programme, according to Lamont, Jenkins went ‘white with anger’ and refused to speak to him, ‘as though I had made a personal attack on him’. Lamont got his own back three years later with a sarcastic article in the Daily Mail on the occasion of Jenkins’ seventy-fifth birthday, attacking his pomposity, self-importance, responsibility for current social problems and outdated economic thinking: ‘What does Lord Jenkins, on his chaise longue, know of the Tiger Economies of the Far East? . . . Maybe he will take them seriously only when they threaten to buy up all the world’s claret.’71 There were very few people in politics with whom Jenkins did not try to maintain friendly relations, but Lamont was one of them.
fn8 The other two, Jenkins guessed, were probably Aberdeen and Rosebery, ‘whose tastes lay in another direction’.
fn9 Their only serious difference was over Jenkins’ wish to have several of his old supporters like Dick Taverne, John Roper and William Goodhart raised to the Lords, whereas Ashdown was determined to nominate only those he believed would really contribute to the new party. All three eventually got their peerages, but the issue temporarily caused some tension between them.85
fn10 Jenkins also got Ashdown reading Gladstone, so that he too became excited by the parallels between the fluidity of mid-nineteenth-century politics and the present.88
fn11 James Cornford was a former politics professor, director of the Institute for Public Policy Research and a tireless campaigner for freedom of information and constitutional reform. He was a special adviser in the first year of the Blair government, but soon became disillusioned and resigned.
fn12 The Blairs were living in Number Eleven, rather than Number Ten, because it had more space for their young family, leaving Number Ten to the then-unmarried Gordon Brown. Jenkins was thus going back to the flat where he and Jennifer had lived nearly thirty years before.
fn13 This conclusion was very similar to that of the last inquiry into electoral systems, set up by the Hansard Society under the chairmanship of Robert Blake, which reported in 1976 and also opted for AMS.
fn14 In 2002, when Campbell was close to leaving politics and applied to join the Scottish bench, Jenkins wrote him a fulsome reference. ‘I . . . have the highest possible regard for his qualities, not only as a politician but in a much wider sense, including particularly his judgements on many aspects of human life. He is one of barely two handfuls of people throughout the world whose opinion I would value most highly.’138
fn15 In July Jenkins lunched at Brooks’s with Peter Lampl of the Sutton Trust, then as now the leading campaigner for wider access, who acknowledged that ‘you have made real progress over the last three years’, but thought there was still ‘an opportunity to go further and faster’.152
fn16 After lunching with Jenkins in January 1998, six months after losing the Tory leadership to William Hague, Clarke had sent him a thank-you note, adding: ‘I suppose events are now pushing you and me closer and closer together.’ According to Ashdown, ‘Roy thought this “very significant”.’168
fn17 Blair in return
confided that he was ‘much more fed up with the new baby than he lets on in public’.170
fn18 In the Guardian Roy Hattersley was delighted by Jenkins’ loss of faith in Blair. ‘I can think of nothing that will do more to restore grassroots support for Tony Blair than the knowledge that Roy Jenkins no longer regards him as his political heir . . . Roy Jenkins’ dissatisfaction makes Labour look less like a cautious mutation of the SDP.’176
fn19 Jenkins had been a staunch supporter of Mandelson through his various troubles. After his first resignation from the Cabinet in 1998 (for accepting a loan from a colleague, Geoffrey Robinson, whose business dealings his department was investigating), Jenkins invited him to lunch and wrote a remarkable defence of his financial irregularities in the Evening Standard: