The new coalition’s initial test came the very next day, at the first of a series of sensationally bitter party meetings. This opening bout had been arranged at the Wembley Conference Centre to approve a new policy statement, which had been drafted by Benn and his allies under the title Peace, Jobs and Freedom. In effect, it was a reheated version of the Alternative Economic Strategy of the mid-1970s, promising full employment, strict import and capital controls, massive nationalization, workers’ control of businesses, nuclear disarmament and withdrawal from the EEC. It even dusted down the old pledge of a ‘fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families’, which Wilson and Callaghan had treated with such derision. The Times considered it ‘a vision of an East German proletarian state’. Most moderate Labour MPs regarded it simply as ‘rubbish’, a collection of airy fantasies with no details of how they would work. The whole thing, John Golding remarked, could be summed up as ‘peace at any price, spend money you haven’t got and deny freedom wherever possible’.58
Nobody doubted that the Wembley conference would approve Peace, Jobs and Freedom, not least because hundreds of moderate union delegates did not bother to turn up. Once again the atmosphere was venomous: Benn and Callaghan did not speak a word to each other all day. Some speakers, such as Benn’s former special adviser Frances Morrell, openly talked of the Labour moderates as ‘our opponents’. ‘The democracy that is being pumped out in the capitalist press is their democracy, not ours,’ insisted one delegate, the Militant member Terry Fields, who later became a Liverpool MP. ‘We will found a new democracy when we have created a socialist state in this country … To the weak-hearted, the traitors and cowards, I say: “Get out of our movement. There is no place for you. Cross the House of Commons.”’ He had even warmer words for Margaret Thatcher. ‘My kids sit and watch the television set,’ he said. ‘If they could get their hands on her, they would rip the throat out of her.’
The delegates liked Fields. They liked Benn, too, rewarding his appeals for nuclear disarmament, EEC withdrawal and the Alternative Economic Strategy with a standing ovation. But they did not like Callaghan, who issued a routine denunciation of the government without any mention of ripping Mrs Thatcher’s throat out. One delegate told the former Prime Minister to ‘retire to his farm’, another called him ‘mealy-mouthed’ and ‘shallow’. As Golding wrote, ‘to have received star rating at this conference, he would have had to attack himself’. Denis Healey came in for equally rough treatment, his appearance at the rostrum being greeted with shouts of ‘Out! Out!’ To that, an unrepentant Healey shouted that he would never accept the ‘clapped out dogmas’ of the ‘Toytown Trotskyists of the Militant group’, which provoked more cacophonous booing.59
But it was a third scapegoat who attracted most ire that day. The former Foreign Secretary David Owen had not planned to speak at Wembley. But after sitting through the morning’s speeches with his ‘gorge rising’, he could take no more. From the rostrum, Owen launched into a passionate attack on unilateral nuclear disarmament, which, he said, would leave Britain frozen out of negotiations between NATO and the Soviet Union. The delegates began to howl with rage, and then Owen made the fatal mistake of alluding to his own experience. ‘I am telling you as someone who has dealt with these negotiations,’ he said desperately – and the jeers resounded around the hall. He might as well have confessed to being a Tory. Afterwards, returning to his seat amid a torrent of abuse, Owen felt a pat on his shoulder. It was his old regional organizer, who murmured: ‘In fifteen years you’ll be very proud of that speech.’ But for a man who had dreamed of becoming a Labour Prime Minister, it was a humiliating moment. ‘David burns,’ a friend told the politics professors Ivor Crewe and Anthony King. ‘You don’t quite know how he burns, but he burns away. Wembley was an extraordinarily deep shock to him.’60
If Wembley was bad, Bishop’s Stortford was bizarre. This meeting, held two weeks later, was the final session of a ‘commission of inquiry’ set up to hammer out a deal on Labour’s rules. The Hertfordshire setting could hardly have been more incongruous: Whitehall College on the edge of Bishop’s Stortford, built at the turn of the century by the gin merchant Sir Walter Gilbey. This was now the pride and joy of ASTMS’s general secretary Clive Jenkins, an unrepentant show-off who had not merely installed a swimming pool and a sauna, but had even bought new goldfish specifically to impress his Labour visitors. As Benn recorded, the rooms were equipped with drinks, ASTMS-themed mugs and ASTMS-branded penknives, presumably in case they needed to stab their leader in the back. ‘The saunas, the swimming baths and champagne, everything laid on, is corrupting and you can’t produce reform unless you withdraw from that, challenge it,’ he lamented. Still, he steeled himself to go down to the pool, where he found Callaghan ploughing through the water. Benn promptly got out his camera and ‘took some marvellous movie pictures’. Callaghan must have found that a bit unsettling. Fortunately they had left their penknives upstairs.
Despite the five-star surroundings, the meeting was predictably bloody. As was now the norm, the commission was heavily weighted towards the left, with the moderates commanding only two out of fourteen votes, namely Callaghan and the engineers’ leader, Terry Duffy. After they voted on Saturday to approve mandatory reselection, Callaghan suddenly said: ‘I can only tell you you have got a fight on your hands. The PLP will never accept this. I can’t recommend this to the PLP.’fn4 With that, wrote Benn, ‘he picked up his papers and walked out’, leaving the rest of them shell-shocked. Some of them assumed Callaghan had gone straight back to London. In fact, he had probably just gone back to the pool. For when they reconvened the next morning, there he was, as though nothing had happened.
It was Sunday’s session that really confirmed the power of the left. The issue on the table was the leadership, and once again there was an overwhelming majority for change. All but three – Callaghan, Foot and Duffy – backed an electoral college; the only question was how the votes would be divided. With a canny eye on union support, the CLPD had recommended that the unions have 50 per cent, the MPs 25 per cent and the constituency parties 25 per cent. Callaghan said this would be a disaster: ‘The country wouldn’t accept it, it would give the impression the trade unions were running the country.’ Michael Foot agreed: it would be ‘daft’ to give the unions so much clout. ‘Be careful,’ Foot said, ‘because Mrs Thatcher will win the next Election if we go on like this.’ These were prescient words, but Benn was not impressed. At lunch, he and Foot had a terrible row. ‘For the last ten years your only answer to any question is “Don’t rock the boat, you’ll bring in Thatcher, lose power …”’ shouted Benn. ‘You haven’t thought about anything for ten years, that’s what’s wrong with you.’61
After lunch, the commission agreed to recommend an electoral college that gave half the votes to the MPs and divided the rest between the unions and the activists. In other circumstances this might have been a workable compromise, though the final decision would be made by the party conference in Blackpool. But the atmosphere was now so acrimonious that both sides went away disappointed. Even though Benn had secured mandatory reselection and control of the manifesto, he was seething that the MPs would still play a major part in choosing the leader. As for the Labour moderates, they were furious that Callaghan had swallowed an electoral college at all. When the Shadow Cabinet met a few days later, there was a blazing row. David Owen accused his leader of appeasing the left. Rodgers jumped in too, and, as one of them remembered, it all got ‘very, very nasty’. When Owen left the meeting he felt utterly depressed. ‘Waiting it out, hoping to turn things around, seemed pointless,’ he remembered, ‘for we had suffered a mortal blow at Bishop’s Stortford.’ For the first time, he contemplated leaving politics and going back to medicine. But then another idea struck him. Why should he leave politics? Why not set up a new party?62
To the press, Bishop’s Stortford was the final nail in the coffin of Callaghan’s rep
utation. The next day’s front pages, which talked of a humiliating ‘surrender to left-wing pressure’, were awful. The editorial columns were worse. Expecting Callaghan to stand up to the activists, wrote The Times’s Bernard Levin, was like ‘expecting a blancmange, left overnight on the dining room table, to rise from its plate and set about knocking down the burglars who have broken in and are busy stealing the spoons’. For the Guardian’s Peter Jenkins, meanwhile, Callaghan would go down in history as Labour’s Neville Chamberlain, with Michael Foot as Lord Halifax and Bishop’s Stortford as Munich. ‘They have saved the party’, he wrote bitterly, ‘by offering to destroy its independence.’63
A week later, the Daily Mirror, for so long the party’s greatest champion on Fleet Street, ran an impassioned front-page editorial. ‘Message to the bickering, brawling Labour Party,’ ran the headline: ‘Don’t you know there’s a crisis on?’ It was a disgrace, the paper said, that with Britain in the worst slump since the 1930s, the opposition was ‘scrapping about how to pick its leader’. Labour should be the ‘party of hope’, but ‘if it continued along its present road the millions who support it will have the same feeling about Labour as they do about the Thatcher Government. DESPAIR.’
Meanwhile, in the Daily Express, one habitual Labour voter wrote to express his horror:
As a Labour supporter I am disgusted that the party that once stood for so much that was good and just in British politics has lost its will to fight the militant malcontents of the extreme Left and their Trotskyist pals who posture and spew out proposals for more nationalisation, disarmament and class warfare.
This is a recipe for disaster at the next General Election, because I and hundreds of thousands like me will never vote to bring them to power.
We all know that nationalisation is futile and that a disarmament programme nearly lost us the last war.
I say to these people: In God’s name go now – preferably to your beloved Russia.
In a coincidence too glorious for fiction, the writer, who came from east London, was a Mr D. Owen.64
15
Another Day of Feud and Fury
We had enough of you when you were here before, with your policy of turning this country into a BLACK STATE, after which you marched your arse off to Brussels … You are a useless money and glory-grabbing dolt … In fact you are hated by many people in this country.
Letter from a Mrs Brown to Roy Jenkins,
c. November 1979, quoted in John Campbell,
Roy Jenkins: A Well-Rounded Life (2014)
HELMUT SCHMIDT: Is there any possibility that Wedgwood Benn would become leader?
MRS THATCHER: None at all.
HELMUT SCHMIDT: That’s good …
MRS THATCHER: No, you needn’t worry about that, Helmut, we’re not that badly off.
Telephone conversation between Chancellor
Helmut Schmidt and Mrs Thatcher, 30 October 1980
It is the spring of 1981, and the Minister of Administrative Affairs, Jim Hacker, is worried about his future at the top of British politics. Unburdening himself at home with his wife Annie, he is interrupted by a telephone call. It is Brussels: would he be interested in becoming one of Britain’s next European Commissioners? Hacker puts down the phone, deep in thought. It would be a ‘great honour, in a way’, he tells Annie, but it is an awful job really, ‘terrible’. ‘You’re at the heart of that ghastly Brussels bureaucracy, and the whole thing’s a gravy train,’ he says, frowning darkly. ‘Fifty thousand a year salary. Twenty thousand a year expenses. Champagne. Lobster. Foreign travel. Luxury hotel. Private limousines. Private aircraft. Siestas in the afternoon. Long weekends on the beach at Knokke-le-Zoute …’ He pauses: ‘I think we ought to go over and have a look, don’t you?’ ‘Why not?’ says Annie, clearly delighted. But there is a drawback. ‘It’s curtains as far as British politics is concerned,’ Jim says thoughtfully. ‘It’s worse than a peerage. Absolute failure. Total failure. You’re reduced to forming a new party if ever you want to get back.’1
As it happens, Jim Hacker never takes the Brussels job, which is just as well because it would have turned Yes Minister into something more like Duty Free. But as the studio audience laughed, they knew who the writers were really talking about. They were talking about the former Labour minister Roy Jenkins: a man who had served for four years as President of the European Commission, was no stranger to lobster and limousines, and really had formed his own party to get back into British politics.
Ten years earlier, everybody had expected Roy Jenkins to leave a deep imprint on the politics of the age. After spells as a reforming Home Secretary and successful Chancellor in the late 1960s, he was widely seen as the favourite to succeed Harold Wilson as Labour leader. But within just a few years his position in the party had begun to disintegrate. Passionately attached to the European cause, Jenkins led a rebellion to support British entry into the Common Market, and then resigned from the front bench when Wilson decided to back a referendum. Returning as Home Secretary in 1974, he cut an increasingly unhappy figure. When Wilson resigned, Jenkins threw his hat into the ring, but finished well behind Jim Callaghan and Michael Foot. He was disappointed, but not shocked. The truth was that he was tired of life in the Labour Party, sick of its aggressive partisanship and weary of the endless battles with the left. So when, at the turn of 1977, the chance arose to become the sixth President of the European Commission, he took it. To get out of British politics, he wrote, left him ‘liberated and exhilarated’, not least because he ‘had come to believe that Britain was one of the worst governed countries in Western Europe’.2
To Jenkins’s admirers, his eloquence and idealism put him far above the petty partisanship of most politicians. He was the champion of the ‘civilized society’, the standard-bearer of liberalism, the greatest Prime Minister Britain had never had. Alas, not everybody treated him with the respect his fans thought he deserved. The sketchwriter Frank Johnson could not resist mocking this ‘grand, stupendously dignified and largely incomprehensible magnifico from another world’, a ‘gracious figure who is to the liberal classes what the Queen Mother is to the rest of us’. In some respects, this image of Jenkins as a claret-marinated grandee, ‘a socialite, not a socialist’, was a bit unfair. Despite the appearance of effortless superiority, he was a shy, bookish man who struggled with small talk, worried about his health and was given to bouts of gloom when things did not go his way. He was also much more industrious than most people realized. Shirley Williams, whom he later treated pretty badly, thought he was ‘incredibly hard working’, though he carefully disguised it.’3
But there was a lot of truth in the caricature, too. Few people who heard Jenkins’s drawling accent would have imagined that he was the son of a Welsh miner. His tastes for long lunch parties, country-house weekends and patrician MPs’ wives were real enough. And by going to the Babylon of Belgium, where Continental fat cats gorged themselves on the butter mountain before throwing British fishermen on to the dole, he had confirmed his critics’ worst suspicions. In Brussels he was paid £50,000 a year, double the British Prime Minister’s salary and the equivalent of £450,000 today. He also enjoyed a £20,000 annual expense account, three years’ severance pay and a handsome pension. This allowed him to maintain a ‘small art nouveau town house’ in Brussels, from where he made regular sorties to the Belgian capital’s finest dining places, as well as to the suburbs (‘littered with Michelin two-stars’) and to nearby cities such as Ghent, Bruges and Antwerp (‘rich in restaurants’). What Tony Benn would have made of this can readily be imagined.4
Yet Jenkins was never entirely comfortable in exile. Part of him missed home: he spent one in four weekends in Oxfordshire, read the British papers avidly and kept up with his political friends and colleagues. In particular, he maintained a strong relationship with the young Liberal leader, David Steel. As Asquith’s biographer, Jenkins was very well disposed to the Liberals, who had polled almost 20 per cent in the two elections of 1974. He had alwa
ys been unusually non-tribal, and told friends that he was ‘thoroughly fed up with the party system’, which was ‘a conspiracy against the people’. Working alongside Heath and Whitelaw in the European referendum, he had felt ‘a considerable liberation of the spirit’. For a time, he hoped that the campaign might lead to a coalition of Tory Wets, Liberals and Labour moderates. But that never happened, so he went off to Brussels instead. It was telling, though, that in the 1979 general election he did not vote. His wife Jennifer voted Liberal.5
Not long after the general election, the BBC invited Jenkins to deliver the televised Dimbleby Lecture on 23 November. Here was an unrivalled opportunity to set out his credo, and one he seized with alacrity. Yet the result, entitled ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’, was not exactly a ringing call to arms. The gist, dressed up in his typically florid prose, was that the current two-party system was not working. The Tories and Labour had drifted to the extremes, partisanship had reached unprecedented heights and the public were desperate for an alternative. It was time, he argued, for Britain to adopt proportional representation and coalition government. In particular, he called for a ‘new grouping’ committed to a mixed economy, ‘co-operation and not conflict in industry’ and a state that ‘knows its place’. His ideal Britain, he said, would be classless, ‘confident and outward-looking’, without succumbing to an ‘aggressive intolerant proletarianism’ or to the ‘brash and selfish values of a get-rich-quick society’. And he ended with what even he admitted was a hackneyed pay-off, a quotation from Yeats: ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity … Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.’6
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