Roy Jenkins
Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by John Campbell
List of Illustrations
Dedication
Title Page
Introduction
1. His Father’s Son
2. David and Jonathan
3. The Gate at Dartington
4. Captain Jenkins
5. False Starts
6. Baby of the House
7. Fair Shares for the Rich
8. Expanding Horizons
9. The Liberal Agenda
10. ‘Fight and Fight Again’?
11. Office at Last
12. ‘A More Civilised Society’
13. ‘Two Years’ Hard Slog’
14. Europe before Party
15. What Matters Now
16. Back to the Home Office
17. Victory and Defeat
18. ‘Le Roi Jean Quinze’
19. ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’
20. The Gang of Four
21. ‘Prime Minister Designate’
22. Elder Statesman
23. History Man
Picture Section
Notes
Index
Acknowledgements
Sources and Bibliography
Copyright
About the Book
Roy Jenkins was probably the best Prime Minister Britain never had. But though he never reached 10 Downing Street, he left a more enduring mark on British society than most of those who did. His career spans the full half-century from Attlee to Tony Blair during which he helped transform almost every area of national life and politics.
First, as a radical Home Secretary in the 1960s he drove through the decriminalisation of homosexuality and the legalisation of abortion, abolished theatre censorship and introduced the first legislation to outlaw discrimination on grounds of both race and gender. Attacked by conservatives as the godfather of the permissive society, he was a pioneering champion of gay rights, racial equality and feminism. He also reformed the police and criminal trials and introduced the independent police complaints commission.
Second, he was an early and consistent advocate of European unity who played a decisive role in achieving British membership first of the Common Market and then of the European Union. From 1977 to 1980 he served as the first (and so far only) British president of the European Commission. Public opinion today may be swinging against Europe; but for the past forty years participation in Europe was seen by all parties as an unquestioned benefit, and no one had more influence than Jenkins in that historic redirection of British policy.
Third, in 1981, when both the Conservative and Labour parties had moved sharply to the right and left respectively he founded the centrist Social Democratic Party (SDP) which failed in its immediate ambition of breaking the mould of British politics – largely because the Falklands war transformed Mrs Thatcher’s popularity – but merged with the Liberals to form the Liberal Democrats and paved the way for Tony Blair’s creation of New Labour.
On top of all this, Jenkins was a compulsive writer whose twenty-three books included bestselling biographies of Asquith, Gladstone and Churchill. As Chancellor of Oxford University he was the embodiment of the liberal establishment with a genius for friendship who knew and cultivated everyone who mattered in the overlapping worlds of politics, literature, diplomacy and academia; he also had many close women friends and enjoyed an unconventional private life. His biography is the story of an exceptionally well-filled and well-rounded life.
About the Author
John Campbell is the author of many biographies including one of Edward Heath, for which he won the 1994 NCR award, The Iron Lady: Margaret Thatcher, from Grocer’s Daughter to Iron Lady and, most recently, Pistols at Dawn: Two Hundred Years of Political Rivalry from Pitt and Fox to Blair and Brown. He is married and lives in Kent.
Also by John Campbell
LLOYD GEORGE: THE GOAT IN THE WILDERNESS
F. E. SMITH, FIRST EARL OF BIRKENHEAD
ROY JENKINS: A BIOGRAPHY
NYE BEVAN AND THE MIRAGE OF BRITISH SOCIALISM
EDWARD HEATH: A BIOGRAPHY
MARGARET THATCHER: THE GROCER’S DAUGHTER
MARGARET THATCHER: THE IRON LADY
IF LOVE WERE ALL . . . : THE STORY OF FRANCES STEVENSON AND DAVID LLOYD GEORGE
PISTOLS AT DAWN: TWO HUNDRED YEARS OF POLITICAL RIVALRY FROM PITT AND FOX TO BLAIR AND BROWN
List of Illustrations
1. Roy with his mother (By permission of Dame Jennifer Jenkins)
2. The day Arthur Jenkins was released from prison, 1927 (By permission of Dame Jennifer Jenkins)
3. Arthur Jenkins at 10 Downing Street, 1945 (Daily Herald Archive/National Media Museum/Science & Society Picture Library)
4. Eduard Beneš addresses the Oxford Union, 1940 (The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Jenkins Paper Box 3, 3 (Oxford Union))
5. The Union Committee, 1940 (The Madron Seligman Collection)
6. Roy and Jennifer on their wedding day, 1945 (Alpha Press/The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Jenkins Paper Box 3, 42991)
7. Jenkins and Denis Healey at the Labour Party conference, 1945 (Getty Images)
8. Jenkins canvassing old soldiers, Southwark, 1948 (Daily Herald Archive/National Media Museum/Science & Society Picture Library)
9. Roy canvassing building workers, Southwark, 1948 (Daily Herald Archive/National Media Museum/Science & Society Picture Library/The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Jenkins Paper Box 3, 154)
10. Jenkins with Clement Attlee, 1959 (By permission of Dame Jennifer Jenkins)
11. Jenkins’ election address at Stechford, 1950 (By permission of Dame Jennifer Jenkins)
12. Canvassing with Tony Crosland, Grimsby, 1959 (Photograph by Neil Libbert)
13. Hugh Gaitskell (Getty Images)
14. Jenkins speaking at the Labour Party conference, 1962 (© TopFoto)
15. Barley Alison (By permission of Rosie Alison)
16. Caroline and Ian Gilmour (Getty Images)
17. Ann Fleming, Mark and Leslie Bonham Carter (donfeatures.com)
18. Roy and Jennifer at East Hendred with Cynthia and Edward, 1969 (PA/PA Archive/Press Association Images)
19. Roy at Ladbroke Square (© Estate of Peter Keen/National Portrait Gallery, London)
20. Jenkins with George Brown, 1968 (PA/PA Archive/Press Association Images)
21. Bill Rodgers (By permission of Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank)
22. John Harris (© UPP/TopFoto)
23. Jenkins, as Home Secretary, inspecting the London Fire Brigade, 1966 (The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Jenkins Paper Box 3, 6942/B/London Metropolitan Archives)
24. Visiting the scene where three policemen were shot, 1966 (Getty Images)
25. The Chancellor of the Exchequer arriving at the Treasury, 1968 (Photograph by Neil Libbert)
26. Jenkins leaving 11 Downing Street to present his first budget, 1968 (Getty Images)
27. Roy Jenkins and Harold Wilson, 1970 (© The Economist Newspaper Limited, London (1970))
28. The Opposition Front Bench, 1970 (Getty Images)
29. Tennis at East Hendred, 1969 (Getty Images)
30. Tennis at East Hendred, 1976 (Getty Images)
31. Speaking at the Labour Party special conference on the Common Market, 1975 (Getty Images)
32. Jenkins with Jeremy Thorpe and Edward Heath during the European Referendum Campaign, 1975 (Getty Images)
33. The television debate between Jenkins and Tony Benn, 1975 (Getty Images)
34. Struck by a flour bomb, 1975 (© PA Photos/TopFoto)
35. Jenkins in his study at East Hendred (The Times/Newssyndication.com)
37. Jenkins on an official visit to Timbuctoo (The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Jenkins Paper Box 2, 469)
38. President Jenkins in session in the Berlaymont building, Brussels, 1977 (© European Union, 2013)
39. With President Giscard D’Estaing (Getty Images)
40. With Chancellor Helmut Schmidt (Bundesregierung/Detlef Gräfingholt)
41. With British Foreign Secretary David Owen (Getty Images)
42. With President Carter and Margaret Thatcher (Archivio Cameraphoto Epoche/Getty Images)
43. Delivering the Dimbleby Lecture, 1979 (© Neil Libbert, first published in the Observer)
44. The Gang of Four after the Limehouse Declaration, 1981 (Getty Images)
45. Jenkins announcing his intention to fight the Warrington by-election for the SDP, 1981 (Getty Images)
46. Canvassing in Warrington (left) (The Times)
47. Canvassing in Warrington (right) (© PA Photos/TopFoto)
48. Laughing in the rain, Warrington, 1981 (© PA Photos/TopFoto)
49. Jenkins returning to the House of Commons, 1982 (Popperfoto/Getty Images)
50. The Leaders of the Alliance: Jenkins and David Steel, 1983 (The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Jenkins Paper Box 5, 472)
51. Jennifer and Roy, Great Yarmouth, 1982 (Photograph by Neil Libbert)
52. Writing in Tuscany, 1993 (By permission of Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank)
53. In procession as Chancellor of Oxford University (© Copyright Billett Potter, Oxford)
54. Winning the Whitbread Biography Award, 1995 (UPP/TopFoto)
55. Roy and Jennifer in 1999 (donfeatures.com)
For Kirsty again, in love and gratitude,
and also for the next generation –
Barnaby, Willow and Angus,
Rosie and Isabel
Roy Jenkins
A Well-Rounded Life
John Campbell
Introduction
ROY JENKINS ENJOYED an exceptionally long career at or near the top of British politics. He was first elected to Parliament at the age of twenty-seven in 1948. He sat in the House of Commons for the next twenty-eight years, rising in that time to be Home Secretary twice, Chancellor of the Exchequer and deputy leader of the Labour party, and appeared well placed to succeed Harold Wilson as Prime Minister until he wrecked his position in the party by his determined support for British membership of the European Common Market. After four years out to serve as the first (and so far only) British President of the European Commission, he returned to the Commons for a further five years as one of the founders of the Social Democratic Party, which, after initial heady success, narrowly failed to break the stranglehold of the Conservative and Labour parties on British politics; he then moved to the House of Lords, where he continued to play an influential role for another fifteen years until his death in 2003. This active parliamentary span of almost fifty-five years is surpassed only by Gladstone in the nineteenth century and Churchill in the twentieth – the titanic subjects of two of Jenkins’ bestselling biographies – and matched by very few others.
Moreover, though he failed in his ambition to become Prime Minister – and indeed only held office for just over eight years – Jenkins left a greater mark on British life and politics than many who did successfully climb Disraeli’s greasy pole. In three distinct areas – his Home Office reforms of the 1960s, Britain’s membership of the European Union and the reshaping of the centre left of British politics – his legacy is enduring.
First, as Home Secretary for the first time in 1966–7, he saw onto the Statute Book a shopping list of overdue reforms which between them transformed the ethos of British life: legalising homosexuality between consenting adults, allowing easier abortion (ending the scandal of thousands of women dying every year from illegal operations), abolishing stage censorship by the Lord Chamberlain, ending corporal punishment in prisons (capital punishment had already been suspended, after a campaign in which he played a leading part, just before he took office) and taking the first steps to outlaw racial discrimination and (in his second spell at the Home Office in the 1970s) sex discrimination, as well as radically restructuring the police service and reforming key parts of the criminal justice system. When subsequently demonised by conservatives as the godfather of the ‘permissive society’ and all its attendant ills, Jenkins was always able to point out that no subsequent government – not even Margaret Thatcher with her three-figure majorities – ever tried to reverse any of these measures, which in combination helped to make Britain a freer and more equal society. No doubt they would all have come about sooner or later, but it took extraordinary determination, courage, clarity of purpose and skill on Jenkins’ part to drive them through in a very short space of time when he had the opportunity.
Second, he played a role second only to Edward Heath in taking Britain belatedly into the European Community, campaigning consistently for British membership from the late 1950s onwards, leading a large rebellion of Labour MPs against the party whip to carry the decisive vote in favour of entry in 1971, and then taking a leading part in the cross-party referendum campaign that confirmed British membership in 1975. At the time, and for thirty years afterwards, this seemed an historic and irreversible decision. Today that certainty is called into question. Not only has Britain consistently baulked at committing to the further evolution of what is now the European Union, from the Social Chapter and the Schengen Agreement to the single currency, but there is now for the first time a serious possibility of Britain leaving the EU altogether. Though in his later years Jenkins was frustrated by the Blair government’s failure to join the euro, he was convinced that it was only a matter of time; withdrawal from Europe entirely was unimaginable at the time of his death. Since then the rising tide of Euroscepticism, driven by a relentlessly hostile press and apparently vindicated by the near-collapse of the euro in 2012, inevitably tarnishes this part of his once unquestionable legacy. Nevertheless the argument is not over. In or out, Britain’s relationship with Europe will remain a critical subject for debate and decision for years to come; and the pro-Europeans are beginning cautiously to find their voice again. Arguments about markets and sovereignty apart, from the moment he took up the cause the central thrust of Jenkins’ case for membership was the belief that Britain must shake off the hangover of empire and learn to live with her continental neighbours as one medium-sized European power among others. In the decade since his death the experience of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and other ill-advised attempts to play the world’s policeman alongside the United States has shown that this lesson has still to be learned.
Third, though Jenkins’ bold attempt to recast the ossified structure of British politics ended in the short run with the failure of the SDP to break the mould in 1983, the shock of the SDP defection helped to drag the Labour party back from the clutches of the far left and led within barely more than a decade to the creation by Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson of ‘New Labour’ – a post-socialist makeover that made Labour electable again by adopting practically everything the SDP had stood for, from continued membership of NATO and the EU to the abandonment of nationalisation and the ending of old Labour’s institutional subservience to the trade unions. The merger of the SDP with the Liberals to form the Liberal Democrats in 1988 created a much stronger and more disciplined third force than the old Liberal Party. Then, in the 1990s, Jenkins hoped to heal the historic breach between the Labour and Liberal parties, which had allowed the Tories to dominate the twentieth century, by persuading Tony Blair to form a Labour–Lib Dem coalition and cement it by introducing some form of proportional representation. Blair’s landslide majority in 1997 and the refusal of his senior colleagues to give up a system that had rewarded Labour so handsomely put paid to that: Jenkins’ recommendations were kicked into the long grass in 1998 and electoral reform was decisively rejected again by the refe
rendum of 2012. Here again, however, the debate is not over. The devolved parliaments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the Mayor of London and British members of the European Parliament are all elected by more or less proportional systems: first-past-the-post for Westminster is increasingly an anomaly, and pressure for reform will continue as elections with a low turnout and a multiplicity of parties continue to produce increasingly bizarre and unpredictable results. Jenkins’ 1998 proposals will continue to be the starting point for discussion of a practical and principled alternative.
Thus while Jenkins’ social reforms of the 1960s remain unchallenged and irreversible, the other two great causes of his later years appear to have suffered serious setbacks since his death. Britain’s membership of Europe could yet turn out to be an historic cul-de-sac; the reformers may never succeed in overcoming the vested interest of the two dominant parties in maintaining the existing voting system. But in the long run the overwhelming likelihood is that in both cases Jenkins’ vision will eventually be realised. Britain cannot for ever evade the geographic facts of life that make it ineluctably a part of Europe, single currency and all; and Westminster must one day accede to the justice of a properly representative electoral system. In all three areas, I believe, Jenkins will ultimately be seen as having been on the side of history.
But Jenkins was much more than just an unusually thoughtful politician. He was also a prolific writer, author over his lifetime of twenty-one books, including four full-length political biographies, four shorter biographies, two biographical collections, his own autobiography and several volumes of assorted essays, speeches, book reviews and other journalism. His writing was done mainly on holiday, in parliamentary recesses and at weekends; but it was much more than a hobby. It was a second career, which he sustained alongside his primary dedication to politics – while somehow managing to earn a reputation for being lazy! Except for the relatively few years when he was in government Jenkins, like Churchill, earned far more by writing than he did from politics and supported his family and an expensive lifestyle largely by his pen. And at least three or four of his books will continue to be read for years to come.