Roy Jenkins

by John Campbell

  The rest of this long letter was mainly about, first, the government’s suppression of the Communist Daily Worker (of which, on balance, Roy approved); and, second, John Strachey’s new line (expounded at another OUDSC meeting the following week) that a third way between socialism and fascism would become possible after the war, namely a sort of modified capitalism on the lines of Roosevelt’s New Deal. In influential books like The Coming Struggle for Power Strachey had been a leading Marxist theoretician before the war; but he was now moderating his views – he finished up as a middle-of-the-road minister in the Attlee government. Jenkins very soon followed the same evolution. At this stage, however, he felt that Strachey’s ‘chief fallacy lay in the fact his examples are nearly all taken from the US, which is still in a rather different stage of development to any European country’. But he wanted to know Tony’s view.

  Finally Roy described his army medical. ‘Despite the fact that I could read nothing with my one eye and was feeling absolutely at death’s door, they put me a Grade One with a certain gay abandon . . . I think that I’m probably safely in the Artillery . . . though I don’t know definitely,’ before ending by assuring Tony that he was ‘looking forward immensely’ to seeing him on 1 March. ‘Saturday afternoons in this term make me want you and the Red Menace v. badly. We must get a car from somewhere and have one drive and one Trust House tea together during your leave . . . Very much love, Roy.’22

  Tony replied from Rhyl, where he was on weekend leave. Having previously persuaded Roy that class was fundamental, he had now – after six months’ experience of the army – realised that Marx was wrong: the working class, he had discovered, was not primarily moved by class feeling, but by patriotism, religion, liberalism and ‘strong conservatism’. Moreover Strachey was right about Roosevelt’s New Deal: ‘modified State capitalism, given efficient leadership, should be quite able to ameliorate w-c standards of living to an enormous extent’. Having led Roy up the Marxist path, Tony was now leading him down it again. He too was looking forward to the next weekend, and hoped that Roy would be able to get hold of a car. ‘I’d awfully love to spend the first night at 2 St John St, so that we could chatter on as long as we liked, but I suppose Mrs P. could only offer me that sleep-destroying sofa. Write soon. Very much love, Tony.’23

  Evidently Roy did not need to find a car, since Tony brought the Red Menace to Oxford. Jennifer was there too, to attend a conference, and so met Tony for the first time: the three of them had a ‘wildly dangerous drive to Woodstock’.24 They continued to make an awkward triangle for the next two years until Tony was posted abroad in 1943. At the same time as beginning to work hard for his Schools that spring, Roy saw both Jennifer and Tony as often as he could. Jennifer clearly resented the fact that Roy still felt obliged to see Tony whenever he got leave, sometimes ahead of her. Roy and Jennifer were still writing passionate letters assuring one another of their love, but they were not yet sure that it would last, obsessively anticipating what they called ‘the BB’ – presumably the ‘Big Break’. After they had spent what Jennifer called ‘an absolutely lovely week’ together in March – ‘I do love you absolutely, utterly and exclusively and you must believe it otherwise it will worry both of us’25 – Roy wrote: ‘I still think that the BB is a good deal further away than I thought it to be at Xmas & I still hold that it’s conceivable that it may never come. But I don’t awfully like your solution – that our love should achieve permanence by reducing itself several stages. My romanticism is so incorrigible that I would almost prefer to remember you when we loved each other completely than to have you when we loved each other partially or, at least, rather unexcitingly.’26

  A fortnight they spent together in Pontypool and Oxford over Easter was marred by arguments over Jennifer’s insistence on her need for ‘independence’. Having returned to Pontypool to see Tony, Roy wrote to Jennifer that he was ‘horribly worried about our future relationship’:

  I have an unpleasant fear that it means that we shall probably have a summer of increasingly frequent disagreements & minor ‘scenes’. This doesn’t necessarily mean the end, unless, as is v. likely, you begin to think that the whole thing is hardly worth while.

  Noting that she seemed to think the BB was inevitable and was ‘even tactfully working up to it’, he went on:

  I don’t imagine that you will come to any different conclusion about the ‘virginity’ issue. It’s probably not really v. important, thinking about it since, I have decided that it was merely another facet of the independence difficulty that came up at Pontypool and, as such, is pretty disturbing.27

  Jennifer, back in Cambridge, replied that, on the contrary, their last row had made the BB less likely. ‘It made us realise that we couldn’t do without each other and know how acutely miserable we could make each other . . . I no longer think I am or ever will be dominated by you Darling, we shall just become part of each other and the influence will be mutual and of course the restaurant argument illustrating who’s on top is v. important from my point of view!’28 But two days later she had backtracked slightly from this flash of feminism: ‘I am completely happy about our present relationship . . . I didn’t mean all that silly stuff about dominating and independence . . . All I want is that we should be a complete unity.’29

  A couple of weeks later again Roy had clearly been discussing the question of ‘emotional independence’ with Tony, since Jennifer now wrote that ‘I’m sure one can’t love anyone as much as we do and still retain it and anyhow I think Tony’s completely wrong to have had that as an object. I’d far, far rather have times of such perfect happiness as we have had, even if they entail such intense misery afterwards, than just go on being moderately happy.’30

  Tony was now training as a signals officer in Wrexham. (He was rather annoyed at this posting, but recognised that it might reduce his chance of getting killed.) In the summer term he wrote three further letters, which showed that he had not yet given up on Roy. In one, dated 11 May, he apologised for not writing earlier:

  Another reason for delay was that I was toying with the idea of writing a long introspective letter about our friendship, discussing the effects on it of various factors such as June [presumably a girlfriend], Jennie, your decisions about the Army, our enforced separation, David Graves [a fellow officer, son of the poet Robert Graves] and other persons & factors. I had actually started this letter, but then decided it would perhaps be wiser to drop it, for fear of your misinterpreting certain things I was going to say . . . Don’t let’s have another fortnight’s delay before I get your next letter. I love you still very much, Tony.31

  In the second, of 3 June, he recalled happy times the previous summer – before Roy met Jennifer – in terms irresistibly reminiscent of Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited. It was now, as then, swelteringly hot – ‘just like some of those days last summer when we used to go out in the Red Menace together’:

  Do you remember a day in Pangbourne when we had tea almost alone in a rather palatial hotel, and laughed cynically together at the photographs in the ‘Tatler’? Or a drive back from, I think, Henley? Or lying in the grass by a ruined Abbey just near Burford? One of the great joys of those expeditions was that even on the way home we always had a flick [film] in the evening to look forward to.

  I’m glad I came back for that brief 48 hrs. We at last had the introspective discussion that otherwise would have been much less satisfactorily carried out through the post, and we have once again settled a problem that seemed at first sight all but insoluble. Perhaps we have even been taught, once again, the folly of being so absurdly introspective about our friendship! . . .

  Well, no more news. Work hard, and don’t let down the old-established and well-known firm of Crosland and Jenkins, which for all its turbulent history is still united by bonds as strong and close as ever. Very much love, Tony.32

  Two weeks later (18 June) came a rather briefer letter:

  My dear Roy,

  I’m a l
ittle disappointed not to have had any reply from you to my last letter; but I’m very tired of all this mutual suspicion and recrimination that have so often marked our friendship, so I will put it down to School’s [sic] & say no more about it.

  He planned to spend the first day or two of his next leave in Pontypool, then London and Oxford, if that suited Roy. ‘All the best in Schools, Tony.’33

  At Easter Roy had belatedly decided that he had better start doing some work for his Schools. Since his first year he had, by his own account, entirely stopped going to lectures; and most of his reading had been directed to Union speeches and OUDSC affairs. Fortunately at least two-thirds of PPE overlapped with his political interests, so he had read and absorbed the prophets of modern British socialism: Cole, Laski, Hugh Dalton and Evan Durbin. Within Balliol he was taught philosophy by ‘Sandy’ Lindsay, politics by John Fulton (many years later the author of an influential report on the reform of the civil service) and economics by a young Hungarian, newly arrived in Oxford, Thomas Balogh. Balogh was eccentric but in Jenkins’ recollection ‘by far the best teacher I had’.34 He used to provoke Roy by attacking Attlee so that Roy would have to defend him.35 Roy also wrote history essays for a senior Fellow called A.B. Rodger, some of which survive: to a modern eye they are very old-fashioned diplomatic history on subjects like ‘The Near Eastern Crisis from 1875 to 1878’ or ‘The Problem of Franco-German Security up to Locarno’, and very dull. Nevertheless Rodger, while sometimes doubting the depth of his knowledge, praised his writing style, which pleased Jenkins so much that he quoted the compliment in his memoirs fifty years later. Because so many of the Balliol Fellows were away at the war, he was also taught by dons from other colleges, including G.D.H. Cole. Looking back, he thought that his heroes were already Keynes and Roosevelt, ‘balanced by an interest in and affection for all things French . . . I was infused by liberal optimism, tempered but not hobbled by a tendency to make mildly mocking jokes about the people and institutions I most admired. That was essentially the cast of mind which Oxford, working on my natural proclivity, gave me.’36

  But then Balogh warned him that he (and Ginsburg, with whom he shared tutorials) must do some work, or both would fail and he would lose his job. So, encouraged also by his flatmate Halevy, Jenkins set himself a schedule of eight hours a day, seven days a week for eighty days – that is, from late March to mid-June 1941 – reworking his old essays and Crosland’s (on philosophy, presumably), which Tony had lent him, filling in the gaps with intensive reading. This was the first exercise of a hitherto unrevealed capacity for concentrated work over a short period, which later served him well in politics. At the time, however, his mood veered between ‘a considerable degree of optimism and absolute despair’.37 At one point, still in Pontypool, he was convinced that he was ‘absolutely set for a 3rd, if not a 4th’.38 Back in Oxford, he fretted that ‘my state is getting progressively worse’:

  I’m completely failing to work on anything approaching a plan. I am only managing to do an average of about 6 hours . . . Most of the time I just sit, doing absolutely nothing at all. This getting up at 6.0 A.M. started off v. well, but has now developed into the most ghastly vice . . . It merely means that I am losing 2 hours of very necessary sleep.39

  In Cambridge Jennifer also had exams, part one of her history tripos, and her nerves too were getting frayed. ‘It’s a good thing you’re not here perhaps Darling,’ she reflected, ‘as it might bring the BB considerably nearer. Also if we were together I very much doubt if either of us would do eight hours a day.’40

  They still found time to exchange political views, with Jennifer tending to be the more radical. She was involved in the same sort of battles with the Communists that Roy and Tony had been fighting in Oxford; but she was also worried by the formation of a middle-of-the-road ‘New Britain Club’, which ‘the wretched [J.B.] Priestley’ was coming to address (having turned down the Labour Club):

  I very much hope, darling, that you agree in thinking that these ‘non-party progressive’ movements are peculiarly insidious. They are in fact the greatest danger that the L.P. will have to face in the next few years. They have such a very obvious appeal to middle class socialists who have come to the L.P., but who have no sound theoretical (Marxist, if you like) background. Fortunately the danger of working-class penetration is not so great, since these new movements tend to be strongly anti-TU.41

  She might have been a Labour loyalist warning about the SDP in 1981! Unfortunately Roy’s reply has not survived. But a few weeks later – soon after Tony had made his U-turn on the class struggle – he told her somewhat pompously that she was ‘in increasingly grave danger of falling into all the faults of the “left-wing intellectual” attitude to politics . . . I must try to put you right again when you come to Oxford.’42 It seems he had only temporary success, since a couple of weeks later she was unrepentant:

  You probably succeeded in removing my left-wing deviation fairly effectively but after the summer when I’ve had time to read a lot and have enough data to base a proper opinion on you won’t . . . I shall convert you from your reactionary tendencies.43

  On the other hand, Jennifer was prepared to consider ‘a modified form of proportional representation – say four or five member constituencies’, as proposed by the Liberal historian Ramsay Muir;44 while Roy – ironically, in the light of his position half a century later – dismissed Muir’s idea as ‘complete nonsense’, merely ‘an attempt to give the poor Liberals a new place in the state’. Just like the critics of his own scheme in 1998, he argued first that PR would mean that ‘Govts are chosen, not by the electorate, but by the manoeuvres of various groups in the House. A British electorate [unlike the French] gets what it thinks it wants’; and, second, that ‘Coalition or minority govt. must inevitably be weak’, except in the special conditions of wartime. ‘The gt. virtues of the 2-party system are, as you are no doubt aware, that it gives some measure of continuity & . . . responsibility.’45

  Over Easter Roy somehow found time to write an article on the future of the Labour Party. He sent it to Jennifer for approval; but her praise was qualified:

  I think your chef d’oeuvre’s rather good . . . As you say, it’s quite impossible to put the case for socialism in a few words, but you seem to have selected the principal problems and shown how they could be solved fairly effectively, tho’ I don’t know that it’s all quite enough thought out.

  She still took a hard line on the question of class war:

  I don’t quite see the point of the paragraph on taking the class war out of politics. It’s obviously v. desirable and it obviously would come, in any socialist state, but just as obviously (I should have thought) it will [illegible] as long as the L.P. is trying to effect far-reaching changes in the distribution of power and wealth and the present possessing-classes are trying to keep what they’ve got. I’m afraid this sounds like the criticism of an essay but I assure you Darling I was very interested and most impressed! I hope it arrived in time to be included in the book.46

  On 1 May Roy spoke in a Union debate against the continuation of the coalition after the end of the war. According to the Oxford Magazine, he was ‘more merciful than usual to the Conservatives, but still demanded a completely Labour Government carrying through a completely socialist programme’.47 His speech, he told Jennifer, was nevertheless ‘regarded as disgustingly right-wing & was therefore badly received by lunatics like Anthony [Elliott] and Michael [Ashcroft]. I think if I had more time I should develop a new political line: we must work on it during the vac; although you almost certainly won’t agree.’48 Jennifer responded firmly:

  I v. much deplore your right-wing speech in the Union – and fear there must be something very reactionary if Michael, Anthony and David were all up in arms against it. This time Darling I expect it will have to be me who will have to put you on the right lines again!49

  A few days later it seemed that Roy’s line had weakened further: ‘The more I think about it,’ Jenn
ifer now told him, ‘the more I think your idea of a short opportune Conservative–Labour Coalition at the end of the war would be disastrous’ – first, because it would be impossible to keep the Labour party together; second, because ‘after the war any government which doesn’t put through a very sweeping programme . . . will become v. unpopular and there will be a great revulsion of feeling against it for not fulfilling everybody’s wartime ideals. If the L.P. can’t use the critical moment for its own policy it should do its best not to share the general opprobrium any government will get’; and, third, because ‘Any democratic socialist party must as soon as it gets a clear majority put thro’ a programme to change the economic structure of the country – a policy of social reform is not much good and can easily be revoked.’50 These letters display both shrewd political judgement and a remarkable confidence that Labour could win a post-war election on its own – not at the time a widely shared view.

  Roy’s hard work paid off. He surprised both himself and his tutors by narrowly achieving a First. Balogh claimed to have needed a stiff drink to recover from the shock. Lindsay was disappointed by his low mark in philosophy – allegedly the lowest by a Balliol man since PPE was established in 1924 – but told Roy that he had gained straight alphas in ‘descriptive history’.51 At least one family friend claimed not to have been surprised. The deputy Prime Minister sent his typically laconic congratulations: ‘My dear Roy . . . I had a bet with Arthur that you would pull it off all right . . . C.R. Attlee.’52