Poor Tories! They still believe that they are the people and those who vote against them are just the riff-raff. But what is the truth? It is that the Labour Government is the greatest bulwark against totalitarianism of any sort, both in this country and in Europe as a whole. It offers freedom with social justice, it offers an end to industrial unrest and to the long dole queues, which are the most dangerous breeding grounds of totalitarianism.
That is why its success is so important to other countries. That is why people all over the world are watching it, almost with bated breath.44
Jenkins held the seat quite easily – Labour did not drop a single by-election between 1945 and 1951 – but his share of the vote was down:
Roy Jenkins (Labour) 8,744
James Greenwood (Conservative) 4,623
Labour majority
4,12145
Greenwood claimed that a similar swing across the country at the next election would give the Tories a working majority; but Jenkins was well pleased. ‘The result shows that, despite the present national difficulties, the majority of people do appreciate the way the Labour Government is trying to solve our problems.’46 He had fought a good campaign, served the government well and achieved his own first ambition at the same time. However precariously, he was – at twenty-seven – the youngest Member of the House of Commons. He had got his toe on the bottom rung of the ladder.
* * *
fn1 Sparkbrook fell to the Tories at the 1959 General Election, so it was not completely safe. But Roy Hattersley won it back for Labour in 1964 and held it until 1997; so the likelihood is that, as the sitting Member, Jenkins could have held on in 1959.
fn2 The Tory candidate, Lt-Col. Martin Lindsay, DSO, was a regular army officer who had achieved fame as an Arctic explorer before the war. He sat for Solihull from 1945 to 1964 without achieving office, before receiving one of the last baronetcies awarded by Macmillan in 1962.
fn3 He also noted a fundamental difference between them. Kinross had an instinctive feel for making money, but no desire to spend it. By contrast, ‘I had practically no feel at all for making it, but quite a considerable desire to spend it.’16
fn4 ‘He was not hostile to religion or clergymen,’ Roy wrote, ‘but quietly agnostic’, which was precisely his own position all his life. Hattie, by contrast, was a devout chapel-goer until Arthur’s death, after which she never attended again. ‘I never asked her why, but I think she must have thought that God had let her down.’22
fn5 Such insights as there are derived mainly from his own very limited experience. Thus he wrote that Attlee’s eight hours’ work a day for his Schools was ‘about the maximum’;34 that ‘the organisers of political meetings are notoriously flattering in their letters to possible speakers’;35 and that Attlee avoided the mistake ‘often committed by younger intellectuals, of attempting to judge his military superiors by standards more applicable to . . . a university don or a writer in a Left-wing periodical’.36 Already he compared Attlee with Asquith, and revealed an early prejudice against Lloyd George. But almost the only flourish that might have come from one of his mature biographies is a remark (apropos Oswald Mosley) that ‘Only the politically illiterate regarded Moscow and Mussolini’s Rome as the same place, but one could start for either by taking the boat train to Dover.’37
6
Baby of the House
JENKINS ARRIVED AT Westminster not, like most new Members, with a sense of excitement and novelty at the strangeness of the place, but rather with a slightly blasé sense of relief that – young though he was – he had come into his entitlement at last. He already knew the House pretty well, not only from watching debates from the gallery since he was a boy, but from meeting his father in the bars and corridors of the building. During the war he had more than once waited for Arthur in the deputy Prime Minister’s room.fn1 He knew most of the senior members of the Labour government, from Attlee downwards, who had been his father’s friends; and this exalted connection was reinforced by Attlee insisting on acting as one of his sponsors when he was formally introduced on 3 May 1948. (The London area whip was, more conventionally, the other.) To Attlee this was a natural favour to his old friend’s son who had just written his biography; but it inevitably cast Jenkins in the eyes of his new colleagues as a sort of teacher’s pet. This was not the best start to a parliamentary career.
He nearly compounded it by immediately becoming PPS to Hugh Dalton. The former Chancellor, who had been obliged to resign after an unwitting budget leak six months earlier, was about to return to the Cabinet as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Before Jenkins was even elected Dalton had floated the possibility of taking him on, and found Attlee warm to the idea.1 Either Dalton thought better of it or Jenkins had the sense to refuse. But Dalton was an assiduous patron of young talent, and Jenkins quickly joined the circle of his young protégés. At the party conference at Scarborough in mid-May Dalton recorded having Roy and Jennifer at his table as well as his particular favourite, for whom he nursed a homoerotic attraction, Tony Crosland. Two weeks later Jenkins wrote to congratulate Dalton on his return to the Cabinet. ‘I don’t know whether I am entitled to address you as “Dear Hugh”, but you once told me that you liked impertinent young men.’2 But Roy could never be as impertinent as Tony.
Jenkins described his first impressions of the House in a speech to the Newport Model Parliament.fn2 With a candour that no new MP would risk these days, he admitted that the first weeks after his election were ‘a period of relief, of relaxation, almost of anti-climax, after the rigours of a by-election campaign’.3 In his memoirs, too, he recalled his time as Member for Central Southwark as ‘an easy life’. Labour’s still enormous majority meant that whipping was light; and Southwark itself was ‘undemanding’:
I went there often – it was only a ten-minute and one-penny tramcar-ride away – and tried to find non- or quasi-political organisations to address. But no-one seemed to expect this. Neither of the other members did it, nor had my predecessor. Constituency correspondence was negligible. Advice bureaux were more popular, but not much. It was one of the last of the pocket boroughs.4
What he most enjoyed, after the constraints of a nine-to-five job at the ICFC and before that the army, was the freedom to allocate his own time. It was not that he did not work hard: he did, all his life, belying his image as a lazy hedonist. But he liked to set his own timetable and hated being answerable to others. The relative autonomy of an MP’s life in the late 1940s and 1950s suited him down to the ground.
The absence of constituency obligations allowed him to concentrate on making his name in the House. He waited only a month before making his maiden speech. It was a polished and typically loyal effort. Stafford Cripps had presented his first budget in April, and the Finance Bill was still going through the House. One of its provisions was a one-off capital levy – euphemistically called a ‘Special Contribution’ – on investment income over £250 p.a. The Tories denounced it furiously as ‘a bad tax . . . economically bad and morally bad’;5 but Jenkins saw the chance to make his debut in its defence. Reminding the House that he represented some of the lowest-paid people in the country, he called the contribution ‘an indispensable weapon’ against inflation – not so much because of its direct deflationary impact as for its ‘psychological effect’ in assuring the poor that the rich were sharing the burden of austerity:
I know that hon. Members opposite pretend to be rather shocked by the thought that the Government are influenced by considerations of this sort. They regard it as playing politics, but I and the majority of members on this side of the Committee do not regard it as playing politics. It is not a question of that, but a question of righting the balance and putting rather more on the shoulders of the rich, who were looked after so well by successive Conservative Governments, and putting less on the shoulders of the poor, who were not so well looked after by the same Conservative Governments. If the Labour Government abandoned this policy in its financial plans it would not
only be politically foolish but morally wrong and socially unjust. Therefore, I submit, it would have been virtually impossible for the Chancellor to carry out the general design of his Budget without some additional impost on the rich.6
Maiden speeches have an uncanny way of anticipating the speaker’s subsequent career. Jenkins wrote later that the austere, teetotal Cripps ‘exercised a considerable fascination over me at this time’.7 Certainly Cripps’ ‘special contribution’ made a lasting impression on him. Though no two men could have been more different, when Jenkins found himself as Chancellor twenty years later facing the same urgent need to squeeze consumption in order to boost exports, he remembered Cripps’ precedent and imposed a similar levy himself. Back in 1948 he saw that Cripps faced the same sort of political/economic judgement that he would have to make in 1970. ‘It was better to have a somewhat harsh Budget that would cure inflation rather than a generous popular Budget which would merely undermine the purchasing power of the pound.’8 He spoke for only fifteen minutes, having learned his text carefully by heart, but he already sounded like an embryonic Chancellor. All maiden speakers are congratulated by those who follow them, but Sir Arthur Salter, the Tory member for Oxford University, was more than conventionally complimentary: ‘I can say with complete sincerity that I have hardly ever heard an hon. Member speaking for the first time in this House, and without notes, who has spoken so charmingly and with such clarity as the hon. Member for Central Southwark.’ Another Tory envied his ‘apparent self-confidence . . . fluency and logicality’.9 Despite his support of the government, he won noticeably more compliments from the other side of the House than from his own.
He spoke once more before the end of the session, balancing gratitude for Marshall Aid – the enlightened American project for rebuilding war-shattered Europe – with a recognition that it would not by itself solve Britain’s problems. ‘I believe that it would be churlish not to stress the first point, and that it would be unbelievably foolish not to stress the second.’ He conceded that the Truman administration’s motivation might not be wholly disinterested, but thought ‘far-sighted self-interest . . . a great deal more rare and more welcome than short-sighted self-interest’.10 The Tory who followed him mocked his naivety:
I hate to shatter the delightful oasis of self-deception and unreality in the matter of what America thinks of the present Government in which he lives. I suggest that the first use of the dollars that the Chancellor will get might be to pay for a trip for the hon. Member to go to America and learn the real naked truth of what the American people, and a good deal of American labour, think of the hon. Gentleman’s Government.11
Jenkins would not pay his first visit to the United States for another five years; but he never qualified his rose-tinted view of the Americans’ essential benevolence.
In September the Commons was recalled for an extraordinary session to carry for a second time the Parliament Bill – reducing the delaying power of the House of Lords from two years to one – which the Lords had rejected in June. This was an issue that Jenkins had already identified as the subject of his next book, and he did not miss the chance to intervene briefly in support of the government’s measure: ‘a modest step, but a step which is well in keeping with the needs of the times’.12 Then in November he made his longest speech so far in support of nationalising the steel industry. Characteristically he made the case for nationalisation on grounds that were determinedly non-doctrinaire: the simple fact was, he argued, that the money to finance the industry could no longer be raised privately:
With the steel industry we have reached the point when nationalisation is the natural next step. It is an industry in which I believe the money must come from public or semi-public sources. It is an industry in which free competition is dead. It is an industry in which even the party opposite admits there must be a good deal of State control. Now, when that position is arrived at – public money, State control, no competition – who are the doctrinaires? Those who want to take the natural and logical step and put the thing under public ownership as well as under public control, or those who despite all these things insist in saying that it must still remain under private ownership?13
That autumn Jenkins also started writing regularly in Tribune, the left-wing weekly founded in 1937, financed largely by Cripps and now edited by Michael Foot. Soon it would be transformed into the main organ of Bevanite opposition to the Labour leadership; but for the moment – so long as Nye Bevan was in the government – it was thoroughly loyal. Jenkins’ first piece for the paper, headlined ‘When Lloyd George called the Lords “Mr Balfour’s Poodle”’, was on House of Lords reform, which was probably his way in;14 but thereafter he used the platform to display his credentials as an economist. On 5 November – ten days before his Commons speech on the subject – he rehearsed his argument that the City could no longer finance the steel industry. ‘Sooner or later the state will have to provide the bulk of the money for steel. It would be ludicrous to do this while leaving the control of the industry in private hands.’15 This drew another withering response from an anonymous writer in the Financial Times, who insisted that the City had already raised £50 million for the South Wales tinplate industry, castigated ‘the iron curtain of ignorance and prejudice which surrounds Mr Jenkins’, and concluded that ‘If the opponents of nationalisation are to have no more serious arguments than this to contend with, they should have no difficulty in persuading even Mr Jenkins that the case for nationalisation is as weak as a new-born kitten.’16 Steel was the most contentious of Labour’s nationalisations after 1945; it was eventually carried in 1949, but the Tories committed themselves to reversing it, and did so in 1953. It then remained the front line of the dispute between public and private ownership for the next four decades, renationalised by Labour in 1967, then privatised again by Mrs Thatcher in 1988, while Jenkins’ enthusiasm for nationalisation steadily diminished.
In January 1949 he enjoyed a nice little perk when he managed to get himself included in a parliamentary delegation to newly democratic Italy, led by the Speaker and including among its number ‘Rab’ Butler, John Boyd-Carpenter and Ivor Bulmer-Thomas. For a francophile railway enthusiast and budding gourmand, it was heaven.
We went to Paris by Golden Arrow, dined at the Embassy, and proceeded by the Simplon express from the Gare de Lyon . . . At Milan we transferred to two saloons of the royal train of the House of Savoy which had been taken over by the Republic, and so proceeded to Rome.17
There they were magnificently wined and dined – in striking contrast to still-rationed Britain – at a series of lunches and dinners with the President, the Prime Minister (Alcide de Gasperi) and other Italian parliamentarians. At one dinner Jenkins sat next to the former Prime Minister, Vittorio Orlando (who had been one of the ‘Big Four’ with Lloyd George, Clemenceau and Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919), which pleased his sense of history. They also met the Pope (Pius XII) and visited Naples, where Jenkins and Bulmer-Thomas slipped away to visit the elderly philosopher Benedetto Croce. On this jaunt Jenkins also took the opportunity to draw out the wonderfully indiscreet Butler, who treated the young Labour Member to some typically barbed ‘Rabbisms’ about his Tory colleagues (‘The trouble with Anthony [Eden] is that he has no intellectual interests’) and even hinted at some sort of centre party as Jenkins recorded:
I doubt if there is anything substantial, except steel, in our home policy with which he disagrees . . . At times it seemed . . . as though Butler were expecting a position in 10 years or so in which the C.P. [Communist Party] would be strong and the bulk of the L.P. [Labour Party] might form a centre party with him & some other Tories. He thinks it is only Ramsay MacDonald who prevents a coalition today.18
This was fantasy, but it is a reminder that MacDonald’s ‘great betrayal’, when he abandoned the Labour party to form a National Government with the Tories in 1931, continued to haunt Labour throughout the post-war period. The allegation of ‘MacDonaldism’ would st
ill be spat at Jenkins himself as late as the 1980s.
The next month he got a second chance to get his foot on the bottom rung of the ministerial ladder when he was invited to become PPS to the Commonwealth Relations Secretary, Philip Noel-Baker; and this time he took it. (‘Mr Attlee is a fellow who looks after his apples,’ ‘Crossbencher’ commented in the Sunday Express.)19 Jenkins had no interest in the Commonwealth and little regard for Noel-Baker (‘He was unco-ordinated, lacked critical judgement and was a weak minister’); but the appointment did not stop him speaking on the subjects that did interest him and it gave him his only experience of the inside of a government department before he became a minister himself in 1964. He did the job for a year – enjoying ‘the frequent Government hospitality meals over which Noel-Baker presided with grace’;20 but he declined the same position with another minister after the 1950 election.
In this year, too, he and Jennifer started a family. At the end of 1948, when Jennifer was already six months pregnant, they moved from their poky flat in Marsham Street to a much larger flat occupying the top two floors of a tall Victorian house in Cornwall Gardens, South Kensington.fn3 Though still only four stops along the Circle Line, this was not only less convenient for the House of Commons, but far from ideal for bringing up young children. In March 1949, however, Jennifer gave birth to their first ‘giraffe’ – a son whom they christened Charles. The ceremony took place, inevitably, in the crypt of the Palace of Westminster, with Attlee and Crosland as a contrasting pair of godparents. Roy and Jennifer stayed in Cornwall Gardens for five years, during which time their second child, Cynthia, was born (in June 1951); so that Jennifer soon found herself carrying two children and a large 1950s pram, as well as coal and shopping, up and down seventy-nine steps several times a day. By the time they moved again she was expecting their third.
Roy Jenkins Page 15
