My dear Roy,
You have made a most useful piece of history . . . with great distinction. The better Balliol attributes fit you ever more closely as you mature. And what about patience! And quiet persuasive movements off stage! Most impressive, and gratifying to your friends.
Hugh18
Jenkins, for his part, thought it prudent to thank Butler for his ‘great help’ in getting the bill through: the whole struggle ‘would have been unavailing had you not been basically sympathetic’.19 This was generous. Reviewing the five-year saga in Encounter that autumn, Jenkins concluded that Private Members’ legislation could still succeed with the right combination of luck, patience, all-party support, a sympathetic minister, determined allies and articulate extra-parliamentary support. ‘When all these circumstances coincide it is possible to make some progress in a liberalising direction.’ The great majority of MPs, he believed, were not so much hostile as indifferent, though some were frightened of their constituents – ‘in most cases needlessly . . . for not one of mine has ever complained to me about my activities in this field’. Nevertheless he ended with a gentle but unmistakable dig at Butler. ‘Libertarian reform . . . is undoubtedly a long and wearisome road for a private member. A determinedly liberal Home Secretary could do it much more quickly and much more surely.’20 Six years later he was given the chance to prove the truth of his words.
Meanwhile, the seismic political event of the mid-1950s was the botched Franco-British operation to seize control of the Suez Canal in October 1956, which divided the political class more bitterly than any controversy since Irish Home Rule in 1912–14. By secretly colluding with France to invade Egypt – and then unconvincingly denying it – Eden betrayed his own reputation as a peacemaker and shattered the consensus between the parties on foreign policy that had existed since 1945; while for denouncing Eden’s duplicity and opposing the invasion, Gaitskell was vilified in the Tory press for lack of patriotism, if not treason. Jenkins was of course firmly behind Gaitskell. Apart from his column in The Current and other occasional journalism, he had hitherto taken strangely little interest in foreign affairs. The first time he spoke in the Commons on any foreign issue was in March 1956 on the subject of Malta. By his own admission, ‘I lacked confidence in the subject and never dared open my mouth in the House of Commons throughout the Suez crisis.’21, fn3 But at the height of the crisis on 4 November – the same day that Bevan memorably castigated the Prime Minister in Trafalgar Square – Jenkins spoke at another Labour rally in Birmingham Town Hall, where he deplored Eden’s ‘squalid imperialist adventure’ for damaging the United Nations, NATO, the Commonwealth and Britain’s reputation in the world, as well as for making it impossible to condemn the Russians’ simultaneous crushing of the Hungarian uprising against Soviet rule in Budapest.23 Two years later he wrote that ‘Suez was a totally unsuccessful attempt to achieve unreasonable and undesirable objectives by methods which were at once reckless and immoral; and the consequences, as was well deserved, were humiliating and disastrous.’24
The humiliation of Suez brought home to the British foreign-policy establishment what it had been strenuously attempting to deny since 1945: that Britain was no longer a great power with the ability to act independently on the world stage. Diplomats and forward-thinking politicians were forced to take seriously for the first time the idea that Britain would do better inside the nascent European Economic Community than continuing to try to go it alone. The EEC was then no more than an economic community comprising just six countries – France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and tiny Luxembourg – which came together in 1957 to sign the Treaty of Rome, though its architects’ long-term political ambitions were already clear. Britain stayed away from the founding conference at Messina in 1955 in the lofty belief (shared equally by Churchill and Eden, Attlee and Bevin) that her special bond with the United States on the one hand and the Commonwealth on the other gave her global interests and responsibilities far beyond Europe. This confidence in Britain’s distinctiveness was badly shaken by Suez; and the shock was perhaps greatest on Harold Macmillan who, as Chancellor at the time and initially a hawk for military action, was most sharply exposed to Britain’s economic weakness in the face of American disapproval. On succeeding as Prime Minister following Eden’s ignominious resignation he began to inch towards a reassessment of Britain’s role in the world.
Jenkins, as he always admitted, was not in the vanguard of this reassessment; but he was a relatively early convert, some way ahead of Macmillan. As a very young MP in 1950 he had unquestioningly toed the Labour party line by voting against British participation in the Schuman Plan; in 1951 he attended a European Movement weekend in Brussels, but still argued what he later called ‘the boring old case’ against Britain’s full involvement; in 1953, however, he accompanied Attlee to a conference in Wiesbaden, which pricked his interest; and in 1955 he was appointed one of the twelve-strong Labour delegation to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. Over the next two years – covering, as he wrote in his memoirs, precisely the period from the Messina Conference to the Treaty of Rome – ‘I spent a total of about seven weeks in Strasbourg or in committee meetings from Palermo to Berlin . . . and I have no doubt that those experiences sowed the seeds of my subsequently persistent conviction . . . I learned a lot from those two years of watching Britain throw away its opportunity to play a formative role in the shaping of the Common Market.’25
In October 1956, as rapporteur to one of these committees, he made a speech in Strasbourg which caught the attention of The Times:
A concise and most effective statement of the British case, which was much remarked on in the lobbies afterwards, came from Mr Roy Jenkins . . . Illustrating his arguments with a quotation from Gladstone, he suggested that the Common Market was an affair of men just as much as of packages,fn4 and thought that the greatest drawback of not being associated with it would not be economic – although there would certainly be grave economic disadvantages – but political, for thus a new political division would be created in Europe.27
This success was doubtless gratifying but, looking back from 1991, Jenkins took little pride in a speech that still contained ‘all the fallacies which were to bedevil our relations with [the EEC] for most of the next thirty-five years’. While wishing to be ‘associated’ with the Common Market, he still accepted the conventional wisdom that Commonwealth commitments made it impossible for Britain to consider joining a full customs union with a common tariff against the outside world, though it might join some sort of free-trade area. But he was still a step ahead of the government. By the time Macmillan in 1958 came up with the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) – a loose alliance with six smaller countries, intended as an alternative to the EEC – Jenkins was already clear that EFTA offered no real substitute, but was merely ‘a foolish attempt to organise a weak periphery against a strong core’.28 Britain’s proper place was to be part of the core. By 1959 he was explicitly arguing the case for EEC membership as a way of exorcising the imperial illusions so disastrously exemplified by Suez:
The chief danger for a country placed as we are is that of living sullenly in the past, of believing that the world has a duty to keep us in the station to which we are accustomed, and showing bitter resentment if it does not do so. This was the mood of Suez; and it is a mood absolutely guaranteed, not to recreate our past glories, but to reduce us to a level of influence and wealth far lower than that which we need occupy . . .
Our neighbours in Europe are roughly our economic and military equals. We would do better to live gracefully with them than to waste our substance by trying unsuccessfully to keep up with the power giants of the modern world.29
This was a central theme that he would continue to sound for the rest of his life. But the lesson had still not been learned at the time of his death.
Jenkins’ enthusiasm for Europe was another eccentric preoccupation which both advertised his growing independence and distanced him from th
e bulk of the Labour party, which was still for the most part either insular and xenophobic or sentimentally attached to the Commonwealth. Even among the Gaitskellites, Douglas Jay was famous for his loathing of ‘abroad’ while Gaitskell himself – a child of the Raj – was far more emotionally attached to India than to Europe. Tony Crosland was at this time an equally ardent Europhile, seeing France in particular, with its street cafés and restaurants, all-day drinking and relative lack of censorship, as the antithesis of the grey 1950s England he had denounced in The Future of Socialism. But most of the left and centre of the party still viewed the Common Market as a capitalist club which would block Britain’s progress to socialism. Jenkins’ commitment to Europe reflected the increasingly important cross-party and non-party friendships – diplomatic, literary and academic – that he was forging across what became known around this time as the ‘Establishment’.
A particularly important new friend whom he first met in February 1957 was Ian Gilmour. Gilmour was a wealthy young Eton-and-Balliol heir to a baronetcy who in 1954 had bought the ancient but staid Spectator magazine and turned it into the liveliest voice on the political scene. It was nominally Conservative but libertarian, anti-Suez, pro-European and persistently critical of the Macmillan government. Its chief political columnist was Henry Fairlie, who coined (or at least popularised) the term ‘the Establishment’; while the irreverent young Bernard Levin made his name by pioneering a new genre of satirical political sketch under the Disraelian pseudonym ‘Taper’. Alan Brien, Alan Watkins, Katharine Whitehorn and many others also cut their teeth on Gilmour’s Spectator in its late 1950s/early 1960s heyday; and Jenkins was part of this golden age. He wrote his first article for the paper – on the literary censorship struggle – in March 1957 and continued to contribute with increasing regularity for the next five years (he had dropped The Current in 1956). In 1959 Gilmour, while remaining proprietor, gave up the editorship to Brian Inglis in order to concentrate on finding a seat in Parliament; but this in no way reduced the frequency of Jenkins’ contributions. During 1960 he contributed eight articles and no fewer than thirteen book reviews. Henceforth reviewing, for a variety of papers, provided not only a steady source of income for the rest of his life, but a useful platform which enabled him to indulge his favourite hobby by passing judgement on practically every political biography, diary and contemporary memoir as it appeared.
Meanwhile Gilmour became one of his best friends, and his wife Caroline one of his most enduring girlfriends. The Gilmours and the Jenkinses holidayed together in France in 1958, and again in America (to observe the Nixon–Kennedy presidential election) in 1960. By this time Roy and Caroline had become lovers. It is not clear whether it was on this American holiday or earlier that their relationship began. But on 24 October Roy had to return from Chicago to Britain. The same day Caroline wrote him – in pencil on flimsy airmail paper – a long passionate letter:
My love,
No words can describe the utter desolation of returning to the Ambassador yesterday afternoon without you. I felt completely lost and shell like as though the major part of me had gone with you. I just lay and ached for you – unable to read or write or watch the television . . .
With the help of several pills I managed to sleep for nearly 12 hours and woke feeling just as miserable but slightly less tearful. I imagined you arriving feeling as desolate (I hope) with less sleep, Boeingitis & being immediately thrown into a maelstrom of Labour upheavals . . .
Promise to burn this immediately. I hope to heaven it arrives safely
My love – I miss you so desperately at the moment that the thought of our [illegible] two days together causes really acute pain – but when the gnawing ache has gone I am sure that they will permanently sit on a high pedestal suffused by rainbow like rays of happiness – and I tremendously hope they will for you too.
So much of my fondest love
Caroline30
Two days later she wrote again.
My love,
I still miss you so enormously and get terrible twinges and pangs and go into mammoth glooms . . . I will obviously have to make a vast effort otherwise Ian might notice I suppose . . .
I feel so unable to cope without having your eye to catch across the room.
I long and long to hear from you but do be careful as I shall have to show it to Ian.
I pine for you in every way.
My immense love
C31
Clearly at this stage Ian did not know what was going on. Later he certainly did. Initially he was not very happy about it, but he was already enjoying affairs of his own, so he had no choice but to accept it; and Roy and Caroline’s relationship continued as a more or less open secret for the next forty years. Jennifer too accepted it, though she never warmed to Caroline, and somehow the quadrilateral relationship between the four of them remained intact for the rest of their lives – Roy and Jennifer were frequent summer visitors to the Gilmours’ house in Tuscany – though it was all so discreet that their children were unaware of the truth until many years later.
Jenkins’ increasingly high-profile journalism added a new string to his political bow. Having established his historical credentials with Mr Balfour’s Poodle and Dilke, he brought a quasi-academic detachment to his observation of the Westminster scene. In November 1957, for instance, he questioned the constitutional propriety of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s use of outside economic advisers.32 In March 1958 he reviewed a defence debate almost as if it were a theatrical performance.33 And in May 1959 – by which time he had started work on Asquith – he contrasted the declining interest shown by the modern House of Commons in its own debates with the packed attendance for the far longer Finance Bill debates of 1909 – not that he was particularly good at attending himself – and called on the Speaker to do more to ensure a real clash of argument.34 But sometimes he was more partisan. In August 1959 he contributed to a series of articles on the meaning of ‘radicalism’ and took the opportunity to debunk the fashionable notion of ‘Tory radicalism’ promoted in a previous article by Lord Altrincham – the historian and biographer John Grigg, a close friend (and Tuscan neighbour) of Ian Gilmour, who occupied a similar perch on the far left of the Tory Party. A streak of iconoclasm, Jenkins argued – citing Lord Randolph Churchill as an example – did not make a man a radical; while the most truly radical Prime Ministers of the past century (Gladstone, Asquith and Attlee) were all in their private lives men of distinctly conservative temperament. This was a favourite paradox to which he often returned. With some exceptions, he argued (thinking of his allies on the Obscene Publications Bill), Tory claims to radicalism on social and colonial questions were quite untenable. On a whole range of social issues – hanging, homosexuality, licensing, betting, Sunday observance, divorce, theatre censorship, policing and abortion – there was ‘immensely more to be hoped for from a Labour Home Secretary than from the most liberal Conservative Minister’; while Tory colonial policy (this was soon after the brutal suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya) threatened to make Africa ‘the Ireland of the twentieth century’:
The Radical tradition still exists in British politics, but it has not become spattered over the political spectrum. As has always been the case, it remains concentrated well to the Left of the Conservative Party.35
By this time Jenkins rarely called himself a socialist, but he vigorously laid claim to the label ‘radical’.
The next month, however – by which time Macmillan had fired the starting gun for the 1959 election – he launched (still in the tolerant columns of the Spectator) a more direct attack on the Tory government. Abandoning any pretence of objectivity, while still affecting a historical overview, he lambasted its colonial policy and its economic policy, but above all its duplicity (or what we now call ‘spin’):
Nothing can be shown for what it is. Everything has to be dressed up and presented as another great triumph of our infallible rulers. The besetting sin of Mr Macmillan and his coll
eagues is a degree of intellectual dishonesty which has not been seen in British politics for a long time past. If a Government can continue with this, and can make the criminal mistakes which have been made since 1955 in the foreign and colonial fields, and still be re-elected, the prospect, not only for policy in the next five years, but for the whole tone of politics in this country, will be an appalling one.36
This assumption of moral superiority was beginning to grate with some observers. Their irritation had been reflected in a sharp New Statesman commentary by the Bevanite MP J.P.W. Mallalieu in November 1957 which recognised Jenkins’ quality while conveying a vivid picture of his distinctive mannerisms:
Jenkins is not everyone’s favourite, for his public manner suggests arrogance. But he is reputed to be so close a confidant of Mr Hugh Gaitskell that only the keenest observer can detect where Mr Jenkins’ mouth ends and Gaitskell’s ear begins. So when he speaks in the House, others grudgingly listen for the sound of things to come. On Tuesday, he spoke with his easy, controlled fluency, glancing occasionally at his notes more for pause and effect than from any need to refresh his memory. Only the movements of his hands seemed uncalculated. These hands twisted and writhed in front of him like snakes, and though from time to time he would thrust them deep into his pockets or plant them firmly on his hips beneath his wide open coat, back they would come in a few seconds to twist and writhe as before.37
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