The swing to the Tories on 9 October was particularly marked in the Midlands, where Labour lost ten seats, and Jenkins felt the effect of it in Stechford. ‘I did not exert myself unduly,’ he recalled. He ventured beyond his home territory only to speak for friends – Crosland, Woodrow Wyatt and David Ginsburg, all of whom were contesting new seats (Grimsby, Bosworth and Dewsbury respectively), which they all won. On arriving with Jennifer at his own count, however – having already heard gloomy pointers to the national result – Jenkins found some of his supporters worried that he had lost.fn9 ‘I can assure you that you’ve won,’ the Tory agent reassured him, ‘but I don’t know what’s happened to your majority.’60 In fact he did not come seriously close to losing, but he suffered a swing ‘worse than the Birmingham average and much worse than the national average’. His 1955 majority was more than halved to just under 3,000 – its lowest level in nine contests over twenty-six years:
Roy Jenkins (Labour) 21,919
J.M. Bailey (Conservative) 18,996
Labour majority
2,92361
Nationally Labour lost twenty-three seats, enough to double the Tories’ overall majority from fifty to exactly one hundred. It was the fourth consecutive election since the great landslide of 1945 at which Labour had lost seats. The post-mortem began almost immediately.
* * *
fn1 Jay, Gordon Walker, Pakenham, Soskice and Crosland were all public-school boys, educated respectively at Winchester, Wellington, Eton, St Paul’s and Highgate; and all had been to Oxford – as, of course, had Jenkins and Healey.
fn2 The Bill was drafted by St John Stevas, whose book Obscenity and the Law, published in 1956, became the reformers’ guiding text.
fn3 That did not stop him penning in The Current a withering condemnation of Selwyn Lloyd’s appointment as Foreign Secretary. Rightly suspecting that Eden wanted a malleable stooge at the Foreign Office, Jenkins told his Bombay readership that Lloyd was ‘to my mind one of the most overrated men in British politics. He has never done a memorable thing or made a memorable speech or associated himself in the public mind with any policy other than that accepted by the generality of the Conservative Party . . . I hope he will make a better Foreign Secretary than I think he will. I find it impossible to believe that he will make a distinguished one.’22
fn4 In 1841 the thirty-two-year-old Gladstone was disappointed to be offered by Peel no more than a junior position at the Board of Trade and complained that where he had hoped to be concerned with the affairs of men, he had been ‘set to governing packages’.26 This is Jenkins’ first recorded use of one his favourite quotations, which he used repeatedly when distinguishing between the economic and political aspects of European unity for the next forty years.
fn5 Back in July he had defended the case for higher taxation in a letter to The Times, responding sharply to familiar Tory criticism of ‘the politics of envy’:
It is hard to understand why an attempt to get more of the national product for those who at present get least is to be dismissed as pandering to envy, while an attempt to tilt it the other way by securing more concessions for the discontented Conservative electors of Tonbridge is not denounced as rapacity, and why the one is manifestly more worthy than the other.
Restraining consumption, he argued, was vital to achieving growth, and fairness vital to achieving restraint.40
fn6 In December 1957 Gaitskell had appointed Jenkins to chair a policy sub-committee on the future role of sterling, following criticism by the economist Andrew Shonfield. His fellow economists Alan Day and Robert Neild backed Shonfield’s view that the sterling area was a burden on Britain, but they and Jenkins failed to prevail against the pro-Commonwealth convictions of Wilson and Douglas Jay, supported by Thomas Balogh.44
fn7 Jenkins had not yet caught up with the new phenomenon of rock-and-roll; in so far as he was aware of it, he probably saw it as a youthful variant of jazz.
fn8 He added that Labour ‘had never conceived its purposes as extending only to this country’; and The Labour Case included a remarkable chapter on the Commonwealth, in which he not only called for early majority rule for Southern as well as Northern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe as well as Zambia), but warned that by 2000 ‘the relationship between peoples of different coloured skins . . . will almost certainly have transcended the importance of the cold war issue of Communism against the West’. If it was not amicably defused, the white races could become a ‘hated minority’ in the world like the whites in South Africa, ‘clinging to their privileges, afraid to mingle with the stream of world progress, and listening with anxious foreboding to the rumblings of the volcano beneath them’.52 This was a strikingly prescient, progressive and surprisingly passionate excursion on a subject Jenkins very rarely wrote about.
fn9 Roy and Jennifer had been dining with Solly Zuckerman and his wife Joan, as he did frequently during the campaign. Though he still stayed with the Hitchmans in Stechford, the Zuckerman house in Edgbaston ‘provided a lot of meals and high-quality wine’ at the end of the campaigning day. Zuckerman was then Professor of Anatomy at Birmingham University, as well as the Macmillan government’s chief adviser on nuclear weapons, ‘but did not find the latter role incompatible with providing me with hospitality and encouragement in Birmingham’.59
10
‘Fight and Fight Again’?
JENKINS MAY HAVE anticipated Labour’s defeat in 1959, but the reality of it was still hugely disappointing. On the Saturday after the election, Hugh Dalton wrote in his diary that Roy and Jennifer had come round for a drink, ‘very crushed, especially she’.1 The next morning the leader’s friends gathered in Hampstead. Those present were Gaitskell, Dalton, Jay, Gordon Walker, Jenkins and Crosland, plus Herbert Bowden (Chief Whip), John Harris (then an adviser to Gaitskell) and Jennifer Jenkins. This meeting was subsequently portrayed by the left as the launch of a concerted effort to wrench the party to the right. It was actually much less organised than the conspiracy theorists imagined. It lasted only a couple of hours – after which Jenkins took Dalton off to lunch – and was mainly an opportunity to lick their wounds and compare experiences of the campaign. It was just one of dozens of such primarily social post-mortems: in the two weeks after the election Roy and Jennifer dined with the Daltons, the Jays, the Wyatts and the Benns, and themselves entertained Tony Crosland, the Healeys and the Gordon Walkers (plus Denis Howell, who was one of those who had lost his seat in Birmingham). But there was clearly some serious discussion that first Sunday morning at Frognal Gardens, since ‘at one stage we all sat in a circle and each expressed our view as though at a seminar’.2 On this occasion Jay took the lead in urging that Labour should drop any talk of further nationalisation, loosen its links with the unions and possibly even change the party’s name, in order to broaden its appeal from the old cloth-cap image of the past. ‘We are in danger,’ he warned, ‘of fighting under the label of a class which no longer exists.’3 Jenkins largely agreed, though he never favoured changing the party’s name. But their view was by no means universally accepted. Dalton thought Jay’s ideas ‘rather wild, pouring out the baby with the bathwater and throwing the bath after them’; Crosland said ‘practically nothing’; while Gaitskell let the discussion flow without at this stage revealing his own thinking.4 Nevertheless he was happy to encourage a public debate. A few days later Jay published his proposals in an article in Forward, which attracted a lot of attention. Meanwhile Jenkins had been due to leave (with Jennifer) for a month’s lecture tour in the United States, arranged for him by J.K. Galbraith. At Gaitskell’s request he postponed his trip so that he could take a leading role in Labour’s inquest.fn1 Indeed, over the next four weeks he threw himself into it with unusual energy.
First he appeared on the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme Panorama, where he took very much the same line as Jay. Tony Wedgwood Benn watched the broadcast and saw Jenkins ‘advocating very modestly that you should drop nationalisation, watch out for the dangers of union links and
not rule out an association with the Liberals’. But on his way home to Ladbroke Square he and Jennifer called in on Benn in Holland Park Avenue and they had a ‘flaming row’. ‘I was very calm and collected,’ Benn wrote in his diary, but ‘he got into a semi-hysterical state’. (‘Usually it’s the other way round’, Benn noted.) ‘“We must use this shock to drop nationalisation entirely at this forthcoming Conference,” he said . . . I concentrated on the dangers to our integrity if we were to be so reckless. In the end he half-apologised for his temper and went off with Jennifer.’5
When Parliament reassembled a few days later Dick Crossman too found Jenkins ‘in a state of neurotic frenzy’, or at least ‘in a mood for heroic crusading’, demanding ‘shock tactics . . . to shake the Party into dropping nationalisation altogether’. (‘After all’, he said, ‘you taught me . . . that in order to educate, one must shock.’) Crossman was as surprised as Benn to find himself ‘cool and reasonable, with Roy frantic’. Crossman told Jenkins that he was actually making it harder for Gaitskell to drop nationalisation. ‘“How can Mr Bevan drop nationalisation because you and Jay order him to?” . . . However Roy stormed out, saying he would make a great speech this morning’ at the party meeting – as indeed he did. Following a similar appeal by Christopher Mayhew and a robust speech from a Durham miner who told Jay bluntly to go and join the Liberal party, ‘Roy Jenkins weighed in with his great plea to cut away from nationalisation’ – which, The Times reported, was not altogether well received:
Mr Roy Jenkins, one of the Party’s younger intellectuals, made some of his colleagues bristle by what seems to have been a complicated and almost theologically subtle exploration of the damage that the two firm election pledges to nationalise steel and long distance road haulage had done to the party image. When Mr Jenkins was challenged to put the argument in words of one syllable he seems to have decided to move warily. He is said to have given no positive answer.6
Crossman conceded that both Jenkins’ and Mayhew’s speeches ‘were very well delivered and thoughtful and were received thoughtfully. It was the highest level of debate I have heard for a long time.’ Nevertheless, he concluded, ‘the Jenkins/Jay line has no chance whatsoever of being accepted . . . Most of the Party were deeply shocked by what they felt was a betrayal by Gaitskell’s closest friends.’7 The week ended ‘with the Hampstead poodles in complete rout’.8
The trouble was not that the ‘Hampstead poodles’ had launched a coordinated coup, but on the contrary that (in the words of Gaitskell’s biographer Philip Williams) they ‘organised no conspiracy and agreed no objectives, but put up a cacophony of individual contributions’ – of which Jay’s Forward article and Jenkins’ Panorama interview were only the most provocative – which ‘greatly harmed their own cause’.9 Driving Crossman home after a dinner at the French Embassy on 27 October, Jenkins admitted that there had been ‘grave tactical errors in the activities of the Hampstead group’.fn2 But he did not ease up. In early November he gave a Fabian Society lecture in which he again blamed Labour’s defeat on the unpopularity of nationalisation (‘We must kill the misplaced view that the Labour Party is a dogmatic nationalising party, existing primarily to pop more and more industries into the bag’)11 and wrote another similar analysis of the result for the Spectator. ‘I also made political speeches in both Oxford and Cambridge, addressed a Socialist Commentary lunch, and proselytised the French and Italian embassies as well as the Time magazine London bureau, the Observer newspaper and all the editors of the Westminster Provincial Press group about the virtues of the new revisionism.’12 At the same time he was careful to keep his Stechford activists onside with what he was doing. In his Spectator piece, published just before the party conference, he dismissed as ‘a complete fallacy’ the idea that the reformers would ‘take the stuffing out of politics’ and reduce Labour to ‘a sort of junior Conservative party’; and he listed seven ‘great issues of today and tomorrow’ which would still divide Labour sharply from the Tories:
Britain accepting her new place in the world;
colonial freedom;
whether, as we grow richer, this new wealth is used exclusively for individual selfishness or for the growth of necessary community services and whether, in consequence, we follow or escape the American precedent of great private affluence surrounding rotting public services;fn3
whether we reverse the present anarchy sufficiently quickly to prevent the permanent destruction of the amenity of life in this overcrowded island;
the right of the individual to live his private life free from the intolerant prejudices of others or the arrogant interference of the State and the police;
whether we can expose and destroy the inefficiencies of contemporary private industry without offering only the sterile alternative of an indefinite extension of public monopoly;
whether, as existing class barriers break up, they are replaced by a new and nasty materialist snobbery or by a fresher and more co-operative approach.14
There were more questions in this list than answers. The key question of public versus private ownership came notably low down. But thirty years later Jenkins still thought his agenda constituted ‘rather a good radical programme’ – though not, he admitted, a socialist one.15
Having delivered this parting manifesto he left on his delayed American tour, thus missing the stormy party conference at which Gaitskell outraged the fundamentalists by proposing to amend Clause Four of the party’s 1918 constitution: the key clause that committed the party to ‘the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange’ – in other words the nationalisation of practically the whole economy. Ironically this was one reform that neither Jay nor Jenkins, Crosland or any of his other friends had urged on him; keen as they were to modernise the party’s image and policies, they all thought it reckless to challenge its Holy Writ. At Blackpool Gaitskell’s face was only saved by Bevan, who finally gained the advantage in their decade-long feud with a brilliant unifying speech – only to fall ill almost immediately and die nine months later. But the furore Gaitskell provoked at Blackpool was only the first round in a renewed battle with the left which almost tore the party apart again over the next three years. In that battle, despite his doubts about Gaitskell’s choice of ground, Jenkins was once again firmly, but much less frenetically, behind his leader.
While he was away the Sunday Times printed a rumour that Gaitskell intended to appoint Jenkins Shadow Chancellor in place of Wilson. It was almost certainly nonsense, though Gaitskell may possibly have toyed with the idea. Some time before the election he had told Crossman disparagingly that Wilson was not an economist and urged him to ‘talk to an economist like Jenkins or Crosland’;16 and during the campaign he told Benn, who was handling the party’s communications, that he should ignore the second eleven and build up ‘the up-and-coming generation – Crosland, Jenkins, Healey, and you can include yourself in that category’.17 Doubtless all these would have got junior office if Gaitskell had formed a government in 1959. But none of them was yet in the Shadow Cabinet – Healey was elected for the first time that autumn, while Jenkins (having stood once unsuccessfully in 1957) did not even stand – so in a party as hierarchical as Labour it would have been suicidal to have elevated a favourite in this way. Gaitskell told the editor of the Manchester Guardian, Alastair Hetherington, that ‘there wasn’t a word of truth in it’.18 But the fact that it could even be suggested reflected the way both Gaitskell and Jenkins were viewed by their critics. It is clear from Crossman’s diary that Wilson believed it; Jenkins thought the story ‘cast a shadow over his [Wilson’s] relations with me for several years’.19 As it was, he was one of five aspirants under forty (only just, in his case) to be given junior frontbench roles,fn4 and he joined – briefly – Wilson’s Shadow Treasury team. In this capacity over the next eight months he asked one or two questions and moved Opposition amendments to the Finance Bill (opposing reducing import duty on sherry, trying to cut the tax relief on ‘golden handsha
kes’), but made only one substantial speech. This was in the debate on Heathcoat Amory’s 1960 budget, in which he rejected the usual Tory clamour for tax cuts with his favourite Galbraith line about private affluence and public squalor: ‘If we are to devote absolute priority constantly to shrinking the total of public expenditure as a proportion of our national income, what sort of community are we to live in?’20
Such was the uproar caused by his questioning Clause Four that for a time Gaitskell thought he might have to resign. In an article in the American journal Foreign Affairs – not exactly bedside reading on the Labour left – Jenkins loyally explained that the Clause as it stood was ‘both inadequate and misleading’: inadequate because it omitted all Labour’s other objectives (‘international, colonial, social, educational, libertarian’) and misleading because it falsely suggested that Labour wanted to nationalise everything. Gaitskell had merely proposed to bring ‘the theoretical position into line with what has long been the practical position. And on grounds of intellectual honesty alone, this is always a good thing to do.’ The left, he suggested, clung to nationalisation as ‘a sort of emotional raft’, arising from its ‘essential defeatism’.21 But Gaitskell had taken on a battle he could not win. The unions refused to countenance any change to the constitution, and long before the 1960 conference he was forced to settle for an expanded but woolly ‘statement of aims’ which left the 1918 aspiration intact until Tony Blair finally consigned it to history nearly half a century later. ‘It is perhaps always a mistake to raise matters of dogma in a left-wing party,’ Jenkins wrote philosophically in the Spectator. ‘They are probably best left to be made irrelevant by the development of practical policies.’22 Gaitskell’s blunder threw the revisionists on the defensive just when they had hoped to seize the initiative.
Roy Jenkins Page 27
