Roy Jenkins
Page 29
The recovery from the sudden fever of unilateralism has been quick and fairly complete, but the disappearance of the disease did not take with it the underlying and independent debility which was there before Scarborough and is still present today. As a result, the decline in the Government’s support reflects itself in almost everything other than an increase in those who say they will vote Labour.
The government, he concluded, seemed to be immune from the electoral consequences of failure. ‘Few things could be worse for the whole tone of British politics.’45
The same month Woodrow Wyatt (now back in the House as MP for Bosworth) floated the idea of a pact with the Liberals, who were then enjoying, under the dashing leadership of Jo Grimond, the first of many deceptive ‘revivals’. (In March they scored a famous by-election victory at Orpington after which their Gallup poll rating jumped temporarily into the mid-twenties, compared with just 6 per cent in 1959.) Gaitskell was furious and threatened to drum Wyatt out of the party. In public Jenkins backed his leader. Though he was currently writing about Asquith, counted Grimond and Mark Bonham Carter among his best friends and was actively cooperating with them on Europe, he had little faith in the Liberals as a serious political force. There was no agreement, he had written in 1960, ‘between the civilised radicalism of Mr Grimond and his immediate colleagues on the one hand, and the outlook of large numbers (perhaps the majority) of Liberal voters on the other’, who were more ‘Poujadist’ than radical and voted Liberal merely as a protest; their 6 per cent of the poll in 1959 actually overstated their genuinely Liberal support.46 In January 1962 he still maintained that a Lab–Lib pact would offer no better prospect of defeating the government than Labour on its own. ‘Every practical politician knows that all talk of a re-alignment of forces on the left is now quite out of the question, at least until after the next election.’47
Yet there are signs that privately he would have liked to see some form of cooperation. According to Wyatt – admittedly not the most reliable witness – Jenkins thought Gaitskell’s rejection of the idea ‘irrational’ and told Jennifer: ‘Woodrow has more political sense than Hugh sometimes.’48 As a historian, Jenkins held that Attlee’s Labour party had simply replaced the Asquithian Liberals as the single progressive party representing ‘the whole of the Left-leaning half of the electorate’ in a two-party system. But when the Liberals showed signs of taking a significant slice of the vote, thus splitting the anti-Conservative forces – as they were to do more and more regularly from 1974 onwards – his instinct was always to try to bring them together. At this time, however, when his lukewarm socialism and his passionate advocacy of the Common Market, combined with his prolific writing in Tory papers and his sybaritic social life, already made him an object of considerable suspicion to much of the party, he probably thought it unwise to add another heresy to his charge sheet.
Too many of his colleagues, while acknowledging his ability, already felt he barely belonged in the Labour Party at all. An Observer profile just after the 1959 election noted that ‘Mr Jenkins . . . with his polished, adenoidal voice is one of the smoothest of the Labour members . . . Much though the Labour leaders enjoy good parties, there are some rank-and-filers who feel, after observing him hobnobbing with a duchess or in company with Princess Margaret, that he may be too socially successful.’49 Even Gaitskell, who mixed happily in Tory circles himself, told Crossman (a fellow Wykehamist) that he was worried about his younger friend’s social life, with a delicately class-conscious explanation of why what was all right for himself was bad for Roy:
He is very much in the social swim these days and I am sometimes anxious about him and young Tony. We, as middle class Socialists, have got to have a profound humility . . . Now that’s all right for us in the upper middle class, but Tony and Roy are not upper and I sometimes feel they don’t have a proper humility to ordinary working people.50
A vivid snapshot of this ‘social swim’ is glimpsed in a letter from Ann Fleming to Evelyn Waugh in August 1962, describing what she called ‘a noisy evening’ with the Avons and the Devonshires (that is Anthony Eden, now the Earl of Avon, and his much younger wife Clarissa, and the forty-two-year-old Duke of Devonshire who was married to the youngest of the Mitford sisters), plus the Tory MP Nigel Birch (another Old Etonian married to the daughter of a peer):
It was very civilised till Lord Avon’s bedtime, then there was great uproar between Andrew and Nigel and lots of four-letter words: Debo [Devonshire] said to Roy Jenkins ‘Can’t you stop them by saying something Labour?’ but this is something Roy has never been able to do.51
Jenkins was perfectly at ease in high Tory company – as often as not without Jennifer – but this suggests that he was treated by some of his hosts as a sort of Labour mascot.
Jenkins’ busy social life, however, was just his way of relaxing; he also worked deceptively hard. Colleagues who sat gossiping in the bars of the House of Commons all day – something he almost never did – imagined Jenkins to be lazy and self-indulgent, but his output of writing, in a range of different outlets, was prodigious. As well as Asquith, which he wrote mainly on holiday, and his regular articles and book reviews for the Spectator (up to 1962), he also contributed heavyweight articles (mainly on the progress of the Common Market negotiations) to Encounter and other highbrow journals,fn8 as well as a steady stream of articles and book reviews for daily and weekly papers, including the Sunday Times, both Telegraphs, the Listener and anyone else who asked him, so that his journalistic earnings considerably exceeded his parliamentary salary. Then in 1962 he began a long association with the Observer, then at its liberal zenith under the enlightened proprietorship of David Astor, who (like Ian Gilmour at the Spectator, but for much longer) edited his own paper. Though its political allegiance was loosely Conservative, Astor made the Observer, from 1948 when he inherited it to 1976 when he sold it, for Jenkins, ‘and I believe for many others, the paper with which, across the whole spectrum of British journalism . . . they most identified and were most proud to be associated’. In an article celebrating its bicentenary in 1991 he handsomely acknowledged his debt: ‘I know how much David Astor’s Observer contributed both to developing me as a writer and to sustaining the causes for which I cared in politics.’52
Between 1962 and 1964 he undertook four major pieces of investigative journalism for the Observer. The series began when Astor – presumably remembering his interest in the 1954 Savoy takeover battle – invited Jenkins to write a detailed account of a recent takeover struggle between the textile giants ICI and Courtaulds, to be spread over three successive review fronts and running to some 8,000 words.53 This was a quite new departure in Sunday journalism, combining close analysis with vivid narrative and anticipating the Sunday Times Insight page, which began the following year. Jenkins gave Astor all the credit – ‘The concept was entirely his, although the treatment was entirely mine’54 – but it won him that year’s What the Papers Say award for innovative journalism. The following year he wrote another equally extensive analysis of the papal conclave by which Pope Pius VI was elected following the death of John XXIII in June 1963 – an improbable subject, which he treated slightly cynically as an exercise in pure politics (‘My account paid more attention to the temporalities than to the spiritualities of the Church’) on the basis of just a week in Rome interviewing cardinals and others.55 For an unbeliever of Welsh Nonconformist background he had a curiously persistent interest in the papacy. His opening sentence gives a good flavour both of the narrative style and of his characteristic choice of incidental detail: ‘On a Tuesday evening in June, 24 hours before the start of the 1963 Papal Conclave, the Cardinal Archbishop of New York left his apartment in the Grand Hotel, one of the six Roman establishments to which the Italian edition of the Guide Michelin gives five roofs, and drove up the hill towards the Pincio.’56 He always took a close interest in Michelin stars.
The same year he also wrote a blow-by-blow account of the Cuban missile crisis, based on interviews
conducted in January with all the leading members of the Kennedy administration from the President down, and published as a single long article on the anniversary of the crisis in October – just a month before Kennedy’s assassination. As well as showing off his Washington connections, the self-consciously statesmanlike conclusion of this piece could have been seen as a job application for a position in the Foreign Office when Labour finally returned to government.57 In the event it was his fourth Observer commission that probably secured him the job he did get in October 1964. This was another two-part investigation into the problems of BOAC – the British Overseas Aircraft Corporation, which was merged ten years later with BEA (British European Airways) to form British Airways (BA). The question was specifically whether BOAC could afford to support the domestic aircraft industry by buying the British-built VC-10 or should make a hard-nosed commercial decision to buy American Boeings. But Jenkins placed the blame for the Corporation’s difficulties and the wider crisis of the British industry squarely on the government’s failure to set a clear policy and priorities. When the two articles were reprinted in hard covers three years later it was under the uncompromising title ‘How Not to Run a Public Corporation’.58 By that time Harold Wilson had given Jenkins the chance to apply his own prescription by appointing him Minister of Aviation to sort out the mess.
In the meantime Europe remained his central preoccupation. As the Macmillan government moved closer to a definite application to join the Community, Jenkins was engaged in a desperate effort to stop Gaitskell committing Labour against it. First he tried to convince him of the economic case for British entry. Then he sought to inspire him with the vision of a united Europe. To this end he arranged a meeting between Gaitskell and the founding prophet of European unity, Jean Monnet, by inviting Monnet to address a dinner of the XYZ club which Gaitskell would attend. The occasion was a resounding failure. ‘I have never seen less of a meeting of minds,’ Jenkins wrote. ‘I think I fondly imagined that Monnet would lucidly meet all Gaitskell’s points and dissolve his doubts.’ Instead he brushed them aside as trivial and urged Gaitskell to ‘have faith’. Gaitskell replied coldly, ‘I don’t believe in faith. I believe in reason and you have not shown me any.’ Douglas Jay, who was present, was delighted and dated Gaitskell’s firm conviction that he could not support entry from that night. Jenkins, by contrast, ‘drove Monnet back to the Hyde Park Hotel in deep depression’.59, fn9
Finally he tried to change Gaitskell’s mind by appealing to tactical considerations. Normally, as a professional writer, Jenkins disliked writing other than for money: he much preferred talking over a good lunch. But at the beginning of May 1962 he sat down and wrote his leader a six-page handwritten letter. ‘My dear Hugh,’ he began, ‘Perhaps because I am so unused to disagreeing with you (and greatly dislike it) I find arguing rather wearing, and as a substitute for doing so I thought I would send you a letter.’ His first argument was that Macmillan and Iain Macleod (the current Tory party chairman) would like nothing better than for Europe to become an election issue, with Labour having come out against the Market. All the evidence of the polls (‘and you have never been inclined to discount them when dealing with unilateralism’) indicated that the Tories would gain votes and Labour lose them on the issue. But even on present voting intentions, ‘I still think that the issue is an immensely dangerous one for us.’
He was still confident that Labour would win the next election, but he also assumed that the Liberal revival would be maintained; in which case ‘it seems as near certain as can be that we shall have to do it on 35–40% of the votes’. In a hung Parliament the Liberals would much rather put Labour in (with Grimond perhaps taking a seat in the Cabinet) than back the Tories. But if the Common Market issue was not settled and Labour was against it, they would have ‘no alternative but to keep the Tories in to carry it through’. Alternatively Labour might win a small majority and be able to form an independent government, but in that case it would still be in a very weak position. ‘A left-wing govt needs more moral strength than a right-wing one, and it is a great disadvantage to start with, say, 38% of the votes.’
Moreover, he went on, ‘if you have fought on an anti-C.M. ticket you add two other special, important and unnecessary weaknesses to the govt’. First, Gaitskell would ‘immediately run head on into a major clash with Kennedy about the whole organisation of the West . . . I have no doubt at all that you would find the issue dominating every Anglo-American discussion and that your good relations with him would founder on it.’ Second, Gaitskell would find that ‘the whole of what may be called non-Tory establishment opinion’ was very hostile to him on the issue. By this he meant Whitehall mandarins like Lord Plowden and Sir Robert Hall as well as most of the serious press, who would not support an anti-Common Market line:
The position you face is therefore this: you have to try to govern on ⅖ths of the votes, with Kennedy hostile and with neutral intelligent opinion here unnecessarily disaffected. I do not believe that you or anyone else could be a successful Labour P.M. in these circumstances.
Gaitskell might claim that he was trying to keep open the possibility of supporting entry. ‘But . . . there is not a single person I know, whether one of your own friends or a detached journalist, who does not believe you are moving in the other direction.’ By going against his natural supporters, Jenkins warned, he was making political difficulties for himself in the future. It was no good waiting to see the terms negotiated by the government before deciding the issue, since ‘people’s attitudes to the terms are overwhelmingly likely to turn on their prior position’. The Labour party could still be swung in favour of entry; ‘but not without a lead, and not by always stressing the conditions . . . and never the advantages’. If Gaitskell allowed the party to swing into opposition, he concluded, ‘then we will face the dangers I have tried to outline at the beginning of this letter’.62
This was a classic expression of Jenkins’ identification with the liberal establishment and his belief in the importance of being in the right company. In reply Gaitskell agreed that it would be better that the Common Market should not become an election issue; but he was more concerned with holding Labour together than with giving a lead:
You will, I am sure, appreciate that it is not really a matter of what I think; it is a question of carrying the party in this matter . . . I suspect that if I were to do what you want, we should be more likely to lose control altogether.63
In a television broadcast that evening Gaitskell was still careful to hold the scales fairly even: ‘To go in on good terms would, I believe, be the best solution . . . Not to go in would be a pity, but it would not be a catastrophe.’ But it was increasingly clear that his emotional priority was the Commonwealth. ‘To go in on bad terms which really meant the end of the Commonwealth would be a step which I think we would regret all our lives and for which history would not forgive us.’64
Over the summer of 1962 Gaitskell gave different people differing impressions of the way his mind was moving. He accepted the argument that he should not separate himself from his natural supporters, and would have preferred the familiar position of taking on the left. But at the same time he was irritated by those of his friends who saw Europe as a matter of semi-religious principle; he was disappointed that they could not reassure him that British membership of the Community would not damage under-developed countries. ‘Roy Jenkins, Tony Crosland and one or two other friends had no specific replies to these points,’ he told Alastair Hetherington. ‘He had rather hoped that they would have, but they didn’t.’65 In these circumstances it was always likely that Gaitskell would find unacceptable terms which Macmillan, in his eagerness for a successful negotiation, would be prepared to recommend. Defending his position to President Kennedy, Gaitskell persuaded himself that ‘Roy Jenkins, the leader of the pro-Market minority . . . did not demur.’66 But Jenkins did demur. By mid-September he was so resigned to a breach with his leader on an issue he thought more important than party tha
t he was actually prepared to consider dumping him; failing that, he preferred Macmillan’s continuance as Prime Minister till British entry was achieved. ‘Roy privately not optimistic – nor I,’ Austen Albu recorded after a gloomy meeting of pro-Europeans at Ladbroke Square. ‘Some discussion of H.G. as leader – agreed no-one else in sight . . . Roy and Strachey said at present Macmillan better P.M. than H.G.’67
Two days later, in his capacity as chairman of the Labour Common Market Committee, Jenkins held a press conference at which he tried to rally the pro-Market forces before the party conference, claiming that Labour MPs were about equally split, with eighty or ninety in favour, another eighty or ninety against and the same number undecided. He was careful to criticise the government’s poor handling of the negotiations, but insisted that Britain could still, by negotiating hard but positively, win better terms:
Mr Gaitskell’s statement seems to stress too harshly the hostile point of view. We should negotiate for better terms, but we want to negotiate in the context of going in and not staying out.