Roy Jenkins

by John Campbell

  Whether jolted by this or not, they both put their names in for the annual beauty contest in November. According to Susan Crosland (who married Tony the next year), Bill Rodgers urged Tony against standing, since he would only take votes from Roy. The idea that he was now seen as the junior partner ‘came as a surprise’.94 Tony stood anyway, and actually got more votes than Roy – 72 to 64. Neither came near to getting elected: they were eighteenth and nineteenth respectively, fifty or sixty votes adrift.fn14 But at least by standing they had shown a willingness to play in Wilson’s team.

  The day after the Shadow Cabinet elections President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. This was the second shatteringly unexpected death in a year. It is no exaggeration to say that Jenkins adored the Kennedys. Almost all his American friends, like Ken Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger, were New England Democrats and he was naturally swept up in their enthusiasm for ‘Camelot’ (as the Kennedy groupies romantically christened the administration). He and Jennifer, with Ian and Caroline Gilmour, had stayed with the Galbraiths in Vermont for the Nixon–Kennedy election in 1960 and spent a day trailing Kennedy on the stump around New York, hearing him make five speeches (‘All of them were invigorating, one or two of them were moving. His command of widely contrasting audiences was complete’).96 Over the following three years he visited Washington several times – usually staying at the British Embassy with the ambassador, David Ormsby-Gore, who was exceptionally close to the Kennedy White House – and loved the sense of being at the centre of the democratic world. The dinner-table talk in Georgetown, he gushingly declared in 1990, might be excessively political, ‘but it is at least conducted by the most famous journalists vying with the most favoured ambassadors to produce the most sophisticated witticisms about the most powerful cabinet officers to be found in any capital’.97 He loved the ‘confidence and vigour’ of the people around Kennedy – his brother Bobby, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy and the rest – as he wrote in the Birmingham Mail in February 1963:

  They all work incredibly hard, but also lead very active social lives. Most of them get to their offices soon after eight . . . and stay there till seven in the evening. They then rush home and change to go out to dinner or to some small informal dance, which goes on until midnight or later. And at eight next morning they are back at their desks again. They work on Saturdays too, but not quite so hard.98

  He did not have much contact with JFK himself. In 1962 he wrote in the Observer a slightly cool review of Kennedy’s student thesis (about appeasement, recently published under the title Why England Slept), treating it as a fairly callow effort while insisting that the still-youthful President had matured since 1940.99 But in January 1963 he was granted a forty-minute interview, which made a deep impression on him:

  He asked a series of rapid-fire questions about all sorts of subjects – economic growth, Europe and de Gaulle, the Labour Party. He interrupted the answers, he gave his own views, he followed up a weak or unconvincing reply by forcing one hard against the ropes.

  The whole experience was ‘peculiarly intellectually testing’. Moreover, Jenkins concluded, Kennedy ‘contributed two pieces of original, rather unconventional, analysis. That, again, was unexpected from any Head of State.’100

  That January he also interviewed Bobby Kennedy, McNamara, Dean Rusk and all the other key players in Washington’s handling of the Cuban missile crisis. Naturally he concluded that in calling Khrushchev’s bluff and facing down the Soviet Union’s attempt to site nuclear missiles barely a hundred miles from the US mainland, Kennedy had ‘led the world with almost faultless skill and precision through the most dangerous crisis in its history’:

  The essence of his strength was his ability to watch the cases for and against the different courses of action being built up or destroyed, without rushing into prior commitment to one or another; and then, when all the relevant information and arguments were available, to make a clear decision in favour of the one that seemed best.101

  This was exactly the sort of cool decision-making that Jenkins also admired in Asquith; and which, when he came very soon to exercise executive office himself, he tried to emulate.

  On Friday 22 November 1963 he had gone to Wales for the weekend when the news came in that Kennedy had been shot. David Astor rang to ask him to write a tribute for the Observer. Jenkins barely slept that night. He wrote his piece the next morning, then went to Gloucester for a Fabian Society engagement which he tried to get out of, amazed that such routine events should still be carrying on. His article, including the judgements quoted above, appeared the following day:

  Compared with the greatest Presidents of American history . . . he inevitably leaves more promise and less achievement behind him. Yet, aided perhaps by the manner of his death, it is difficult to believe that his name will not live with theirs. He will be the great ‘might-have-been’, the symbol of fate in its most vicious and retaliatory mood.102

  Though written in shock within hours of Kennedy’s death, this was a judgement that he would never modify. Twenty-eight years later, by which time the romance of ‘Camelot’ was badly tarnished, Jenkins still rated JFK ‘the best president of the past four decades’ – that is, since Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.103

  Though he met Jack only once, Jenkins got to know other members of the Kennedy clan well – particularly Bobby (about whom he wrote a long, admiring essay in 1972) and Jackie, and also Jackie’s sister Lee Bouvier, who had married (as her second husband) a Polish count, Stanislaw Radziwill (which somehow made her a princess). Lee now lived in England, where she featured regularly in the gossip columns, and was rumoured to be another of Jenkins’ lovers.fn15 Bobby he met in London two months after Dallas, when he was still ‘completely disoriented’,fn16 and thereafter two or three times a year in London, Washington or New York until he too was assassinated in 1968.106 With Jackie – now the beautiful, tragic widow – he developed an affectionate friendship. He took her to a New York performance of his Right Honourable Gentleman (the play made from his Dilke biography) in 1965; and the next year he escorted Jackie and Lee to Juno and the Paycock at the National Theatre in London. He saw less of Jackie after she married Aristotle Onassis in 1968; but after Onassis’ death in 1975 they again used to lunch together whenever she was in London or he in New York, and they exchanged letters for the rest of her life.

  A typical – and very funny – letter was one Jackie wrote from Gstaad in January 1966, where she was skiing with her children and the Galbraiths, trying to escape the press and social life by ‘violent physical exertion’. (‘You don’t have time to think about anything. You do your stint on the mountain & stumble to your bed. I have a luxurious but tiny chalet where we just squeeze in. When Caroline has a friend for the night, John sleeps in my bed & the nurse I don’t like to imagine where.’) It ends:

  This whole letter makes me laugh – as I have just read it over to see if it makes sense – & it sounds just like something Diana Cooper’s gardener wrote to Margot Asquith’s chambermaid. Travelling with Ken & writing to you could do wonders for one’s style . . . Dear Roy – so much is ahead of you – I shall always hope to see you somewhere, & hope for so much for you. Love [signature illegible].107

  Meanwhile, at the end of 1963, Jenkins had begun his relationship with Leslie Bonham Carter. They had known each other ever since Leslie married Mark Bonham Carter in 1955, but the moment when the spark ignited was at a New Year’s Eve party at Mark’s brother Raymond’s house in Golders Green. They had lunch together two days later. Leslie’s understanding was that his relationship with Caroline Gilmour had ended; this was not so, though there may have been a temporary interruption. He continued to see both of them almost equally frequently for the rest of his life. Leslie was a gentler personality than Caroline, and Jennifer liked her more: indeed they remain good friends to this day. Mark too quietly accepted the relationship. In getting to know Leslie, Roy also became close to her children: in particular the eldest, Laura Grenfell, her daught
er by Lord St Just, who would come to play an important part in his life in the late 1970s; but also her three younger daughters, one of whom (Jane) in time became a Liberal Democrat peer. From the time he started work on Asquith in 1959 the whole extended Bonham Carter clan became an increasingly important part of Jenkins’ world.

  As the 1964 election loomed his priority was finishing Asquith. He was lucky that the election was delayed till the last possible moment. Already damaged by the Profumo and other scandals, Macmillan was forced by ill health to resign in October 1963, but contrived – to general ridicule – to have himself succeeded by Lord Home, who took advantage of the new law to disclaim his ancient hereditary earldom in order to descend to the Commons as Sir Alec Douglas-Home, and then carried on as Prime Minister until October 1964. This just gave Jenkins time to finish his book. He had been writing in concentrated bursts since 1959. After the success of Dilke he had wanted another biographical subject, preferably another Liberal, but this time a first-rank figure. Asquith practically chose himself. He was, with Attlee, the embodiment of that cool liberal intelligence which Jenkins most admired in politics; yet there had been no major life since the official biography in 1932. Moreover his publisher, Mark Bonham Carter, was Asquith’s grandson and held the copyright on a major unpublished source, the enormous sequence of intimate letters written by Asquith, at the height of his premiership, to Venetia Stanley. This was gold for any biographer. In addition he was allowed to take away – six boxes at a time – Asquith’s political papers, owned by Balliol but housed in the Bodleian Library. These two collections apart, Jenkins used no other primary sources; but he scarcely needed to.

  He worked on the papers during 1960 and did most of the writing over the next three summers – 1961 in the south of France near Saint-Tropez; 1962 at Jakie Astor’s house near Cambridge; 1963 near the Beaumarchaises in the Basque country near Saint-Jean-de-Luz – ending with a final burst at Nicko and Mary Henderson’s house in Berkshire at the beginning of 1964: a pattern characteristic of his lifelong habit of working holidays, usually staying in other people’s houses while the rest of the household revolved around him. In this way he completed the 220,000-word manuscript – in longhand – in time for publication by Collins in October 1964. But there was a last-minute problem. It turned out that Asquith’s surviving daughter and fierce guardian of his reputation, the formidable Lady Violet Bonham Carter (Mark’s mother), was unaware of her father’s letters to Venetia – her contemporary and close friend – and was horrified by them. She had thought the early chapters ‘rather dull & flat’, and was already ‘shattered’ by the unflattering description of her own mother, Asquith’s first wife, who died young.108 She then read some more ‘& got a terrible shock when I reached Chapter 22. I cannot believe that Mark cld have contemplated publishing it. It is a betrayal of intimacies of private life second to none.’ When Mark told her that it was necessary to let Roy publish the letters in a responsible way in order to forestall Lord Beaverbrook doing worse with them, she wrote that this was ‘like burning down your own house for fear an enemy might burn it down tomorrow! The remedy is worse than the disease.’109 In reality Beaverbrook had copies of the letters, given to him by Venetia’s daughter, but did not own the copyright, so he could not have done anything with them. Mark Bonham Carter wanted to publish them on purely commercial grounds and did not share his mother’s filial scruples. She reluctantly read the whole correspondence ‘with pain – and astonishment. It is so strange to know that I was quite unaware of what was passing between 2 human beings’110 – the closest people in her life at that time – and was horrified at the idea of exposing her father’s ‘“infatuation” . . . which must inevitably cheapen him and reduce his stature to posterity’.111 She was particularly upset by the revelation that Asquith wrote to Venetia during Cabinet meetings. ‘This wld shock others terribly, as indeed it has shocked me.’112 Right up to the verge of publication she begged for cuts. ‘She did not exactly exercise censorship,’ Jenkins wrote after her death, but ‘we argued a good deal. In the majority of cases she generously gave way to me. In a few I gave way to her.’113 He finally agreed to cut some passages of Asquith’s most desperate pleading (‘Shall I try to tell you what you have been and are to me? First, outwardly and physically, unapproachable and unique . . .’).114 He always insisted that these cuts did not significantly bowdlerise the truth; but he did take the opportunity to restore them when the book was republished, after Lady Violet’s death, in 1978.

  Asquith was an almost perfect match of subject and author. Jenkins not only admired Asquith, but already in 1964 seemed to be modelling himself on him. The effortless Balliol gloss superimposed on a relatively humble background, the smooth intellect hiding a strong competitive streak, the self-consciously Edwardian style and what Asquith recognised in himself as ‘a certain capacity for the enjoyment of comfort and luxury, with a moderate fondness for social pleasures and (perhaps) a slight weakness for the companionship of clever and attractive women’ – all these were already clearly present in Jenkins. Further career parallels were yet to unfold: both the Home Office and the Treasury within the next five years, though of course Jenkins, unlike his model, never made it to Number Ten; a country house near Oxford; and, most uncanny, a late return to the House of Commons at a famous by-election for a Scottish constituency. But there was enough similarity already for the parallel to be levelled at Jenkins by political opponents, particularly in the Labour Party, who always suspected him of complacent elitism and closet Liberalism. Once when he was Home Secretary an unusually literate graffiti artist scrawled ‘ASQUITH’ on the pillars of Ladbroke Square.115

  Asquith is, with some mild criticisms, an almost wholly admiring portrait which describes the supporting personalities and expounds the sometimes tortuous crises of 1911–16 with an economy and concise clarity lacking in Jenkins’ later biographies of Gladstone and Churchill. It remains probably his best book. His facility with elegant historical parallels is already developed; while his penchant for elaborately sustained metaphors has not yet got out of hand. But much of it reads like a self-portrait. Jenkins notes Asquith’s ‘lack of interest in speculative thought’, and writes that ‘There was always in his character a surprising but strong streak of recklessness’. Asquith wrote for the Spectator as a young man, was of course a member of Brooks’s, and shared Jenkins’ dinner-table passion for rating historical figures in order. ‘He had an intellectual self-confidence which left him in little doubt about the rightness of his own decisions’, but also a ‘steadily developing belief in an economy of intellectual effort’. He saw no harm in appointing his friends to important offices, but was ‘a little too concerned with “Athenaeum opinion”’. He enjoyed ‘a constitution which required no austerity of life to keep it unimpaired’; and ‘an extraordinary taste for relaxing with pen and paper’. His ‘capacity for the swift and almost effortless transaction of business was always such that he never worked excessively long hours’; but ‘in spite of his “guise of lethargy” he rather despised those who liked living at half-pressure’. Every one of these passing comments on Asquith could equally be applied to Jenkins himself.116

  The reviews were good without being unanimously ecstatic. ‘There are few political historians writing today,’ wrote Kenneth Rose in the Sunday Telegraph, ‘who so agreeably blend scholarship with imagination, authority with liveliness’; while Michael Foot in the Evening Standard called Jenkins ‘a skilled, generous and graceful biographer’. Some of the kindest comments came from friends like Asa Briggs (‘lucid, fascinating and highly readable’) and John Grigg (‘intelligent and suggestive and above all readable’).117 The Times rather surprisingly invited Lady Violet to write a stirring defence of her father, accepting the praise, refuting the few criticisms and ignoring the Venetia letters entirely (she wrote in her diary that she wished she ‘had not lived to see this week’).118 But some reviewers thought the book a bit too bland, notably Robert Rhodes James in the Spectator, who thought
that ‘Asquith was surely a tougher, stronger, more acute man . . . than Mr Jenkins would have us believe . . . We required a Sutherland; but we have got an Annigoni’;119 and A.J.P. Taylor in the Observer, who typically charged Jenkins with covering up Asquith’s drinking and wondered what else he had omitted in deference to Lady Violet: ‘A biographer has an overriding duty: he is the servant of the reading public, not of the family.’120 (‘Poisonous’ was Lady Violet’s verdict on Taylor.)121, fn17 Nevertheless the book did well. It sold about 20,000 copies in hardback, more in paperback, and has been reprinted several times. It is a bit dated now, as a wider range of sources has become available, but for half a century it has remained unchallenged as the best biography and is rightly regarded as a classic.

  Labour went into the October 1964 election confident of victory. By his energetic performance as Leader of the Opposition against a tired and scandal-damaged Tory government, Wilson had papered over – at least temporarily – the old Bevanite–Gaitskellite split, and the party enjoyed commanding leads in the opinion polls for the last two years of the Parliament. Even Jenkins conceded that Wilson, building on his inheritance, had done well. ‘I was one of the large minority which did not support him for the leadership,’ he wrote in the Observer in September 1963. ‘But I find that many of my doubts have gone.’ Wilson’s great theme – that after the ‘thirteen wasted years’ of backward-looking old-school Toryism, Labour would somehow harness ‘the white heat of the technological revolution’ to stimulate a much higher rate of planned economic growth – was exactly what Jenkins had been saying for years. ‘Industrially, educationally, socially,’ he believed, ‘we must move 25 years in the next five’; and he looked forward optimistically to a Labour government that would be ‘as adventurous as it is undogmatic’.122 Concentrating on the Common Market question for the past few years, he had rather neglected economics; but each year in the budget debate he had berated successive Chancellors for their failure to promote investment and exports. ‘We have never accepted the view,’ he lectured Selwyn Lloyd in 1962, ‘that the most likely way of dealing with balance of payments difficulties is by restriction rather than expansion.’123 The following year he condemned Reginald Maudling’s ‘half-hearted approach to expansion’.124 Even in 1964, when it was plain that Maudling was actually fuelling an unsustainable pre-election boom, he still criticised a ‘budget of missed opportunities’.125 Like Wilson, Jenkins believed unquestioningly that Labour would be able to conjure growth where the Tories had failed.