The next day he attended the second meeting of the new Cabinet – for Item 5 on the agenda only – where he argued, first, that there would be no immediate savings from cancellation and, second, that relations with France would be damaged and future cooperation on other projects put in jeopardy. He urged the Cabinet at least to hold back from an immediate announcement.10 But Callaghan was insistent, while Patrick Gordon Walker, who as Foreign Secretary might have been expected to be concerned for Anglo-French relations, was strangely unsupportive. Jenkins was deputed the tricky job of explaining the government’s decision, first to the manufacturers (the British Aircraft Corporation and Bristol Siddeley) and then to the French. Before flying to Paris on 29 October he was warned by the Foreign Office that he would be met by an ‘atmosphere of cold enmity’.11 On arrival he suffered an awkward lunch with the British ambassador, Sir Pierson Dixon, at which – horror! – ‘the wine was lightly corked . . . So we proceeded to the key meeting . . . without much prior fortification’.12 This actually went better than expected. His opposite number ‘gave absolutely nothing away from the French point of view, but he was perfectly courteous and even friendly throughout’.13 Jenkins’ next hurdle was the House of Commons.
The occasion was the debate on the Address, when the Tories decided at short notice to focus on Concord, forcing Jenkins to make his first speech as a minister, with little time for preparation, in reply to an attack by his new shadow, Angus Maude. In those days the winding-up speeches in a packed (and well-lubricated) House before the ten o’clock vote were highly charged gladiatorial events. It was another testing baptism, but Jenkins achieved a parliamentary triumph, defending the government’s decision to seek an ‘urgent review’ of the project, and blaming both Amery for concluding an agreement with no break clause and the outgoing government for leaving Labour such a crippling deficit.14 It was, wrote the Daily Telegraph, ‘a tremendous rapping fighting speech’:
In little more than half an hour he established himself as one of the most formidable and powerful debaters on the Government Front Bench . . . Rarely has a new Minister made so decisive an impact on the House.15
Just three weeks after the General Election, Jenkins had already announced himself as a star of the new government. But he remembered it as a nerve-racking initiation. ‘My whole recollection of those first weeks of government,’ he wrote in a book review thirty-three years later, ‘is of feeling like a rather bad and inexperienced skier being swept down a steep slalom course, trying desperately to stay on my feet.’16 Even at the time he confessed to Walter Terry of the Daily Mail: ‘It was like having to dodge bulls without knowing the size of the arena. I had certain patches of knowledge about the aircraft industry . . . but it was five weeks or so before I was able to see the full picture.’17 At a Cabinet committee on 16 November he set out a range of alternatives to outright cancellation; but he was still having to argue a case in which he did not really believe, between the ‘brutal economisers’ (as Crossman called them) – the economic ministers, Callaghan and Brown – on one side and the ‘internationalists’ – Crossman, Crosland and (ironically) Douglas Jay – on the other. (As President of the Board of Trade, Jay already had the embarrassment of explaining to Britain’s EFTA partners the government’s unilateral imposition of import charges.) The economisers inevitably won, and Jenkins ‘went away with instructions to negotiate from an impossible position’.18 But the French still refused to give an inch. On 20 January he had to announce that Concord would go ahead after all. Although the British government still retained ‘some doubts about the economic and financial aspects of the project’, they had been impressed by French confidence and were resolved to stand by the treaty.19 The truth was that the Cabinet could find no way to renege on it. Legal opinion presented by the Attorney-General, Elwyn Jones, suggested that France could be awarded as much as £200 million in compensation at The Hague if Britain unilaterally cancelled. This made it more expensive to cancel than to carry on; so Callaghan and Brown bowed to the inevitable and Concorde (the British eventually accepted the French spelling) survived.
With hindsight, Jenkins believed that if the government had either consulted Paris in the first place or else persisted and called the French bluff, they too would have been happy to abandon the project: it was the hasty unilateralism of Britain’s initial announcement that caused the French to dig in. He came to wish they had cancelled it, as it turned into ‘a tremendous financial albatross’.20, fn2 Concorde never operated at a profit, was never sold to any other country and singularly failed to herald an age of supersonic travel. Only twenty planes were ever built and these were finally taken out of service in 2003 after a fatal crash in Paris. The failure to cancel was a somewhat inglorious start to Jenkins’ ministerial career; yet the decision was not his, but the Cabinet’s, and by pinning the blame squarely on the Tories he contrived to come out of it with his reputation enhanced.
He had made such an instant impression that he was first in line for promotion when the government faced its first enforced reshuffle. Patrick Gordon Walker had been appointed Foreign Secretary in October even though he had lost his Smethwick seat to a nasty racist campaign. Another constituency was quickly found for him, but the voters of Leyton objected to having a defeated minister foisted on them and in January 1965 he lost that too, after which he could not carry on. Needing a new Foreign Secretary, Wilson thought seriously of appointing Jenkins.22 Somehow the veteran chairman of the parliamentary party, Manny Shinwell, got to hear of this and tipped Jenkins off, so that when called to see the Prime Minister he walked up Downing Street in a delirium of anticipation. In fact Wilson had decided to play safe and appoint the colourless figure of Michael Stewart, previously Secretary of State for Education; it was this vacancy that he offered to Jenkins, whom he and Burke Trend, the Cabinet Secretary, had already identified as ‘by far the outstanding success among ministers outside the Cabinet’23 – even though Wilson knew it was not a job he coveted. Disappointed, Jenkins prevaricated. He first objected that all his children were at private schools, but Wilson brushed that aside. (So, he pointed out, had his own been: it was not a problem for Labour politicians in the 1960s.) Then he asked for a couple of hours to think about it and summoned Jennifer for a sandwich lunch in his office. The sandwich was unusual, but at every key moment in his career he always discussed his big decisions with her. She inclined towards acceptance; but Roy decided that he was enjoying Aviation too much to want to give it up after three months, even for a seat in the Cabinet. Education was frankly not a subject that excited him. It did not at that stage, he later confessed, occur to him that someone else would necessarily leapfrog over him. He went back to the Commons and told Wilson, who once again was impressed. He probably realised that Jenkins was gambling that the next vacancy would be the Home Office. Even so, he wrote in his memoir of the Labour government, it was ‘a brave decision: few politicians would refuse their first chance of joining the Cabinet’.24 A few hours later Jenkins heard that Tony Crosland had been appointed, and ‘experienced an inevitable stab of jealousy that I had surrendered my brief lead over this great friend but formidable rival’.25 He quickly restored his advantage, however, by letting it be known that he had been offered the job first. Crosland was not amused.
Two days later Jenkins wrote Wilson a slightly grovelling letter of thanks. ‘I am very struck by how well you have treated me ever since I came to see you to discuss the Economist offer. Each time you have been a little better than your word. May I also be permitted to say what a great pleasure it is to work closely with you on a problem.’26 From disliking and even despising Wilson, Jenkins had come to appreciate both his political skill and how much he stood to gain from getting on with him.
Despite having no previous executive experience of any sort, Jenkins took to government like a duck to water. He had been reading and writing about the exercise of power for the past fifteen years; and in Asquith he had a model of how to be an effective minister. From the beginnin
g his civil servants thought him first-class: ‘He is highly intelligent, extremely agreeable, very quick on the uptake, and he works very fast.’27 Though he generally preferred reading to verbal briefing, he believed in listening to all available advice before making a decision; he would then adjourn the meeting, take time to think out his line and then announce his decision at the start of the next meeting. Coming into a scientific department where he had to deal with technical specifications and – on the military side – complex weapons systems, he made it a rule not to pretend to understand something if he did not: the memory of Bletchley, where he had at times been frankly out of his depth, still scarred him. Above all he was determined not to spread himself too thinly. ‘One has to decide what are the main areas of policy and confine oneself to, say, three or four issues at a time’, he told the Daily Mail.28 He was also determined – like Asquith – to keep up his social life and make time for general reading. After just four months he gave an interview to the Observer in which he described his working day with remarkable confidence and candour:
I wouldn’t say that in the last few months in office I’ve been excessively overworked. I arrive at about 10 in the morning and work through till about 1.15 fairly solidly: meetings, work on papers and so on. I then go out and lunch with somebody; I don’t always talk business then by any means. I have an hour and a half for lunch. If there’s not something arranged I go to the House of Commons or Brooks’s Club.
In the afternoon my hours are a quarter-to-three to a quarter-to-eight. Apart from this I do perhaps an average of an hour working on papers outside the office. I do half-an-hour every day in the car; that’s one of the advantages of having a chauffeur-driven car, which I’ve never had before in my life. I can get through a lot of papers between Ladbroke Square and my office.
Note the refusal to take work home in the evening – the bane of most ministers’ lives.
He actually thought being a minister less demanding than writing, which cannot have endeared him to his hard-pressed colleagues:
In a sense I work very hard as a Minister; but in another sense I don’t think I work as hard as I used to: I only regard writing as real work. The most difficult thing is sitting down at a desk with a blank sheet of paper; and unless you write the thing there will be nothing there. As a Minister you hardly write anything. You have something in draft form: you can rewrite it if you want to; or approve it; or say, ‘do you mind redrafting it?’ But I think the most difficult thing of all is to sit faced with a blank piece of paper . . .
As a Minister . . . I suppose you sometimes take fairly responsible decisions; but you don’t have this extreme form of mental effort, which is starting from blank. There’s a momentum in a Minister’s work . . . Even if you’re not on best form, you have a certain number of people to see and drafts to approve, and so you get through the morning’s work because the morning’s work doesn’t have to be created by oneself . . .
Despite his testing initiation he found that he worried less than he had done before:
I don’t mean that I don’t think terribly carefully about what I should do. But I’m much less a prey to destructive worry – thinking about things one cannot alter – than I used to be . . . There have been moments of high tension, certainly; but regrets and destructive worry less than before. Certainly I have thought, ‘God, it matters terribly how I do that in the next half-hour.’ And occasionally there’s an absolutely sickening feeling that one’s going to do it badly. But I draw a great distinction between worry about the future and worry about the past. Worry about the future is sometimes good; worry about the past is almost always debilitating.29
A second expensive aeroplane that the incoming government was determined to review was the nuclear-strike bomber, the TSR-2, designed as a replacement for the old Canberra, commissioned in 1959 and now being built by Hawker Siddeley in Coventry. There were actually three British-built military aircraft under threat in the November 1964 defence review. The HS681 was a short take-off transport plane, a replacement for the Argosy, and the P1154 was a supersonic vertical take-off fighter intended to replace the Sea Vixen and the Hunter. But it was on the TSR-2 that controversy centred. The decision raised in acute form the question of whether the RAF should fly British planes, at greater expense if necessary, to support the survival of the independent British aircraft industry, or go for American planes which, being built for a bigger market, could be bought more cheaply. The Ministry of Defence, under Denis Healey, was moving towards scrapping all three British planes and buying instead the swing-wing F-111A (in the case of the TSR-2), Hercules Transport planes (in place of the HS681) and Phantoms plus more British Buccaneers (in place of the P1154).
In the House of Commons on 9 February Jenkins defended the scrapping of the HS681 and the P1154, but still held out some hope for the TSR-2. At Cabinet the day before, however – which he again attended for this item only – he had recommended scrapping that too, even though Hawker Siddeley had made an ‘almost embarrassingly good’ new offer on costs and delivery time.30, fn3 In the House he reviewed the whole future of the aircraft industry, which consumed 25 per cent of the government’s research and development spending to produce models that were then unsaleable and now made up only 2½ per cent of British exports. (The death knell had sounded for the TSR-2 in 1963 when the Australian government decided to buy the F-111A instead.) The lesson from the TSR-2 – whether it went ahead or not – was that the aircraft industry must never again tie up all its resources in one or two commercially uncertain projects. The future must lie (and here Jenkins could restore his European credentials) in international cooperation:
Whatever decisions we have taken in the past weeks, and whatever decisions we may take in the next few months, we are at the end of the road as far as exclusive British manufacture of complicated weapons systems for an exclusive British market is concerned. We can afford to make the products only if others will buy them. The corollary is that we must be prepared to buy some of the products of others. An all-British industry equipping an RAF flying all-British planes is out, whether we like it or not.32
‘A masterly speech,’ The Times enthused. ‘In less than 45 minutes Mr Jenkins took the aircraft industry and shook it inside out.’33 Among the private congratulations were notes from Shirley Williams (‘The best speech I’ve heard so far here’ – though admittedly she had only been elected the previous October) and Michael Foot (‘Mr Asquith at his peak could not have done it better’); while the Sun quoted a Labour MP, not previously an admirer, saying, ‘I’ll be damned . . . but I think he could be Prime Minister.’34, fn4 Still the Cabinet had to take the decision on the TSR-2. Healey’s proposal to make a straight substitution of the F-111A ran into strong opposition from the defenders of British industry, led by Cousins, Jay and Crossman (a Coventry MP) and backed by marching aircraft workers. But the Chancellor was adamant, particularly after the failure to cancel Concorde, that TSR-2 could not be kept going at the cost of £4 million a month and he was determined to announce the cancellation in his budget. Over two long Cabinet meetings on 1 April Jenkins argued for cancelling TSR-2 without replacing it at all. ‘My scepticism about a continuing British East of Suez role predisposed me in favour of doing without either.’35 The Cabinet was split evenly three ways: between cancellation; cancellation with an option to buy the F-111A; and carrying on with the TSR-2. At the end of the second meeting, however – for which Jenkins had postponed a visit to New York – Healey, backed by Wilson, got his middle way. By a majority of 12:10, well after midnight, it was agreed to cancel, but with an option on the F-111A; and a year later the American plane was duly bought, as the MoD had clearly intended all along.36 Once again, however, Jenkins was seen to have done well, as Crossman noted: ‘The only man who has come out on the defence side with a will and a mind of his own is Roy Jenkins at Aviation . . . Roy Jenkins is an example of a non-Cabinet Minister who has steadily raised his status.’37
In the Commons the Tories moved a cens
ure motion, which gave him another parliamentary triumph. If his speech in February had been impressively reasoned, this was back in his most combative vein. After only six months the government was already in trouble: the loss of the Leyton by-election had halved its already tiny majority, the economic outlook was gloomy and the party was rapidly becoming demoralised. But Jenkins rallied the troops, as The Times described:
As if to prove that they can still win in the place where it matters, the Government pulled off a huge victory in the House of Commons last night, defeating the Opposition censure motion on the cancellation of the TSR-2 by a clear 26 votes.
The end came after a thunderous tub-thumping display by Mr Roy Jenkins, Minister of Aviation, which set the Commons alight after what had been – by censure debate standards – a rather dull day.
What Mr Jenkins had to say hardly mattered, even if the House had been able to hear more than a fraction of it. In fact it was largely a repetition of what Mr Healey had said earlier, but Mr Jenkins’ style was so belligerent that he could have spoken Swahili and still provoked a riot.38
The third major decision to occupy Jenkins during his fourteen months at Aviation was the one he had addressed in his Observer articles in 1964: what to do about BOAC? The problem was the same one in civil guise: whether the national airline should fly the flag or buy the cheapest in an effort to make a profit. In 1963 Amery had appointed a new chairman, Sir Giles Guthrie, with instructions to make a profit. Guthrie’s response had been to cancel BOAC’s order for thirty British Super VC-10s in favour of American Boeing 707s. Jenkins had argued that this was unacceptable: though BOAC should in principle fly the cheapest plane available, the corporation was too far committed to Vickers to scrap its order now. The government should make good the financial disadvantage to BOAC in this instance and write off its £80 million past loss, but with the instruction that it should operate as economically as possible in future.39 In office a few months later he followed his own advice, except that the amount of debt written off was actually £110 million, to be accompanied by a restructuring of the corporation’s relationship with the government. Announcing this in the Commons on 1 March, he again made short work of the Opposition: ‘The Minister chopped Mr Maude down to size with a few cutting phrases before going on to speak at length of his own decision.’40
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