Meanwhile he had set up a small but high-powered inquiry intended – as he wrote much later – to ‘shine a searchlight of sceptical judgement upon a somewhat cushioned industry’,41 and persuaded Lord Plowden to chair it. Edwin Plowden, formerly chief planner at the Treasury, more recently chairman of the Atomic Energy Authority, was one of the most revered figures in Whitehall, so he was quite a catch and an example of Jenkins’ networking skill (Plowden was a member of Brooks’s). He reported towards the end of the year, recommending – as Jenkins hoped – that the industry should concentrate on a small number of cost-effective projects with a guaranteed export market, and more collaboration with Europe. He also proposed that the government should take a stake in the largest air-frame manufacturers, BAC and Hawker Siddeley. This too was something Jenkins had privately supported even before he became the responsible minister. ‘Although I am very far from being a fanatical nationaliser,’ he wrote in August 1964 to the Labour-supporting industrialist Michael Montague, ‘I think that public ownership would now probably be a good thing for the aircraft industry and, I daresay, for the efficiency of the economy as a whole.’ His only doubt was that nationalisation had caused the Labour Party such trouble in recent years that it might be politically unwise. ‘I think one has to have a certain amount of regard for these rather “cowardly” considerations. But I would certainly keep the matter open for the next Labour Government to consider.’42 In the event Jenkins was moved on before he could act on Plowden’s recommendation; his successor Fred Mulley tried to implement it by merging the two companies under public control; but that plan fell through and it was not until 1977 that they were nationalised by the Callaghan government as British Aerospace – only to be privatised again by Mrs Thatcher in the 1980s.
One lasting piece of reorganisation that Jenkins did achieve was to set up the British Airports Authority to run Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted (Scottish airports were added later), while devolving smaller government-owned airfields to the relevant local authorities. Typically he took the opportunity to visit every one, including those in the Scottish highlands and islands, in a small plane. ‘I am not sure it greatly helped the passage of the Bill,’ he wrote, ‘which in any case John Stonehouse was mostly conducting, but it gave me a grid of geographical knowledge which became useful when I entered Scottish politics seventeen years later.’43 The BAA too was privatised in the 1980s.
By now, however, he was ready to move on. Indeed he claimed somewhat arrogantly in his memoirs that he began to lose interest in Aviation after just six months. As soon as the TSR-2 question was settled in April ‘I began to feel that I was no longer in the front line. At first this was a relief, then it became rather boring.’44 Frank Soskice had not been a success as Home Secretary and was expected to retire soon on health grounds. This was the next job Jenkins had his eye on, and the press was lining him up for it. But Wilson really wanted to put him into an economic department. ‘He was one of the few people who was familiar with financial and economic subjects,’ he told Alastair Hetherington, ‘and could deal with them both by knowledge and by instinct. In a way, he was the kind of person one wanted as Chancellor.’45 He probably thought the Home Office a waste of a good economist. In September Lord Longford warned Jenkins that this was how the Prime Minister was thinking; so once again Jenkins went see him, on some Aviation-related pretext. Wilson assured him that he wanted to bring him into the Cabinet very soon, as one of ‘a series of moves’ following Soskice’s resignation. Jenkins deliberately let his disappointment show. ‘You surely wouldn’t like to be Home Secretary, would you?’ Wilson asked; and when Jenkins said that he would like it very much indeed, he said, ‘Well, that makes it all much easier.’46 Wilson should not have been surprised. Did he not recall the last chapter of The Labour Case, in which Jenkins had set out his detailed list of reforms which he thought a Labour Home Secretary should undertake? Maybe they were all metropolitan issues like homosexuality, censorship and abortion, which Wilson, ever-conscious of his Nonconformist northern roots, thought traditional Labour voters would not stomach: his every move at this time was geared towards an early General Election to secure a working majority. But on reflection he may have welcomed the chance to restore the government’s credit with its Guardian-reading supporters while shuffling off these difficult causes to someone who believed in them. At any rate Jenkins came away with the impression that he would be appointed almost immediately.
On the strength of this he counted his chickens before they were hatched. In early October he set off on an eighteen-day trip to Australia and New Zealand, confidently expecting to be called back to London halfway through. But in his absence Cecil King – the megalomaniac chairman of the Daily Mirror, who at this time saw himself as a confidant of the Prime Minister – wrote in his diary that Soskice was not keen to go and Wilson was too soft-hearted to sack him, even though he had already offered the job to Jenkins, ‘who had told his friends and had even done a little celebrating’.47 Wilson also disliked having his appointments leaked in advance and had decided – as Crosland took ‘some pleasure’ in telling him – to show Jenkins who was boss by letting him stew for a bit.48 In the end he had to wait until just before Christmas before the reshuffle was finally announced.
No one questioned that Jenkins had earned his promotion, though it was slightly overshadowed by the simultaneous promotion of Barbara Castle to Minister of Transport, which shocked the newspapers because she did not drive. Jenkins was actually in Bonn, discussing German participation in the European airbus, when the call from Number Ten came through; and this underlined the only criticism of his appointment: that he should be leaving Aviation just when big decisions were needed to implement the Plowden report. ‘It is incredible,’ Ted Heath – now Leader of the Opposition – charged, ‘that having brought the aircraft industry into its present difficulties Mr Jenkins should now abandon it at such a crucial stage.’49 But The Times reflected the general view in welcoming his switch to the Home Office:
It is not simply Mr Jenkins’ liberal outlook which recommends him, for liberalism and judgement are not invariably yoked. His administrative competence and power of decision make it a most promising appointment.50
The Daily Telegraph entered a note of caution:
It remains to be seen whether MR ROY JENKINS . . . will be able to retain, in so daunting a department, that peculiar combination of toughness and charm which have so far marked his political career.51
But the Birmingham Post had no doubt. By his cool handling of the problems of aviation Jenkins had shown himself a fighter, not a dilettante. ‘If it came to the fight of his life,’ it predicted, Labour MPs ‘would find him tough as steel . . . Here was not only a leader, but a leader among leaders.’52 This was putting it a bit high; but across the Atlantic the potential significance of his advance was noted by Time magazine:
Jenkins is not yet a serious rival for Wilson’s succession. But with his youth, he may become the very model of a leader for the 1970s: pro-Europe, moderate in social philosophy, possessed of a feel for the past as well as an openness towards the future in an era of rapid change for both the Labor Party and Britain.53
The announcement released a flood of congratulations from an immense range of friends, running from Attlee (‘How pleased your father would have been’) through political colleagues from both sides of the House, Balliol contemporaries (Nicko Henderson, Madron Seligman), journalists (Walter Terry, Jeremy Isaacs, Ludovic Kennedy, John Grigg) and academics (Noel Annan, John Sparrow, Christopher Hill, Hugh Thomas), to girlfriends (Barley Alison, Caroline Gilmour) and other lady friends (Ann Fleming, Pamela Berry, Marietta Tree and Jackie Kennedy). The fat file of letters in his papers – all immensely flattering, often comparing him to Asquith and many of them explicitly hoping that he would in due course follow his model all the way to Number Ten – give a flavour of the admiration that Jenkins aroused among the liberal establishment and the hopes now vested in him. Caroline Gilmour wrote from Scotland:
‘Darling Roy, Many, many congratulations. What a gigantic relief to have the uncertainty over. I am so pleased for you . . .’; Ann Fleming more teasingly from Sevenhampton: ‘Dearest Roy, Please time your next visit when your box is crammed with the Pennine murders evidence – better reading than Plowden. I thought you looked like a Home Secretary the other night . . .’ Generously swallowing any jealousy he may have felt, Tony Crosland was typically sardonic:
Had thought to see you at Cab. Thurs. Then called at Lad. Sq. this morning, but only stillness & silence.
All goes to show (a) pessimism never justified, (b) people have their just deserts, & (c) you’ve lost nothing by a few months delay.
So many congratulations: & please make abortion compulsory at earliest date, thus winning plaudits of Observer & easing my problems in the schools. (Tho’ in fact still think you’ve gone to the wrong Dept.)54
One wonders which department he thought Roy should have gone to.
Jenkins spent the Christmas holiday with the family in the dower house at Hatley, replying to all these letters while reading himself into his new responsibilities. It was a happy Christmas.
* * *
fn1 Tom Bradley had been an official of the Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association before becoming MP for Leicester North-East in 1962; he was a faithful supporter who followed Jenkins to the Home Office and the Treasury, and much later into the SDP. Stonehouse, also from a trade union background, was a high flyer who rose quickly through several departments in 1964–70 before coming spectacularly unstuck in the 1970s when he ran into money troubles and was sent to prison for faking his own death.
fn2 On the day Jenkins announced its continuation, the cartoonist Vicky drew him dolefully surveying a large white elephant with the face of General de Gaulle.21
fn3 Denis Healey’s unpublished diary suggests that Jenkins initially wanted to go on with TSR-2, out of concern for the jobs at stake. If so, by February 1965 he had changed his mind.31
fn4 The Sun was still the new incarnation of the stodgy old TUC-owned Daily Herald, launched in 1964. Not until 1969 was it bought by Rupert Murdoch and transformed into a raunchy tabloid.
12
‘A More Civilised Society’
THE HOME OFFICE was in many ways a surprising department for an ambitious politician to set his sights on. Though supposedly one of the three ‘great offices of state’, it has more often than not been occupied by second- or even third-rank figures who advanced no further, or occasionally by a first-rank player on the way down. The Home Secretary has no concern with economic policy, which is where the real power in modern government lies; his (or her) responsibilities cover a ragbag of somewhat miscellaneous administrative functions, ordinarily routine but with an unusual potential for controversy. There is no subject on which the press more stridently seeks a scapegoat when things go wrong – a policeman murdered, or a prison riot – than the web of interconnected social problems known collectively as ‘law and order’. For this reason the Home Office is usually regarded as a graveyard of reputations rather than a launch pad: in the previous sixty years the only former Home Secretary to reach the premiership was Winston Churchill – and it took him thirty years and a world war.
It was just because it had so long been a backwater of timid illiberalism, however, that Jenkins saw in the Home Office the opportunity for a determined reformer to make his mark. During the long years of Tory rule he had derided the wilful obscurantism of David Maxwell Fyfe (1951–4), Gwilym Lloyd George (1954–7) and Henry Brooke (1962–4), but had been especially disappointed by the one – Rab Butler (1957–62) – who might have brought to the office both a more liberal outlook and the authority of a senior minister. As a backbencher trying to steer his Obscene Publications Bill onto the Statute Book in 1958, Jenkins had experienced at first hand the power of the department to obstruct reform; now he was eager to have the resources of the Home Office under his command in order to advance it. Rarely does a new minister come into office with his personal agenda so clearly mapped out as he did in December 1965: Prime Ministers are usually careful to keep potential rivals away from their areas of expertise. It is to Harold Wilson’s lasting credit that he gave Jenkins the opportunity he craved.
Jenkins’ two years at the Home Office – actually less than two years – are a classic example of the right man in the right job at the right time. Half a century later his brief tenure still excites admiration and controversy in equal measure. Coinciding with the height of Beatlemania, the miniskirt, the contraceptive pill and ‘Swinging London’, but also with the Rolling Stones, the drug scene and the first Vietnam war demonstrations, the period 1965–7 now appears, for good or ill, a turning point in the social history of the country – a halcyon time of personal liberation or the onset of national decadence. While Jenkins himself always spoke unapologetically of the ‘more civilised society’ he helped to inaugurate, Mary Whitehouse in the 1970s and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s denounced him as the chief corrupter of morals who loosed the demon of ‘permissiveness’ in the land. Of course Jenkins did not create, but only reflected, the new moral climate which twenty years of peace and growing affluence suddenly produced in the mid-1960s. It was not he, nor even the Labour party, that had abolished National Service in 1960; curtailed the use of the death penalty in 1957; given the green light to high street betting shops and bingo; opened the door to new Commonwealth immigration; and titillated the country with the Profumo scandal in 1963. But he was far more in tune with the changing times than most Home Secretaries. He was openly on the side of the youth revolution, not against it, and if a forty-five-year-old balding politician could hardly be its patron saint, he was certainly its benevolent sponsor. To an extent, of course, he was lucky: there was a steadily building consensus (at Westminster and in most of Fleet Street, if not necessarily in the country) in favour of libertarian reforms – from the permanent abolition of hanging and the legalisation of homosexuality to the relaxation of licensing laws and the ending of theatre censorship – for which the moment (and after March 1966 a parliamentary majority) was now ripe. But no one had done more over the last ten years to promote this liberal agenda. So Jenkins deserved his luck; and it still required a committed Home Secretary to push it through. He was not in place long enough to deliver the whole list. The death penalty had already been suspended a few months before he took office – one thing Frank Soskice did achieve for which Jenkins was deeply grateful. But he ended flogging in prisons; secured government time to ensure the passage of Private Members’ Bills on both homosexuality and abortion; initiated the ending of theatre censorship; and introduced a groundbreaking Race Relations Bill. It was a remarkable record in just twenty-three months.
And this was not even the main focus of his activity. Taken as a whole, Jenkins’ period at the Home Office was by no means a time of liberalism run mad. Like every other Home Secretary, his first priority had to be the maintenance of law and order, the more so since he took office in the middle of what was then seen as an unprecedented crime wave, and suffered his full share of the political embarrassments Home Secretaries are heir to. His liberal reputation made it imperative to demonstrate that he was not ‘soft’ on crime. Here too he succeeded, winning the confidence of the police by overhauling their administrative structure and improving their equipment, while putting through a major Criminal Justice Bill incorporating important reforms of court procedure. ‘I see the central purpose of the Home Office as being that of striking a very difficult balance between the need to preserve the Queen’s peace and the need to preserve the liberty of the individual,’ he told Robin Day in a thoughtful interview a few days after taking office. ‘I certainly don’t regard the fact that I consider myself broadly a libertarian means that I don’t consider myself as having a great responsibility for trying to do something effective about organised crime.’1 On the whole he held this delicate balance between liberty and order extraordinarily well.
His first priority was to transform the et
hos of the Home Office itself, starting with his own room. It was ‘a rather formidable office physically’, he told Day, ‘with a very high ceiling and a slight atmosphere of Victorian punishment about it . . . I hope to make certain changes . . . which will make it look a little more in accordance with how I see my role.’2 He replaced the Secretary of State’s forbidding desk with a long dining table (an idea he had inherited from Julian Amery at Aviation and thought a good one); replaced the small ancient electric radiator with a coal fire burning in the grate; changed most of the pictures; and symbolically banished the grim board – ‘somewhat in the form of a billiard marker’3 – which had recorded the names of murderers awaiting execution and replaced it with a refrigerator, presumably well stocked. More importantly, he wanted to change the way the department worked, and much of the senior personnel. If he needed any prompting, Kenneth Younger, a Home Office minister under Attlee who was now chairman of the Howard League for Penal Reform, wrote to tell him that all his contacts in the prison service were ‘desperately hoping that you will be able to shake things up’. Generally, Younger wrote, the officials were ‘decent, liberal men with a reasonably intelligent approach to their work. But compared with the top officials one knows in, for instance, the Treasury or the Foreign Office, they are seriously lacking in drive and self-assertion and seem to be brought up to believe that their first duty is to keep their political chief out of trouble at Question Time.’4
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