By far the most controversial innovation was majority verdicts, designed to prevent the ‘nobbling’ of juries, which was allowing a lot of hardened criminals to escape conviction. Senior policemen – Robert Mark prominent among them – had been pressing for this for some time. But tampering with the ancient requirement of unanimous verdicts was an affront to legal conservatives and civil liberties watchdogs alike. The Times published several outraged letters and thundered editorially against ‘the abandonment of a principle of unanimity in a society that has known no other for six hundred years’.36 To guard his flanks Jenkins was careful to get both Michael Foot, the leading tribune of the Labour left, and his new Tory shadow, Quintin Hogg (later, as Lord Chancellor, a crusty defender of legal precedent), onside. Both agreed to support the clause. Hogg in particular had to withstand considerable pressure from colleagues both legal and political who saw an opportunity to defeat the government; but as he wrote in his memoirs, ‘I kept my word to Jenkins and backed his proposals for all I was worth as a welcome, if minor, rationalisation, of the creaking old eighteenth-century ox-wagon of our criminal law.’37 When it came to the vote in April 1967 Jenkins generously adjourned the debate to allow more passionate objections to be voiced from both sides of the House: seventy-four Tories – including the Shadow Energy spokesman, Margaret Thatcher – a dozen Labour members and most of the Liberals voted against. But the contentious clause was carried by 180 votes to 102 and has never subsequently been seen as anything but common sense.
The rest of the Bill, which Jenkins introduced in December with ‘an hour-long speech of didactic clarity’,38 aroused no comparable furore and passed into law the following summer. More controversial was his determination to deliver a new Race Relations Bill. Soskice had already passed one Race Relations Act in 1965; but though it broke new legislative ground it was a timid measure which established a Race Relations Board to investigate allegations of discrimination but excluded housing and employment from its remit, which made it virtually useless. From the moment Jenkins came into office Anthony Lester was pressing him to beef it up. Lester drafted a major speech for Jenkins to give to the National Committee for Commonwealth Immigrants, and was very critical of the ‘disastrous’ draft that the department had written for him. (It was perhaps significant that the relevant assistant secretary, J.T.A. Howard-Drake, had come from the Colonial Office.) ‘I respect Roy more than anyone else in British politics,’ Lester wrote to Maurice Foley, whom Jenkins had brought into the Home Office from the DEA specifically to deal with immigration issues:
If he makes the speech in its present form he will lose the right to be regarded as liberal and creative on race relations . . . What he says on 23rd May will set the tone for future Government policy . . . If the speech is delivered in its present form it will create universal dismay and hostility in the immigrant communities.39
Similar advice came from Mark Bonham Carter, whom Jenkins had appointed as the first chairman of the Race Relations Board. The department had been seeking a chairman for months, trawling through dozens of worthy names, who either declined or were for one reason or another judged unsuitable. (The great West Indian cricketer Learie Constantine was vetoed by the Prime Minister of Trinidad; Dora Gaitskell was thought to lack relevant experience; they also tried Gaitskell’s younger brother Arthur, an expert on African development.) Jenkins immediately added Bonham Carter to the list and quickly offered him the job.40 ‘I have never seen any objection to appointing friends,’ he explained years later, ‘provided they are good enough; and if they are not, maybe there is something wrong with one’s choice of friends.’41 Bonham Carter was an excellent appointment. Asquith’s grandson, who had stuck loyally to the Liberal party through its leanest years, winning a famous by-election at Torrington in 1958 but then losing the seat again in 1959, had been disappointed in his hopes of a political career: this was a good way of giving him some role in public life. He was initially doubtful that he could combine the chairmanship with his directorship at Collins and his commitments to the Liberals: but when persuaded that he could, he threw himself into it with energy and success. Jenkins tacitly encouraged him to press for greater powers and he did. American experience, he urged, showed that strong legislation was needed to combat racial discrimination: in the build-up to Jenkins’ big speech, he echoed Lester in urging him to stress the positive benefits of immigration, not just the problems, and suggested that he should make reference to his own Welsh heritage.42
Jenkins did that, and also spoke warmly of the contribution made by successive waves of immigrants from 1066 to the 1930s; he called for faster integration, which he defined ‘not as a flattening process of assimilation but as equal opportunity accompanied by cultural diversity, in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance’. Such a process was essential, he insisted, ‘if we are to maintain any sort of world reputation for civilised living and social cohesion’. A lot could be done under the 1965 Act – he could hardly rubbish his predecessor’s legislation completely – but he dropped a clear hint that ‘my mind is far from being closed about future changes to the Act’. British policy-makers at this time were acutely conscious of the racial violence that was beginning to erupt in inner cities in the United States: the following year Enoch Powell grimly foresaw ‘the river Tiber flowing with much blood’ unless large numbers of immigrants were ‘repatriated’. Their aim was to pre-empt such trouble in Britain by wise legislation now. Compared with America’s bitter legacy of slavery, Jenkins suggested, Britain started with a relatively clean slate:
The problem we are discussing today makes less demands [sic] upon our capacity for tolerance and change than many which we have successfully surmounted in the past. But the way in which we face it, particularly in the next few years, can have a great effect upon our future. If we overcome [it] we shall have a new message to offer the world. If we fail we shall be building up, both inside and outside the country, vast difficulties for future generations of English people.43
This speech was known to his advisers as his ‘We Shall Overcome’ speech. Lester, Dowler, Harris, Foley and Bonham Carter all had a hand in it, while Howard-Drake did his best to emasculate it; but, as he always did with major speeches, Jenkins wrote and polished it carefully himself. For the present he did not press for a government Bill. The next month Maurice Orbach, the Labour MP for Stockport who had won a high place in the ballot for Private Members’ Bills, published a Bill, drafted by Lester and Foley and supported by a range of Labour and Liberal Members, to extend the scope of the 1965 Act; while the veteran Fenner Brockway introduced a similar Bill in the Lords. In the Cabinet Legislation Committee Jenkins cited the inevitable flaws of Orbach’s Bill to argue that the subject could be properly dealt with only by a government Bill, fully negotiated between the interested departments.44 But he faced a stiff battle, since both the TUC and the CBI were lobbying against any further legislation, while the Treasury, the DEA and the Ministry of Labour – already embattled with them over prices and incomes policy – were reluctant to open another front of conflict. Beyond Westminster there was still a lot of casual racism in the workplace (hence the unions’ opposition), while organisations like the Society for the Preservation of All Races (formerly the Racial Preservation Society) called openly for the separation, not integration, of races and the abolition of the ‘provocative and un-British’ 1965 Act. Bonham Carter’s first report, however, made it clear that the existing Act was not working – only a quarter of the complaints the Board received fell within its powers – and threatened to resign if it was not given more teeth, which would have embarrassed the government. So in April 1967 the Cabinet agreed to let Jenkins have his Bill in the next session; he brought his proposals to Cabinet in July and announced them to the Commons the following week. He insisted that the new legislation must outlaw discrimination in employment, though he drew back from the minefield of religious discrimination.45 He had moved to the Treasury by the time the Bill was ready to be introduced, leaving it to his suc
cessor, Jim Callaghan, to pilot it through; but in an interview the following year Jenkins judged announcing the legislation ‘probably the most important thing I did’ at the Home Office.46 Praising his ‘patience and tactical skill’, the New Statesman recognised what he had been up against. ‘In confronting his own party, the Commons and Labour in the country, he exhibited a masterly, even noble, capacity to nullify prejudice, to achieve what he believed right in the face of serious odds.’47 The strengthened Race Relations Act became law in 1968.
In another area of racial policy, however, Jenkins was lucky. The question of what to do about a possible influx of 200,000 Kenyan Asians – holders of British passports who were being driven out by the ‘Africanisation’ policy of the Kenyan government – was a tricky one for a self-consciously liberal Home Secretary. In October 1967 he brought the problem to the Cabinet’s Home Affairs Committee, warning that the government could not let them all in, yet had no power to keep them out. Despite ‘formidable’ legal objections, he feared a white backlash if he did nothing, so he asked for a slot in the legislative programme for an emergency Bill in case the trickle (currently 500 a week) turned into a flood.48 By the time this appeared to be happening, however, just four months later, Jenkins had left the Home Office and it fell to Callaghan to incur the odium of introducing ‘racist’ legislation to deny British passport holders their right of entry. The Commonwealth Immigrants Bill, based on Jenkins’ draft, honoured the promise, but tried to stagger the numbers by imposing a quota of around 7,000 a year, enforced by a voucher system. No longer departmentally responsible, however, Jenkins now felt free to oppose Callaghan’s Bill in Cabinet, as Crossman recorded, ‘partly because he hates him and partly because [he] was convinced that if we plunged into this in the kind of spirit Callaghan showed we would have offended every decent instinct. Roy pleaded for delay whereas Harold was ready to impose the quota that very day.’49 The Bill was rushed through all its stages in a single week in February 1968, honourably opposed by thirty-five Labour Members, fifteen Tories (including Ian Gilmour) and ten Liberals. Jenkins voted for it on Second Reading, but not on Third.
In subsequent interviews Jenkins claimed that he would not have introduced the Bill:
I can’t say that it is inconceivable that I would have done it, because I did say that a draft Bill could be prepared. But I certainly gave no approval in principle to a Bill being brought in, and I do not think I would have taken the view that the influx or the threat of influx was such as to justify this highly divisive measure.50
Rather he blamed himself for not having fought it more strongly. ‘I am afraid I behaved a good deal less than heroically when the Bill was discussed by the Cabinet,’ he told Anthony Howard in 1970, excusing his failure by claiming that he was too busy with the economy.51 In reality there can be little doubt that he would have had to introduce very similar legislation had he still been Home Secretary. What he wrote in 1973 about Gaitskell’s opposition to all controls on Commonwealth immigration in 1962 applied equally to himself in 1968: ‘It was a position to which it is now difficult to believe that he could possibly have held. As a practical democrat he would have had to move. But he would have suffered great anguish in the process.’52 Jenkins was fortunate to be spared that anguish. Callaghan, on the other hand, felt understandably aggrieved that he got the blame for introducing Jenkins’ Bill while Jenkins escaped with his liberal reputation largely intact.53
Meanwhile he had been coming under fire from the other direction for being too liberal. After a relatively easy first few months, a sequence of the sort of unexpected crises to which the Home Office is so vulnerable suddenly blew up in the autumn of 1966. First, in August, three policemen were shot dead at Shepherd’s Bush, West London, in the course of a robbery that went wrong. To the right-wing press this was a natural consequence of the suspension of the death penalty, and a ‘soft’ Home Secretary who had been a prominent supporter of abolition was an easy target. Jenkins insisted that there was no connection – murder was one of the few crimes that was not increasing; but strident demands to ‘bring back the rope’, at least for the murder of police officers, continued until a Commons vote in November reaffirmed its suspension by a solid 292:172. Then, in September, Maidstone magistrates ordered the birching of a young prisoner serving a life sentence for murder, following a riot in the local prison. But the sentence required the confirmation of the Home Secretary; and since he was already committed to abolishing corporal punishment in prisons as part of the Criminal Justice Bill, Jenkins reversed it, to the fury of the Sunday Express and other papers.54, fn5 Next, on 18 October he announced a posthumous free pardon for Timothy Evans, who had been hanged in 1950 for a murder which it was now clear he did not commit. This was a notorious miscarriage of justice, which had greatly assisted the cause of the abolitionists; but two days later he had to address the London Police Federation, which did not see it that way. The whole force was said to be ‘seething with discontent over pay and capital punishment’; he was booed when he mentioned Timothy Evans and the Maidstone birching case, and there was a ‘howl of derision’ at his suggestion that the police should recruit some black officers. The press reported that 300 officers walked out (though Jenkins claimed it was only about twenty).56 Even so, this was ‘one of the roughest and most disagreeable meetings I have ever had’, Jenkins wrote. ‘When it was over I went to Brooks’s with David Dowler and John Harris and sat exhausted over a large drink.’57
Two days later the Soviet spy George Blake escaped from Wormwood Scrubs. Less famous than Philby, Burgess and Maclean, but arguably more damaging than any of them, Blake was an MI6 agent who had passed secrets to the KGB and allegedly caused the deaths of forty British agents before he was exposed in 1961 and sentenced to a record forty-two years. He escaped by scaling the perimeter wall with a nylon ladder reinforced with knitting needles.fn6 Embarrassing at any time, this came when high-profile escapes were already a scandal and becoming a cartoonists’ joke. In the past two years two of the so-called ‘Great Train Robbers’, Charlie Wilson and Ronnie Biggs, had escaped from Winson Green and Wandsworth respectively. Nine long-term prisoners had escaped from Parkhurst in May; and four more had walked out of Wormwood Scrubs in June. Jenkins heard the news on Friday evening when he had just arrived at Hatley to spend the weekend with Jakie and Chiquita Astor. He immediately rang Wilson ‘in a great stew’, according to Crossman, who was with Wilson at Chequers when he took the call. ‘When Harold put down the receiver he turned to me and said, “That will do our Home Secretary a great deal of good. He was getting too complacent and he needed taking down a peg.”’59 ‘Whatever snide comment he may have made to Crossman’, however, Jenkins noted at the time that Wilson ‘took the whole thing reasonably calmly. He is always good in a situation of that sort, no note of recrimination, although obviously slightly agitated himself by what had happened.’60
Cummings, Daily Express, 22.10.66 (Cartoon Archive, University of Kent)
Over the weekend Jenkins decided to set up an inquiry, not just into Blake’s escape but into prison security in general, and asked Lord Mountbatten to chair it. The Queen’s cousin, the last Viceroy of India and just-retired Chief of the Defence Staff, Mountbatten was a clever choice, which somewhat wrong-footed the Tories. Nevertheless Heath and Hogg gave Jenkins a rough ride in the Commons on Monday. ‘Anger, recrimination and insult rocked the chamber as they pressed their view on an uncomfortable Mr Jenkins.’61 By insisting on a wider inquiry while refusing to be drawn on the possibility of Russian involvement in the ‘springing’ of Blake, Crossman wrote, ‘poor Roy Jenkins . . . seemed obstinate and a little stupid’.62 But he stuck to his guns; and when Heath decided to table a full-dress censure motion the following week Jenkins was ready for him.
He knew his career was on the line. He spent most of the preceding weekend working on his defence. He even bought a new suit for the occasion. When the three-hour debate started, in a packed Chamber, he was visibly keyed-up.fn7 Hogg opened, charg
ing that Jenkins had practically invited Blake’s escape by relaxing special precautions put in place by his Tory predecessor, Henry Brooke. Duncan Sandys intemperately reinforced the indictment from a back bench, charging first that Mountbatten was an inappropriate choice as chairman who was clearly intended to deliver a cover-up, and more widely that Jenkins had demoralised the police and strained the loyalty of the prison service. The former Solicitor-General, Sir Peter Rawlinson, suggested that Jenkins would ‘adorn every single office in the Cabinet, save for one’: he was ‘unfitted to be Home Secretary’. A Labour Member loyally interjected that he was ‘the best Home Secretary we have ever had in the history of the country’, while Patrick Gordon Walker and Jeremy Thorpe also defended him, before Enoch Powell wound up. Heath did not speak, but was present throughout. The Tories complained that Jenkins waited till the end of the debate before replying; but when he did respond his reply was a parliamentary tour de force, as Crossman recorded:
Before he got up he sat there next to me rubbing his hands and looking as nervous as hell but the moment he started one realised he’d prepared that speech with tremendous care. He demolished Quintin’s case and demonstrated that no special precautions had been taken by Henry Brooke. The demolition job was so total that when the vote came many of the Tories just weren’t there. It was a tremendous reversal achieved by sheer debating skill – the first really good evening the party has had since we came back from the recess.64
Jenkins began combatively by rejecting as ‘typically disgraceful and totally unfounded’ the charge that he had demoralised the police and prison service, and repeatedly slapped down Sandys when he tried to repeat it. When Tory backbenchers bayed, ‘What about Blake?’, he told them: ‘If the hon. Members opposite will give up their tribal bleating I will immediately come to Blake.’ (One Tory told him to ‘calm yourself down a little’.) As well as refuting the allegation that he had relaxed Brooke’s precautions on Blake, he also demonstrated that prison escapes generally had not suddenly increased but had been running at a roughly similar level since the early 1960s. ‘The striking change is not in the figures but that we are now doing something about them.’ Moreover, if Blake should not have been in Wormwood Scrubs in the first place, it was Rab Butler who had put him there! He comprehensively demolished the Tories’ ‘trumped up motion’, since enquiring into Blake’s escape was specifically part of Mountbatten’s remit, and directed his scorn very personally at Heath. The problem of prison security would be solved by constructive measures, he concluded. ‘It will not be met by that combination of procedural incompetence and petty partisanship which is the constant characteristic of the right honourable gentleman’s parliamentary style.’65
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