Crossman observed his colleagues carefully in Cabinet, and pointedly contrasted the performance of ‘our two leading Europeans’:
Roy keeps himself to himself with extreme care. He’s the most conspiratorial member of the Cabinet. I watch him as he sits opposite me. He speaks very little but when he does it’s always terse and to the point, as though he had kept a lot in reserve. Tony Crosland is proving himself a jolly good departmental Minister, but in Cabinet he’s curiously lightweight.96
Barbara Castle too recorded her shrewd assessment of Jenkins after the Sunday Times profile. Like Crossman, she recognised his ability and enjoyed good working relations with him; but they belonged to different tribes within the Labour party, and she – the feisty left-wing battler who saw permanent exhaustion as a badge of seriousness – always thought he was essentially a dilettante:
I was interested to read that Roy works at the Department only till 7.30 p.m. My day’s work is just beginning then. I think the explanation is that Roy carefully contracts out of anything ancillary, e.g. I never see him at Party meetings. Ambitious he may be, but he isn’t going to sacrifice himself. Personally I believe he is temperamentally incapable of leading the Party. Despite all his care, his instinctive high-handedness will slip out.97
The idea that Jenkins was lazy was a canard sedulously propagated by the old Bevanites, which reflected a mixture of jealousy and disapproval that he managed to maintain such a busy social life while still being – they could not deny – an extremely effective minister. He achieved it partly by a remarkable ability to concentrate intensely for short periods, absorb information and then take decisions quickly; and partly by his deliberate policy of focusing on certain key areas and letting the rest go. He quite consciously made reserving time for his social life a priority, first to keep himself refreshed, believing (unlike Mrs Castle) that an exhausted minister was unlikely to make good decisions; and, second, to keep himself widely informed. To this end he had lunch with someone outside the department practically every day. This might be anyone from Tony Crosland, Mark Bonham Carter or Caroline Gilmour (with whom he lunched about once a fortnight) to the Governor of the Bank of England or the editor of The Times. Unless there was an official lunch or other unavoidable appointment, his officials had to leave his diary clear for an hour and a half to two hours in the middle of the day: he never ate a sandwich at his desk. Barbara Castle might sneer, but he believed this break actually made him a better minister. He drank wine with his lunch, but it did not affect his capacity to work in the afternoon. This was not in the least unusual. ‘A politician of the day,’ Alan Watkins recalled, ‘– Anthony Crosland, Richard Crossman, Denis Healey and Iain Macleod come to mind – would think nothing of enjoying a large aperitif beforehand, sharing a bottle of wine with the meal and having some brandy afterwards with his coffee . . . Tomato juice and mineral water . . . came in during the 1980s, to the detriment of politics and journalism alike. Roy belonged to an earlier and better age.’98
It was the same in the evening. Quite often he would have an official dinner or a speech to make; but he also dined out privately – sometimes with Jennifer, often without – a couple of times a week. John Chilcot, then serving under Dowler in his private office, vividly remembers seeing Jenkins coming down the main staircase of the Home Office one evening flanked by Jackie Kennedy, her sister Lee Radziwill and Barbara Castle, all dressed to the nines.99 He belonged to an astonishing number of dining clubs – both The Club and the Other Club, the Literary Society and Grillion’s – and was a regular attender at all of them.fn12 He would generally do his boxes before going to bed; but he did not like going to bed late, and also made a point of keeping up his non-departmental reading: on being appointed to the Home Office he claimed to have re-read the whole of Proust (unfortunately he did not record how long it took him). At weekends he frequently had to make a speech or address a conference somewhere; but he very often managed to structure this around a country house visit, whether to Ann Fleming at Sevenhampton, the Astors at Hatley or some other welcoming host. He now also had a country house of his own.
He and Jennifer had bought St Amand’s House in the (then) Berkshire village of East Hendred, ten miles south of Oxford, in the autumn of 1965 and moved in after minor building work the following spring. Jennifer had spotted it in a newspaper advertisement and bought it at auction in Abingdon a few days later. It is an attractively rambling old house with fourteenth-century foundations and cellar, mainly eighteenth-century, but enlarged in the nineteenth: not a vicarage, but with church connections. (St Amand was a local saint, and it is still a strongly Roman Catholic area.) Its glory is the garden, big enough for both a tennis court and a croquet lawn as well as several well-shaded sitting areas. It was said to have been bought with the proceeds of Asquith, which says something about the sales of political biography half a century ago; more relevant perhaps is the fact that ministerial salaries were raised in 1965 from £5,000 to £8,500. Roy and Jennifer bought most of the furniture together at a sale in Cirencester. It became a comfortably cluttered family home, not in the least grand, which rather surprised both Crossman and Barbara Castle when they visited.fn13 For the rest of Jenkins’ life it provided an escape from London where he could relax, but also entertain friends and (more rarely) colleagues at weekends. Its location was to some extent fortuitous – they had also looked at East Anglia – but neatly reflected Roy’s identification with Asquith, whose country house at Sutton Courtenay was only a couple of miles away. It was not too far from Birmingham, and once the M4 motorway was completed in 1971 only forty-five minutes from Heathrow, which turned out to be convenient both for flying to Brussels in the late 1970s and to Glasgow in the 1980s. It was even more perfectly situated when Jenkins became Chancellor of Oxford University in 1987. So altogether it was a most happy purchase.
Jennifer’s career too was taking off, with the children all now in their teens. In 1965 she became chairman of the Consumers’ Association, then a rapidly growing organisation reaching 600,000 members in 1969 and very much part of the 1960s consumer revolution. As well as testing washing machines and toasters, Which? that year reported on wine for the first time, as well as on corkscrews. One American journalist called Jennifer ‘the closest thing to a British Ralph Nader’.103 fn14 She and Roy continued to lead very close yet independent lives; but the work of holding the house and family together fell entirely on her. Barbara Castle, on her one visit to East Hendred, found ‘the contrast between Roy’s poise and polish and her general air of rather untidy harassment . . . fascinating’. ‘The garden was rather neglected and Jennifer complained that she had to do all of it, whereupon Roy drawled that gardening really wasn’t his strong point. “It would be nice if you could do the lawns,”’ Jennifer retorted. ‘Supper was a very domesticated affair. Jennifer’s eked-out chicken pilaff was fully adequate in quantity but I wasn’t surprised that Roy has a taste for expensive meals out in restaurants.’104 But Jennifer had never pretended to be a fancy cook; she thought it good for Roy to eat plainly when at home. For lunch parties she usually got a local woman in to do the cooking, but the food was still unpretentious – unlike the wine, which was Roy’s one responsibility.
The children were all growing up. Charles, the eldest, having had a difficult time at Winchester, was much happier at Holland Park comprehensive, where he met the extrovert daughter of a Yugoslav diplomat who, nearly fifty years on, is still his wife. Roy hoped that Charles might go to Balliol, and in December 1965 wrote slightly tentatively to the Master, Christopher Hill, explaining his switch of schools – ‘I do not know how the combination of educational experience will work out’ – but hoping he might be good enough.105 In fact Charles won a place at New College. Cynthia was still at St Paul’s Girls’ School and Edward at the City of London School, both London private day schools. Jennifer told the Sunday Times in 1966 that none of them had inherited Roy’s combination of qualities. ‘I mean one of them might be very intelligent,’ she explained, c
learly thinking of Charles, ‘but not very buoyant.’106 The first time Crossman visited East Hendred in 1968 all three children were there, plus Jennifer’s parents. ‘I hadn’t at all expected this family atmosphere. It shows how little one knows about one’s colleagues. So Roy has got a real family to cope with at home, I thought.’ He noted the difference between the two boys. Charles, ‘a tall willowy young man at New College . . . with his girlfriend . . . is certainly a difficult son’; whereas Edward, ‘the rumbustious boy’, was ‘an object lesson of what Patrick [Crossman] may be if we let him talk all the time, busting and crashing into the conversation’. ‘Roy gave us some excellent claret,’ he concluded, ‘and . . . in the noise of the family talk he told me about his conversation with the Prime Minister.’107
Perhaps Jenkins was able to combine politics and private life so successfully because he made little distinction between them: his friends were almost all in the broadest sense political, so while he did not talk shop over his lunches and dinners, all his conversations served to inform his approach to his work. He moved within an extensive, yet at the same time quite narrow, political elite in which he knew and made a point of cultivating everyone who mattered. His meticulously kept engagement diaries allow us (apart from the difficulty of deciphering his tiny handwriting) to trace his movements every day. One week in June 1966 is fairly typical. The weekend began with lunch with Michael and Pandora Astor at their house in Oxfordshire; he or they (one can never be sure whether Jennifer was with him) then moved on to Jakie and Chiquita Astor in Hertfordshire, where Noel and Gabrielle Annan and Rab Butler were also staying, and David and Sylvia Harlech came to dine. On Sunday there was tennis and Selwyn Lloyd came to lunch; and in the evening Roy dined (possibly back in London) with Victor and Tess Rothschild. On Monday 6th he took John Harris to lunch at Brooks’s, and in the evening attended a dinner for the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Terence O’Neill, at the Savoy.fn15 On Tuesday morning he had a Northern Irish meeting at the Home Office at 10.15, saw Wilson at Number Ten at 11.00, lunched at the Beefsteak Club (unusually he did not record with whom) and visited Wormwood Scrubs prison in the afternoon, before dining for once at home and going to see the film of the moment, Tom Jones (starring Albert Finney and Susannah York). On Wednesday he had the Home Affairs Committee of the Cabinet in the morning; lunch with Hugh Cudlipp, chairman of the Daily Mirror; an appointment with his doctor at 6.00; and Ronald and Doreen McIntosh to dine at Ladbroke Square at 8.00. Thursday was full Cabinet at 10.00, followed by lunch with Michael Stewart at Brooks’s, then dinner at the Other Club in the evening. On Friday he flew to Newcastle, where he met the police, gave a press conference, had lunch with the Lord Mayor and met the notorious former leader of the council, T. Dan Smith (now head of the North Eastern Planning Council), flew back to London and dined at Ladbroke Square before driving to East Hendred. Ann Fleming came to lunch on Saturday, after which he drove to Cardiff for what was probably a constituency dinner for George Thomas, preceded by a drink with his old schoolfriend Derek Powell. He got back to East Hendred at 2 a.m. and lunched there on Sunday before returning to London for tennis in Ladbroke Square followed by a quiet dinner. In the morning he started again with an equally packed schedule for the next week.109
And yet he was unquestionably an ambitious minister who took his work as seriously as his social life. Far from neglecting his office, Jenkins was thought by Crossman – as Leader of the House – to be always pushing for more than his share of the legislative timetable. On top of the Criminal Justice Bill already going through Parliament, he irritated his colleagues by wanting ‘a second major Bill this Session . . . to deal with the extraordinary consequences of Rab Butler’s measures for legalising gambling. This has turned London into the gambling headquarters of the world and Roy insists that we must act to control the activities of this vast and dangerous new industry.’110 At first he seemed to get his way, but when it got squeezed out he wanted a bipartisan Dangerous Drugs Bill instead. When that too fell through because the Tories would not cooperate, Jenkins went back to gambling. ‘Well now, look,’ he pressed Crossman, ‘if I lose the Gaming Bill can I have a little Commons time for the Bill about the Registration of Clubs which is just going through the Lords?’ ‘It’s a minor Bill and I think we can just fit it in,’ Crossman conceded, ‘but he is certainly an intrepid pusher and shover and we have to push and shove back to get the programme right.’111
By the end of 1966 Jenkins was becoming disillusioned with Wilson’s failure to give the government a clear sense of direction. When Crossman, coming out of Cabinet on 8 December, grumbled that ‘I wish we could have been given a clearer vision of his long-term vision for Rhodesia’, Jenkins replied tartly: ‘I’d give anything for evidence that we have a long-term plan for any part of this Government’s policy, thank you very much, Dick’ and walked off – doubtless to share his depression with Dowler and Harris over lunch at Brooks’s.112 When Labour suffered a pasting in the local elections at the beginning of May 1967 – winning only eighteen out of a hundred seats on the Greater London Council in what had always been a Labour stronghold – he decided to make his concern public in a major speech to the London Labour Conference which set out his vision of where the government should be heading and was inevitably taken as a coded challenge to the Prime Minister.
He began, typically, by introducing a bit of historical perspective by reminding his audience that all parties suffered ‘periods of short-term electoral gloom’: the Tories had suffered ‘equally crushing and widespread reverses’ in 1952, but had gone on to enjoy the longest uninterrupted period of power that any party had achieved in modern times. But his message was ‘not one of comfort, still less of complacency’. In taking the painful short-term measures that were necessary to achieve long-term prosperity, the government had seemed to lose sight of its social objectives – the elimination of poverty, slum schools, and so on – on which action must be taken soon. But such measures were not the core of the problem:
The core of the problem is to give the party and the nation a clear sense of direction: a lifting of the sights, a view at once sharp and far-reaching, of where we want to get to by the end of this Parliament, an exposition of the purposes, a good deal more elevated than merely keeping the Tories out, for which this Government exists.
This was a pretty clear swipe at Wilson’s ‘A week is a long time in politics’ style of leadership. The rest of his wide-ranging speech focused particularly on his two pet themes: Europe and the ‘civilised society’. First, he argued more explicitly than ever that Britain should stop trying to ‘cling on to our precarious position as the third of the great powers’. The military overstrain caused by trying to police large parts of the world had undermined the economy over the past twenty years, which in turn neutralised Britain’s military capacity. ‘To maintain a role which has to be paid for by others bailing us out is neither dignified nor effective.’ The answer lay in Europe, which was now back on the agenda. ‘Europe . . . offers the prospect of living amongst equals, and exercising great influence through our co-operation with them, instead of straining ourselves into weakness by trying vainly to keep up with the power giants of the world.’ He made the economic case for joining the Common Market too: access to a large unified market, stimulus to investment, bigger companies to secure economies of scale, both mergers and competition – a balance which would be easier to achieve in a bigger market. He admitted that food prices would rise, but this would be offset by lower prices of manufactured goods and faster growth, so that ‘after five years it would all be net gain’.
He still banged the drum for faster growth, which had been ‘the core of our electoral appeal’ in 1964 and remained ‘fundamental to our other objectives’, despite the admitted failure to achieve it so far due to the vast inherited deficit. Despite that, he claimed that the government’s record – he mentioned higher pensions, redundancy payments, school building and housing subsidies – was a proud one in the circumstances. And he
called for a ‘fair’ taxation policy ‘directed firmly in favour of those to whom unrestricted economic forces would be most harsh and unjust’:
That is an essential duty of a Labour government, and anyone who believes the reverse would be willing a society so grossly unfair that the consequences would be unacceptable to anyone with a social conscience.
At the same time, however, he warned against ‘the disincentive effect which very high taxation of earned incomes might have’, insisting, perhaps contradictorily, that ‘We desperately need a competitive and thrusting business climate.’
Finally, turning to his own responsibilities as Home Secretary, he restated his vision of ‘a more civilised, more free and less hidebound society’, insisting that there was no conflict between this and measures to control the crime wave, which he claimed were already having some success:
I have never seen the slightest contradiction between being tough where we need to be tough, and striving at the same time to enlarge the area of human freedom. We gain nothing, and lose a great deal, by keeping subject to the penalties of criminal law, personal actions and conduct which should be matters of personal choice and do no harm to society.
Roy Jenkins Page 38
