Roy Jenkins

by John Campbell

  One last episode gave him another parliamentary triumph at the very end of his time at the Home Office. In the summer of 1967 a whistle-blower made serious allegations of excessively severe use of corporal punishment at Court Lees ‘approved school’ – that is, a school for young offenders – in Surrey. A quick inquiry by a leading QC revealed a thoroughly corrupt regime run by ‘an inbred oligarchy’, most of whom were related to one another; Jenkins was ‘particularly incensed’ that ten more beatings took place after he had ordered the inquiry. He promptly sacked the headmaster, dispersed 116 inmates and closed the school. (It later reopened, with a new name, under the aegis of Surrey County Council.) ‘I acted quickly and I believe I was right,’ Jenkins told Alastair Hetherington. His only misgiving was that it was bad luck on this headmaster to be singled out, when there were ‘probably at least ten other approved schools that were as bad as Court Lees’.139 But his action raised another furious storm from the defenders of corporal punishment. When Parliament returned in November the local Tory MP, Sir John Vaughan-Morgan, accused him of ‘butchering’ Court Lees so that he could go off on his Italian holiday. ‘He was more concerned with a theatrical gesture and with the preservation of his own image as a liberal-minded Home Secretary’ than with justice.140 Quintin Hogg piously condemned him for sacking the headmaster without a hearing, saying that he himself could never have done such a thing. But Denis Howell – now an education minister – briefed Jenkins that this was nonsense: Hogg when Education Secretary must have sacked dozens of teachers without a hearing – it was normal procedure. Jenkins intervened to put this to Hogg. ‘It was a knock-out blow. Hogg never recovered and the Home Secretary wound up the debate with a devastating speech.’141 ‘Mr Jenkins’, The Times reported, ‘had an easy time with some revelations about the close family ties of the Court Lees Board of Management’, who failed to realise the seriousness and the allegations and were only concerned to discredit and sack the whistle-blower. ‘The Tory case . . . was razed to pretty near ground level by Mr Roy Jenkins.’142

  But this was Jenkins’ last stand as Home Secretary. That same morning – Thursday 16 November – the Cabinet was told that Wilson and Callaghan’s vain battle to maintain the parity of sterling had finally failed. The Six-Day War in the Middle East, the Arab oil embargo and the closing of the Suez Canal had increased the pressure; a dock strike in September was the last straw, and devaluation had become inevitable. On the previous Monday Jenkins took Barbara Castle to lunch at the Connaught Grill. (‘Nothing very significant about it,’ he told her, ‘just the feeling that we all ought to keep in touch more.)’ Neither of them was on the Economic Strategy Committee, so they were both completely in the dark; but they agreed that they should both be ready to resign rather than accept another deflationary package without devaluation; and she urged him to ‘probe at Cabinet tomorrow about what was being cooked up behind our backs’, even though Wilson would suspect a conspiracy. ‘“He really does believe I’m plotting, doesn’t he?” Roy mused. “It really is very absurd.”’ They found that they agreed about a lot of things, except Europe. ‘An affable and delicious lunch. Roy can be very charming when he likes,’ she concluded. ‘But I left him in no doubt that I didn’t think anyone could lead the party but Harold.’143

  The next day at Cabinet, Jenkins did probe. ‘The Home Secretary suggested that it would be useful for the Cabinet to have a general discussion in the near future about the economic situation.’144 ‘After a whispered conversation’, Wilson promised a full discussion in two or three weeks’ time.145 This, Mrs Castle wrote, ‘was hardly reassuring and Roy said so . . . Jim and Harold looked like a couple of schoolboys caught with their hand in the till.’146 Their embarrassment was not surprising, since the decision to devalue by around 17 per cent had already been taken. Two days later they told the Cabinet, though the public announcement was not for another two days after that – leading to a further disastrous outflow of reserves as Callaghan tried unconvincingly to deny that it was imminent. ‘This is the unhappiest day of my life,’ the Chancellor told his colleagues. ‘I will not pretend that it is anything but a failure of our policies.’ (Wilson, by contrast, drew only ridicule by trying to play down the humiliation on television.) Barbara Castle doubted that the devaluation was big enough, and suggested floating the pound; but she found no support, ‘not even from Crosland or Roy’.147 Crossman objected to Callaghan’s proposed list of spending cuts – ‘announced verbally and so fast there was only just time to write it down’ – and Jenkins backed him up. ‘“Why do we have to pre-announce a winter budget?” he asked. “This will give us the worst of both worlds . . . We can’t have these decisions taken in a split second.”’148 The next day he and Crossman agreed that the way devaluation had been announced had been ‘utterly chaotic . . . We had to have a package with a social philosophy.’149 It would very soon be his job to provide one.

  It was taken for granted that Callaghan would resign as soon as he had completed the immediate practicalities. The question was who would succeed him. For at least a year there had been widespread speculation that it should be Jenkins. But Wilson had been increasingly irritated by the press puffing of Jenkins. Earlier that year he had been furiously jealous that the Home Secretary scooped most of the headlines over the successful operation to contain a huge oil spill from a tanker, the Torrey Canyon, which ran aground off the Scilly Isles – Wilson’s own holiday retreat – over Easter. As chairman of the Cabinet Emergencies Committee it was Jenkins’ decision, on scientific advice and with the Prime Minister’s assent, to bomb the stricken vessel in order to burn off the oil that threatened the Cornish beaches. But Wilson complained bitterly to Crossman that ‘the moment he took over on that Sunday afternoon he tried to create the impression that he found everything in a shemozzle and that no decisions were taken until he, the decisive Roy Jenkins, took command. That’s an impression I resent . . . He’s rigged the whole Sunday press as well.’150 Three months later Crossman was still writing of Jenkins as ‘the man [Wilson] detests and whose influence he really hates in Cabinet’.151 And in September Wilson was childishly delighted with his latest reshuffle in which he had moved Tony Crosland to the Board of Trade (in place of Douglas Jay). ‘I managed to increase my crown princes from two to six . . . Now I’ve got seven potential Chancellors and I’ve knocked out the situation where Jenkins was the only alternative to Callaghan. You know . . . this is one of the most successful political operations that’s ever been conducted.’152 Quite how Wilson worked this out, or whom he considered his six crown princes or seven potential Chancellors, is not obvious; what is clear is that he both saw Jenkins as the front runner and was determined not to be cornered into appointing him.

  Crosland was very doubtful about moving to the Board of Trade. He desperately wanted to be the next Chancellor, and was afraid that the move to a lesser economic department might rule him out. But Callaghan congratulated him on his ‘step nearer the centre’: Crosland would still ‘have to put up with me – but you would prefer that than having to put up with Roy’. His chances of going to the Treasury were ‘not prejudiced – on the contrary, I would say’.153 Crossman too told him that his new job put him ‘at least on a level with Roy in his chances of becoming the next Chancellor’, and wrote in early November that Crosland ‘looks to me like the man booked for the Treasury’.154 There is no doubt that Crosland thought himself far better qualified for the job than Jenkins: he had found his old friend’s speech in May trumpeting the need for growth ‘almost more than flesh and blood could stand’.155 Academically he was – as Jenkins always admitted – unquestionably the better economist. Yet in Cabinet he came across as ‘curiously lightweight’ and he was equally unimpressive in the House of Commons. Callaghan wanted Crosland to succeed him, and assured him the day after devaluation that the job was practically his;156 he also told Jenkins on 23 November that Crosland was going be the new Chancellor.157 But the succession was not Callaghan’s to bestow; and several factors chang
ed Wilson’s mind.

  First, Jenkins had proved himself, initially at Aviation and then at the Home Office, the more effective minister, both in his capacity to take tough decisions and in his ability to defend them robustly in the House. Once devaluation had been decided on, it was not economic expertise but political personality that would be needed to force the painful consequences through the Cabinet and convince the party, the country and the markets that Britain was now on the right track. On his record since 1964 there could be no question that Jenkins was the better option. As Alan Watkins wrote in the New Statesman: ‘As a parliamentary performer . . . Mr Jenkins is a class apart from the rest of either front bench . . . He not only looks superior: he is superior.’158 Crossman urged Wilson that moving Jenkins to the Treasury would ‘give us the kind of lift we need’.159 So, crucially, did the Prime Minister’s closest confidante, his personal secretary Marcia Williams, who recognised Jenkins’ appeal to non-Labour opinion. But more Macchiavellian calculations also came into it. Though Wilson was wary of Jenkins, he thought he could best secure his loyalty and bind him to himself by giving him the Treasury; at this moment the challenger he feared most – paradoxically, after the humiliation of devaluation – was a resentful Callaghan. He knew that Jenkins would never combine with Callaghan against him; whereas Crosland, Callaghan’s protégé, might make a very dangerous combination with him. Despite his suspicion of Jenkins’ ambition and mockery of his glossy lifestyle, Wilson thought he could work well with him, as indeed proved to be the case. They shared a similar fascination with obscure statistics – ‘railway timetables or Wisden-like political records’160 – whereas real intellectuals like Crosland (and Denis Healey, another possible candidate) made him uncomfortable. Finally, the most practical and possibly decisive consideration was what to do with Callaghan. The Home Office was a suitably senior position for a former Chancellor to which, as a former adviser to the Police Federation, he was eminently suited; the simplest option then, once Callaghan had decided that he wanted to stay in the government, was a straight job-swap between Callaghan and Jenkins, which avoided the need for a wider reshuffle.

  Jenkins was called out of a meeting about House of Lords reform on 28 November to go and see the Prime Minister: Wilson immediately offered him the Treasury and he accepted without hesitation – though not without a good deal of apprehension. It was a tough moment to be taking on the second job in the government: as he admitted in a speech a few days later, the Treasury was ‘the only post which could make the Home Office look almost like a bed of roses’.161 He had some regrets about leaving the Home Office with a certain amount of unfinished business, but he must have reflected with satisfaction that this promotion continued his close emulation of Asquith’s career path – with the difference that Asquith was fifty-three before he reached the Treasury, while he was only forty-seven. The press reception of his appointment, ranging from ‘Roy’s the Boy’ in The Economist to ‘Jenkins the Cash has the Makings of a First-class Chancellor’ in the Daily Mirror, with major profiles in all the papers over the weekend, was, in his own words, ‘exceptionally favourable, really rather frighteningly so’.162 The Times set the tone:

  There is something almost alarming about the relief and hope which have greeted MR ROY JENKINS’ appointment as Chancellor. It is natural that he should arouse new hope. His combination of economic understanding, parliamentary skill and political judgement makes him the most promising appointment to the Exchequer since Hugh Gaitskell in 1950, though that was a mixed blessing.163

  There was general agreement on the great opportunity his appointment represented. ‘Thanks to the new situation created by devaluation,’ the Financial Times declared, ‘the Treasury becomes for the first time a job worth having by an ambitious politician. With luck, firmness and patience he might even find himself presiding over the long-delayed British economic miracle.’164 But there was equal appreciation that the stakes were high. The Sunday Telegraph called him ‘the Last-Chance Chancellor’;165 while the Sunday Times went so far as to suggest that the whole future of the economy, of the Labour Party and even the survival of parliamentary democracy in Britain depended on his success.166

  But Crosland was devastated to have the prize for which he felt pre-eminently qualified not merely snatched from him but given to his younger friend whom he had always regarded as his junior partner. No one but the two of them knew quite how close they had been at Oxford twenty-seven years before; but they cannot have forgotten. Through their early careers they were written of as a pair of rising stars; but Tony had always been seen – first by Dalton, then by Gaitskell – as the more brilliant of the two. But this was the third time in three years that Wilson had preferred Roy: first for a department of his own in October 1964, then for Education and membership of the Cabinet in January 1965, and now for the Treasury. Tony was bitterly jealous, and their friendship, already under strain, never fully recovered. It was rather like the moment in 1994 when Tony Blair snatched the Labour leadership from his older friend and early mentor Gordon Brown, who never forgave him. To rub salt into Crosland’s wound, the first thing he had to do – before Jenkins’ appointment was officially announced – was fly to Paris to represent Callaghan at an OECD meeting. As a result he and Roy did not meet until he got back on the following Monday. In the circumstances, Jenkins wrote, ‘he behaved remarkably well’. Crosland did not hide his disappointment, but regretted having moved from Education to the Board of Trade in August. He now felt that any achievements in the economic field would redound to Roy’s credit, and possibly to Wilson’s, but certainly not to his; he would therefore welcome another move to a different area entirely. In fact Wilson kept him at the Board of Trade until October 1969 before switching him to Local Government, so he and Jenkins were obliged to work quite closely together – with Jenkins now the senior – for the next twenty-three months, which was difficult for both of them; and the hurt festered longer than that, with enduring consequences, as Jenkins reflected in his memoirs:

  It would be idle to pretend that these events of November 1967 did not leave a scar on Crosland which had the effect of crucially damaging the cohesion of the Labour right over the next eight or nine years. Had he and I been able to work together as smoothly as did Gaitskell and Jay or Gaitskell and Gordon Walker a decade before it might have made a decisive difference to the balance of power within the Labour Party and hence to the politics of the early 1980s.167

  Denis Healey had less hope than Crosland of becoming Chancellor himself; but he too was disenchanted at seeing his younger Balliol contemporary promoted over him. As Giles Radice described in his triple biography Friends and Rivals, published in 2002, by promoting Jenkins Wilson effectively divided Gaitskell’s heirs for years to come.168

  Meanwhile Jenkins was facing the biggest challenge of his life.

  * * *

  fn1 Sir John Chilcot, who served as an assistant secretary under Dowler, remembered that one way Jenkins helped shake up the Home Office was by introducing ringing telephones. Previously the phones had only flashing lights and the office was as silent as a public library.11

  fn2 This house party, fairly typical of Jenkins’ social circle at this time, also included Lady Diana Cooper and the literary historian Peter Quennell and involved ‘much tennis and coming and going with the Astors’. When Jenkins was first appointed, Ann wrote him an outrageously (by modern standards) politically incorrect postcard:

  Dear Home Sec: Do be the first Home sec to employ a negro detective, he’d ‘mash’ (Jamaican for murder) P. Worsthorne and rape P. Berry for you. Love, A. P.S. and think what fun for your friends.21

  Presumably Peregrine Worsthorne, then deputy editor of the Sunday Telegraph, had written something critical about Jenkins; but what had Pam Berry – Lady Hartwell – done to offend him?

  fn3 While in Chicago, Jenkins called on the city’s notorious Mayor Daley, who was ‘distinctly vague about the role of a British Home Secretary’ and later described him on television a
s ‘that London police official who called on me this morning’. ‘I, rather proud of having been recently promoted to the office of Peel and Palmerston, Asquith and Churchill, was not too pleased to be regarded as a sort of precinct captain.’31

  fn4 The daily average prison population in England and Wales had risen from 29,000 in 1964 to nearly 35,000 in 1966 (compared with just 11,000 before the war). But Jenkins’ Bill checked the growth only briefly: by the time he became Home Secretary for the second time in 1974 the figure was more than 40,000, and today it is 85,000.

  fn5 When the Sunday Express renewed its attack in October, alleging that Jenkins was ‘tender to prisoners and out of sympathy with the police’ on account of his father’s imprisonment during the General Strike, Dick Taverne urged him to sue, force a retraction and give the enormous damages to the Police Benevolent Fund. Wisely Jenkins did no such thing.55