Roy Jenkins

by John Campbell

  fn6 Blake later turned up in Moscow, where he was hailed as a national hero. In 2007, aged eighty-five, he was honoured by Vladimir Putin.58

  fn7 Leslie Bonham Carter wrote him a supportive letter earlier that day: ‘Darling Roy, I am thinking about you all the time and am in agony about today – not because I have any doubts about the way you will scatter your foolish and ill-advised adversaries. I have none about this, and nor should you. But all the same the nervous strain must be appalling at this moment . . . If it is at all possible will you ring up when it is all over? I know that you will be marvellous. With love, Leslie.’63

  fn8 When an outraged reader objected to this comparison, Jenkins dismissed the objection as ‘ridiculous’. ‘I have never shot an animal in my life, and like you rather disapprove of blood sports . . . But this does not affect the fact that many people certainly get such a thrill; and I am not willing to see vivid similes banned.’68

  fn9 McCaffrey was later Jim Callaghan’s chief press officer in 10 Downing Street in the 1970s, and then worked for Michael Foot when he was Leader of the Opposition until 1983.

  fn10 Ann liked entertaining the more amusing Labour politicians, but her own politics were thoroughly Tory. If Labour got back with an increased majority, she wrote in March 1966, ‘it won’t be tiptoe through the tulips with Tony and Roy, but Harold may put Foot on the pedal’, which would be bad news for ‘an old reactionary like me’.83

  fn11 Bernard Donoughue was then a young LSE lecturer who had been active in CDS; he later headed the Number Ten Policy Unit under Wilson and Callaghan in 1974–9. He became a Labour peer in 1985 and served briefly in the first Blair government.

  fn12 Jenkins was invited to join The Club by the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Cobbold, in April 1966. ‘It is the oldest dining club in London (straight from Dr Johnson) & I have found it the most agreeable . . . I think you might find it entertaining.’ But Cobbold admitted there was some prejudice against Labour members: when Gaitskell had been proposed for membership he was blackballed.100 Jenkins was already a member of the marginally less Establishment Other Club, founded by Churchill and F.E. Smith in 1911, whose rulebook famously stipulated that ‘nothing in the rules or intercourse of the Club shall interfere with the rancour or asperity of party politics’.101

  fn13 ‘I was most curious to get this new glimpse into Roy’s environment,’ Mrs Castle wrote in April 1969. ‘Their cottage is authentically old and beautiful with uneven floors, low doors and a number of rooms full of character. It is furnished with taste but by no means lavishly . . . It is a lovely village but I personally could not stand being in a garden overlooked by houses on all sides . . . I couldn’t help wondering occasionally whether some enterprising journalist might be eavesdropping on the other side of the garden wall.’102 She herself had recently bought a rather more secluded old farmhouse in Buckinghamshire.

  fn14 Ralph Nader was the leading American campaigner for consumer rights and environmental protection who stood for the presidency five times between 1992 and 2008.

  fn15 The ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland hit the headlines only in 1968, just after Jenkins had left the Home Office, so one would not think that the province featured highly in his concerns. Nevertheless he may have had some influence in encouraging the first tentative steps by a Northern Irish Prime Minister to try to bridge sectarian differences. ‘Home Secretaries come and go,’ O’Neill wrote in December 1967, ‘but I have never worked so closely with anyone else before.’108

  fn16 Jenkins tended to steer clear of the religious and ethical arguments about abortion. But thirty years later he revealed his essentially practical motivation in reply to a correspondent who accused him of murdering five million unborn babies since 1967. ‘You presumably think that the addition of hundreds of millions (I cannot much distinguish conceptually between contraception and early abortion) of unwanted children would make the world a better place. I do not.’115

  fn17 While Greenwood was speaking, Barbara Castle, also a Lancashire MP but a strong supporter of the Bill, threw Jenkins a note across the table: ‘What a contemptible man he is.’116

  fn18 Willie Ross, Secretary of State for Scotland, was so vehemently opposed that he refused to countenance a parallel reform on his patch, with the result that homosexuality remained illegal in Scotland until 1980 (and in Northern Ireland until 1982).

  fn19 During its run Mrs Wilson’s Diary was continually updated to keep up with events. When Jenkins became Chancellor in November he was added to the script and played by Nigel Hawthorne.

  13

  ‘Two Years’ Hard Slog’

  WHEN JENKINS AND John Harris crossed the bridge that connected the old Home Office with the Treasury on 29 November 1967, Harris recalled, it was ‘like entering the French General Staff’s Headquarters at Sedan in 1870, so pervasive was the gloom and defeatism’.1 In the aftermath of the devaluation it had fought so long to avoid, the Treasury was a thoroughly demoralised department. No other Chancellor in modern times – except perhaps Sir Kingsley Wood in the rather different circumstances of May 1940 – has entered on his inheritance in such grim conditions. Having been deliberately kept away from any detailed knowledge of the economy for the past three years, Jenkins had to start from scratch, picking up the pieces of a failed policy. Yet this gave him three advantages. First, he was generally thought to be a good appointment, both economically literate and tough. Second, he was known to have been one of those who had argued for devaluation at least as far back as July 1966, so he came in with no responsibility for the failure but personally vindicated by the debacle. Third, he took office when the critical decision had been taken, with a clean slate to write on and the responsibility, but also the opportunity, to make a success of a new, post-devaluation strategy. In this respect, therefore, Jenkins could be said once again to have been lucky in his timing.

  In addition to the overwhelmingly positive press coverage of his appointment, he received a mountain of congratulatory letters which bore witness to his wide circle of admirers. They came from both sides of the political spectrum – from Rab Butler, Quintin Hogg and Selwyn Lloyd as well as from Michael Foot; from leading journalists; from old school friends (and his old headmaster) in Abersychan and members of his constituency party in Stechford; from senior policemen and prison officers who had appreciated his work at the Home Office; as well as from several of his female fan club (Barley Alison, Ann Fleming, Pam Berry, Marietta Tree and Lee Radziwill) – almost all of them assuring Roy that he was the man to save the country and hoping that he would soon go on to become Prime Minister. Ian Gilmour reminded him of how fortunately the cards had fallen for him:

  It is funny to think that if dear old Hugh had been PM he would probably not have been able to promote you so fast for fear of ill-founded charges of nepotism . . . It is even more peculiar to remember that you might have disappeared into the recesses of the Economist. In the circumstances what an escape!2

  While from the Ministry of Defence, Denis Healey wrote generously:

  My dear Roy, Just to say how delighted – and relieved! – I am at your move. I’m afraid in some respects I may find you a more formidable adversary than Jim, but I am certain you are just what the country, the Government and the Party need as Chancellor.3

  Tony Crosland did not find it in himself to be quite so generous. But Michael Shanks – the author of an influential Penguin Special, The Stagnant Society, which embodied all the hopes, so far unrealised, that the leftish intelligentsia had placed in the Labour government – was not alone in seeing the combination of the two leading Gaitskellites now taking over the top two economic jobs (Jenkins as Chancellor with his old friend Crosland as President of the Board of Trade) as offering the government a second chance. ‘A tremendous responsibility,’ he wrote in The Times, ‘rests on the shoulders of this suave, rational, Kennedy-like man of cool nerves and radical instincts.’4 Jenkins was of course delighted to be Chancellor. But all the hopes invested in him and the dire predictions of
the consequences if he should fail imposed a frightening degree of pressure. Normally a sound sleeper, he confessed that in these first few weeks at the Treasury he slept badly, waking early with a dread of what the day ahead might bring. He also started smoking again, having given up a few months earlier: during the long Cabinet battle over spending cuts in early 1968 he got through a dozen cigars a day, before managing to give them up again in February. Yet he contrived to keep up a front of unruffled confidence. Dining at the Annans’ on 7 December – his diary shows that his promotion barely affected his social habits – one of the other guests, Cecil King, noted that ‘Roy was his usual suave self, showing no sign of pressure or any idea that this is the crisis of his life.’5

  Much was made of the fact that Jenkins was ‘an expansionist, first and foremost, recognising that faster economic growth is the only respectable objective of economic policy’.6 But his expansionist instincts were, in the short and medium term, irrelevant. Growth was still the ultimate goal; but sustained growth depended on restoring a stable currency no longer at the mercy of the international money markets, as it had been since 1964; and that could be achieved only by getting the balance of payments – the balance of exports over imports – back into surplus after five consecutive years of deficits. In the immediate aftermath of devaluation the absolute imperative was to use the temporary competitive advantage that devaluation gave to restore the balance of payments: only this could make sterling secure at its new value. The new Chancellor therefore had no choice but to impose a further massive dose of deflation – by a mixture of spending cuts, taxation and other controls – to switch resources from domestic consumption into exports. Ironically this was where Jenkins had come in as a young MP, just in time to see Stafford Cripps, Labour’s famously austere ‘Iron Chancellor’, facing almost exactly the same challenge in 1948: no two men could have been more different, but Jenkins was obliged to follow closely Cripps’ example. The very lack of options, however, was another source of political strength. No one seriously advocated any other strategy; and Wilson could not afford to lose a second Chancellor. The whole Cabinet, and even the Labour left, recognised that any premature relaxation would immediately suck in more imports and put fresh pressure on the pound, bringing the dismal cycle quickly back to square one. The only question was whether he was being tough enough. After three wasted years vainly trying to postpone the inevitable, deflation was thus inescapably still the order of the day: ‘two years’ hard slog’, as Jenkins promised in his first budget speech, ‘with no weakening and no short cuts’.7 But at least it was now deflation with some prospect of ultimate success. Ministers were no longer trying to defy the facts of life. ‘For the first time since it came to office,’ Samuel Brittan of the Financial Times wrote in 1969, ‘the Government had a rational strategy which at least had a chance of working.’8

  Nevertheless Jenkins got off to a slightly hesitant start. He immediately published Callaghan’s Letter of Intent to the International Monetary Fund – an initiative hailed by Wilson as ‘a new exercise in open government’9 – setting a target (which proved over-ambitious) of a surplus of at least £200 million p.a. by the second half of 1968 and a borrowing requirement below £1,000 million; and lost no time in seeking deep spending cuts from every department. But he decided – on Treasury advice – to delay a further squeeze on consumption until the budget. This Jenkins soon recognised as a mistake. Everyone knew that tax increases were on the way, and that prices would rise as a result of devaluation; the result was a pre- (and post-) Christmas buying spree as the public sensibly rushed to spend their money while the going was good: imports rose 10 per cent (by volume) in the first three months of the New Year. It was clear to most commentators, as Nicholas Davenport put it, that ‘the extra taxation should have been imposed at once to prevent the fever rising’.10

  One reason for this misjudgement was that senior officials from the Permanent Secretary, Sir William Armstrong, downwards were simply exhausted by the failed effort to avert devaluation. Another was that it took the new Chancellor several weeks to get his private office sorted out. As at the Home Office, Jenkins wanted to have his own trusted confidants around him. The Principal Private Secretary he inherited from Callaghan, Peter Baldwin (later Permanent Secretary at the Department of Transport), was anxious to move on. The Civil Service candidate to replace him was Robert Armstrong (later Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinet Secretary – no relation of Sir William); but Jenkins was determined to have David Dowler, and he was in a strong enough position to insist, until Wilson resolved the situation characteristically by suggesting that he should have both! This, Armstrong recalled, was ‘a profoundly unsatisfactory arrangement’: Dowler enjoyed Jenkins’ confidence but was new to the Treasury, while Armstrong knew the Treasury but not the new Chancellor.11 Somehow they made it work for nine months until Armstrong was promoted, but the awkward interregnum – with Baldwin still in post until January 1968 – helps to explain Jenkins’ failure to spot what he later recognised as bad advice. For nearly six weeks, he wrote in his memoirs, he was dependent on John Harris, ‘who would not at that stage have claimed much economic expertise’.12 But he should not really have needed to be told that action was required urgently. ‘We lost a few months in early 1968,’ he admitted soon after leaving the Treasury, ‘but the effect was not decisive. The turnaround in the Balance of Payments may have been delayed by a few months, but not by more.’13 At the time, however, it felt a good deal more serious.

  Meanwhile he set out, in consultation with Wilson, a programme of spending cuts designed to fall equally heavily on domestic and overseas commitments. At home, Jenkins’ most controversial proposals were the restoration of prescription charges and postponing the raising of the school leaving age. Both were highly emotive issues within the Labour party. Prescription charges were the sacred cow over which Nye Bevan had resigned in 1951. The incoming government had abolished them in a symbolic act of socialist piety in 1964: for a leading Gaitskellite to restore them again, only three years later, was a slap in the face for Wilson’s old Bevanite supporters. Raising the school leaving age to sixteen (known as ROSLA) was another long-cherished Labour ambition, which had been announced to take place in 1970–71. Jenkins’ proposal to defer it for another four years was opposed particularly bitterly by the elementary-educated members of the Cabinet like Brown, Callaghan and Ray Gunter, who felt that it denied opportunity to people from poorer backgrounds like themselves.fn1 There were also severe cutbacks on planned expenditure on housing and road building.

  These were regrettable postponements of desirable objectives, which caused much anguish on the Labour benches. But Jenkins was also determined to use the economic squeeze to achieve his long-held ambition to cut Britain’s anachronistic and unsustainable military commitments, which helped to placate the left. Once again, he was the right minister in the right place at the right time. Wilson had come into office as determined as any Tory to honour Britain’s post-imperial obligations; he even made an exceptionally foolish statement that Britain’s frontier was still – in 1965! – on the Himalayas.14 Realism had actually forced him to announce some withdrawal from bases in the Far and Middle East by the mid-1970s as part of the July 1966 package of economies. But when Jenkins proposed to accelerate the withdrawal to 1971 he still encountered fierce opposition from a powerful section of the Cabinet who shared the Prime Minister’s hankering to preserve Britain’s status as a global power: George Brown, Denis Healey and George Thomson (Foreign, Defence and Commonwealth Secretaries respectively) were backed by the former Chancellor, Jim Callaghan, and the former (and future) Foreign Secretary, Michael Stewart. Washington too applied heavy pressure to the government to maintain a military presence East of Suez: Brown reported a ‘disturbing and distasteful discussion’ with the American Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, who had told him, ‘For God’s sake act like Britain.’15 The Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew – an old friend of several Labour ministers – also flew to London ‘i
n a very excitable state’ to beg the government to think again.16

  Before taking his proposals to Cabinet, Jenkins went a long way to disarming his potentially difficult colleagues by meeting them individually, not formally in the Treasury, but socially, as was his preferred way, over a meal. Denis Healey, with whom he was particularly anxious to maintain good relations, he took to lunch in a private room at Brown’s Hotel on 14 December, with a return engagement the following week in Healey’s flat in Admiralty House. Patrick Gordon Walker (Education) he lunched at Brooks’s on 28 December; and Barbara Castle (Transport) he invited to East Hendred. Then, since she was ill, he visited her at her farm in Buckinghamshire on New Year’s Eve, on his way to the Radziwills’ nearby. ‘I am interested in the way he is handling all these interviews himself,’ Mrs Castle noted, ‘without officials present . . . I am interested in the way, too, that he never seems over-pressed with work. Come what may, he would always take life in a relaxed way.’17 She characteristically fought the cuts to her road programme; but Gordon Walker accepted the postponement of ROSLA, preferring to protect university funding instead, which made it hard for others to oppose it; while Kenneth Robinson (Health) and Anthony Greenwood (Housing) put up no great resistance. As always it was a matter of international confidence. The Cabinet reluctantly accepted Jenkins’ insistence that ‘the re-introduction of prescription charges had, rightly or wrongly, come to be regarded as a symbol – at home and abroad – of the Government’s determination to take all the measures required to restore the economy’.18 The major battle was thus over withdrawal from East of Suez. Departing from his strategy of one-to-one interviews, Jenkins agreed to meet Healey, Brown and Thomson all together, with their officials, in Brown’s room at the House of Commons (and hence under his chairmanship):