From Roy and Tony downwards there is a striking sense of kinship, affection and loyalty . . . Roy embodies this to a great extent: integrity, intellectual distinction, political nous and an un-meanness. These were the qualities we looked for in Gaitskell. The Home Office was a complete and logical part of the Gaitskellite achievement. I’m very fond of Roy. All of us will do anything for each of us.87
This turned out to be not quite true of all of them. But it vividly captures the emotional quality of Rodgers’ devotion to his leader.
But the Jenkinsites faced three problems in 1968. First, even on the most generous estimate they only constituted a minority of the PLP and not the most popular with their colleagues; they included some of the brightest talents, certainly, but people like Owen and Hattersley, Dick Taverne, John Mackintosh and David Marquand were widely seen as arrogant intellectuals, out of touch with the working-class movement they were supposed to represent – much like Jenkins himself. The solid centre of the party, still in those days containing a high proportion of down-to-earth trade unionists, frankly distrusted them, as naturally did the Tribunite left. Second, there was no support among senior members of the Cabinet for a change of leader. However much their loyalties were sometimes strained, old Bevanites like Crossman and Castle would always ultimately stick with Wilson. Brown was gone; Callaghan was still bitterly resentful of Jenkins and, from the low point of his resignation, was steadily rebuilding his own position as an alternative contender; while Crosland and Healey were both too jealous and too ambitious themselves to wish to see their younger contemporary leapfrog them into the leadership. ‘We discussed the mechanics of how [Wilson] might be replaced endlessly,’ Rodgers recalled. ‘But Roy would never have supported Jim and Jim would never have supported Roy.’ Nor would Tony or Denis. ‘They all belonged to the same generation and they all wanted to be Prime Minister.’88 Wilson was safe so long as his senior colleagues could not agree on a replacement.
Third, they lacked clear encouragement from Jenkins himself. He never denied that he ‘very much’ wanted to be Prime Minister. He thought he had the ‘intellectual capacity’ to do the job, and never seemed worried by his lack of rapport with the industrial side of the labour movement.89 ‘The old cloth cap idea is dead,’ he over-confidently told the journalist Anne Scott-James.90 But he did not think that his time was yet. In mid-1968 he had only been a minister for three and a half years and Chancellor for a few months. He thought he must prove himself a success in that role before he could credibly aspire to the leadership, and for the moment he was too busy worrying about sterling to have any energy left for plotting. Having studied history, written three political biographies and reviewed dozens more, he was almost too well aware that – as he had written about Rab Butler’s failure to seize his moment back in 1952 – ‘“There is a tide . . .” but it does not often continue at the flood for very long, nor does it often recur.’91 But he calculated that his best chance of succeeding Wilson was by natural succession, not by a coup d’état; and he knew that if he tried to grab the prize he would inherit a divided party that would face certain defeat at the next election. ‘Unlike Callaghan,’ Gerald Kaufman shrewdly told David Butler, Jenkins ‘wanted to be PM, not just leader of a broken party.’92 So when his followers urged him to go for it, he hesitated. To some, like David Owen, his hesitation raised doubts for the first time about whether he had the necessary ruthlessness for leadership. For others his honourable caution was exactly why they had supported him in the first place.
The aborted coup is documented in the diaries of two of the senior plotters, Patrick Gordon Walker and Christopher Mayhew, both of whom had their own grievances against the Prime Minister. Gordon Walker’s ill-starred ministerial career had ended in April 1968 when he was replaced as Education Secretary by Ted Short. Mayhew, a dashing young Foreign Office minister under Bevin in 1946–50, had been brought back by Wilson to the MoD, but resigned over cuts to the Royal Navy in 1966. Neither could expect any further advancement under Wilson. During the war Mayhew had taken part in the ill-fated Dieppe raid in 1943; and in his memoirs Jenkins fancifully likened the plotters of 1968 to ‘a dedicated group of commandos, waiting as it were with their faces blackened for the opportunity to launch a Dieppe raid against the forces of opportunism’.93 By May 1968 they had put together an inner group of nine or ten, including several ministers, who met in one another’s houses to go through lists of names. On 7 May Mayhew reported to Jenkins that they had sixty who would be ready to sign a letter to the Chief Whip calling for Wilson to go. But Jenkins, while happy to say that he was ‘utterly fed up with Harold’ – their relations were just then going through a bad patch – thought sixty was not enough, as Mayhew recorded:
‘80?’ I asked. ‘100,’ he replied, and then as an afterthought: ‘I suppose really one ought to go for a majority of backbenchers.’ I said this would be about 120, statistically speaking.
A few days later, at another meeting at Dick Taverne’s house, the rebels reckoned they could count on thirty-five ‘certainties’, thirty-nine ‘probables’ and sixty-three ‘possibles’, with another seventeen potential supporters whose views were still unknown. ‘It no longer seemed impossible that a majority of backbenchers against Harold was out of the question.’
But three weeks later Jenkins again raised the bar. ‘“I don’t intend to do a Ramsay MacDonald,” he said. “I must have a substantial part of the Party with me.” “Fifty–fifty,” I queried. “Seventy–thirty,” he replied.’ If Mayhew’s account can be believed, Jenkins was already playing with the idea of breaking the party system itself:
I put it to Roy that simply to take over the leadership and to struggle on trying to maintain a semblance of unity and morale would at best allow him two years as prime minister before a shattering election defeat which would in effect end his political career altogether. The only hope would be to combine the takeover of the leadership with an entirely fresh revolutionary political approach. We should embrace the biggest political issue of all – far-reaching constitutional reform aimed at ending the farce of the present party struggle and the kind of ludicrous performance we were now getting in Parliament . . . He most warmly agreed. ‘I would not agree to lead without getting out of this appalling nonsense’ – he nodded in the direction of the Chamber – ‘We must break loose from the present political straitjacket.’94
There was no possibility of this in 1968. But this is the first record of Jenkins’ disillusion with the existing political system, even when he was at the peak of his conventional success within it.
‘The Conspiracy is now in full swing,’ Gordon Walker wrote excitedly on 17 June. But while Taverne was keen to ‘come out into the open and hot things up’, others, including Mayhew, wanted to wait until the autumn, while Jenkins himself still had no intention of putting his head above the parapet unless he could be certain of success:
Roy Jenkins thought better not move now. He did not want to say, at any time, that we should move. He wanted to be consulted and might advise against action – but, otherwise, he would leave it to us. He clearly did not want to be implicated in actually launching an action.95
On 19 July the majority agreed that they had ‘missed the bus’ for the moment, and should try again in the autumn.96
But the autumn, with another sterling crisis in November, turned out to be too fraught a time. They did gear up for another attempt in the spring of 1969, when a group now including Robert Maclennan and David Marquand, meeting in Ivor Richard’s chambers on 7 May, decided that it was now or never: ‘no better chance would ever recur’. The local election results were certain to be terrible, and any later would be too close to the next election. Fifty MPs were said to be ready to sign a letter to the chairman of the PLP, Douglas Houghton, which they thought would be enough to call a meeting at which they would have sufficient votes to force Wilson to stand down. But now Jenkins sent word via John Harris that they should not move while Barbara Castle’s Industrial Relations Bil
l was dividing the party: ‘The centre of the party would not move against HW while this issue was still open.’ More importantly, Callaghan had by now, by his opposition to the Bill, re-emerged as a serious challenger. So once again at Donald Dewar’s flat on 12 May the plotters agreed to wait, but to hold themselves ready.97 In fact the moment never did recur and the Jenkinsite revolt petered out. In retrospect, Jenkins thought that the previous year was the closest he ever came to becoming Prime Minister:
Looking back . . . I think that those troubled summer days of 1968 were for me . . . the equivalent of . . . 1953 for Rab Butler. Having faltered for want of single-minded ruthlessness when there was no alternative to himself, he then settled down to a career punctuated by increasingly wide misses at the premiership. People who effectively seize the prime ministership – Lloyd George, Macmillan, Mrs Thatcher – do not let such moments slip.98
Jenkins would have had to be a different character to have seized his moment in 1968; and he did not, at the end of his life, seriously regret not having acted out of character.
This capacity to see his own career as a biography in the making probably inhibited his capacity for decisive action at critical moments. Ambitious though he was, he could seem curiously detached. Barbara Castle put her finger on this quality at the height of the Mayhew plot in May 1968. After lunch with him alone at Number Eleven – by the end of which she confessed, ‘I liked him more . . . than I have ever done before’ – she concluded:
Despite his concern that things are really serious, he seemed remarkably relaxed, but then I think he is in some strange way an observer of politics rather than a practitioner. I have the feeling that it would not really break his heart if the Government fell, provided he could write its history.99
Crossman too doubted whether Jenkins really had the necessary desire to be Prime Minister:
When I sit beside him I feel that he has a patrician air – a little like Balfour,fn9 disdainful, detached – plus a delicious boyish humour. He also likes his tennis and his croquet and is much more of a family man than I realised. But throughout his political career he has always succeeded in remaining to some extent uncommitted. If he became Prime Minister I’m sure he could live up to the big hours – the big broadcasts, the big speeches. But could he show the energy to do the endless fixing and arranging which is Harold’s daily life? I don’t know two more sharply contrasted men.100
Jenkins would not have quarrelled with these judgements. When push came to shove he had too many other interests, and too healthy a sense of perspective, to give his whole being obsessively to politics.
‘Things’ continued to be serious throughout 1968 – too serious for playing politics. Jenkins’ draconian budget achieved its purpose eventually, by switching resources into exports; but in the short run the impact of devaluation was that imports were now more expensive and continued to rise faster than exports – the ‘J-curve effect’ – so that the balance of payments got worse before it could get better and sterling remained vulnerable to rumours of a second devaluation. The drain on Britain’s reserves was still running at around £500 million every quarter, while a succession of traumatic international events – the French événements in May, the still-escalating Vietnam War, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August – further buffeted the money markets, with every puff of wind threatening to blow sterling off its precarious new parity. Alec Cairncross’s Treasury diary is a record of almost unmitigated gloom as the economy staggered from one crisis to the next. In April Jenkins had to fly to Washington to negotiate another standby loan of $1,400 million from the IMF, while the Treasury prepared all sorts of contingency plans for floating the pound if necessary, including import deposits and a secret plan for blocking the sterling balances held around the world by other (mainly Commonwealth) countries, codenamed with typical Treasury classicism ‘Operation Brutus.’fn10 (Various alternative plans were named ‘Hecuba’, ‘Priam’ and ‘Orestes’.) Jenkins had long argued that these sterling balances – worth more than five times the value of Britain’s foreign exchange reserves – were a source of weakness, not strength, to Britain. Many years later he likened sterling’s over-extended world role to ‘too large a sail on an unsteady small boat’, which constantly threatened to capsize it.102 But that July Harold Lever and the Governor of the Bank persuaded a meeting of central bankers in Basle to share the burden by providing a $2 billion credit, under cover of which Britain could begin the gradual dissolution of the sterling area. This was a long-term achievement comparable to the withdrawal from East of Suez.
The August trade figure was unexpectedly better, and there was also a slight fall in unemployment (currently around half a million), so Jenkins had a slightly more positive backdrop against which to make his first speech as Chancellor to the Labour Party conference at the end of September. Since he was not a member of the National Executive, it was not certain that he would be allowed to speak from the platform – by the strict rules he could have been limited to just five minutes from the floor – but eventually the brothers relented and he grasped the opportunity to spell out the hard truth of the country’s economic situation. ‘I took a great deal of trouble with my speech,’ he recorded, ‘and worried about it more than about almost any other speech ever.’ Britain, he explained, was not paying its way, but was being subsidised by other countries:
I do say to you, therefore, that it is not some malevolent quirk of international bankers which makes a balance of payments surplus necessary for this country, it is the hard facts of life.
The ‘shackles’ of the IMF, he said, were often exaggerated:
But if you want to have less to do with bankers, if you want fewer IMF visits here, the answer is straightforward: help us to get out of debt. [Applause] It is no good urging independence and denying us the policies to that end.103
In other words, he was begging the party, and the trade unions in particular, to accept the government’s incomes policy, which had imposed a 3½ per cent ceiling on wage rises. That did not stop conference voting overwhelmingly against the policy later that day; but his speech was surprisingly well received: ‘a near triumph but not quite one’, as he characteristically scored it. (Dowler and Harris, monitoring its reception in the hall, thought that ‘if Wilson had got to his feet, two-thirds of the audience would have too, and very good applause would have turned into a standing ovation’.)104 At least he was not booed, as Denis Healey was when making a somewhat similar speech to a much more hostile conference in 1976.
But then the autumn was bad again. First, domestic consumption was still rising too fast, so he proposed to tighten hire-purchase restrictions – the extra shot he had deliberately left in his locker at the time of the budget. But this was strictly a matter for the Board of Trade, which gave Tony Crosland the chance to make difficulties of a sort that Jenkins found increasingly characteristic: his old friend was ‘half in favour, half against, but always opposed to an immediate decision on any particular course. His view (very typically) was that we ought to do something different from the proposition currently under discussion, maybe more drastic, maybe less but certainly much later.’105 Jenkins wanted to take moderate action quickly: he got his way eventually, but the announcement (made by Crosland on 1 November) was delayed ten days longer than it should have been.fn11 This was ‘a classic example of split control and fully justified my refusal to allow a revival of the DEA’.107
Then, after three better months, the October trade figures were disappointing, which triggered yet another sterling crisis – ‘perhaps the most palpitating of all’, in Cairncross’s view.108 Once again sterling was caught up in wider international instability caused by an expected devaluation of the franc and upward revaluation of the D-mark: in a single day (15 November) the Bank had to spend £250 million, about one-eighth of its reserves, to stop the pound going through its floor. Watching helplessly as the reserves flowed out, the Treasury was seriously considering another 5 per cent devaluation, before Jenkins decided
– ‘in a kind of last fling’ – to use the 10 per cent regulator (further increasing purchase tax and excise duty) and impose import deposits (requiring 50 per cent upfront deposits from importers). His officials disliked the latter; but Jenkins overruled them, insisting that he could not hit the public again without also being seen to act directly against importers.109 This mini-budget added another £250 million of extra taxation on top of the £923 million raised in March.
Roy Jenkins Page 44
