Actually Wilson claimed to have pencilled in a June election ever since 1966: among other things, he hoped to gain a boost from England successfully defending the football World Cup in Mexico. But up until the budget most calculations had assumed an autumn election, and most press comment immediately afterwards assumed that its caution confirmed this expectation. It was the sudden leap in the polls, confirmed by good local election results on 7 May, that led Wilson to gamble on June. Jenkins was initially doubtful. ‘Roy was clearly in favour of waiting until October,’ Crossman wrote on 4 May.183 But the local elections, plus the enthusiasm that he encountered on a visit to Birmingham, brought him round. By 10 May he was ‘beginning to think that we ought to work on the June assumption’, if only because the government could not put the genie back in the bottle once it had been released.184 The rest of the Cabinet acquiesced without much difficulty, and on 18 May Wilson announced the election for 18 June. John Harris did point out that the May trade figures were due to be published on 15 June. But in the prevailing mood of over-confidence neither Jenkins nor Wilson listened.
‘After the event,’ David Butler and Michael Pinto-Duchinsky wrote in their Nuffield study of the 1970 election, ‘it is difficult to record how completely the astonishing Labour upsurge in the polls had swept most commentators and politicians off their feet.’185 With far more polls than ever before, Labour began the campaign with a lead averaging around 7 per cent, which barely moved over the next three weeks. This had been enough to secure a landslide majority in 1966, so there was virtual unanimity in Fleet Street that Wilson, after all the vicissitudes of the past four years, was coasting back to Downing Street with another comfortable majority. As the principal architect of the government’s recovery, Jenkins naturally played a leading part in trumpeting Labour’s record and ridiculing Heath’s increasingly desperate warnings that the economy was not as sound as he pretended. He spoke more widely around the country, accompanied Wilson at four of Labour’s morning press conferences and gave several television interviews.fn19 Britain’s balance of payments was now the strongest in the world, he told Robin Day on Panorama, and sterling was strong. To talk about another devaluation in these circumstances, he insisted, was ‘absolute nonsense’; while Tory scares about a looming crisis were ‘pure moonshine’.187 Delivering what was generally reckoned to be the best of Labour’s five television broadcasts – the others were given by Wilson, Callaghan, Short and Wilson again – Jenkins claimed the economic turnaround as ‘a great national success story in which the nation as a whole is entitled to take pride’, and promised that Labour would now use Britain’s new economic strength to promote growth by means of regional policy and positive action to eliminate poverty, protect the environment (a newly fashionable concern) and improve the quality of life. ‘This is one of the biggest gulfs between the two parties,’ he asserted. ‘We believe the community must do a lot of the job. They believe it can mostly be left just to happen, but it won’t . . . Only you can help us maintain this advance.’188 He might not use the word very often, but Jenkins in 1970 was still in a real sense a socialist.
He did not expect to carry on as Chancellor, however. It was an open secret that Wilson had virtually promised him a move to the Foreign Office, where he would have responsibility for overseeing Britain’s renewed application to join the Common Market. Before accepting, Jenkins told George Thomson that he had secured Wilson’s assurance that he was absolutely committed to achieving entry this time.189 Talking freely to David and Debbie Owen when he visited Plymouth during the campaign, he said that he wanted to ‘move fast towards Europe’ while recognising that it would be necessary to ‘nurse the Left and Right wings of the Labour Party through the European transition’. At the same time he promised to ‘break the Government’s “absurd, almost craven silence” over Vietnam’ and openly criticise ‘the whole of the US’s Vietnam policy’. (In this view Owen thought he was influenced by his Democrat friends in the US.)190 Jenkins was greatly looking forward to becoming Foreign Secretary, which would have given him a full hand of the great offices of state as preparation for becoming Prime Minister.
Though privately critical of much of Labour’s record, particularly the waste of the first three years, and of Wilson’s often devious performance as Prime Minister, he still felt that the government deserved to be re-elected. At just 2.2 per cent, growth between 1964 and 1970 had actually been slower than in 1959–64. But with a projected current account surplus of £735 million for 1970 and £1,058 million in 1971, he believed that he had laid the foundations that would allow Labour to advance in the next Parliament the social reforms that it had promised but generally failed to deliver since 1964; and which he himself had a reasonable expectation of succeeding Wilson in a couple of years. (Wilson told him that he intended to step down once he had overtaken Asquith’s tenure, which would be in June 1973.) In fact Jenkins was not only over-confident, but over-sanguine about the inheritance he left to his – as it turned out Tory – successor. The balance of payments was stronger, certainly, and sterling temporarily secure; but both higher inflation and higher unemployment were in the pipeline: the dreaded combination later dubbed ‘stagflation’. In his only Commons speech as Chancellor before his early death, Iain Macleod – getting his own back for Jenkins repeatedly wiping the floor with him over the past three years – asserted: ‘I do not see how anybody . . . could conceivably claim that it is a happy heritage that we have taken over’.191 And during the election it seemed that Macleod’s and Heath’s warnings did finally get through to the electorate, raising doubts about Wilson’s and Jenkins’ sunny optimism.
The Tories’ most successful television broadcast showed a pound note being snipped away by a pair of scissors to produce what they called ‘Labour’s ten-bob pound’ – a graphic illustration of the effect of inflation, which was not countered by Jenkins’ warning that Tory policies would make it worse. But the most serious blow to Labour’s success story was delivered by the publication of the May trade figures on 15 June: exports were somewhat down on recent months, while the import figure was swollen by the exceptional delivery of two jumbo jets costing £18 million, giving a deficit of £31 million. Jenkins and Wilson had actually known about this ticking bombshell since 1 June, but the figure was so clearly an aberration, and would be announced so late in the campaign, that they decided against either trying to fiddle the figures or changing their narrative. In the event Heath had a field day, claiming that the one great achievement on which Labour based its case for re-election had been rumbled. Jenkins toured the television studios trying to limit the damage, but ‘it is difficult to look self-confident when running round trying to plug holes in a dyke’.192 The Tories’ private polls – which they immediately released to the press – showed an increasing number of voters inclined to believe their warning of another crisis and saying they trusted a Tory more than a Labour government to handle it: this was clearly the crucial switch in voting intention.193 Even so, it only showed up in one little-noticed opinion poll (ORC) published on polling day, which gave the Conservatives a 1 per cent lead; the others (Gallup, Marplan, Harris and NOP) all still pointed to a comfortable Labour victory. On the way to his count in Stechford, Jenkins was still confident enough to discuss with the family whether they should continue to spend weekends at East Hendred or at the Foreign Secretary’s country house at Dorneywood.
The result – the loss of seventy-six Labour seats, turning Labour’s 1966 majority of ninety-eight into a Conservative majority of thirty – was a shock, but not, Jenkins claimed in his memoirs, a devastating one. ‘I was surprised but in no way incredulous . . . My belief in a Labour victory had been firm, but skin-deep, for I had not believed in it for long . . . While disappointed, I was not shattered by what had occurred.’194, fn20 For one thing, he had long maintained that the regular alternation of administrations every few years was generally healthier than one party holding office for too long; and he personally, after the intense strain of the past s
ix years, was ready for a period of recuperation. He had enjoyed a rapid rise, in those few years, from semi-detached backbencher to the second place in the government; but he was still only forty-nine and felt that he had plenty of time ahead of him to take the next step. He had no inkling that this was actually the peak of his career, or of how quickly his position in the Labour party would deteriorate in opposition.
* * *
fn1 ROSLA was eventually carried through by the next Conservative Education Secretary, Margaret Thatcher.
fn2 Labour in the 1960s was still haunted by the ‘great betrayal’ of 1931 when Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden insisted on cuts, particularly to unemployment benefit, which fell most heavily on the poorest, and then, when the Cabinet split, abandoned Labour to form a ‘National Government’ with the Tories to force them through.
fn3 In addition to David Dowler, John Harris and Robert Armstrong, the principal officials involved in composing the 1968 budget were the Permanent Secretary, William Armstrong; Alec Cairncross; Professor Kaldor; and two special economic advisers, Michael Posner and Kenneth Berrill (later head of the government ‘think tank’). The two second-tier ministers were Jack Diamond (Chief Secretary) and Harold Lever (Financial Secretary), whose instincts were entirely opposed: Diamond cautious and miserly, Lever naturally expansionist. Dick Taverne was initially Minister of State until he replaced Lever in 1969.
fn4 Of his royal audience he wrote in his memoirs that he found the Queen ‘informed and interested’. But in the notes he recorded at the time he was rather more specific. ‘She . . . asked a number of questions, not about the Special Charge, in which she showed no interest at all, partly perhaps because she doesn’t pay direct taxation, but a good deal more about SET, which she does pay. In other words she showed individual rather than class self-interest! . . . I found her more intelligent and interesting than on any previous occasion’ – to which he added in 1970 ‘or any later one’.46
fn5 For example, Jenkins had very little to do with the change to decimalisation. The big decision had already been taken in 1966. The new coins started to circulate in 1968–9 before the changeover in 1971, but the practicalities of the transition were handled by his junior ministers.
fn6 In fact even Wilson had his relaxation. He found time to play golf seventy-three times in the first ten months of 1968, usually with Marcia’s brother.69
fn7 Unlike most new Chancellors, Jenkins already knew Number Eleven from when his father had been Attlee’s PPS during the war. But Jennifer and the children hated living there. ‘As a family we loathed it,’ Jennifer told the Birmingham Evening Mail. ‘It is gloomy and inconvenient . . . You cannot go out without crowds of sightseers watching . . . The kitchen is miles from the dining room and the washing machine is 50 steps up and round a passage.’ Moreover the Ministry of Works was only responsible for the ground floor. She tried to improve it by collecting pictures and cartoons of former Chancellors and got Roy Strong, director of the National Portrait Gallery, to hang them up the stairs like the pictures of former Prime Ministers in Number Ten.81 But Cynthia and Edward, now teenagers, hated it so much that in 1969 they moved back for a time to Ladbroke Square, so that (as Barbara Castle wrote) ‘poor Jennifer has to commute between two homes’.82 At this time she was still chairman of the Consumers’ Association, and was also able to resume sitting as a magistrate when Roy left the Home Office.
fn8 Jenkins used to recall, however, that when he went to see the Prime Minister, Wilson would pour him half a tumbler of whisky and then talk endlessly without coming to a decision. ‘You had to be prepared to come out drunk two hours later in order to get five things agreed.’85 As a strong believer in lunch and dinner, he also found it tiresome that Wilson did not observe proper mealtimes.86
fn9 Arthur Balfour succeeded his uncle, Lord Salisbury, as Prime Minister in 1902 and held the job for three years before leading the Conservatives to a heavy defeat in 1906.
fn10 While Jenkins was in Washington, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. Jenkins decided to attend the funeral in Atlanta three days later. He flew down with the Governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, and joined the four-hour march behind the coffin under a blazing sun, partly in company with Rockefeller and other liberal Republican governors, senators and congressmen, and partly with Bobby and Ethel Kennedy – an emotional occasion of which he wrote a memorable description in 1973.101 Just eight weeks later Bobby himself was assassinated in Los Angeles.
fn11 The deteriorating relations between Jenkins and Crosland were illustrated by a sour little spat in September 1969 when Jenkins objected to Crosland making a statement about the August trade figures without consulting him about it. Crosland’s reply recalled the prickliness of their letters of thirty years before:
I was at first astonished, then saddened, to receive so hectoring and pompous a communication from an old friend and Cabinet colleague. It was tempting to reply in kind. I refrain for the sake of our future relationship which, apart from anything else, is not unimportant to the Government and the Party.
Your tone was curiously ungracious. There will always be some tension between the Treasury and the Board of Trade, the Chancellor and the President, and no doubt us two personally. But as virtually everyone in the Treasury knows perfectly well, you are very lucky to have had me at the Board of Trade in the last 2 years; and the degree of constructive tension between our Departments is just about right.
Crosland insisted that Presidents of the Board of Trade always made statements about the trade figures, and he would continue to do so: Roy would just have to trust his judgement, not bicker about ‘trivia’. But Jenkins declined to back down:
I would not have written to you in the terms I did if I had not felt strongly about the matter and if this feeling had not accumulated over some time. If, as you say, you attach importance to our relationship (which I most certainly do), I wonder why you do not give more consideration to the reason for my attitude.
His objection was that Crosland’s statement could have had a serious effect on the foreign-exchange market:
This is of great importance, and I bear the responsibility. This is not worrying about ‘trivia’. It is a point on which the principle of consultation is essential. You know perfectly well that I do not seek to interfere with your judgement on any other aspect of Board of Trade work.
Having said that I am content to let the matter rest, and like you I look forward to a long friendly talk as soon as possible.106
fn12 Jenkins’ desire to tax the rich was largely unaffected by mixing with them at weekends, as Ann Fleming found when he and Jennifer lunched at Sevenhampton in October 1969. ‘I very very mildly and for the first time criticised the CHANCELLOR,’ she wrote to Nicko Henderson:
I only said that if they brought in a wealth tax then everything I loved and to which he was not averse would end – e.g. country houses and large tracts of unspoiled countryside; that Squire Eyston probably protected much of the beauty of East Hendred. I had hoped Jennifer was out of earshot, but no, she intervened with alarming vehemence; naturally I retreated, since I have always recognised the seagreen incorruptibility of the female of the species! She is far more formidable than Roy, not handicapped by the wish to please.119
fn13 Macleod, then Shadow Chancellor, was one of the few senior figures in politics with whom Jenkins could never get on friendly terms, finding him consistently petty, petulant and partisan. Maybe it stemmed from his having written a critical review of Macleod’s 1961 biography of Neville Chamberlain. But according to Kenneth Baker, who as a young MP was part of the Tory team opposing the 1968 Finance Bill, ‘Iain could not stand Roy Jenkins, who he thought represented the worst element of the soft left.’124 In June that year Jenkins wrote to Macleod to try to improve their relations:
I must confess that I feel more aggressed against than aggressing. No doubt you feel otherwise . . . But as you are one of the leading politicians on either side whom I most respect, it does seem a g
reat pity. I would welcome a talk . . . I do not in any way wish to still controversy between us. But even when we disagree most strongly, we ought to be able to speak to each other!125
But his olive branch was not accepted. ‘When I eventually got him to lunch alone at 11 Downing Street (probably a mistaken venue) he sulked throughout the meal, declining both conversational gambits . . . and alcoholic refreshment.’ In fact Jenkins did not rate Macleod very highly. Some years after his death he wrote that he was constantly struck by ‘the contrast between the splendour of his phrases and the vacuity of his economic prescriptions’.126
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