The long sentence is superbly constructed and reads impressively. Yet it contains no thought that is in the least original; rather a catalogue of solidly conventional judgements complacently accepted as received truths. The effect is achieved by the arresting choice of words, particularly adjectives, and the final graphic image. Jenkins’ writing always relied heavily on pictorial metaphors, often extended to ingenious length. These made for vivid reading, but at the risk of running away with the meaning, so that content could come to be determined by style. A facility with images seems to be a peculiarly Welsh characteristic, exemplified by those other great Welsh orators Lloyd George and Aneurin Bevan; it was an important part of Jenkins’ force as a politician. But in his writing it carried the danger that once he had hit on an image he was pleased with, he would pursue and elaborate it to wearisome and sometimes comic effect: he wrote quickly and disliked revising what he had written, because he thought in images rather than ideas. This is one reason why he was an effective populariser, but never an original historian.
Jenkins wrote these nine essays mainly in the recesses of the parliamentary year, starting with Bevin in October 1970 between the Blackpool conference and the return of Parliament (though it is still hard to see when he found the time, since his engagement diary was as packed as ever with lunches and other meetings filling every day); then Kennedy over the Christmas holidays at East Hendred, with the rest following over the next three years until the February 1974 election spared him the necessity of deciding on a tenth.
In addition to this lucrative hobby he also managed a good deal of travelling on his usual mixture of business and pleasure. In December 1970 he visited New York and Washington, where he delivered one economic speech, but also managed to meet all the leading Democratic contenders for the presidency (Teddy Kennedy, John Lindsay,fn4 Ed Muskie and George McGovern) and fitted in a visit with Arthur Schlesinger to Roosevelt’s house at Hyde Park. (While in New York he stayed with Lindsay in the Mayor’s mansion; in Washington he stayed at the British Embassy, as he usually contrived to do on his travels to foreign capitals.) A year later he returned to America to deliver three foreign policy lectures at Yale, combined as always with a whirl of Washington and New York dinner parties. The lectures, published as a slim volume entitled Afternoon on the Potomac?, Jenkins himself described in retrospect as ‘a slightly tiresome sermon to the Americans telling them that they had to adjust from total pre-eminence to being merely primus inter pares . . . expressed in florid prose’.22, fn5 Later in this Parliament he made further trips, usually with Jennifer, to Persia (as Iran was still known), Singapore, India and newly independent Bangladesh, in February 1972; to Africa (January 1973); and to China and Australia (October 1973). On all these visits he combined sightseeing with meetings with the national leaders (the Shah, Mrs Gandhi, Deng Xiaoping, Gough Whitlam), and then wrote up his impressions in lengthy articles for The Times, very much in the style of his political travelogues for The Current in the 1950s, but now with the added gravitas of a senior statesman and potential Prime Minister.
Politically it soon became clear that he faced a difficult time. The first sign that Labour in opposition was going to repudiate much of what it had advocated in office came with the party’s decision to fight the Tory government’s Industrial Relations Bill, even though it was substantially similar to Barbara Castle’s aborted White Paper of barely eighteen months before. Mrs Castle herself, in an undignified effort to repair her credit with the unions, vowed to fight her successor’s Bill ‘tooth and nail, line by line . . . We shall destroy this Bill.’24 Jenkins thought this not only hysterical but hypocritical. At the Shadow Cabinet on 8 October 1970 he warned that the public wanted something done to curb the abuse of union power: Labour should therefore offer ‘moderate but not screaming opposition’ until the committee stage, and then ‘hammer them’ on some of the detail.25 But screaming opposition was what the unions demanded; Wilson – at the time more interested in writing his self-vindicating account of the Labour government – tamely agreed, and as deputy leader Jenkins had to toe the line. As the complex Bill ground its way through Parliament in early 1971, accompanied by mass demonstrations and ‘days of action’ (that is, strikes), he earned Mrs Castle’s contempt by complaining that all-night sittings left him more tired than he had been as Chancellor. (To be fair, Crosland and Lever complained too.) Jenkins was told he could go home early the next time, so long as he was back by 8 a.m.26 The Bill finally carried, but was rendered unworkable by the unions’ refusal to implement it. Meanwhile this battle set the tone for Labour’s determination to paint the Heath government as the most reactionary since the 1930s, to be opposed by every possible means, as the left increasingly made members of the previous government eat dirt to make up for their failures in office.
At an all-day meeting of the Shadow Cabinet in January 1971, recorded by Barbara Castle, Jenkins tried to argue for a more responsible approach to opposition. Labour’s aim should not simply be to regain power, but to prepare itself to make a greater success of the next government than it had of the last. Incomes policy he now believed was crucial, more so than reforming industrial relations, so that he came close to apologising for In Place of Strife. (‘I attached too much importance to what could be done legislatively with IR. The trade off in my budget was false.’) The Tory government, he argued, was ‘doctrinaire and uninspiring’, but not necessarily incompetent. ‘They will be changing things; we mustn’t just be in favour of keeping things as they are.’27 Sadly neither the official minutes nor Mrs Castle recorded the upshot of this discussion. A few weeks later, however, Jenkins was ‘clearly disturbed’ by Jim Callaghan’s support for Reginald Maudling’s Immigration Bill, frankly designed in response to Enoch Powell’s stirring of the racial pot, which many believed had helped Heath win the election. It tried to restrict the number of ‘New Commonwealth’ (that is, black and Asian) immigrants entering the country by creating a new provision for ‘patrials’ – those with parents or grandparents born in Britain, who were by definition largely white citizens of the ‘Old’ Commonwealth. ‘It was surely an entirely new principle of English law,’ Jenkins objected, ‘that you go round asking people who their grandfather was.’28 Despite their differences, Barbara Castle at this stage still could not help liking Roy. ‘He may not be a Socialist,’ she reflected, ‘but at least he is a radical. Jim is neither.’29
Far more serious was the party’s reversal on Europe. In June 1970 all three parties had gone into the election supporting a renewed application to join the Common Market. For most of the past decade the heat had been taken out of the European controversy by General de Gaulle’s veto of the Macmillan government’s application in 1963. Labour’s anti-Marketeers had not been too worried by Wilson’s conversion to making a second attempt, since it clearly had no chance of success so long as the General ruled France: in 1967 he duly repeated his veto. But Labour’s application still lay on the table; and following de Gaulle’s retirement in 1969 his successor, Georges Pompidou, was known to look more favourably on British membership. In this situation a Labour government re-elected in 1970, with Jenkins as Foreign Secretary and George Thomson as chief negotiator, would have re-presented its application and Wilson as Prime Minister would have remained committed to its success. (‘Not just committed,’ he assured Jenkins, but ‘dedicated’.)30, fn6 In government, Wilson could have overridden the confirmed antis and kept the majority of the party substantially united on a pro-Europe line. Instead it was Ted Heath who picked up the historic opportunity to renew the negotiations for which he had been personally responsible in 1962. Within days of the election Tony Barber, as Minister for Europe, submitted the application which had been prepared for Thomson. But almost as quickly Labour began to backtrack. All the party’s old suspicion of Europe was fanned back to life by the loss of the election and its loathing of Heath; and in the interest of party unity and the doctrine that the Opposition’s job is to oppose, Wilson began to equivocate about what term
s of entry Labour would find acceptable.
The very day after the election he told Barbara Castle that it was ‘not inconceivable that the terms they get . . . will not be acceptable to us’. ‘So that’s what the wily old devil is plotting!’ she noted with delighted admiration.32 The next day Tony Benn – hitherto pro-Market – hinted that he too was ‘having second thoughts about the market and ready to challenge the Tories on it’.33 Dick Crossman, now editing the New Statesman, used its columns to lead the shift to outright opposition; while the defection of Eric Heffer, a leading left-winger who had previously supported entry, was an important indicator that Europe was being shaped into a left–right divide, with the centre increasingly siding with the left. By the turn of the year the antis had gathered 100 signatures for an Early Day Motion opposing entry, and the supporters of entry – which had been the policy of the Labour government just six months before – were being made to feel like a beleaguered minority.
Thus opened the critical battle of Jenkins’ career: a battle which, in the course of 1971, quickly destroyed his position in the Labour Party and eventually drove him out of it. The pros and cons of membership of the Community soon became subsumed in the wider question of political morality and ultimately the very purpose and direction of the Labour Party. On the first question he remained resolute. He refused to get bogged down in niggling about the terms of entry. ‘I am in favour of strong bargaining,’ he wrote in The Times in May 1971 when the Tory negotiations were nearly complete. ‘But we must not lose sight in the process of the purpose of the exercise’, which was to get Britain in. ‘The terms themselves are not in any circumstances going to sound overwhelmingly attractive. An admission fee never does . . . But anything will appear extortionate unless we have a lively idea of why we want to join.’ Taking almost for granted that access to the European market would stimulate Britain’s sluggish economy, he emphasised more than ever the political and psychological benefits of membership: Britain’s political opportunity inside Europe as a counterweight to France and Germany, and a united Europe’s power for good in the wider world as a counterweight to America and Russia and a source of aid to the developing world:
Good transitional terms are necessary. So are honourable arrangements for those overseas who are economically dependent upon us. But necessary too is a full appreciation of the wider issues involved and a clear appraisal of the opportunities before us. What this country needs is a little more realistic self-confidence. Without it we face a future of narrowing horizons. With it we can find a new role as rewarding as any in our history.34
Even more impassioned now than such repeated statements of his old faith, however, was Jenkins’ stand on the principle that Labour must not deny in opposition what it had proclaimed in office. When Jim Callaghan, his finger as always on the pulse of party feeling, signalled his intention to oppose entry not merely on the likely terms, but on any terms – claiming, quite irrelevantly, to be defending ‘the language of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton’ – Jenkins retorted sharply. Speaking in Birmingham on 18 June, the first anniversary of the election, he was careful to begin by blaming the Tories for ‘a rapid devaluation of the standards of British politics’. Elected on ‘an utterly bogus prospectus’ to reduce prices and unemployment, they were now watching helplessly as both soared. But his point was that Labour must not mirror this duplicity, but rather make a stand for ‘honesty and consistency’ in public life:
I can see no basis on which it was right to seek entry in 1967, and to persist in this enterprise in 1968, 1969 and the early part of 1970, but to oppose it in principle in 1971 . . . unless we believe that a party should take a different attitude to the nation’s interests and say different things in Government than in opposition. I do not believe that.
Garland, Daily Telegraph, 29.7.71 (British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent)
Public opinion, he conceded, might have swung against entry; but it had swung before and could swing again. ‘In any case, I do not believe that it is always the duty of those who seek to lead to follow public opinion.’35
This was widely interpreted as a challenge to Wilson. The cartoonists had a field day – Garland in the Daily Telegraph depicted Jenkins as a noble Brutus honourably stabbing Caesar in the front36 – and the pro-European commentators once again contrasted his shining integrity with Wilson’s slippery opportunism as he prepared to follow Callaghan’s lead. ‘The great build-up of Roy Jenkins and the denigration of Harold is in full flow,’ Barbara Castle complained. ‘Really the lengths to which the press is prepared to go these days to discredit anti-Marketeers are limitless.’37 Wilson bitterly resented the denigration, but insisted that he knew what he was doing. His job, he told her, was to hold the party together and avert a split. ‘That means I have to come out against the terms in my own time and in my own way. I am about to go through the worst three months . . . in my political life. The press will crucify me. But I will bring the party out of this united and then I am seriously giving up the leadership.’38 By the time he finally gave it up in 1976, following a cosmetic renegotiation of Heath’s terms and the constitutional innovation of the 1975 referendum, he could claim to have succeeded, after a fashion, while ensuring that Britain did in the end remain in Europe with solid public endorsement. Indeed it could be said that it was the anti-Europeans whom Wilson ultimately double-crossed.
By the end of his life Jenkins was half prepared to recognise this backhanded achievement. But at the time he believed that Wilson could have achieved both his objectives by playing it very differently, without dragging his own reputation though the mud. Labour was badly split on Europe, with deeply held views on both sides; its own recent record made nonsense of its opportunistic desire to oppose; and the likelihood was that Heath’s application would succeed whatever Labour did. In these circumstances, Jenkins maintained, ‘the only sensible course was to let the Heath Government get on with it, show complete tolerance to its large pro-European minority and generally play the issue in a minor key. Instead it did exactly the reverse, with predictably disastrous consequences.’ By the time he came to write his memoirs in 1991 Jenkins had developed a theory – based on the Tories’ split over tariff reform after 1903 and David Owen’s behaviour in relation to nuclear weapons in the 1980s – that political parties cannot resist returning obsessively to the issues that most divide them, instead of leaving well alone and focusing on those that unite them.39 Wilson’s manoeuvring over Europe did not, after all, hold Labour together in the long run. Though the party did not formally split until 1981, five years after his retirement, the seeds of that rupture were sown by his allowing the left to hound and harass the pro-Europeans in 1971–2.
Jenkins had no wish to challenge Wilson in 1971; he would rather have supported him in holding the European line against Callaghan, who posed a far more dangerous threat to his leadership, and in a friendly conversation on 9 June he told him so. But Wilson would not be placed in a position of dependence on the Jenkinsites; he was determined to play it his own way.fn7 On 23 June, however, he could not prevent the NEC voting by a narrow majority (13:11) to hold a special one-day conference in London on 17 July, which widened the rift. (Ironically the vote was swung by Shirley Williams, an ardent pro-Marketeer, switching sides because she thought it the proper democratic thing to do.) In the meantime Wilson’s attempt to limit the argument to the detail was demolished when the government published the terms it had obtained from the Community, and George Thomson – the minister who would have led Labour’s negotiation – promptly declared that he would have accepted them, supported by all three of the others who had held responsibility for Europe between 1966 and 1970 (George Brown, Michael Stewart and Lord Chalfont). But the terms were now irrelevant. The mood of the special conference was expressed by a newly elected Welsh firebrand, the twenty-nine-year-old Neil Kinnock, who declared uncompromisingly that ‘Because I want to see the Tories beaten, and because I am willing to use any weapon to beat them, I am against EEC entry
on these terms at this time.’41 On the other side John Mackintosh (MP for Berwick, but also Professor of Politics at Edinburgh University) made the most passionate pro-European speech. No vote was taken; but in his closing speech Wilson edged closer to outright opposition to entry on any terms. ‘It was like watching someone being sold down the river into slavery,’ Jenkins wrote, ‘drifting away, depressed but unprotesting.’42 Just as they had done with Gaitskell’s ‘thousand years of history’ speech nine years earlier the Jenkinsites sat grimly, refusing to applaud.
As part of the minority on the NEC, Jenkins was not allowed to speak at the special conference. But two days later his frustration burst out in one of the most powerful speeches of his life at a meeting of the parliamentary party. He agreed that a Labour Cabinet would have accepted the so-called ‘Tory terms’, which were as good as anyone could have realistically hoped for: to suggest that Labour would not have accepted them was to say that the whole 1967 application had been a sham from the beginning. Exempting those like Barbara Castle and Fred Peart who had opposed the application all along, he bluntly condemned Wilson’s and Callaghan’s cynicism and derided their alternatives. Wilson’s ‘kith and kin’ argument that Britain had a duty to protect the Commonwealth was mere sentimentality: Australia was ‘the toughest, roughest, most self-interested Government with which I ever had to deal’. Callaghan’s prescription he dismissed with contempt:
Jim Callaghan offered running the economy flat out for five years. That is not a policy: it is an aspiration. We were not lacking in aspirations during the early days of the last Government. What we were lacking was results.
The third alternative was the left’s: ‘Socialism in one country’. ‘That is always good for a cheer. Pull up the drawbridge and revolutionise the fortress. That is not a policy, either; it’s just a slogan’ – unconvincing in itself and hypocritical when dressed up as Labour’s contribution to international socialism. If Britain rejected Europe, Jenkins warned, she would not have ‘rugged independence’, but merely greater dependence on the USA:
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