And then he only retained the job for another four months. Before and after Christmas Jenkins twice escaped the toils of domestic politics, in December to visit America and deliver his three lectures at Yale, in January on his whistlestop Asian tour taking in Iran, Singapore, India and Bangladesh, hobnobbing with Indira Gandhi and the Shah. (The Head of Chancery at the British Embassy in Delhi attended the interview with Mrs Gandhi and wrote that he handled her with great skill, ‘penetrating the ice-barrier which begins to form after about 10 minutes and ending up with the lady eating out of his hand’.)82 But on his return he was instantly plunged back into the next phase of the European battle. On 22 January 1972 Ted Heath had signed Britain’s formal accession to the EEC, to take effect from 1 January 1973; and on 26 January the government published the European Communities Bill. Instead of the expected mammoth ‘Bill of a thousand clauses’, the parliamentary draughtsmen had managed to reduce it to just twelve clauses and four schedules, making up just thirty-seven pages. Not that this eased the agony of the sixty-nine Labour Europeans as they faced the first critical vote on Second Reading on 17 February. Most of them, under threat of expulsion or deselection, had already promised to fall into line; and by his statement on 4 November Jenkins felt himself bound to do the same or else resign, which he did not then want to do. But there was a real danger that if they all obeyed the whip, while enough of Powell’s Tory rebels held firm, this might indeed ‘undo’ their vote of 28 October.fn12 This time, unlike October, Heath declared it a vote of confidence, so Labour really could defeat the government and force a General Election if the whole party voted together. In this situation Jenkins had no choice. But there were, among the sixty-nine, enough stubborn old lags – mainly those who had already declared their intention not to stand again – to ensure the passage of the bill by quietly staying away. While Jenkins and most of his younger supporters swallowed their self-respect and voted miserably against their deepest conviction alongside fifteen unrepentant Eurosceptic Tories in the Opposition lobby, six of these Labour veterans were absent unpaired, just enough to ensure that the government squeaked through with a majority of eight (309:301). ‘There were fantastic scenes in the House,’ Benn recorded, ‘and great rage that some Labour people who had abstained would have carried Heath absolutely to the brink of defeat if they had voted.’84 Anger was also directed at the Liberals, five out of six of whom (including Jeremy Thorpe, Jo Grimond and David Steel) voted for the Bill and could therefore be said to have given the government its majority. On this occasion Thorpe was physically assaulted by one of the Labour whips.
Over the next five months there were another ninety-six divisions on the detail of the legislation, culminating in the Third Reading on 13 July. Not all were three-line whips, and Jenkins contrived not to vote in all of them. (He actually voted against the legislation fifty-five times, was paired thirty-four times and absent unpaired seven times.)85 But most of the Labour Europeans were obliged to go on voting unhappily night after night, while just enough were always absent to ensure that the government was never defeated, though the majorities often fell to single figures. Labour loyalists, repeatedly thwarted by this handful of blacklegs, suspected collusion and they were right: John Roper (MP for Farnworth) acted as unofficial whip liaising discreetly with the Tory whips to keep the numbers up (or down) as required. Bill Rodgers, David Owen, Roy Hattersley and others have all written of the shame and misery of this period; Jenkins described the embarrassment of sheltering behind others whom he characteristically distinguished as ‘old men who had decided their political fate no longer mattered and young men with the gallantry of 1916 subalterns . . . It is never comfortable to be dependent on men braver than oneself.’86, fn13
Jenkins’ embarrassment was magnified by the fact that he had just been awarded the Charlemagne Prize for his part in promoting European unity; this was a great honour whose previous recipients had included Churchill, Adenauer, Jean Monnet and Ted Heath. ‘It was not something which any European in his right mind would lightly decline.’87 But before accepting he was obliged to warn the prize committee that he was committed to vote against the European legislation; while at home the announcement only confirmed the suspicions of those who thought him more interested in collecting foreign gongs than in serving the Labour party. ‘I suppose it was impossible for him to refuse it,’ Barbara Castle commented, ‘but he is intelligent enough to know that it hasn’t done him any good with the party as a whole.’88 He collected the prize at a splendid ceremony at Aachen in May.
He came very close to resigning the deputy leadership after voting twice more against his conscience on 21 and 22 February. At least two of his inner circle, Dick Taverne and Bill Rodgers, were reported to be urging this course, though Rodgers later claimed he was only playing devil’s advocate to get the option discussed.89 He was pulled back by the weight of others – Denis Howell, Joel Barnett, Tam Dalyell, John Smith and Neville Sandelson among them – urging that his resignation now would be ‘disastrous’ or ‘madness’. Several were highly critical of Rodgers and Taverne. Roy Hattersley told Barbara Castle that he had ‘just spent four of the most hectic days of his Parl[iamentary] life fighting the madmen who were trying to get Roy to resign’;90 Phillip Whitehead warned against ‘a handful of romantics with a Thermopylae complex’;91 while Gwynoro Jones begged Jenkins to resist those with ‘a martyrdom complex’: ‘It should be your aim over the coming months to be seen to be moving away from this happless [sic] magic circle, and assert your undoubted connection with other spectrums of the Parliamentary Party.’92 These divided counsels were summarised by Austen Albu after a 1963 Club dinner at which John Smith and Alex Lyon argued that Jenkins’ role as leader of the ‘militant moderates’ was so essential that ‘he should not put himself in a position in which he might be forced to resign’. The majority of those present, however (Taverne, Mayhew, David Marquand, David Owen, John Roper, Patrick Gordon Walker and Albu himself), ‘in varying degrees thought this not possible – partly because R’s strength in the party depended on his strength outside and partly because for him, as for many of us, Europe was the supreme issue’ and he would lose credibility if he toed the party line. He would become – perhaps had already become – Wilson’s prisoner, and he would corrode his own soul. ‘Although there were therefore differences of view and emphasis there was overwhelming agreement against immediate resignation but in favour of escalation of opposition to H.W. and the antis – even if, in the end, this led to resignation.’93
This position was elaborated at length by David Marquand, who had initially wanted Jenkins to resign immediately but now thought that he should wait a bit longer and choose his moment. He should make ‘a very belligerent speech’ sometime in the next few weeks, ‘staking out your territory and laying down your terms . . . in such a way that Harold couldn’t accept it’. Then he should resign. What was at stake, Marquand argued, was ‘the whole future . . . of the democratic left in this country’. Jenkins was the only person who could stop Wilson selling the pass, and this was the only way to do it.94 David Owen argued similarly that he should widen his attack in a way that might lead to resignation, but that they should not keep on defying the whip. ‘Persistent abstaining by a major group,’ he warned, ‘will lead to a new party’ – evidence that a breakaway was already seen as a possibility. ‘I hope you have no doubt of one thing,’ he ended. ‘Whatever your decision if you resign – I resign and I will support your decision to the hilt.’95
It is significant that all those listed as taking this more aggressive view later joined the SDP; whereas most of those counselling against resignation, notably Smith and Hattersley, ultimately stuck with Labour. The fault line within the Jenkinsites was already visible. For the moment Jenkins was persuaded to hang on – a decision made easier by the Shadow Cabinet’s decision not to press a three-line whip on every vote. To Neville Sandelson (MP for Hayes and Harlington), who had written urging that the European battle had been won and there were now wider
issues involving the whole shape of the party on which his leadership was essential, Jenkins replied on 28 February: ‘I hope we can get through without upheaval, but this will require a touch of steel on our part as well as sense and caution. But I am more optimistic after last week.’96 His strategy, following Marquand’s advice, and Sandelson’s, was to try to move beyond Europe and reassert his credentials as an alternative leader by setting out his own vision and programme in a series of wide-ranging speeches over the spring and summer.
The first was delivered in John Roper’s Farnworth constituency (in Greater Manchester) on 11 March. It was largely written by Marquand, but harked back to Jenkins’ long standing concern with poverty and inequality. ‘In the 1950s,’ he admitted, ‘many of us thought the inequalities would diminish as society became more prosperous. It is now clear that this view was at best over-simplified, and at worst just wrong.’ Confessing that the 1964–70 government, despite its achievements in certain areas, had been a disappointment in this respect, he asserted ambitiously that ‘the next Labour Government can be content with nothing less than the elimination of poverty as a social problem’. The problem was that the poor were now a minority, while the bulk of Labour’s traditional supporters were relatively well off. Formed to fight for the poor majority against the wealthy minority, the party’s new challenge was to ‘enlist the majority in a struggle on behalf of a poor minority’:
We have to persuade men and women who are themselves reasonably well off that they have a duty to forgo some of the advantages they would otherwise enjoy for the sake of others who are much poorer than they are. We have to persuade motor car workers in my constituency that they have an obligation to low-paid workers in the public sector.
‘Our only hope,’ he concluded, ‘is to appeal to the latent idealism of all men and women of goodwill – irrespective of their income brackets, irrespective of their class origins, irrespective in many cases of their past political affiliations.’
Here was a clear anticipation of the SDP. (Marquand even included a quotation from Andrew Marvell about Cromwell ‘casting the Kingdoms old into another mould’, and coined a phrase later adopted by the SDP: ‘We have to break the mould of custom, selfishness and apathy which condemns so many of our fellow countrymen to avoidable indignity and deprivation.’) But this was not the part of the speech that attracted attention in 1972. What made the headlines were a couple of sentences at the beginning, which were read as a barely veiled attack on Wilson:
When the next election comes, we shall not be judged by the vehemence of our perorations, still less by the dexterity with which we follow the transient twists and turns of public opinion. We shall be judged by the quality of the programme we put before our fellow citizens, and by the consistency and courage with which we advocate it.
And if this was not clear enough, right at the end he called again for Labour to put ‘in place of the politics of opportunism, the politics of principle. Only so can we hope to succeed. Only so will success be worth having.’97
Trailed in advance as a major political event, the speech was carefully timed to catch the Sunday papers, which duly made it their front-page lead. But then Jenkins took fright, decided he had gone too far and drove into Oxford on Sunday morning to re-record a radio interview he had already given to The World This Weekend to deny that he intended to stand for the leadership. He was merely trying to open a debate on some fundamental issues. ‘And I rather resent it when the whole press reacts to this as though it is a personal issue, which it is not, and tries to create a great leadership crisis which does not exist.’98 Those like Marquand and Owen who thought they had finally screwed him up to the point of issuing a clear challenge were in despair at this bathetic climbdown, which seemed to confirm the view that he was not, when push came to shove, a fighter. At the same time he conspicuously declined to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ when asked if Wilson still had his support, so he got the worst of both worlds, appearing ‘willing to wound but yet afraid to strike’.fn14 Barbara Castle was initially furious at Jenkins ‘getting all these press hallelujahs for plagiarising ideas on which some of us have been working quietly and constructively in the NEC groups for months’. But she still felt he was more a victim of ‘press sensationalism’ than actively bidding for the leadership; and she was delighted when his botched coup – ‘carefully planned in his little group’ – seemed to have rebounded on him. ‘I think Roy must be regretting it now: the whole business has done him enormous harm.’100
Resignation was still very much on his mind. He told the editor of the Guardian, Alastair Hetherington, on 9 March that he had been reading about historic resignations, particularly that of Anthony Eden, who almost resigned as Neville Chamberlain’s Foreign Secretary four or five times before he finally did. Jenkins knew quite well that resignations are usually mistimed and the last straw is often quite trivial. He recognised that if he resigned, others would feel obliged to go with him, leaving vacancies in the Shadow Cabinet which would be filled by ‘one extremely right-wing anti-marketeer [Reg Prentice] and three or four left-wing anti-marketeers’ (Barbara Castle, Eric Heffer and John Silkin), pushing the party still further to the left. But he was afraid that Wilson was already being driven towards a commitment not merely to oppose entry, but to withdraw from the Community, and in that case he would have to resign.101 Up to the end of March, however, he still intended to ‘stagger on uncomfortably as deputy leader through the summer and perhaps to re-election in the autumn’.102 But then within a few days came three fresh setbacks. First, on 28 March George Thomson told him that he had decided to accept an offer to become one of Britain’s two Commissioners in Brussels when the country joined the Community in January 1973. Jenkins did not try to dissuade him; but Thomson, a heavyweight of robust Scottish good sense and humour, was ‘by far the best and steadiest and most important’ of his allies, and his loss would be ‘a major blow’.103 Then the next day the NEC, after a long procedural wrangle and on the casting vote of Tony Benn as chairman, appointed the left-wing and anti-European Ron Hayward to be the party’s next General Secretary, rather than the right-wing, pro-European and (in Jenkins’ view) much more able front-runner for the job, Gwyn Morgan. This was ‘a serious defeat because it both symbolised and reinforced a significant leftward shift in the control of the party machine’.104 Third, later the same day, the Shadow Cabinet reversed its previous position and voted to support Benn’s call for a referendum before Britain joined the Community.
Jenkins had always opposed referenda on principle, subscribing to Attlee’s view that they were ‘a splendid weapon for demagogues and dictators’, which would be a serious brake on progressive legislation.105 Way back in 1954 he had argued in a letter to The Times that ‘Representative democracy demands a clear division of function between the electors and the elected.’ The former could dismiss the latter, but meanwhile they must be free to exercise their own judgement. ‘Any form of referendum is an infringement of this freedom, and the more complex and detailed the issue upon which it is held the more absurd an infringement it becomes.’106 Moreover he believed that a referendum on Europe, with members of the Shadow Cabinet taking opposite sides, could only widen the division within Labour. As a matter of fact, as he came to acknowledge after 1975, the referendum turned out to be the means by which the party reconciled the opposing views without splitting, at least in the short term. But in 1972 it was not just the referendum per se, but the way the Shadow Cabinet once again reversed itself within the space of a fortnight that he could not stomach. For more than a year Benn had been a lone voice pressing the idea: the 1971 party conference had rejected the proposal – so much for the sanctity of conference decisions – and on 15 March he found just four supporters in the Shadow Cabinet. But then on 22 March he persuaded the NEC, with Wilson, Callaghan and Jenkins all absent (Jenkins was attending a PLP meeting on the budget), to vote 13:11 to refer it back to the Shadow Cabinet, where (on 29 March) Wilson seized on the pretext that President Pompidou h
ad just announced a referendum in France to execute another tactical U-turn.
Foot, Shore and Benn led the case for supporting a dissident Tory motion demanding a referendum, backed by Fred Peart and Bob Mellish. Jenkins spoke strongly against, dismissing Pompidou’s announcement as an irrelevance dictated purely by domestic politics and warning that ‘the intrusion of referenda was harmful to left-wing policies’; he was supported by Shirley Williams, Harold Lever, Houghton, Thomson and (for once) Tony Crosland. But Wilson, in self-pitying mood, complained that while he had never doubted the pro-Marketeers’ integrity, ‘none of the pro-market leaders . . . had ever publicly given him credit for similar integrity. None of them had gone to his help despite the fact that he was bitterly attacked by enemies of the Party.’ He admitted that the French precedent was irrelevant, but nevertheless ‘thought we might have to come to a position where we supported a referendum’; at which Jim Callaghan pitched in to say that losing the amendment would be a serious defeat for the government, ‘and as he thought getting rid of the Government was more important than the question of the Common Market he agreed with Mr Wilson’. Ted Short, though a pro-Marketeer, then changed sides; and since Denis Healey and Willie Ross, both opponents of referenda, were absent, the decision came out 8:6 in favour of supporting the referendum.107 Benn hailed ‘a tremendous victory’,108 while the Jenkinsites were ‘stunned’. Having been ‘sandbagged in the morning’ at the NEC, Jenkins wrote, they had been ‘garotted in the afternoon’.109 He drew the conclusion that the anti-Europeans would stop at nothing till they drove him out, while Wilson no longer had any intention of trying to hold the balance.
Roy Jenkins Page 51
