Roy Jenkins

by John Campbell

  But that was no reason to give his enemies what they wanted. For ten days over Easter he stayed at East Hendred, taking advice from his most trusted associates. On Easter Monday he drafted a resignation letter which he read over the phone to Thomson and Houghton and to others (Owen, Marquand, Maclennan and Barnes) who came to lunch over the next week. Bill Rodgers, a hawk in February, now wrote him a long letter arguing on balance against resigning. The European argument was won; the referendum, if carried, might be a nuisance but was not disastrous. Jenkins could still be the next leader if he just sat tight for two or three years and waited for the storm to pass. If he resigned now, ‘You would lose a valuable platform as the price of winning your freedom.’ It might not matter if Foot became deputy leader, but if Short, Crosland or – ‘most dangerously’ – Healey succeeded, ‘he might be hard to dislodge and Wilson could choose his moment to go with the deliberate purpose of dishing you’. Having set out the case for hanging on, however, Rodgers accepted that Jenkins might feel that lying low for two years would be intolerable and assured him that ‘I am with you whatever course you choose.’110 David Owen also argued against resigning but undertook to follow his judgement.111

  Jenkins made his decision at the end of the week, when his most important sounding board, John Harris, flew back from Chicago (where he had been covering the Democratic primaries for The Economist) and came straight to East Hendred. He had been traced by Roy Hattersley, who had expected him to be an ally against resignation; but he turned out to be strongly in favour. That Sunday the Thomsons and Bradleys came to lunch. Jenkins’ account of their arguments, dictated five weeks after the event, is rather different from the more polished version he wrote two decades later in his memoirs and crucially includes Jennifer’s reluctant conversion. Tom Bradley’s advice, he wrote, was broadly the same as Rodgers’: ‘Never resign, hold on, accept humiliations, wait for the leadership to drop into your lap.’

  But Thomson argued very strongly that this was not a possible position, that it would erode me externally and internally and indeed, which was strongly my view, that at the end of the day I would hardly be in a state to be leader even assuming I could be, because I would have destroyed my own self-confidence and self-respect. This I think was the view which Jennifer also accepted, although she during the week had taken a good deal of convincing and really I think came to be in favour of resignation not because she thought it was tactically wise but because she thought it was personally necessary to me.112

  It was ‘a hideous error’, he acknowledged in a television interview some years later, had his sole ambition been to become leader; but he still maintained it was the right decision, since he would not have been a good leader if he was not happy in himself.113 That may well be true; but as a political leader Jenkins can still be blamed for putting his personal feelings before his responsibility to his supporters and the wing of the party that he led. As he had anticipated, Thomson and Lever resigned from the Shadow Cabinet with him (though Shirley Williams, who was rather in favour of referenda, noticeably did not); and David Owen, Dick Taverne, Dickson Mabon and Lord Chalfont resigned their lesser positions outside the Shadow Cabinet. (Rodgers had already been sacked by Wilson in January.) This represented a serious weakening of the front bench, which surrendered the field almost entirely to the anti-Europeans and the left. Meanwhile Hattersley, Denis Howell, Joel Barnett and Ivor Richard chose to stay in their posts, and Hattersley accepted promotion to defence spokesman (taking Thomson’s place), which as The Economist wrote ‘shattered the concept of the Jenkinsites as a coherent, well-trained political force’.114 Meanwhile Wilson appointed Denis Healey to be the new Shadow Chancellor, telling Barbara Castle that he felt ‘liberated’ by Jenkins’ self-removal (‘I’m impregnable now’) and claiming that Healey would ‘really get stuck into the Finance Bill’ in a way that Jenkins never did (‘Do you know Roy never attended a single meeting of the committee last year?’). With Taverne gone as well (‘good riddance’), he would now be able to build ‘a really effective Treasury team’.115

  Jenkins’ resignation of the deputy leadership was a watershed for the Labour party comparable in its consequences with Nye Bevan’s resignation from the Attlee Cabinet in 1951. In Roy Hattersley’s view it was ‘the moment when the old Labour coalition began to collapse’ and the eventual formation of a new centre party became inevitable.116 But whereas Bevan’s resignation had split Labour into two warring tribes, Jenkins’ split it into three. It both signalled and accelerated the mounting disillusion of the core Jenkinsites – those who later left to form the SDP – with the takeover of the party by the left; but it also divided the right, leaving the two mutually suspicious camps less able to combine to fight the left. Hattersley was the symbolic figure here: pilloried in the press as ‘Rattersley’ – the Jenkinsite who betrayed his master – he spent the next decade protesting his unshakable loyalty to Labour, right or wrong, and ended up (ironically) as deputy leader under Neil Kinnock.fn15 Still more important in the short term, it widened the rift between the Jenkinsites on the one hand and Crosland, Healey and their smaller bands of supporters on the other. Relations between the three Oxford contemporaries had been strained since 1967; but it was the perception on the part of the other two that Jenkins was leading his own clique, intent on making him leader and willing to sacrifice the party to preserve their own moral superiority, that wrecked any possibility that the former Gaitskellites would be able to contain the rise of the new hard left.

  The breach between Jenkins and Crosland was particularly bitter because they had once been so close. The Jenkinsites considered Crosland’s defection on Europe especially unforgiveable because he had once been as strongly pro-European as Jenkins. In fact he did not quite defect: he actually abstained in the vote on 28 October. But he adopted a pose of lofty boredom towards the issue, claiming that it was not really very important and certainly not worth splitting the party for, which the Jenkinsites thought dishonest as well as infuriating. For his part Crosland was jealous that Europe had become so much Jenkins’ issue. Candidly assessing his prospects at the beginning of 1972, he recognised that 1971 had been a bad year for him in which he had done poorly in Shadow Cabinet and NEC elections:

  For 1st time reputation as trimmer, ditherer, lack of consistency & courage . . . Not for 1st time, but more acutely uncomfortable & ambivalent relationship c. CDS Eur. Right, wh. now totally Jenkinsite.

  He now planned to distance himself from the 1963 Club, which he thought had become narrow, elitist, Euro-obsessed and ‘now wholly Royite’, which was ‘v. embarrassing & being No. 2 intolerable’. He particularly objected to Rodgers’ whipping (‘Bill bullying quite unacceptable’). He still saw himself as a possible future leader, however – even though he admitted he might not be a very good one! – and was anxious to widen his support among the anti-European right and centre.118 When Jenkins resigned, therefore, he stood for the deputy leadership. But in a show of pettiness of which Jenkins subsequently felt ashamed, the Jenkinsites decided to back Ted Short – even though Short had also abstained on 28 October and voted the ‘wrong’ way on the referendum proposal, while Crosland had voted the right way: Rodgers justified this partly as a means of ‘punishing’ Crosland for his apostasy, but also as a blocking move to keep the seat warm for Jenkins’ possible return.119 The result was that Crosland got only sixty-one votes to Short’s 111 and Foot’s eighty-nine; Short then beat Foot 145:116 on the second ballot to become the least distinguished of all Labour’s deputy leaders. With the Jenkinsites’ forty-odd votes, Crosland would have won easily. By missing the chance to heal, or at least contain, the division on the right the Jenkinsites played into the left’s hands.fn16

  ‘What a mess he has made of things!’ Barbara Castle wrote:

  He ought to have abstained in the first place and not run for the office. Lying low for a bit would have saved both his own position and the party’s unity. Now he – and the fanatics who have been egging him on – have the nerv
e to argue that it is those who are supporting the party line on the C.M. [Common Market] who are ‘splitting the party’. Middle-of-the-roaders seem to disapprove of Roy’s step.121

  She was at least half right. Jenkins was probably right that he could not honourably abstain in the historic European vote in October 1971. But voting against the whip as deputy leader put him in an inherently false position. He would have done better – had he known how swiftly the party was going to reverse its position – not to have stood for the job in 1970; and he would certainly have saved himself a lot of agony had he not stood again – that is, effectively resigned – in November 1971, instead of staggering on to resign five months later. As it was, he looked both indecisive and self-indulgent. The possibility of a referendum – which the Commons comfortably rejected anyway, with sixty Labour abstentions and only fourteen Tory rebels – was a poor issue to resign on, which made him appear anti-democratic.

  He did win plaudits from his cheerleaders in the liberal press, notably The Times, where the extravagantly hyperbolic Bernard Levin was supported in magisterial editorials by the editor, William Rees-Mogg, who hailed ‘an act of political courage and principle . . . [which] contrasts with the stricken lack of policy or understanding of too many other members of the Shadow Cabinet’. Describing Jenkins as ‘a remarkable and serious statesman . . . who can be seen to set himself the standards of an earlier and stronger age of British statesmanship’, he predicted (wrongly) that by driving the Europeans out of the Labour leadership, ‘anti-Europe has probably secured Conservative government for most of the rest of the 1970s’.122 The Economist too, after suggesting initially that he had made ‘a disastrous mistake’, concluded that ‘Mr Jenkins has shown that he has the guts to put his political future totally at risk, not only for the sake of a credible, principled Labour party but for parliamentary politics.’ It was now up to moderate Labour MPs and supporters to follow his lead.123

  He received a huge postbag of letters – 80 per cent of them supportive. There were dozens from friends on both sides of the House of Commons and from senior ornaments of the liberal establishment (Lords Longford, Gladwyn and Shawcross); from bishops (Mervyn Stockwood), journalists (Samuel Brittan, Harold Evans) and playwrights both old and young (Terence Rattigan, Michael Frayn); from America (Pierre Salinger and Arthur Schlesinger) and further afield (Lee Kuan Yew), all expressing congratulation, admiration, sympathy and support. But there were as many from ordinary members of the public praising his integrity and courage as ‘a breath of fresh air’ and ‘restoring their faith in politics’, several of them urging him to form a new centre party and almost all hoping that he would soon be Prime Minister.124 If Jenkins began to show increasing signs of vanity and self-righteousness, such flattering fanmail might have turned anyone’s head.

  On the other hand, there were letters from Labour loyalists saying ‘good riddance’, calling him Judas, a fascist and a traitor to the working class, and telling him to get out of the Labour party, where he had never belonged. Many were racist (‘dirty Welsh bastard’) or xenophobic:

  You are no bloody good, to yourself or anybody else. You have ponced on the people long enough. Now piss off. And take that yid and scotchman [that is, Lever and Thomson] with you. You git, you soft git, go on now, piss off.125

  Jenkins replied carefully to all the positive and rational ones, and ignored the abusive ones.

  The printable view from the left was expressed in a letter to Labour Weekly from London NW5:

  April 10, 1972 will go down in history as a great day of purification for the Party and the Labour movement. Without Roy Jenkins and his pals on our backs we can go forward in unity to a landslide for Socialism in the next General Election. I have never before felt as proud to be a member of the Labour Party as I am today.126

  * * *

  fn1 As an Oxford undergraduate in 1966 Oakeshott had been involved in a breakaway from the left-dominated Labour Club uncannily like that which Jenkins and Crosland had led twenty-six years earlier. In 1972 he and David Lipsey successfully answered advertisements to become aides to Shadow ministers. Jenkins had them both to lunch (separately) at East Hendred and chose Oakeshott – partly, Lipsey believed, because he (Lipsey) had the temerity to beat Jenkins at croquet, but probably more importantly because Jennifer approved of Oakeshott.1 Lipsey was then assigned to Crosland. Both became closely identified with their respective patrons over the next few years. Oakeshott went with Jenkins to the Home Office as a special adviser in 1974, filling the role hitherto taken by John Harris; he was closely involved in the creation of the SDP in 1981, fought Cambridge for the Alliance in 1983 and became a Liberal Democrat peer in 2000. Following Crosland’s death, Lipsey stayed with Labour and became a Labour peer in 1999, but served on Jenkins’ inquiry into the voting system in 1998.

  fn2 In reality Heath merely patronised him – ‘The right honourable Gentleman will have to do rather better than that if he is permanently to occupy the place of his right honourable Friend the Leader of the Opposition’ – but in the House of Commons bearpit that is enough.9

  fn3 In fact he did get one offer: he was invited by Leslie O’Brien to become a non-executive director of the Charterhouse Group at a salary of £2,000 a year for one meeting a month; he declined for the moment, and again two years later when he was sure he did not need the money. His tax return for 1972–3 also shows that he received £3,000 from Rothschild’s for services unspecified. That year he declared a total income of £35,135, mainly from writing, of which his parliamentary salary plus expenses comprised just £5,546. (His salary as Chancellor had been £8,500.) He paid his secretary Bess Church £1,300.15

  fn4 Lindsay was then a Republican, but switched to the Democrats in 1971 to contest the Democratic nomination.

  fn5 Afternoon on the Potomac? met with mixed reviews in Britain, ranging from the Times Literary Supplement (‘frank and statesmanlike’) to Patrick Cosgrave in the Spectator, who loathed ‘the narcissism of Mr Jenkins’ style’, his ‘mean and pampered mind’, his ‘tepidity of spirit’ and his ‘assumed hauteur . . . that so many of his colleagues in the Labour Party find repulsive’.23 Under new ownership, the Spectator was now virulently Conservative.

  fn6 Indeed the recently published official history of Britain’s relations with the European Community has revealed that Wilson and Jenkins were committed not just to joining the existing Community, but to early movement towards a single currency. Visiting Paris as Chancellor in February 1970, Jenkins assured his French opposite number, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, that Britain would have no difficulty in moving ‘as far and as fast as any member of the Six’. When Giscard suggested that ‘in due course there might be only two currencies of any importance – the European currency and the US dollar – Jenkins did not demur and confirmed that the British Government “did not want to reserve the monetary field from the Community and were prepared to move far in this field”. When Wilson saw the record of this conversation, he minuted his approval: “Yes. Interesting. Chancellor seems to me to have given all the right answers.”’

  Five weeks later Wilson and Jenkins together met the Swedish Prime Minister, Olof Palme, in London and told him that there was ‘a new momentum within the Six towards some form of monetary union, to be achieved by the end of 1978 or 1979. Jenkins . . . thought the date a little optimistic and that it might slip into the 1980s . . . Wilson did not gloss what Jenkins had said in any way.’31 No commentator seems to have picked up this revelation of how deeply Britain was committed to the single currency more than forty years ago.

  fn7 He may well have been right not to trust the Jenkinsites. ‘If Wilson loses his support on the left,’ Bill Rodgers was reported to have said, ‘he won’t have any at all. And we’ll cut his bloody throat.’40

  fn8 The margin was officially 5:1. But this was almost entirely due to the block votes of the unions, only one of which balloted its members. Analysis of the constituency parties showed a much narrower margin of just 3:2 against Europe
.51

  fn9 On the first vote Tony Crosland, having earlier defected to the anti camp, voted with the pro-Marketeers, to Barbara Castle’s disgust: ‘So he has re-ratted! Really that man is the flabbiest figure in national politics.’60

  fn10 Only one of his supporters urged him to go further and challenge Wilson for the leadership. He would not win, Bob Maclennan argued, but he would attract a good vote – ‘probably well over a hundred’ – and do more to strengthen his position than by hanging on for another year as deputy. ‘In retrospect,’ Jenkins wrote in his memoirs, ‘I think he was right.’70 ‘The greatest tactical mistake of his career,’ he told Robert Harris in 1996, ‘was not standing for the leadership . . . against Wilson in 1971.’71 But this is very doubtful. By setting himself openly against the leader Jenkins would have been seen as even more divisive than he already was, and he would surely have won fewer votes than he did in the election for deputy.

  fn11 Houghton was re-elected even more narrowly, by 139:130. But if the left had hoped to punish Thomson, Lever and Williams in the Shadow Cabinet elections, they were disappointed. All three leading pro-Europeans actually improved their ranking, while Mrs Castle was surprisingly knocked off. ‘Roy came up to me with one of those serious faces which he normally reserves for exchange crises,’ she wrote. ‘“I want you to know how sorry I am.”’ He admitted that he had not voted for her this year ‘for obvious reasons’, but wanted her to know how sorry he was.81

  fn12 Over lunch at Brooks’s on 11 January Jenkins tried to persuade Foot that the Labour pro-Europeans were just as principled as the Tory antis. But Foot, who had an inexplicably soft spot for Enoch Powell, persisted in regarding the Tory rebels as honourable patriots who put their country before their party, while the Labour Europeans were unpardonable traitors. ‘We parted in total mutual intellectual incomprehension.’83