Some Labour people still suspected that his heart was not in it. The former MP for Hampstead, Ben Whitaker, who had lost his seat in 1970 and was now working in Wilson’s office, wondered of Jenkins and his friends: ‘Do they really care who wins this election?’41 But Jenkins did appeal to intelligent middle opinion which despaired equally of Heath and Wilson. The Oxford historian Raymond Carr wrote that he was ‘deeply impressed’ by his television broadcast. ‘It was the only morally & intellectually respectable speech of the whole lot & left you head & shoulders above every other politician in the country.’42 Terence Rattigan wrote similarly, wishing Jenkins could somehow be Prime Minister.43 And the Labour MP Raymond Fletcher (pro-European, but not a Jenkinsite) wrote a week before polling day thanking him for his television appearances, saying that his constituents in Ilkeston liked his style even when they disagreed with his views. He feared that Labour had lost, but thought that this would be Jenkins’ opportunity:
This, of course, will enlarge the role which you will have to play in the coming period of national disintegration and decline. You can rise to this challenge. Please do it in the style you brought to this otherwise degrading election campaign.44
Campaigning more for others than for himself, Jenkins spent as little time as possible in Stechford, which he found increasingly dispiriting. Such canvassing as he did – using for the first time a counting machine in his pocket to record exactly how many people he had spoken to – impressed him with the persistence of tribal voting. A lot of Labour supporters told him that they disagreed with his views on Europe or capital punishment, but would nevertheless vote for him; while Tory and Liberal voters assured him that they would have voted Labour if he had been leader. When he asked how they could want him to be Prime Minister and yet not vote for him as their MP (‘Cannot you see that massive local support would help to make me leader?’), they replied doggedly that he was not the leader: ‘Mr Wilson is.’ ‘This experience left me feeling that . . . the British party system was so rigid as to make it almost impossible to build up a cross-party constituency base, such as any well-known American senator easily achieves.’ He felt particularly aggrieved that the Liberals – fielding a candidate against him for the first time since 1950 – attracted so much support. ‘I already regarded myself as such a closet Liberal that I naively thought they ought nearly all to have come to me.’45
At his eve-of-poll meeting he claimed to see a late swing to Labour, which offered the only way out of Heath’s ‘blind alley of gloom, despondency, division, selfishness and frustration’.46 But going to his count he still anticipated a comfortable Tory majority of about fifty. Instead the early results pointed to a narrow Labour victory. ‘You know,’ he told Matthew Oakeshott gloomily, ‘I think we’re going to win this bloody election.’47 The final result was thoroughly inconclusive. Labour gained fourteen seats, several of them by the tiniest majorities, which was enough to give them four more than the Tories – 301:297 – but with 230,000 fewer votes (37.1 per cent against 37.9 per cent); while the Liberals, who had campaigned openly for a hung Parliament and a government of national unity (supported by Dick Taverne, who narrowly retained Lincoln), won more than six million votes (19.3 per cent), but were rewarded with just fourteen seats. The Scottish and Welsh nationalists took another nine between them, while the imposition of Direct Rule in Northern Ireland meant that the twelve Ulster Unionists could no longer be counted as Conservatives.fn4 This outcome called the fairness of the electoral system seriously into question for the first time since the 1920s. Moreover it was exactly the result Jenkins had dreaded, since after a weekend of uncertainty while Heath tried to cobble together a deal with Jeremy Thorpe – which did not stand up, since the Tories and Liberals together still fell short of an overall majority – he was forced to contemplate what job he should seek, and what job he was willing to accept, in a minority Labour government still led by Harold Wilson, committed to a lot of left-wing policies and more than ever in the pocket of the unions.
Back in July 1973, when Jenkins decided to rejoin the Shadow Cabinet, his supporters had pressed him to insist on going back to the Treasury when Labour regained power. He had refused then, and he was no more enthusiastic now. On the Friday evening after the election, following an afternoon meeting which endorsed Wilson’s determination to form a minority government if he got the chance, Bill Rodgers called at Ladbroke Square to re-emphasise their view. ‘Roy was very tired and depressed and had drunk a fair amount.’ He reiterated his reluctance, but agreed that he might go back for a short time.49 He also rang his old friend Ronnie McIntosh, ‘very depressed’ and saying that ‘he felt like a prisoner’. McIntosh too tried to persuade him that his bargaining position was very strong, since the electorate had clearly voted for the things he stood for. But Jenkins felt that Wilson was bound to give the job to Denis Healey, who had been Shadow Chancellor for the past two years.50 More to the point, he really did not want to return to the Treasury at such a difficult time: the only job he coveted was the one great department he had not already experienced, the Foreign Office. But that was earmarked for Jim Callaghan and was out of the question anyway while the party was committed to renegotiating the Common Market terms. Jenkins justified his position by arguing that no one could be a successful Chancellor without the Prime Minister’s full confidence. ‘To force myself into the Treasury over the reluctance of my colleagues, and to believe that I could then command their loyal acceptance of what I laid down was a non-starter.’51 This was probably realistic. But over the weekend his mood changed, partly under continued pressure from Rodgers and David Owen (with whom he and Jennifer lunched on the Sunday), but more as a result of hints from a number of sources that Wilson – himself pressured by Marcia Williams – did want him back at the Treasury after all. If that were really so, he did not think he could refuse. He actually got as far as drafting a memorandum setting out the terms on which he would accept. On Sunday evening Rodgers found him ‘a good deal more cheerful’ about the prospect; and Jenkins told McIntosh that he had ‘become quite nostalgic for his old job as Chancellor of the Exchequer’.52
But then Wilson found that he could not break ‘the Healey/Callaghan matrix’. He had hoped – or so he told Jenkins – to send Callaghan to sort out industrial relations and give Healey the Foreign Office, allowing Jenkins to return to the Treasury. That would actually have been the best deployment of his available talent. But Callaghan was determined to have the Foreign Office, and was strong enough to get his way. Unwilling to tell Jenkins himself, Wilson initially sent Bernard Donoughuefn5 to convey the news, provoking an uncharacteristic outburst in a House of Commons corridor, which spoke volumes about his edgy state:
Roy explodes in an extraordinary fashion, shouting, ‘You tell Harold Wilson he must bloody well come and see me and if he doesn’t watch out, I won’t join his bloody government.’ He repeated this several times, on a public staircase. He was very angry . . . Roy shouted again, ‘This is typical of the bloody awful way HW does things.’53
Wilson was sufficiently anxious to have Jenkins on board that – reversing normal practice – he did go to see him in his small room at the top of the Palace of Westminster, ‘puffing his pipe and panting for breath after the unwonted exercise of the stairs’.54 But he could still only offer a return to the Home Office, with a clumsy attempt to enhance it by throwing in Northern Ireland. Jenkins had no difficulty refusing the latter, but weakly accepted the former without using his window of bargaining strength to try to influence the shape of the government – the only appointment he objected to was the possibility of Peter Shore as Trade Secretary having charge of negotiations with the EEC – or to insist on suitable jobs for his own supporters.
He went on almost immediately to meet a large group of them at Harry Walston’s rooms in the Albany, where he ran into ‘a wall of disappointment and dismay’ when he told them what he had done.55 The usually loyal Rodgers led the attack, bitterly blaming him for letting them all down by not ins
isting on the Treasury. As Chancellor, Jenkins would have been the central figure of the government and still a challenger for the leadership; but as Home Secretary he would be marginalised. ‘We can’t mount a political campaign on the basis of penal reform.’
I said it was a defeat and we must recognise it as such . . . Roy reacted to my view by saying that he had no choice and we always had greatly exaggerated his position. I said, ‘Did you want the job? Did you make clear you wanted the Treasury?’ Roy was very angry. He said that he had no choice. ‘If you’re not the Prime Minister you can’t make these decisions’ – and at one point that if we went on like this he was going to leave.56
They were both shocked by this open row. On reflection, Rodgers wrote the next day, ‘I suppose I’m disappointed in Roy’:
Not that he’s disloyal – he’s a terribly loyal person, a terribly affectionate person – but in an odd way he hasn’t got the muscle or the will for the ugliness or the in-fighting. On this occasion his distaste for the idea of a Wilson government, his hesitation about coming back at all, the extent to which he’s been very flat since Jennifer’s mother died – all these have made him even less of a fighting man.57, fn6
As well as failing to secure the Treasury for himself, the Jenkinsites felt particularly sore that he had failed to insist on jobs for his friends. Apart from Shirley Williams (Prices and Consumer Protection) and Harold Lever (Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster) – both in the Cabinet – they were all ignored in the first tranche of appointments to the new government. Jenkins himself quickly recognised that he had let them down. Only a few months earlier he had written that Adlai Stevenson, in accepting the post of ambassador to the United Nations from President Kennedy, had made sure that his associates all got good jobs too. ‘He was as loyal to them as they had been to him.’58 And yet he failed to do the same for his associates. Rodgers, Owen, David Marquand, Dickson Mabon and Bob Maclennan (‘almost choking’) were among those disappointed; while Cledwyn Hughes, who had held two Cabinet posts in 1966–70, first as Secretary of State for Wales and then as Minister of Agriculture, was in Rodgers’ words: ‘the saddest looking man last night as the most senior, most deserving, most unkindly treated two years ago and most let down now by Roy’.59 Jenkins took Rodgers for a depressing lunch at Brooks’s on the Wednesday, at which Rodgers told him he had never imagined that Jenkins would go back into government without him; Jenkins said miserably that he had not realised he felt like that and ‘had he known this on Friday he would certainly have said to Wilson that it was a condition of his returning’ that Rodgers should get a good job.60 This was a strange failure of imagination towards his chief lieutenant. In fact it was not too late. Jenkins saw Wilson that afternoon and again the next morning to plead his supporters’ cause, as a result of which Rodgers was offered Minister of State at the Ministry of Defence, while Owen and Maclennan became Under-Secretaries at Health and Prices respectively. Rodgers was so fed up that he nearly refused until Jenkins urged him to accept; while Maclennan wrote slightly tartly to thank Jenkins for his advocacy:
I am the more conscious of my good fortune in the light of the position of others among your friends who have not been so favoured. Paul Rose is feeling particularly bruised and you may want to have a word with him. Dick Mabon seems the most philosophical – admirably so.61
Paul Rose, MP for Manchester, Blackley, since 1964, was a pro-European barrister, more left-wing than most of the Jenkinsites, who had been an employment spokesman in 1970–71, but lost his job after voting the wrong way in October 1971. He now wrote bitterly to Jenkins that people like himself faced blighted careers, ‘feeling that one has been a pawn sacrificed in a gambit that failed’, while ‘those who played it both ways have been suitably rewarded’. ‘I have taken it upon myself,’ he wrote, ‘to say what others undoubtedly feel. You were in a strong position to prevent this massacre of the innocents and did not use that strength.’ While it must be galling for Jenkins not to return to ‘your rightful place as Chancellor’, several of them – ‘Bob, David, Dick, Cledwyn and those who might have followed us’ – now faced a future as ‘permanent lobby fodder . . . as the casualties of a battle in which . . . we were made the scapegoats’. He was now wondering ‘whether to soldier on . . . or to break out before it is too late’:
If there is no future, and you must know Harold’s mood better than we do, then please be frank about it so that I for one can fight my political battles elsewhere and build up a different future from the one I had some fragile hope of no more than three years ago.62
This was really rubbing Jenkins’ nose in the responsibilities of political leadership. He wrote on Rose’s letter that he would reply verbally (as, frustratingly for his biographer, he often did). His diary gives no indication of when they met, but his advice cannot have been encouraging, since a year later Rose wrote again that, acting on it, he had built up his Bar practice successfully and intended to leave Parliament at the next election – as indeed he did.63, fn7 Of the others he mentioned as feeling similarly aggrieved, Marquand also left Parliament in 1976 and Cledwyn Hughes lost his seat in 1979; Maclennan did belatedly get a job from Wilson in 1974, and Mabon from Callaghan in 1976. But it would be fair to say that they all felt disillusioned with Jenkins at this time. He had failed once too often to stand up for himself and them when the chance was there, and they all felt – as did Rodgers, David Owen and Shirley Williams – that he had shot his bolt as a potential leader and their generation should begin to look elsewhere for leadership. This was the end of the Jenkinsites as a cohesive force.
One other recently elected supporter was not yet disillusioned, though he sounded as if he thought he might soon be. Giles Radice – the victor of the Chester-le-Street by-election held the same day as Lincoln in March 1973 – wrote to Jenkins that even though not Chancellor, he was still strategically ‘the most powerful man in the Cabinet’, since everyone knew that ‘in present circumstances there can be no Labour administration without you’. The knowledge that he would be willing to resign, as in 1972, if pushed too far gave him ‘a formidable strength inside the Cabinet – a strength which nobody else has’. Radice urged Jenkins to ‘forget what happened last week – and use your power fearlessly and ruthlessly in the Cabinet. Your admirers still believe in you. Please don’t let them down.’64
Others of a more coalitionist tendency still hoped that the combination of a hung Parliament and a continuing national emergency might yet be Jenkins’ opportunity. Madron Seligman – who from Balliol onwards had managed to remain a good friend of both Jenkins and Ted Heath – wrote to congratulate him on his return to the Cabinet: ‘I feel you are ideally placed to bring maximum influence to bear, when the present equivocal stage comes to an end.’65 An even older friend, Derek Powell from his Pontypool schooldays, was afraid that by sending him back to the Home Office, Wilson had given him ‘the bum’s rush’, but still hoped that he might yet be called upon to lead a National Government that would command a huge majority.66
But how much of this did Jenkins himself believe? He knew he had suffered a serious defeat. For an ex-Chancellor, going back to the Home Office was a clear demotion, and the upward momentum of his career had clearly stalled. In 1967 he had been a rising star; now, like so many Home Secretaries, he was probably on the way down. In appointing him – confident that he was no longer a dangerous rival – Wilson was friendly and even renewed his previous hints that, with Labour back in office, Jenkins would be his favoured successor when he stood down, probably in a couple of years. He accompanied this with the suggestion that ‘if, as was perhaps inevitable for a time, I wanted to be a semi-detached member of the Government’, the Home Office was ‘the most suitable department from which to play such a stand-off role’. Jenkins called this ‘one of the oddest remarks that a Prime Minister has ever made to a colleague in a new Cabinet’.67 In fact he had made the same point himself in his 1971 article comparing the Home Office with the Treasury, writing that ‘A man could, I bel
ieve, be a tolerable and even a good Home Secretary while not on speaking terms with most of his principal colleagues.’68 The hard fact was, however, that for all his seniority he was not going to be a central figure in the new government: with Healey at the Treasury, Callaghan at the Foreign Office and Michael Foot at Employment (charged with ending the miners’ strike and keeping the unions happy), Jenkins was barely on speaking terms with his senior colleagues. Tony Crosland at Environment was still outside the big four, but now more clearly on the up than his old rival. So was Tony Benn, boosted by his triumph in committing Labour to hold a referendum on Europe and now Secretary of State for Industry, charged with setting up the National Enterprise Board and enforcing planning agreements on private industry. Nor could Jenkins console himself with going back to unfinished business at the Home Office: the liberalising chapter of the 1960s had been written – if anything the backlash had begun – and he felt no enthusiasm for a second bout of wrestling with prisons and the police. For all these reasons he went back to the Home Office in March 1974 with a heavy heart, quite unlike his first arrival there full of hope and energy, nine years before.
* * *
fn1 Taverne had wanted to call himself a Social Democrat, but was persuaded that Democratic Labour would be better understood. The official Labour candidate was Margaret Jackson, then a hard-left local activist who later reinvented herself as the model Blairite Margaret Beckett.
fn2 At Chester-le-Street Labour’s majority slumped from 20,000 to 7,000, with the Liberal winning 38 per cent of the vote, while in Dundee East Labour only narrowly held off the Scottish Nationalists and the Tories in a three-way cliffhanger. Meanwhile the Liberals were enjoying a spectacular revival. Having won Rochdale from Labour in October and Sutton and Cheam from the Tories in December 1972, they went on to take Ely, Ripon and Berwick from the Conservatives during 1973, while consistently scoring around 20 per cent in the polls, making the likelihood of Labour winning a clear majority at the next election increasingly remote.
Roy Jenkins Page 55
