fn3 Wilson later claimed that they had another spat over the Arab–Israeli war, when Wilson, always strongly Zionist, wanted to impose a three-line whip on a motion condemning the government’s refusal to supply arms to Israel. When Jenkins objected, Wilson retorted: ‘Look, Roy, I’ve accommodated your ******* conscience for years. Now you’re going to have to take account of mine. I feel as strongly about the Middle East as you do about the Common Market.’ Wilson’s official biographer, Philip Ziegler, repeats this story (from Wilson’s book The Chariot of Israel) as though it happened in Shadow Cabinet. But the Commons vote (on which Labour MPs were actually allowed a free vote) was on 18 October; and Jenkins did not rejoin the Shadow Cabinet until 7 November. Was this then just Wilson’s imagination? There must have been some ground for his remembering the incident.24
fn4 Jenkins’ personal result showed a modest recovery from its 1970 dip, despite a strong performance by the Liberal:
Roy Jenkins (Labour) 23,704
D.J. Wedgwood (Con) 13,472
G.A. Gopsill (Lib) 7,221
R. Bull (WRP) 280
Labour majority
10,23248
fn5 An academic at the London School of Economics, Bernard Donoughue had been seconded to Downing Street as an adviser to the Prime Minister. He became a Labour peer in 1985.
fn6 Jennifer’s mother, Lady Morris, had died on New Year’s Day, while staying at East Hendred over Christmas, as a result of falling from an upstairs window. She was in her early eighties. But the incident evidently affected both Jennifer and Roy very badly, if Roy was still depressed by it two months later.
fn7 Rose continued to be politically active in the areas of civil liberties and human rights, and was a leading campaigner against the National Front. In 1981 he joined the SDP, but did not stand again for Parliament.
16
Back to the Home Office
JENKINS’ SECOND PERIOD at the Home Office was very different from his previous tenure nine years earlier. Then he had been a rising star, the youngest Home Secretary since Churchill, widely tipped as a future Prime Minister, with a clear agenda of reforms he wanted to pursue and a liberal social climate which supported his programme. Now, though still only fifty-two, he was a senior but marginalised member of a minority government, returning without enthusiasm to a job he had done before, against a much more anxious and illiberal national mood dominated by economic crisis, industrial militancy and Irish terrorism. The optimism and confidence of the 1960s had given way to the fractious and disillusioned 1970s. Jenkins was thoroughly out of sympathy with the colleagues he had reluctantly rejoined – Wilson a tired and tarnished Prime Minister; Healey initially out of his depth at the Treasury; Callaghan cynically Eurosceptic at the Foreign Office; Michael Foot in the Department of Employment bent on giving the unions everything they wanted. At the Home Office his in-tray was dominated by an escalating campaign of IRA bombings, spreading in 1974–5 from Northern Ireland to the British mainland; while on the wider political front he increasingly feared that the combination of roaring inflation and left-wing militancy could lead to social breakdown and a threat to democracy itself. The one positive priority he set himself was to ensure a ‘Yes’ vote in the Common Market referendum which he now accepted as inevitable.
Unlike most incoming ministers in a new department, Jenkins made little secret of the fact that he did not want to be there. Once again he did not begin to feel happy until he was able to surround himself with some of his own people. The Permanent Secretary since 1972, Sir Arthur Peterson, was not as hidebound as Sir Charles Cunningham in 1965, but nor was he as congenial as Philip Allen, or Douglas Allen at the Treasury, and Jenkins never formed the same sort of bond that he had enjoyed with those two. But he soon managed to bring in some familiar faces, starting with the faithful John Harris, no longer as a mere special adviser but now as Minister of State (in charge of prisons and the police), for which purpose he was given a peerage as Lord Harris of Greenwich. It was said that Harris was the first peer created by a Home Secretary; but in fact the promotion suited Wilson admirably and may even have been his idea, diverting Harris from the day-to-day polishing of his master’s image – which had created such irritation and jealousy in 1964–70 – by giving him defined responsibilities of his own. His elevation also provided a useful precedent for the equally unusual translation of Marcia Williams into Lady Falkender two months later. It raised some eyebrows at first, but Harris quickly proved himself an effective departmental minister, so much so that he not only stayed on under Merlyn Rees when Jenkins went to Brussels in 1976, but was then appointed chairman of the Parole Board by Willie Whitelaw in 1979. He remained Jenkins’ most trusted adviser, still on hand whenever he was needed and a frequent lunch companion. But he was no longer ever-present in his private office.
The Principal Private Secretary he inherited from Robert Carr was a Home Office lifer named Syd Norris – ‘an able assistant secretary,’ Jenkins wrote in his memoirs, ‘but not in my view a natural private secretary’.1 After six months Jenkins got Peterson’s agreement to replace Norris with his deputy, the thirty-one-year-old Hayden Phillips, who thus stepped into the role filled in 1965–9 by David Dowler: the indispensable official with the intellectual self-confidence and the zest for good living to become an inseparable companion – one of his first duties was to accompany Jenkins to the Colchester Oyster Festival – and a lifelong friend.fn1
A still younger long-term confidant was Mathew Oakeshott, his Rowntree-funded special adviser since 1972, whom Jenkins now brought into the Home Office, partly to keep an eye on the Common Market ‘renegotiation’ by forging close links with George Thomson’s cabinet in Brussels, but also to keep him in touch with Labour party feeling and help write speeches and newspaper articles. Anthony Lester, who had edited Jenkins’ speeches in 1967, thought Oakeshott tended to over-egg them, writing to Jenkins that his ‘remarkable ability to emulate your magisterial political style can be a disadvantage. At its worst it can become a parody, too verbose and a tiny bit pompous and complacent.’ He should write more briskly, ‘leaving you to add the flourishes, the metaphors and the irony’.3 But Jenkins disagreed: he thought Oakeshott’s speeches extraordinarily good – ‘enough in my style to enable me to deliver them with conviction [but] in a slightly harder and more extreme form than I would have used myself’.4 Oakeshott was delighted when The Times praised the Home Secretary’s use of English. Finally Jenkins brought Lester into the department as his special adviser on legal and racial policy. Lester provided the initiative for the two principal legislative achievements of his second term at the Home Office, the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 and the Race Relations Act of 1976.
After a few months these three – Phillips, Oakeshott and Lester, in their different (slightly competitive) roles – formed a sort of inner cabinet which gave Jenkins the support he needed to enjoy the job again and to prove once more, in difficult circumstances, a pretty good Home Secretary. Those officials outside the close circle of his confidence still found him chilly and remote: he was shy, and could be ‘brusque and dismissive’.5 But others actually thought him better than the first time round: less driven, more experienced and more reflective. He still enjoyed long lunches and his mind was often on wider matters, but when he attended to Home Office business he listened carefully to all views and then made decisions quickly and judiciously. And it can be argued that the legislation he introduced in these years, promoting gender and racial equality, actually affected the lives of more people than the homosexuality and abortion Acts of 1967.
The Northern Ireland conflict had exploded since he was last in the Home Office. It was Jim Callaghan who had sent troops onto the streets in 1969, initially to protect the Catholics, since when they had become a target for the Provisional IRA who saw them as an occupying force. In 1972 the Heath government suspended the devolved parliament at Stormont and imposed direct rule from London while successfully negotiating a power-sharing agreement. But when th
is broke down in 1974 in the face of Protestant strikes, the IRA took its campaign of indiscriminate murder from Ulster to the British mainland. London and other cities became sickeningly resigned to regular attack. The bloodiest atrocities came later in the year; but Jenkins had an early taste of the policy dilemmas thrown up by terrorism as early as May, when two young sisters, Marian and Dolours Price (aged twenty-three and twenty respectively), sentenced to twenty years for helping to plant bombs outside the Old Bailey and New Scotland Yard which killed one person and injured 213, went on hunger strike in Brixton prison. They had been forcibly fed since December, but now withdrew the necessary minimum degree of cooperation. Their aim was to be allowed to serve their sentences in Northern Ireland. It was a relatively modest request, and because they were young girls it attracted noisy demonstrations and some sympathy. (Four male hunger strikers, one of whom died, drew far less attention.) As their condition worsened Jenkins as Home Secretary came under enormous pressure to grant their wish: humanitarian appeals from the Catholic hierarchy were backed by warnings of terrible retribution if the girls should die, and the pragmatic argument that only the IRA would benefit from creating a new pair of youthful martyrs. ‘The difficulty,’ Jenkins reflected some years later, ‘was that there was no particular reason why they should not be moved . . . One had to try to . . . enable them to be moved to Northern Ireland at some stage in the future without doing it under pressure of their threats.’6
Over the May bank holiday weekend he decided that the prudent course was to announce a date when the girls would be transferred. But when he tried to frame the case for doing so, ‘the words simply failed to come . . . To be respectable I had to pretend I was not acting under duress. But as that was in fact what I was doing I could find no convincing words to act as a cloak.’ In his memoirs he gives credit to Anthony Lester for showing him that he could not do it, because he knew it was wrong. Over lunch at East Hendred – ‘fortified by one of Roy’s dangerously potent dry Martinis’7 – Lester ‘argued with force and cogency that the correct thing was to make it absolutely clear that I was not moving under threat and that if the sisters were determined to kill themselves we must allow events to take their course’ – while holding out the possibility of a move at some time in the future.8 After clearing it with Wilson, Jenkins announced his decision in a statement, repeated in a television broadcast, in which he weighed the alternatives with gravity and compassion before concluding that ‘After deep thought, I am clear that I must not be forced into a decision about their future location or an unwarranted promise as a result of any intimidation, however harrowing may be the consequences.’9 His broadcast was widely admired. ‘In his judgment and explanation,’ George Hutchinson wrote in The Times, ‘he has delivered . . . one of the finest statements of principle heard from any minister in recent years . . . in words of such simple, compelling dignity as to elevate the public debate. This is Prime Ministerial language.’10 It is still remembered forty years later. Moreover it worked. After informal assurances from a string of mainly Roman Catholic intermediaries, the girls were persuaded to start taking liquid food again and the crisis passed. Six months later they were moved to Durham prison; and the following March, with little publicity, to Northern Ireland. Essentially Jenkins had given them what they wanted; but with Lester’s help he had finessed his concession very skilfully. The most important thing from the British perspective was that the sisters were not allowed to die: their death, he believed, would have triggered ‘a wave of retributive violence which would have dwarfed even the other incidents of that bloody year’.11 That at least was prevented. Meanwhile the praise heaped on him from all sides helped greatly to restore his self-confidence.fn2
Over the summer of 1974 IRA activity increased in intensity, with further bombings in London, Manchester and Birmingham. Jenkins had repeatedly to come to the House to report on the latest outrage, promising that the perpetrators would be brought to justice while urging vigilance on the public. The horrors climaxed in the autumn with attacks in Guildford on 5 October, where five people were killed and sixty-five injured by bombs planted in two pubs frequented by soldiers; and in Birmingham on 21 November, when twenty-one were killed and nearly 200 injured in city centre pubs packed with young people. Jenkins was dining with an American lady friend at Lockets restaurant in Westminster when he was told of the Birmingham attack, by far the worst yet. He returned immediately to the Home Office where he was joined by John Harris; they quickly decided to bring forward emergency legislation already prepared. Jenkins got Wilson’s agreement on the phone that evening and announced it in the Commons the next morning, before hurrying to Birmingham to inspect the damage and visit the mutilated survivors. The fact that it was his own city that had been targeted made a deep impression on him: touring the familiar streets, he was oppressed by the ‘stench of death and carnage’ in the air, but also by the ‘pervading atmosphere of stricken, hostile resentment such as I had never previously encountered anywhere in the world’.12 As well as predictable demands to bring back hanging there were ugly calls to deport the entire Irish population. Accompanied by Denis Howell – who had himself been the target of a car bomb just the week before – he called on the Lord Mayor and the police; but he also made a point of visiting the Roman Catholic bishop to try to stem the growth of anti-Irish feeling.
The legislative response – the ironically named Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act – was finalised over the weekend. Home Office draftsmen came to East Hendred on Sunday morning and Jenkins presented it to the Cabinet on Monday morning. Hitherto the police had insisted that they already had all the powers they needed to pursue terrorists. But public reaction to the slaughter in Birmingham demanded that more must be seen to be done. So the IRA – which as recently as June had openly staged the paramilitary funeral in Kilburn of the one hunger striker who had died – was declared an illegal organisation. A proposal to introduce identity cards was rejected as ‘disproportionate’; but the police were given the power to hold suspected terrorists for forty-eight hours without charge, plus a further five days with the consent of the Home Secretary; and the Home Secretary was given the power to deport suspects to Ireland and – most controversially – bar Northern Irish suspects from mainland Britain. The Cabinet raised concerns about civil liberties, and Merlyn Rees, as Northern Ireland Secretary, objected to the discrimination between UK citizens; but by promising that the ‘unprecedented’ and ‘draconian’ provisions would run for only six months, renewable for another six months by Affirmative Order, Jenkins got his package agreed.13 He explained it to the Commons that afternoon, and to the country on television that evening. The Bill was published on the Wednesday and rushed through all its stages in the Commons over Thursday night (28–9 November) and in the Lords on Friday morning, to become law the same day. During the all-night committee stage Jenkins – supported by the Law Officers, but doing most of it himself – spoke more than a dozen times, defending his proposals from critics who thought them either excessive or insufficient (Enoch Powell characteristically mocked the ‘almost humorous optimism’ of imagining that you could prevent terrorism by legislation at all)14 while fortifying his team, and disarming critics, with champagne in his room. He finished up at Brooks’s for ‘a large late breakfast’ with Harris and Phillips.15
By introducing the Prevention of Terrorism Act, Jenkins wrote years later, ‘I provided a locus classicus for the permanence of the provisional.’16 As the Irish troubles persisted, the supposedly temporary Act was renewed annually for the next twenty-five years – he himself renewed it twice – until, to counter the still greater threat of Islamist terrorism from 2001, it was replaced by ever more restrictive measures by the Blair government. The seven-day limit on detention without charge was extended to fourteen and then to twenty-eight days, with the government in 2008 actually seeking to extend it to ninety days before Parliament finally rebelled. Jenkins naturally felt some qualms in later years that he had introduced this Fr
ankenstein’s monster: a paradoxical legacy for an avowed liberal. But in his memoirs he justified it as necessary at the time, ‘both to steady opinion and to provide some additional protection’, though he would have been horrified to be told it would still be in force three decades later.17 In truth it was probably the minimum any Home Secretary could have done. Once again his relatively measured response – and particularly his television broadcast – drew admiration from his friends in the liberal establishment. ‘I simply cannot tell you how thankful I am that, faced with our present difficulties . . . we have you as Home Secretary,’ wrote Sir Robert Birley, the former head of Eton;18 and the former royal secretary Sir Alan Lascelles wrote that he had never heard a better ministerial announcement at a time of national stress – and that included Asquith, Lloyd George and Churchill.19 Even Denis Healey wrote generously: ‘My dear Roy, Just to say I thought you were superb . . . on TV last night. It could not have been done better.’20
Public anger against the IRA also led to new calls for the restoration of the death penalty, at least for terrorists. As a prominent abolitionist and a Birmingham MP as well as Home Secretary, Jenkins bore the full force of this demand: he received ‘a bigger volume of nasty disagreeable mail than I had ever had from Stechford on any issue previously . . . much of it couched in very bitter and hysterical terms’.21 For a time it seemed that enough MPs of both parties might join the public clamour to reverse Parliament’s previous decision. Jenkins was as determined as ever to stand against it. Quite apart from his long-standing personal abhorrence of capital punishment, he had just confronted the likely consequences if the Price sisters had starved themselves to death: their potency as martyrs would have been many times greater if they had been executed, like the rebels of 1916. He considered ‘nearly insane’ the argument of his Tory shadow, Keith Joseph, who still claimed to be an abolitionist while making an exception for terrorists.22 Fortunately Willie Whitelaw (a former Northern Ireland Secretary) and Ted Heath (still just clinging on as Tory leader) held firm, so that following a highly charged debate the motion to restore hanging was heavily defeated, to Jenkins’ immense relief, by 369 votes to 217. He had always maintained that he could not have served as Home Secretary had the job still involved the power of life and death. He was not of course responsible for the fact that the police subsequently arrested, and the courts convicted, the wrong men for both the Guildford and the Birmingham bombings. In the 1980s he worked hard behind the scenes with Cardinal Hume and others to secure the eventual pardon and release of the ‘Guildford Four’ and the ‘Birmingham Six’ in 1989 and 1991 respectively. That experience made him more than ever thankful that they had not been executed in 1975.
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