Roy Jenkins

by John Campbell

  fn2 The sisters were released under the Royal Prerogative in 1980. Dolours then married the actor Stephen Rea, who later voiced the words of Gerry Adams when he was banned from the airwaves by Mrs Thatcher. Both sisters remained unrepentant Republicans who opposed the Good Friday Agreement and were linked to bombings carried out in 2009–11 by the ‘Real IRA’. Marian was sent to prison again in 2011–13. Dolours died in 2013.

  fn3 Reviewing Garret FitzGerald’s memoirs in 1991 he confessed that his prejudices were ‘much more green than orange. I am a poor Unionist, believing intuitively that even Paisley and Haughey are better at dealing with each other than the English are with either.’26

  fn4 Two of the Balcombe Street gang had earlier carried out the murder of the journalist Ross McWhirter, co-author of the Guinness Book of Records, who had offered a reward for information leading to the arrest of IRA terrorists. McWhirter was shot on his own doorstep in North London. Such incidents meant that Jenkins and other ministers dealing with Northern Ireland now had to be heavily guarded wherever they went.

  fn5 ‘Ricky’ Tomlinson, as he was now known, later achieved fame as an actor in the TV series The Royle Family.

  17

  Victory and Defeat

  WITH THE OCTOBER election out of the way, Jenkins’ attention – so far as the IRA permitted – turned back to his top political priority: making sure that Britain, having finally joined, stayed in the Common Market. Over the summer he had continued to fight a rearguard action against a referendum, maintaining that it would be divisive, detract from the sovereignty of Parliament and could not be binding anyway.1 But by December it was clear that he had lost that battle: a referendum, with Cabinet ministers exceptionally allowed to campaign on opposite sides of the argument, was actually the only way the government and the Labour party could be kept united, and the only way – as he later acknowledged – to settle the European question for the foreseeable future. He eventually voted for it on the assurance from Wilson and Callaghan that, once the renegotiation was complete, the government would recommend a ‘Yes’ vote. A MORI poll in January 1975 showed for the first time a majority for staying in, if the government recommended it – the first clear encouragement to the pro-Europeans that they could win a popular vote. In March Jenkins (along with Heath, Shirley Williams, Jo Grimond and others) attended the twenty-fifth anniversary meeting of the Anglo-German Konigswinter conference, which he had first attended in the 1950s, where he announced that he was ‘beginning to savour the scent of battle in my nostrils’.2 At the end of the proceedings Nicko Henderson and his wife gave a ball at the British Embassy in Bonn at which Jenkins took to the floor and danced for the first time in nine years; but ‘he soon got the hang of it,’ Henderson recorded, ‘and was still galumphing around at 2.30 a.m.’3

  Two days later the Cabinet began its two-day deliberation which formally endorsed the outcome of the largely cosmetic ‘renegotiation’. Explaining his pragmatic reconversion, Callaghan claimed that the EEC had changed since the early 1970s: it had abandoned the ambition of economic and monetary union (EMU) – originally planned for 1980 – and other ‘federalist concepts’; the Commission was less powerful and the Council of Ministers more powerful; and the Community was supposedly more open to the world and more responsive to its members’ national interests.4 On the second day Wilson too weighed in, stressing the dangers of withdrawing. The antis made their last stand. Tony Benn warned of a ‘tragic decision’ which would lead to the break-up of the UK and possibly the Labour party. Barbara Castle linked her opposition to the Common Market to Labour’s objection to electoral reform: the Council of Ministers, she argued, was in effect a permanent coalition, ‘and the Labour party had always been united in its opposition to the notion of coalition government. Our virility as a nation would be weakened if we remained a member of the Community.’ These two were still supported by Foot, Shore, John Silkin, Willie Ross and Eric Varley, but by no others. Jenkins felt no need to speak until the very end. The Cabinet then voted 16:7 to accept the renegotiated terms.5 After all the wriggling of the past five years this was an historic moment.

  The wider party was still divided. When the Commons voted after Easter, Labour MPs split almost equally – 145:137 against, with thirty-three abstaining: even ministers were only 45:38 in favour. With the Tories still overwhelmingly pro-Europe, however (despite Margaret Thatcher having replaced Heath as leader in February), the terms were approved by 396:170: an even bigger margin than in October 1971. This time it was the antis’ turn to suffer for defying the latest reversal: Eric Heffer lost his ministerial job for speaking against the government line. Then yet another special conference on 26 April voted heavily for a ‘No’ vote. Thus the referendum, set for 5 June, pitched the Labour government directly against the Labour party.

  There was a plethora of competing campaign organisations. On the ‘Yes’ side Jenkins accepted the presidency of the all-party umbrella grouping, Britain in Europe (BiE). (Ted Heath, who might most appropriately have headed it, was now considered too divisive.) Heath and Whitelaw for the Tories, Shirley Williams for Labour and Jo Grimond for the Liberals were named as vice-presidents, while Shirley Williams also chaired the separate Labour Campaign for Europe (LCE), which held its own meetings, untainted by the suspicion of coalitionism. There were suggestions that she was deliberately shunted into this less prominent role by the Jenkinsites; but she told David Butler that she found BiE ‘too professional and too upper-class for her taste’ and preferred to campaign within the Labour fold.6 Jenkins himself admitted that the leaders of BiE looked like ‘well-fed men who had done well out of the Common Agricultural Policy’.7 On the ‘No’ side an incongruous ragbag of opponents ranging from the extreme left to the far right were pulled together as the National Referendum Campaign, chaired by the Tory MP Neil Marten. Each side received £125,000 from the government, plus a leaflet putting its case delivered to every household in the country. But Britain in Europe, overwhelmingly backed by business and the City, was able to raise and spend another £2 million on glossy propaganda, while the NRC raised just £166,000. So the spending ratio was around twelve to one.8 Moreover the print media – both the broadsheets and the tabloids – were almost unanimously for a ‘Yes’ vote. The only papers in the ‘No’ camp were Tribune, the Communist Morning Star and the High Tory Spectator. The anti-Marketeers, who had campaigned so long for a referendum and confidently expected to win it, were entitled to feel unfairly outgunned. With the government adding a statement of its own official recommendation, even the leaflets through the door were two-to-one in the ‘Yes’ campaign’s favour.

  Not that this imbalance worried the pro-Europeans. The sense that the leadership of all three main parties, all the newspapers and virtually the whole establishment were on one side, opposed only by the mavericks, romantics and extremists of all parties – Michael Foot and Enoch Powell, Tony Benn and Ian Paisley, the Communists and the National Front – only confirmed that they were right and that their hour had come. For Jenkins in particular the referendum, bringing together all the sensible people in public life in a common cause, came at exactly the moment when he had been losing faith in the rigidly tribal party system which forced him to work with old colleagues with whom he disagreed while dividing him from others with whom he increasingly felt more comfortable. He had always believed in cross-party alliances to secure goals like the abolition of hanging or reforming censorship. But now the experience of sharing platforms up and down the country with leading Tories (not only Heath and Whitelaw, but Reggie Maudling, Lord Carrington and others) and Liberals (Jo Grimond, Jeremy Thorpe and David Steel) as well as longstanding Labour Europeans like Cledwyn Hughes and the former General Secretary of the TUC, Vic Feather, was both very civilised and immensely liberating. It did not make him any keener to get into bed with the Tory party – particularly now that it was led by Mrs Thatcher (who kept a conspicuously low profile in the campaign). But it did convince him that the public rather liked the spectacle
of politicians of different parties working together instead of endlessly blaming each other; and, most important, it confirmed that he now had more in common with the Liberals than with much of the Labour Party. Admittedly he did not have much time for Thorpe, whom he thought lightweight and untrustworthy. But the experience renewed the high regard he already felt for David Steel. ‘Of all the people I worked with during the campaign,’ he wrote soon afterwards, ‘he was one of the best. A man of great sensitivity, reliability, imagination, somebody certainly well worth a major Cabinet place if he belonged to a major party.’9 The referendum planted a seed which would bear fruit in six years’ time.

  Jenkins was reinvigorated by the campaign in which, as president of the ‘Yes’ campaign, he played an almost Prime Ministerial part. Only Heath was as prominent. (Wilson, like Mrs Thatcher, took a relatively back seat.) Between 14 May and 4 June he was flown around the country in a small plane, often with Willie Whitelaw, speaking at nine big BiE rallies from Aberdeen to Plymouth, all enthusiastically attended by audiences numbering between 1,000 and 2,000, and at five LCE meetings which were much less well attended and where he faced some heckling from Labour and far-right anti-Marketeers. (The contrast again made an impression on him.) He also chaired steering-group meetings most mornings in London, usually followed by a press conference, gave interviews, wrote articles and appeared on innumerable TV programmes. At the same time he still had to deal with essential Home Office business (though he had arranged with Arthur Peterson to keep this to a minimum). Hayden Phillips or Matthew Oakeshott usually accompanied him on his speaking trips to help him handle it, but fortunately no major crises cropped up.

  The European debate had been going on so long that there was really nothing new to say. Jenkins stuck mainly to his well-worn argument that Britain must take its rightful place among other medium-sized powers in Europe, where her real influence would be enhanced as part of a larger entity, rather than seeking to go it alone in an increasingly hostile world, with the added point that the country was now in the Community:

  I believe that both the security and the prosperity of the country depend upon a Yes vote. Not to have gone into Europe would have been a misfortune. But to come out would be on an even greater scale of self-inflicted injury. It would be a catastrophe. It would leave us weak and unregarded, both economically and politically.10

  He made relatively little of the economic case for staying in and steered firmly clear of the heated arguments about how much food prices would rise inside the Community, pitching his tent firmly on the high ground of Britain’s role in the world and the vaguely defined goal of European unity. Subsequently he and Heath were blamed for failing to spell out what exactly this might mean in the longer term, and thus for having taken Britain into Europe on a dishonest prospectus. In his memoirs he sought to refute this charge:

  Heath and I . . . agreed that it was always the high arguments, the broad discussion of the country’s future orientation in both foreign policy and economic terms, which most captured the attention and fired the imagination of audiences. Neither did either of us attempt to play down the importance of the issues or to suggest that all that was at stake was a narrow trade policy decision. It was political Europe in which we were interested. A common market, which existed and of which we were a part, was a vital step on the road but it was not the ultimate goal or the primary purpose.11

  This may have been true. But it is also true that they never disclosed what the next steps were, let alone the ultimate goal. If they said anything at all about the single market, tax harmonisation, majority voting, enlargement or a single currency – all ideas that would become contentious reality over the next thirty years – it was not reported. They never seriously addressed the issue of national sovereignty, doggedly pursued by Enoch Powell and others, beyond repeating that sovereignty was an outdated illusion in the interdependent modern world, to be shared, not hoarded. Jenkins’ line was still, as it had always been, that one could not know exactly how the Community would evolve and it was foolish to try: the important thing was to be a part of it and to maintain the momentum.

  One of the pleasures of the Cabinet’s ‘agreement to differ’ was the licence it provided to criticise colleagues. Tony Benn had been making headlines with the claim that membership of the EEC had already cost the country half a million jobs. Since the unemployment figure was currently about 800,000, this amounted to claiming that outside the EEC Britain would have been enjoying – in the middle of a world recession – the lowest unemployment since the war. At his press conference on 27 May Jenkins demolished this absurdity, suggesting that Benn’s method seemed to be simply to think of a number and then double it, before adding, quite deliberately: ‘I find it increasingly difficult to take Mr Benn seriously as an economic minister.’12 This ‘public brawl’ brought a sharp rebuke from Wilson, who objected not so much to the refutation of Benn’s figures – which he echoed – as to the implication that Benn should be moved from the Department of Industry: either Jenkins was putting ‘irresistible pressure on me and limiting the options in a reshuffle’, he charged, or he was implying that he was ‘already privy to my intentions, which of course is not the case’.13 In fact Wilson already intended to move Benn if the referendum returned a ‘Yes’ vote, but he did not want to seem to be dictated to by Jenkins.

  The following Monday, by chance, Jenkins and Benn were booked to go head-to-head on Panorama in an unprecedented debate between two Cabinet ministers, chaired by David Dimbleby. This was a highlight of the campaign, watched by some eight million people. But anyone expecting an acrimonious dust-up was disappointed: Dimbleby barely had to intervene at all. ‘With firm ministerial politeness,’ David Butler and Uwe Kitzinger wrote in their Nuffield study of the campaign, ‘they achieved a decidedly more lucid and intricate level of discussion than is commonly seen on political television.’14, fn1 It was an open question who came off best, as John Whale scored it in the Sunday Times:

  The contrast between the two men’s styles was complete: Jenkins rapid in speech, Benn measured; Jenkins qualificatory, parenthetical (‘Curiously, on a point of reminiscence . . .’), Benn simple (‘Be commonsensical, Roy!’); Jenkins anxious to deal with everything that came crowding into his head (‘Well, there are a lot of points there, and I’d like very quickly to run through one or two, if not three of them’), Benn banging one point repeatedly (‘This erodes the importance of the vote’); Jenkins eager to peg out common ground (‘I don’t think Tony would disagree with this . . .’), Benn quite prepared to come through with the moralising rebuke (‘A joke about weather is not really right when we’re talking about people’s jobs’); Jenkins worrying about truth, Benn intent on making a case.

  On the page, Whale felt that Benn’s evasion of Jenkins’ persistent questioning about jobs and alternatives might have looked shifty; on television, however, ‘it seems likely that his single point will have stuck more in viewers’ minds than any of Jenkins’ did’. But television was never Jenkins’ medium. As a throwback to the age of Asquith and Lloyd George, he was far more at home on the platform:

  At the Newcastle meeting he tried physically to keep his chairman from intervening so that he could deal with his hecklers himself; at the Philharmonic Hall in Liverpool he totally outshone his fellow speakers, Jeremy Thorpe and Reggie Maudling, laying an incantation on his audience with his most characteristic gesture, right arm outstretched, hand tilted up, fingers spread; in an ill-filled Birmingham Town Hall [this was an LCE meeting], on the very last weary night before polling, he could still speak with such verve as to prompt a woman in the gallery to call out as he sat down: ‘I’m glad he’s my MP, anyway.’16

  At the last London meeting at the Central Hall, Westminster on 2 June – having already taken part in a three-hour television debate in the morning and recorded the Benn encounter in the afternoon – Jenkins found a new image for his favourite theme. For Britain to withdraw from Europe, he warned, would be to retire into ‘an old peopl
e’s home for fading nations’, adding tartly: ‘I do not think it would be a very comfortable old people’s home. I do not like the look of some of the prospective wardens.’17 Since the start of the campaign the polls had consistently forecast a clear victory for the ‘Yes’ camp. The pro-Marketeers’ only worry was a low turnout, which, Jenkins warned at his final press conference, might yet allow the antis to question the verdict, prolong the uncertainty and still try to prevent Britain from pulling its full weight in the Community. Therefore, he concluded, ‘Let us vote decisively to settle the issue overwhelmingly and free us from the continual debilitation of being hesitant and reluctant partners.’18

  The result matched his highest hopes. On a 64 per cent turnout the public voted by a margin of slightly more than two to one – 17.3 million to 8.4 million, evenly spread across the country – to stay in the Community. Labour voters were reckoned to have voted ‘Yes’ by a margin of 5:4. With no individual count to attend, Roy and Jennifer were able to watch the exit polls at Ladbroke Square with Bill and Sylvia Rodgers, the Harrises and Anthony Lester. The next day Jenkins welcomed the ‘massive and heartening majority’ and hailed ‘a day of satisfaction and jubilation’, noting characteristically that 6 June was the thirty-first anniversary of D-Day, when Britain had ended a previous period of exclusion from Europe.19 It was indeed a famous victory, which only a few months earlier had looked unlikely. The long saga of dithering and wrangling, failed applications and renewed applications, which had lasted since 1961, was finally – so it appeared – over. Britain was at last, for better or worse, in Europe. But Jenkins did not get much credit from his colleagues. When the Cabinet met a few days later there were no congratulations: ‘Callaghan, Wilson, Healey, Crosland were all what one might best describe as fairly po-faced.’20 It was clear that they were going to do as little as before to make Britain’s membership a reality. So on 19 June Jenkins celebrated with those who had borne the heat of the battle by hosting a dinner at Brooks’s attended by Heath, Whitelaw, Steel, Grimond and the rest, the only result of which was to reignite Wilson’s suspicion that he was hatching a coalition plot.fn2 The possibility was now certainly in his mind. The next day he told George Canning, his long-standing constituency chairman in Stechford, that the Labour government might not be able to survive on its present basis and ‘one could not exclude the possibility of some political realignment’. Canning was shocked, but loyal.22 But still he did nothing serious to advance it.