Roy Jenkins

by John Campbell

  In retrospect, when he came to write his memoirs, Jenkins rather regretted that he had not done more. ‘Looking back, I think that I should have been more and not less “disloyal” in 1975.’ With the government facing enormous difficulties, the Labour Party becoming ever more fractious and many moderate Tories alarmed by Mrs Thatcher, the referendum had temporarily brought together a combination of people who might possibly have been kept together for wider cooperation even after the European campaign had been won:

  All in all I look back on 1975 as a great missed opportunity for Heath and Whitelaw and a whole regiment of discarded Conservative ‘wets’ as much as for Shirley Williams and Steel and me. They and we could have had much more the sort of government we broadly wanted than anything which was in office in the 1980s, and the country would in my view have greatly benefited.23

  But if anyone is to blame for not having done more to make it happen, it is Jenkins himself. There were plenty of people outside politics urging him to take his courage in his hands. The historian Hugh Thomas, for instance – one of a number of prominent intellectuals whose despair with Labour eventually led them to embrace Mrs Thatcher – wrote urging him, as soon as the referendum was over, to ‘break out on your own with a new movement in politics. You would soon see that you would be very far from being “on your own” . . . You have, as you must be aware, a very large national constituency.’24 Jenkins, however, was still too much a prisoner of the tribal politics he was hankering to transcend. Not until he put a physical distance between himself and Westminster did he see his way clearly enough to act. In the immediate aftermath of the referendum he was quickly sucked back into Labour’s internecine battle by the need to fight his corner – specifically to defend his most outspoken ally in the Cabinet, Reg Prentice, who was under serious threat from the hard left in his Newham constituency. Playing off left against right as usual, Wilson determined to balance the removal of Benn from Industry to Energy by the simultaneous demotion of Prentice from the Department of Education, even though he had explicitly promised Jenkins that Prentice’s position was safe. When he heard of this, Jenkins abandoned his dinner (and his dining companion) at the White Tower to demand an immediate meeting with Wilson at which he threatened to resign himself if Prentice was sacked. In his memoirs he gave a pretty frank account of their interview; but the contemporary note on which his published account was based was even stronger:

  I cannot recall my exact words but they were several times in a form which left no doubt that I regarded him as a squalid little man who was using squalid little arguments in order to explain why he was performing so much below the level of events, as well as going back on a firm undertaking which he had given me, and that this was not the way in which I was prepared to do business . . . I only made my offensive remarks . . . in reply to extremely offensive dribbles from him.

  With some reason he feared that this – ‘almost the most disagreeable row of my political life’ – might have ‘a long-term effect on my relations with Wilson’.25 A stronger Prime Minister would have accepted Jenkins’ resignation; in fact it was a measure of Wilson’s weakness that he swiftly backed down, calling Jenkins back within the hour to concede that ‘provided we were dealing with a statement of consequences and not a threat, he was prepared to relent and keep Prentice in the Cabinet’.26 He then offered Prentice a move back to Overseas Development (a job he had held in 1967–9, but now upgraded to the Cabinet) at the cost of displacing Judith Hart, for whom Foot, Benn and Castle had fought as furiously as Jenkins did for Prentice. Altogether this was an utterly pointless shuffle, which fully bore out Jenkins’ criticism of the Prime Minister’s trivial and devious modus operandi: it had nothing whatever to do with good government, but at least Jenkins could take some comfort from the fact that the upshot was to shift the balance of the Cabinet marginally to the right.fn3

  Prentice turned out to be an unfortunate ally on whom to stake his own position, since when he finally lost his reselection battle in Newham the next year he abandoned Labour and crossed the floor to join the Tories: he was quickly rewarded with a safe seat and office in Mrs Thatcher’s government, thus seeming to confirm the left’s charge that those who opposed them were closet Tories all along. But in 1975 Prentice was the most robust right-winger in the Cabinet whom Jenkins – remembering his failure to support Dick Taverne – felt bound to fight for: just three years earlier he had topped the Shadow Cabinet elections. So in September Jenkins and Shirley Williams (accompanied by Jennifer, Bill and Sylvia Rodgers, Matthew Oakeshott and the Annans, plus his Special Branch detective and his driver) went to East London to show solidarity with him. The occasion turned into a roughhouse when both the far left and the far right turned up to barrack him and fight each other. Jenkins had difficulty making himself heard above the Socialist Workers and the Workers’ Revolutionary Party (WRP) chanting ‘Free Des Warren’, but he had the good sense to stop the stewards from calling in the police, reckoning that the demonstrators made his point for him; he also managed to retain his dignity when hit full in the chest by a flour bomb thrown by a member of the National Front (protesting against the Race Relations Bill) which made a dramatic picture all over the next day’s newspapers. Jenkins was ‘magnificent’, Prentice told the press: ‘He was angry, but he showed his scorn and contempt for these people and delivered his prepared speech.’28 He attacked both tribes of extremists, but particularly the left, recalling that Vanessa Redgrave, standing for the WRP against Prentice the previous October, had won just 570 votes, while their candidate in Stechford in February had managed only 280: now these tiny hard-left groups had realised that by infiltrating local Labour parties they could win 20,000 or 25,000. Reaching once again for Gaitskell’s old promise to ‘fight and fight and fight again as long as we have political breath in our bodies’, he warned that if Prentice was deselected ‘an axe was being laid’ to the Labour party itself:

  If tolerance is shattered, formidable consequences will follow. Labour MPs will either have to become creatures of cowardice, concealing their views, trimming their sails, accepting orders, stilling their consciences, or they will all have to be men far to the left of those whose votes they seek. Either would make a mockery of parliamentary democracy. The first would reduce still further, and rightly reduce, respect for the House of Commons. It would become an assembly of craven spirits and crooked tongues. The second would, quite simply, divorce the Labour Party from the people.29

  In the short run the publicity given to the scenes at Newham won Jenkins, and Prentice, a good deal of support and sympathy. But it did nothing to halt the takeover of the party. ‘If there was any sort of extreme behaviour,’ a member of the Newham executive maintained with a straight face, ‘it came from the platform, because they should not have been there.’30 No one else in the leadership – not Callaghan nor Healey nor Crosland – showed any willingness to refute this sort of nonsense. A number of younger MPs (most of whom would later join the SDP) formed the Manifesto Group to try to counter the influence of the left in the Commons. But where it mattered – that is, on the NEC – Shirley Williams and Tom Bradley were isolated and helpless as the majority voted tamely to uphold Prentice’s deselection and steadfastly refused to act on the clear evidence of far-left ‘entryism’ which ultimately destroyed Labour as a party of government for a generation, precisely as Jenkins had warned it would.

  With just a handful of middle-ranking supporters – Prentice, Shirley Williams and Harold Lever – Jenkins was equally isolated in the Cabinet. Throughout 1975 both Barbara Castle and Bernard Donoughue recorded him sounding increasingly apocalyptic warnings about the coming ‘catastrophe’. In February Andrew Graham (now in the Number Ten Policy Unit) told Donoughue that on the Economic Strategy Committee ‘nobody except Jenkins raised any concern about the progress of the economy. “They are just going to sit and wait for it to hit them.”’31 As inflation climbed inexorably past 20 per cent (it eventually peaked at 26.9 per cent in August) he warned that it
was not only ‘bankrupting all sorts of institutions . . . but it was also bankrupting civilised government . . . “We have got to stop it in its tracks . . . The survival of society is threatened”’,32 and privately worried that ‘we were living through an equivalent of the summer of 1939’.33 Against this grim background he did what he could to protest against what he saw as damaging or irrelevant policies: he successfully resisted Foot’s attempt to extend union closed shop legislation to journalism, opposed the nationalisation of aircraft and ship-building – ‘Roy murmured gloomily that he hoped nationalisation would not provide the most expensive programme yet for subsidising uneconomic aircraft’34 – and opposed the hasty devolution of power to Scotland and Wales (though he later changed his mind on this). In December 1975 he and Shirley Williams alone opposed the government rescue of the Chrysler motor company.35 He was briefly cheered when Healey, under severe pressure from the markets, belatedly forced through a package of ‘voluntary’ price and income controls (with statutory powers in reserve). Critical as he was of Healey’s tardiness to grasp this nettle, Jenkins was thankful that he was not Chancellor again himself: ‘The last thing I wanted was to have to try and show people for a second time running that the golden coach was a pumpkin.’36 When Healey finally imposed deep cuts in public spending, however, he supported him not just as a matter of economic necessity, as it had been in 1968, but out of ideological principle.fn4 This was a moment of truth in his journey from socialism.

  Hitherto, while rejecting the fundamentalism of the left, he had remained faithful to the revisionist doctrine formulated by Gaitskell and Crosland in the 1950s, which took it for granted that ever-higher public spending – including new forms of public ownership – was still an essential means of creating a more equal society. Now, after some rumblings in Cabinet over the previous year, he publicly repudiated this central article of Labour faith. In January 1976 he used a speaking engagement in Anglesey (Cledwyn Hughes’ constituency) to deliver what he called ‘my most provocative speech . . . since Haverfordwest’, eighteen months earlier. (He had a habit of making major speeches in remote corners of Wales.) Knowing it would provoke a storm, he deliberately delayed clearing it with Healey until it was too late: by the time the Chancellor’s office caught up with him to try to stop it Hayden Phillips was able to say that Jenkins was already on his feet. Since 1964, he asserted in the critical passage, the proportion of GNP taken up by government expenditure had risen from 44 to 60 per cent, while producing no commensurate improvement in public services or social welfare. This could not go on. There was a limit to how far one could go on taxing the rich: further taxation would have to bite deep into average and below-average incomes. He concluded by drawing a line in the sand:

  I do not think that you can push public expenditure significantly above 60 per cent and maintain the values of a plural society with adequate freedom of choice. We are here close to one of the frontiers of social democracy.39

  ‘How these people come out in their true colours!’ Barbara Castle had exclaimed when he tried out this line in Cabinet the previous summer.40 To her, it was all of a piece with Jenkins’ closet coalitionism. Even former supporters like Roy Hattersley felt that he had sold the pass and used this speech as an excuse to distance himself. In fact Jenkins had only dared to voice an insight that was coming to be widely shared even within the Cabinet. Crosland had already warned local authorities that ‘The party is over.’41 Nine months later Callaghan, now Prime Minister, would tell the party conference that Keynesianism had run its course: ‘We used to think that you could just spend your way out of a recession . . . I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists.’42 Yet when Jenkins said much the same he was seen to be detaching himself from Labour.

  ‘It was a thesis of truth and relevance,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘and it did not appear to cause offence to the Anglesey audience.’ Nevertheless it was ‘a crazy sermon to deliver to the Labour party’ at that particular moment – and curiously enough he knew it. He had been tipped off a few weeks before, at Ann Fleming’s house on Boxing Day, by Wilson’s confidential ‘fixer’ Lord Goodman that Wilson intended to resign around his sixtieth birthday in March. This inside knowledge, which he immediately shared with Jennifer, John Harris, Hayden Phillips, Bill Rodgers and David Owen, ‘ought to have galvanised me into the most intense politicising of my life’, if he was to give himself a last outside chance of winning the leadership.43 Instead it had almost the reverse effect: partly because he had flu that winter; partly because (like many others) he could not quite believe that Wilson would ever really step down voluntarily; but partly also because he did not want to believe it. He knew that if there was a leadership election he would have to stand. But he also knew that he was now unlikely to win; and deep down he no longer truly wanted to lead the ugly, fractious party that Labour had become, even if he could have been elected. He was already – subconsciously, perhaps – looking for a way out; and the day before he went to Anglesey, Wilson, ironically, offered one.

  He saw Wilson on the Friday evening for what he called ‘an hour’s routine ramble around the ramparts of the Home Office and other government business of mutual interest’,44 in the course of which he told the Prime Minister that he was nearing the end of what he could usefully do at the Home Office. ‘Unless he saw some role for me to play, a major role either in economic or foreign or constitutional affairs – I had devolution a little in mind at that stage . . . I probably wouldn’t wish to stay on indefinitely.’ Without referring to his own intentions, Wilson said that both the Treasury and the Foreign Office were filled but suggested that replacing Short as Leader of the House, in charge of devolution, might be a possibility. But then he mentioned that the presidency of the European Commission would fall vacant in January 1977 and there was a ‘predisposition’ in favour of a British candidate, if a sufficiently senior figure was available: French President Giscard d’Estaing and German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt would be willing to accept either Jenkins or Heath. ‘I was caught completely off balance by this,’ Jenkins wrote soon afterwards, ‘because I had never considered it before.’ He immediately declined, telling Wilson almost reflexively that he was ‘a British political animal’ and wanted to stay in the House of Commons.45 But Donoughue thought he looked ‘unhappy and distracted as he left’.46 And over his Welsh weekend – where he was opening a police station at Wrexham as well as speaking in Anglesey – he began to have second thoughts. On the Monday he wrote to Wilson withdrawing his refusal:

  If, as seems likely, there seems little prospect of my being able to play a major foreign policy, economic or constitutional role in this country, I think I ought seriously to consider, in spite of my dislike of the place, whether I could not best spend the next four years in Brussels.47

  Neither accepting nor refusing, he asked for more time to consider his options.

  The problem was the unspoken and unmentionable possibility of Wilson’s resignation triggering a leadership contest which he would feel bound to enter. So long as there was a chance of winning he did not want to rule himself out. Even if he did not win, he might at least get the Foreign Office, which would be better than going to Brussels. On 29 January he tried to get Donoughue to confirm Goodman’s tip-off; but Donoughue felt obliged to keep mum.48 In February he went to Paris, nominally on Home Office business, but actually to see Giscard, who pressed him – speaking for Schmidt as well as himself – to take the European job. This was not only flattering, but encouraged Jenkins to believe that with their support the job would be worth doing; it also made him less dependent on Wilson’s favour. Before leaving he went to see the eighty-seven-year-old Jean Monnet, who also urged him to accept. ‘Insofar as I was increasingly tempted,’ he wrote in the introduction to his European Diary, ‘I was exhilarated by being blessed by the spiritual as well as the temporal authorities of Europe.’49 But others whom he consulted counselled him the other way. Nicko Henderson – newly translated from Bonn to Paris – urged him
to ‘stop the band-waggon’ at once. He was surprised that Giscard seemed to want Jenkins. ‘I am also increasingly doubtful in my own mind whether it is the job for you. In the next few years, European policy is not going to be made by the Commission. Both Giscard and Schmidt will see to that.’50 And his old friend Jacques de Beaumarchais (now French ambassador in London) likewise told him that he would have far more influence as Foreign Secretary.51

  His mind was still not made up when Wilson resigned. In spite of all the hints and tip-offs, Wilson’s announcement still came as a bombshell to most of the political world. As his sixtieth birthday passed (on 11 March), even Jenkins had begun to discount it.fn5 But on Tuesday 16 March Wilson read out a twenty-five-minute statement to his astonished Cabinet. After thanking them for their services over the past dozen years he pointedly reminded the claimants to his job – who comprised about a quarter of the Cabinet – that being Prime Minister was nowadays ‘a full-time calling . . . These are not the easy, spacious, socially-oriented days of some of my predecessors.’ This barb could only have been aimed at Jenkins. He added that being over sixty should not be a disqualification: a barely coded endorsement of Jim Callaghan, who was sixty-four.52 By chance, Jenkins was lunching that day with the ‘Walston group’ of his supporters at the Albany. They all took it for granted that he would stand. This was the moment they had been anticipating for the past eight years. There was a general recognition that he had lost a lot of ground since resigning the deputy leadership in 1972, but there was still a hope that when it came to electing a new Prime Minister in the middle of an economic crisis enough Labour MPs would put aside their personal reservations and choose the best-qualified man for the job. After all, Jenkins had clearly been a better Chancellor than either Callaghan or Healey. That evening he dined at Brooks’s with Bill Rodgers, John Harris and his PPS, Ian Wrigglesworth, and appointed Wrigglesworth to run his campaign.