fn3 Jenkins also took over secretaries from his two British predecessors: Sue Besford from Soames and Celia Beale from Thomson. Sue Besford stayed with him for two years before being replaced first by Patricia Smallbone and then by Sarah Keays. Celia Beale stayed with him until 1983. Bess Church continued as his London secretary until 1980, when she was replaced by Patricia Smallbone. Another vital member of his personal support team was his driver, Peter Halsey, whom Jenkins took with him from the Home Office and who helped out in all sorts of practical ways, as well as getting him unfailingly to meetings and airports on time.
fn4 Oddly, Jenkins had told in his Dilke a somewhat similar story of Joe Chamberlain having a premonition of Dilke’s death.43 Even stranger, he had the same dream about Tony Crosland again on the anniversary of his death the next year.44
fn5 Henderson also noted that Jenkins already considered Owen ‘well and truly right wing’.55
fn6 The seven at that time were the United States, Britain, France, West Germany, Italy, Japan and Canada.
fn7 The Economist’s Brussels correspondents at the time were Stephen Milligan, later a Tory MP who died in bizarre circumstances in 1994, and Chris Huhne, who became a Liberal Democrat MP in 2002, twice contested the party leadership and was Energy Secretary in the Cameron coalition until his enforced resignation in 2012 and subsequent imprisonment for obstructing the course of justice.
fn8 The fact that Jenkins envisaged monetary union taking ‘only’ 5–7 per cent of GNP is noteworthy, since the single currency when eventually established in 1999 was backed by just 1 per cent of the EU’s collective resources – which possibly explains its fragility after the crash of 2008.
fn9 Bretton Woods was the name given to the system of international currency management established in 1944 based on convertibility to gold. It ran successfully until 1971, when the United States unilaterally came off gold.
fn10 It was not as though Jenkins was unaware of the tendency of some applicant countries to bend the rules to gain admission. Very early in his presidency, in February 1977, he told Giscard that the Greeks, whose application to join the Community was already well advanced, ‘seemed curiously unwilling to negotiate seriously. They tended to agree with every proposition put to them by the Commission and were clearly proceeding from the position that it was better to join quickly and allow problems to be dealt with once they were inside the Community.’ When Giscard asked if they were ready to accept regulations on state aid and competition, ‘Mr Jenkins replied that . . . it was difficult to get the Greeks to come to grips with these questions. The Commission sometimes felt like a man boxing with a pillow.’118 Despite these doubts, Greece was nevertheless allowed to join the Community in 1981 – and later the euro.
19
‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’
ONCE THE EMS was successfully launched, Jenkins’ focus shifted back increasingly towards Britain. Not that he had ever really taken his eye off domestic developments. He actually read the British papers more avidly than ever – noting after just two weeks in Brussels that ‘it is curious that away from London or East Hendred one finds much more to read in the combination of the Sunday Times and Observer and Sunday Telegraph than would be the case at home’.1 On his regular hops back to London he was assiduous in keeping up with all his British friends, political and otherwise: his engagement diaries show that he filled every minute of every visit with lunch, a quick drink here or a social call there, squeezed in between formal calls on the Prime Minister or the Foreign Secretary, usually followed by an official dinner or a meal at one of his many dining clubs.fn1 Weekends at East Hendred – roughly one in four – were equally packed with mixed lunch parties, often on both Saturday and Sunday, usually followed by tennis or croquet, though guests rarely stayed the night.
His schedule for the ten days of his first Easter break in 1977 was entirely typical. He flew back to London on Wednesday 6 April. The next day he and Jennifer looked at a house they were thinking of buying and visited the British Council to choose some pictures for his office in Brussels; he then fitted in a visit to his doctor and a haircut before seeing Callaghan for an hour at 12.20. This was followed by lunch with Leslie Bonham Carter and a call on his publishers (still Collins) at 3.45, after which he and Jennifer drove to East Hendred. On Good Friday they lunched with the Michael Astors, preceded by tennis and followed by croquet. On Saturday Nicko and Mary Henderson and Woodrow and Verushka Wyatt came to lunch. Easter Sunday was a family lunch, followed by an afternoon visit from the Owens; Monday was Bill and Sylvia Rodgers with Matthew Oakeshott and his wife. On Tuesday 12th they went to the Davenports for lunch and tennis. On Wednesday Roy lunched with Caroline Gilmour and her mother, the Duchess of Buccleuch, near Kettering before going on to Jakie Astor at Hatley for the night, and then on Thursday to Victor Rothschild for a ‘spectacularly good dinner’ at Cambridge.3 Friday was lunch with Noel and Gabrielle Annan and Jennifer at one of their favourite pubs, the Blue Boar at Chieveley; and on Saturday the American writer and academic Douglas Cater and his wife came to lunch at East Hendred with Ian and Caroline Gilmour, Ann Fleming and Peter Quennell. The next morning, his holiday over, Jenkins flew to Washington for five days of meetings with President Carter and other American leaders, fitting in another busy schedule of lunches and dinners with Democratic friends in both Washington and New York before returning to Brussels. The whole of his life was like this.4
During 1977 Roy and Jennifer sold their house in Ladbroke Square after twenty-three years, and bought instead a large, somewhat cavernous flat in Kensington Park Gardens on the other side of the square, which would serve as their London base for the next twenty-five.fn2 Leaving the house where they had raised their family, entertained the Gaitskells and played tennis until they bought East Hendred was a wrench; but Jenkins consoled himself that the new flat, ‘with its vast drawing room, is in many ways better than Ladbroke Square’.5 They still overlooked the same communal garden, but he liked the fact that the sun now rose and set in the opposite direction.6
He also encouraged a stream of visitors to the rue de Praetère, who often did stay the weekend – sometimes when Jennifer was there, frequently when she was not: again a mixture of political friends, social, literary and diplomatic friends and girlfriends – Gilmours, Griggs, Bonham Carters, Annans, Beaumarchaises and others. One who invited himself (for four days!) in 1978, but was not made welcome, was Harold Wilson, in retirement suddenly a somewhat pathetic figure. Jenkins (as he told John Grigg, who came to stay a few days later while filming a television programme on Great War battlefields) ‘didn’t see why he should have him to stay and offered only to give him lunch at the Commission’.7 There Wilson talked exclusively about ‘the most recondite details of English politics, which hardly anyone except him and me . . . could be expected to understand’, and claimed to have ‘specially timed his resignation in order to be as helpful to me as possible’. Now he begged his former Chancellor not to cut himself off from British politics:
I might well be needed in the future, he said. Callaghan was too old, Owen was too young. The whole thing was very bad . . . He did not think there was much future for the Government, or indeed the Labour Party. A coalition government would almost certainly be necessary; he would bless it from outside, but would not serve.
‘Altogether, an extraordinary visit,’ Jenkins concluded. ‘He was thoroughly agreeable, except for being an absolute caricature of himself.’8
Jenkins took Wilson’s gloomy prognostications with ‘several pinches of salt’. He told Grigg that he now wished he had resigned after his row with Wilson immediately following the 1975 referendum: that was the moment, he now believed, when he might have forced a coalition. Since then he thought Callaghan had done well enough as Prime Minister that Labour might yet be re-elected. Jennifer shared this view, but had already decided to vote Liberal.9 That autumn, when Callaghan postponed the expected election, they were irritated by a story started by Tribune (but gleefully taken up by al
l the papers) that they had not paid their Labour Party subscription for several years. The story – ‘obviously . . . motivated by a malicious Trot in the North Kensington Labour Party’ – was plausible because it reflected their obvious disillusion with Labour. In fact they had switched (as long ago as 1968) to paying by banker’s order and their payments were up to date. On the plane to London Roy drafted ‘rather a good letter’ for Jennifer to send to The Times, humorously but firmly detailing her efforts to squash the story, which she compared to ‘trying to catch a very vigorous eel by its tail’.10 It cost them £300 in legal fees, which they never recovered. But the story only ran so strongly because, though wrong in detail, it was substantially true in spirit.
In January 1979 – by which time Labour’s chances of re-election had been all but destroyed by the wave of public-sector strikes dubbed by the press the ‘winter of discontent’ – Jenkins had a gloomy conversation with Shirley Williams (now Education Secretary) at a Labour Committee for Europe dinner. They agreed that their mistake was not to have supported Dick Taverne in 1973. ‘Everything had got worse since then . . . She thought the election lost whenever it came and that the party would be in a very bad state after it, and she was thinking very clearly in terms of splits and anxious for me to come back.’11 Jenkins was already pretty certain that he could not return to Labour; but talk of splits kept him interested in the idea that there might be some other way back for him. At the European Council in Paris a few weeks later, Callaghan – in the gents’ lavatory – casually offered him the governorship of Hong Kong. ‘Certainly not, Jim,’ he replied. ‘I have never heard a more preposterous suggestion.’ Callaghan then assumed that he would go to the Lords when he came back from Brussels. ‘Probably not,’ Jenkins replied, ‘as I told you when you last suggested that to me. Not for the moment, certainly. I want to come back and look around and keep options open.’ ‘You might find it quite difficult to get back into the House of Commons,’ Callaghan warned him. ‘And you might not like it when you got there . . . It has deteriorated a lot.’ ‘Yes, yes,’ Jenkins fended him off. ‘All I intend to do is come back and look around at the political landscape, Jim, and certainly not become Governor of Hong Kong.’12
He was actively considering other options. In 1979 he was offered the headship of at least two Oxbridge colleges: St Catherine’s, Oxford (‘Not . . . I fear, a particularly tempting offer’) and Corpus Christi, Cambridge.13 Declining St Catherine’s, he wrote that ‘I am totally committed in Bx [Brussels] until 1981, and after that I cannot as yet see clearly.’14 Towards the end of that year he was flattered to be pressed to stay on in Brussels and did not rule it out.15 Of course he was also thinking about getting back to writing. Ian Chapman at Collins was keen to publish his half-written biography of Baldwin, possibly paired with an American subject: Jenkins was initially keen on Franklin Roosevelt, but thought there might be nothing new to say about him and began to consider Eisenhower or Truman instead. During 1980 he had several offers from the City – making up for its marked lack of interest in him ten years earlier. In June he was surprised to be invited to become a consultant for Deloitte’s. (‘Rather a strange idea,’ he noted. ‘I had never thought of accountants as having people who were not professionally qualified.’ But it had ‘certain possible attractions’.)16 In August Claus Moser pressed him to join Rothschild’s.17 And in September Morgan Grenfell made him a more substantial offer, which he accepted. Over dinner with three of the bank’s directors in November – only a month before he was due to leave Brussels – it was ‘more or less fixed up that I would start with them on a sort of three day a week basis sometime in the spring’. In subsequent negotiations he asked for £30,000 for a three-day week; they countered that his ‘infrastructure’ (office, secretary, car plus chauffeur and pension) would cost £25,000 and offered only £20,000. They were happy for him to be politically active, but if his political profile became too high they would renegotiate; he could join a clearing bank and an accountancy firm as well, if he wished, but not an American investment bank.18
But still what he really wanted was to get back into politics. When Callaghan lost a confidence vote in the Commons at the end of March 1979 and could delay the election no longer, Jenkins was genuinely unsure what result he hoped for. Residual allegiance to Labour warred with a feeling that the country needed a change of government and the hope that Mrs Thatcher might be more positively disposed towards Europe – plus the calculation that a Labour split following the party’s defeat might give him his best opening. The day before polling day (3 May) both Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers rang in alarm at a rumour that he was about to issue a statement supporting the Tories. He assured them that he was making no statement at all. Neither did he vote – though Jennifer did indeed vote Liberal.fn3 They watched the results together in Brussels with Laura, Celia Beale and Thea Elliott (the widow of Jenkins’ old Balliol friend Anthony Elliott, who had drowned while serving as ambassador to Israel in 1976). Jenkins thought Mrs Thatcher’s victory probably the best outcome, ‘but one can’t pretend that one has any real pleasure in it. Thea I think was the most solid Labour supporter amongst us, though we were all somewhat torn.’20 But next day he was shaken by the ‘totally unexpected and dreadful news’ of Shirley Williams’ defeat in Hertford and Stevenage.21
Historically – in 1931, 1951 and 1970 – Labour in defeat had invariably swung left. Now in 1979 the Bennites and all the various factions of the hard left were better placed and more determined than ever to take control of the party, while Mrs Thatcher was driving the Tories determinedly to the right. Between them these developments left a wide political space in the centre and opened a real prospect for some form of new party. Jenkins spent much of the weekend after the election on the telephone, speaking to Bill Rodgers, Shirley Williams and David Owen on one side and to Tory friends including Ian Gilmour and Peter Carrington (the new Foreign Secretary) on the other. At a dinner in Edinburgh the following week he sat next to Joe Gormley – Ted Heath’s nemesis in 1974 and still President of the NUM – and noted that even such an old trade union stalwart was ‘making a great number of centre party noises’.22 For the next few days he was on Commission business in Brussels, Copenhagen and Munich; but on 16 May he was back in London to address a big CBI dinner where his large audience included half the Cabinet and almost half the Shadow Cabinet, as well as all the leaders of British industry – ‘one of the most formidable gatherings I had ever addressed’. While speaking mainly about Europe he took the chance to deliver ‘a good plug for centrist politics’, begging the new Tory government to ‘spare us too many queasy rides on the ideological big dipper’.23 This was an old theme, but one whose time suddenly seemed that it might have come.fn4
By lucky chance Jenkins had already accepted an invitation from the Director-General of the BBC, Ian Trethowan, to give the televised Dimbleby Lecture later in the year – an unrivalled opportunity to address an even bigger audience on a subject of his choice. The seven previous lecturers since 1972 had been Noel Annan, Robert Mark, Arnold Goodman, Huw Wheldon, Quintin Hailsham, Jack Jones and Victor Rothschild, so he was only the second active politician to be invited. The BBC probably expected Jenkins to speak about Europe, but he quickly determined to use the occasion to propose ‘a new anti-party approach to British politics’ and devoted much of what he called his ‘working leisure’ that summer to thinking about what he wanted to say.25 In focusing his ideas he was considerably influenced by an article by David Marquand in the July issue of Encounter. After an unhappy eighteen months in Brussels when he had failed to find a satisfactory role, Marquand had left to take up a chair in politics and contemporary history at the University of Salford, to which he was far better suited. His Encounter article reflected his experience as a Labour intellectual – born, like Jenkins, into the party purple: his father was a middle-ranking minister under Attlee – who had seen people like himself increasingly driven out of the party. It was, he wrote, the influx of middle-class radicals
between the wars that had transformed Labour from a narrow trade union pressure group into a broad-based governing party, replacing the Liberals as the main vehicle of the centre left. All its leaders since 1935 (Attlee, Gaitskell, Wilson) as well as many of its leading figures from Cripps and Dalton to Crossman and Crosland had come from that class, contributing crucially to its thinking and its appeal. The changed ethos represented by the deselection of moderates like Taverne and Prentice was symbolised for Marquand by the 1976 leadership election and the choice of the least intellectual candidate – Callaghan – over his five university-educated rivals. Labour, he argued, had become increasingly conservative and backward-looking since 1970, intolerantly proletarian and wedded to an outdated socialism. As an instrument of progressive social reform it had ‘outlived its usefulness’, and the middle-class radicals who had found it a comfortable home in the past needed to find a new vehicle for their ideas – implicitly a new party.26
Marquand sent Jenkins an advance copy of his article at the end of June, saying that he was coming to Strasbourg the next month and wanted to talk to him about it – ‘particularly about the possible implications for your own position of the conclusion I come to that it’s a waste of time for Social Democrats to go on working within the Labour Party & that some new structure is needed instead’.27 This was music to Jenkins’ ears, providing academic backing for the conclusion he had already reached. Marquand came to Strasbourg on 19 July for the first meeting of the directly elected European Parliament – about which he was writing a book – and he and Jenkins had dinner together. Another significant conversation around this time was with David Steel (Liberal leader since 1976), who came to dinner (alone) at rue de Praetère on 14 June. Jenkins recorded in his diary ‘a rather gossipy talk with him, more about the election than the current and future political situation’. Steel was at pains to emphasise that though the Liberals had not done particularly well, he personally had had a good election and was now ‘a major public figure, possibly the best-known after Callaghan, Heath and Mrs Thatcher. In other words, he was, I think, underlining in the nicest possible way that in any future political arrangement he wasn’t to be treated as an office boy.’28 Though they did not yet discuss it in any detail, the idea of future cooperation was already in both their minds.
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