Jenkins started trying to write his Dimbleby Lecture at East Hendred in August (he and Jennifer did not holiday in Tuscany that year, but had ten days staying with the Griggs in Spain). But it did not come easily. In October he showed an incomplete first draft to the BBC producer Eddie Mirzoeff, who was unimpressed (‘Quite right too probably, though it depressed me mildly at the time’).29 Then on 1 November, with three weeks to go, he settled down at East Hendred again to break the back of it. He wrote solidly for eight and three-quarter hours, broken only by a pub lunch with Jennifer. ‘I was very pleased to discover that I could still concentrate as hard as this on writing something for myself and produce nearly three thousand words in a single day.’ That evening Bill and Sylvia Rodgers came to dinner and Jenkins read bits of it to Rodgers, who did not fully take it in – ‘perhaps because I was full of claret and sleep’30 – but ‘showed no sign of reacting with deep shock or hostility’. Jenkins judged that Rodgers had ‘moved quite a bit’ since the summer, when he had tried to persuade Roy that he could still come back for a Labour seat.31, fn5
The next day the Gilmours came to lunch and Jenkins got Ian to read it. Gilmour (now number two at the Foreign Office) was the wettest of the Tory ‘wets’. He thought Jenkins’ text ‘too right-wing’ – he objected particularly to the phrase ‘the social market economy’, which was just coming into use as code for privatisation and increased competition – and thought the Yeats quotation with which he proposed to end (‘The best lack all conviction . . . the centre cannot hold’) too hackneyed.33 Jenkins accepted the first of these suggestions but not the second, and kept on tinkering. When he reread his draft the next weekend he was ‘really rather pleased with it. It seems to me, now, taut and good and sensible, nearly all of it right.’34 But a few days later Marquand made a critical contribution, harking back to his Encounter article by suggesting that Jenkins should talk not just about the centre, but about ‘the radical centre’.35 After more rewriting over the weekend of 17–18 November, Jenkins finally sent off his text on the 20th, borrowing from Browning the title ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’ (Browning’s poem, starting with the famous lines ‘Oh, to be in England / Now that April’s there’, was an apt reference for an exile beginning to sense the first shoots of a political spring at home). In his diary he complained that an unusually heavy load of Commission meetings that week – leading up to a critical European Council in Dublin starting on the 29th – was not the best way to ‘prepare and be fresh for . . . the long-awaited, and with much foreboding, Dimbleby day’ on the 22nd, which was clearly his priority.36 The Dimbleby Lecture was only a ballon d’essai, but it was potentially an even more momentous one than his Florence speech two years earlier.
He finally delivered it at the Royal Society of Arts, live on television, with most of his friends in the audience and the whole BBC top brass sitting in the front row. He began with a historical analysis of the decline of the two-party system since 1951, developing the case he had started making five or six years earlier when he was still a contender for the Labour leadership. Even now he did not explicitly disavow the Labour party, only the leftward path on which it seemed irrevocably set. What was new was what he called an ‘unashamed plea for the strengthening of the political centre’, building on his 1973 theme that the tendency of both main parties towards the extremes was disenfranchising a large part of the electorate:
In 1951 83% of the electorate voted, and no less than 97% of those who went to the polls voted for one or other of the two big parties. In the second 1974 election only 73% of the electorate voted, and only three-quarters of those . . . voted Labour or Conservative. To put it another way: the Labour Party in 1951 polled 40% of the total electorate . . . and it just lost. In October 1974 it polled 28% of the electorate and it just won. Even in 1979, with some recovery in the total vote and a substantial victory, the Conservatives polled only 33% of the electorate.
The missing voters, Jenkins argued, were alienated by the false hopes and unredeemed promises held out by both parties over the past twenty years and the alternation of governments each claiming a monopoly of wisdom and rushing onto the Statute Book a mass of ill-digested legislation founded on little popular support and promptly reversed by its successor. Good government demanded not an avoidance of controversy – he cited the great Reform Bills, the repeal of the Corn Laws, the curbing of the power of the House of Lords and the Beveridge revolution as measures bitterly contested at the time which quickly became inviolable parts of the social fabric – but the assurance, before embarking on any major reform, that it would last, because no succeeding government would dare repeal it. ‘All this implies a certain respect by politicians for the opinions of their opponents.’ Exaggerated partisanship, the pretence that everything was the fault of the other side and each successive government either ‘the most reactionary since . . . Lord Liverpool or some other hobgoblin figure shrouded in the past’ or ‘the most rapacious, doctrinaire and unpatriotic conspiracy to be seen this side of the Iron Curtain’, was no longer convincing to most of the electorate, whose aspirations, he believed, ‘pull far more towards the centre than towards the extremes’. The job of politicians was ‘to represent, to channel [and] to lead the aspirations of the electorate’.
That being so, he believed that the case for proportional representation had become ‘overwhelming’. Already in 1974–6 he had tried to have the possibility examined by a Speaker’s Conference. But now, fortified by his experience in Europe, he believed that the demands of equity could no longer be denied by the argument that first-past-the-post produced strong government compared with the weakness and instability of coalitions:
Do we really believe that we have been more effectively and coherently governed over the past two decades than have the Germans? . . . Do we really believe that the last Labour Government was not a coalition, in fact if not in name, and a pretty incompatible one at that? I served in it for half its life, and you could not convince me of anything else.
All democratic government, he now asserted, depended on some form of coalition:
The old Labour Party of Attlee and Gaitskell was a coalition of liberal social democrats and industrially responsible trade unionists. Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt have governed the Federal Republic of Germany with a coalition of Social Democrats and Liberals for the past decade. Sometimes the coalitions are overt, sometimes they are covert. I do not think the distinction greatly matters. The test is whether those within the coalition are closer to each other, and to the mood of the nation they seek to govern, than they are to those outside their ranks.
Proportional representation might indeed produce coalition:
I would much rather that it meant overt and compatible coalition than that it locked incompatible people, and still more important, incompatible philosophies, into a loveless, constantly bickering and debilitating political marriage, even if consecrated in a common tabernacle.
The last word was straight out of the political vocabulary of the 1890s. It was typical of Jenkins that he did not talk down even to a mass audience on television, but used his own – sometimes slightly recondite – language. For this he was mocked as an elitist. Unabashed, he concluded this part of his argument with a line from Hamlet:
The great disadvantage of our present electoral system is that it freezes the pattern of politics, and holds together the incompatible because everyone assumes that if a party splits it will be electorally slaughtered. They may be right. They may be wrong. I am not so sure. I believe that the electorate can ‘tell a hawk from a handsaw’ and that if it saw a new grouping with cohesion and relevant policies it might be more attracted by this new reality than by old labels which had become increasingly irrelevant.
Turning specifically to the Labour party, he conceded that there was nothing inherently objectionable about the left’s current demands: the mandatory reselection of MPs, NEC control of the manifesto and the leader to be elected by an electoral college. They were contentious because they
were the battleground between two incompatible views of the party. This brought him to his call to arms, couched in a favourite military metaphor:
The response to such a situation should not be to slog through an unending war of attrition, stubbornly and conventionally defending as much of the old citadel as you can hold, but to break out and mount a battle of movement on new and higher ground.
By changing the political structure, strengthening the centre and ending the see-saw alternation of irrelevant dogmas, he contended, Britain might go a long way towards restoring national prosperity. ‘Our great failure, now for decades past, has been a lack of adaptability’: the economic system mirrored the political. ‘The paradox is that we need more change accompanied by more stability of direction.’ Specifically he called for acceptance of ‘the broad line of division between the public and private sectors’ so that those in the private sector were not constantly threatened with nationalisation or expropriation, setting out an even-handed middle way between the excesses of Thatcherism and Bennism:
You encourage them without too much interference to create as much wealth as possible, but use the wealth so created both to give a return for enterprise and to spread the benefits throughout society in a way that avoids the disfigurements of poverty, gives a full priority to public education and health services, and encourages co-operation and not conflict in industry and throughout society. You use taxation for this purpose, but not just to lop off rewards . . .
You recognise that there are certain major economic objectives . . . which can only be achieved by public action, often on an international scale . . . You use market forces to help achieve these objectives, but do not for a moment pretend that they, unguided and unaided, can do the whole job.
Finally he repeated the libertarian themes that had been his particular hobby-horse since the 1950s:
You also make sure that the state knows its place . . . in relation to the citizen. You are in favour of the right of dissent and the liberty of private conduct . . . You want the nation to be self-confident and outward-looking, rather than insular, xenophobic and suspicious. You want the class system to fade without being replaced either by an aggressive intolerant proletarianism or by the dominance of the brash and selfish values of a get-rich-quick society.
All these objectives, he believed – adopting Marquand’s paradoxical formulation – could be assisted by ‘a strengthening of the radical centre’. Without explicitly advocating the formation of a new party, he anticipated that such an initiative would tap a huge unfilled demand:
I believe that such a development could bring into political commitment the energies of many people of talent and goodwill who, although perhaps active in many other voluntary ways, are at present alienated from the business of government, whether national or local, by the sterility and formalism of much of the political game. I am sure that this would improve our politics. I think the results might also help to improve our national performance. But of that I cannot be certain. I am against too much dogmatism here. We have had more than enough of it. But at least we could escape from the pessimism of Yeats’s ‘Second Coming’ where
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity
and
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.37
To most of the political commentators and professional cynics, Jenkins’ thesis was as hackneyed as his concluding quotation. Talk of realignment had been going on for as long as anyone could remember, and nothing had ever come of it. The idea of a ‘radical centre’ was either a contradiction in terms or woolly naivety. Moreover it seemed singularly self-serving for Jenkins to advance it now, after he had done very well out of the old two-party system for the past twenty years, but now needed a new system (and a new party) to facilitate his re-entry from lucrative exile in Brussels. Fred Emery in The Times was amazed that the BBC should have granted him ‘fifty minutes of prime time, free of charge’ for a blatant job application: ‘a personal political broadcast by someone preparing to come back from the EEC Commission Presidency to oust Conservative and Labour alike. Marvellous.’38 The BBC’s house magazine, The Listener, reprinted the full text and then invited a number of politicians, academics and journalists to comment on it. From Enoch Powell and Paul Johnson on the right to Jack Jones and Professors John Griffith and Bernard Crick on the left they were unanimously contemptuous: the most respectful, remarkably, was Neil Kinnock, who alone conceded that Jenkins’ views had ‘the appeal of reason and the authority of demonstrated commitment’, but thought him misguided on the ground that Britain had already suffered centre government for the past thirty years. Even Jo Grimond was grudging: instead of welcoming Jenkins’ revelation, he complained that it was twenty years too late and invited him, if he was serious, to ‘come down into the battle’ and join the Liberals:
Let him shove with the rest of us. All too many social democrats have gone off into banking, consultancy, TV, academic life etc. It is Mr Steel who has been in the scrum. Will they join him? The opportunity is indeed great . . . but time is very short.39
Paul Johnson – the former editor of the New Statesman, now turned Thatcherite – likewise accused Jenkins of wanting ‘the palm without the dust’:
A call to battle by Jenkins might have been useful, even well-received. Instead he drops a hint that if the system is changed and provided the breakaway works and once the dust has settled – and always assuming he hasn’t been offered a better job in the meantime – then he might consider accepting the leadership.40
Some of the editorials, including The Times, Sunday Times and Observer, were more positive; but even among those sympathetic to his analysis there was widespread scepticism that any change of the sort Jenkins advocated was practical politics. Since neither Labour nor the Conservatives would ever agree to proportional representation, there was general agreement that no hypothetical new party could have any realistic hope of breaking through. Where he struck a chord, however, was with the public – or at least that section of it to which he had attempted to appeal: those ‘many people of talent and goodwill’ who felt themselves disfranchised by the ‘sterility and formalism’ of current politics and longed for a new movement to which they could relate. Within days letters were pouring in from all sorts of people, which were overwhelmingly supportive. The numbers were not enormous (around 300), but the quality was unusually high. He had never before, Jenkins declared in a second speech six months later, received such a weight of mail ‘which was, first, 99% friendly; second, 99% sane; and third, revealed, often argued over 400 or 500 words, such a degree of desire for release from present political constraints and for involvement in the future’.41 These were the people who would flock to join the SDP as soon as it was launched. The 1 per cent of letters that were not supportive, he noted in his diary, were ‘dotty rather than against’.42, fn6
Most of his friends and long-standing supporters in the Labour Party – those whom he would need to carry with him out of the party, if his new venture were to take off – were more or less enthusiastic, or ‘certainly not hostile’.44 The exception at this stage (perhaps because he was not invited to the lecture) was David Owen, who immediately made a defiant speech scorning Jenkins’ appeal as a diversion and vowing to carry on the fight for Labour from within:
The trouble in the past was that too often the centre right of the party has disdained from fighting from within, has not been prepared to muddy its feet on doorsteps, not fought for a place on the National Executive, not taken the battle enough into the constituency parties.
He urged the centre of the party to ‘stand firm. We will not be tempted by siren voices from outside, from those who have given up the fight from within.’45 Bill Rodgers, on the other hand – far more deeply rooted in the party than Owen – told Jenkins that ‘suddenly in the course of the lecture he had a vision of himself sitting in the headquarters of the new party with his sleeves rolled up, actually organising things’.
This, Jenkins confided to his diary, ‘I took to mean – I hope rightly – that Bill had passed over some intellectual watershed.’46 In the published version of his European Diary he changed ‘intellectual’ to ‘emotional’.47 Either way, it actually took Rodgers longer than Owen to reach the point of breaking with Labour. Between the Dimbleby Lecture and the launch of the SDP there was still to be a long and rocky road. Jenkins himself still had another year to serve in Brussels before he was in a position to show the doubters that he was ready to come down into the arena and muddy his feet on doorsteps. But in the immediate aftermath of Dimbleby he had reason to be encouraged by the strong public response to his trial balloon. Looking ahead at end of 1979 to the coming year and the coming decade, he felt ‘slightly intimidated by the thought of having let a genie out of its bottle’.48
Meanwhile, now that he had recovered his self-confidence and knew that he could discharge the job successfully in his own way, Jenkins was reasonably happy to serve out his time in Brussels and make the most of what the European gravy train had to offer. Brussels itself he never much cared for. Rather like Birmingham, he confessed in his last completed book, Twelve Cities, ‘it does not clutch at my heart strings’.49 But it had its good points: notably the Forêt de Soignes (‘a Brussels asset which surpasses Hyde Park, the Bois de Boulogne or Central Park in New York’); twenty-seven theatres and some fine art galleries (though it was 1980 before he visited the Musées Royaux for the first time); and above all – the most important criterion by which he judged any city – its restaurants, which he rated ‘formidably good, at least comparable . . . with the range and quality of those in Paris’. His favourites were the Villa Lorraine (‘which by its sylvan but not rustic location . . . between the Bois and the Forêt recalls both Pré Catalan in the Bois de Boulogne and Ledoyen in the Jardin des Champs Elysées’); L’Ecailler du Palais Royal (‘to my mind the best of all fish restaurants’); and Comme Chez Soi (‘the highest peak of the lot, now secure in its three stars, but set in the far from glossy Place Rouppe . . . in London terms a sort of Clerkenwell location’).fn7 But the suburbs too were ‘littered with Michelin two-stars’, while the attractive old Flemish towns within easy distance – Ghent, Leuven, Bruges, Antwerp – were also ‘rich in restaurants’. ‘Flemish menus,’ he was happy to confirm after thorough research, ‘are far from being just an affair of moules and frites.’ The wine lists too were ‘of great depth and quality . . . overwhelmingly French and overwhelmingly red’, but not as he had been led to expect biased towards burgundy. ‘The claret lists,’ he noted, ‘are at least as strong’ – adding with a real oenophile’s precision, ‘with perhaps a more subtle trade-route discrimination, compared with a rare English list of equal quality, in favour of the right-bank and overland-moving St Emilions and Pomerols as opposed to the left-bank Medocs and Graves which were more easily shipped to Britain, Scandinavia or America’.51
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