Roy Jenkins

by John Campbell

  Jenkins played him skilfully, careful not to seem to assume the leadership; but in his diary he was still quietly confident that things were going his way:

  We will see how that works out, but at any rate it is a great advance which no-one would have thought possible some time ago. There will now be a real break in the parliamentary party, and I may well get, at the end of the day, much more the sort of party I want than the sort of party that for the moment he wants. But we will see.57

  In trying to marginalise the older man, Owen underestimated Jenkins’ undimmed competitiveness. When he and Jennifer had lunched at the Owens’ country house in Wiltshire in October, Jenkins noted characteristically that he had ‘played three games of ping-pong after lunch, again satisfactorily beating them both’.58 It was the same in politics: once fully committed to launching his project, Jenkins played to win.

  When he finally came back from Brussels, the Gang of Three formally became the Gang of Four. After spending Christmas and the New Year at East Hendred, Jenkins returned to Brussels on 5–6 January 1981 to clear his office and hand over to his successor, the former Luxembourg Prime Minister Gaston Thorn, with a round of farewell meetings, lunches and dinners – lunch with his retiring Commissioners, dinner with his cabinet and a final lunch at Comme Chez Soi with Maxine Jenkins. But then he was back in Britain to launch the greatest gamble of his life. Though Owen still tried to speak of Jenkins attending ‘our’ meetings, his seniority as a former Chancellor and deputy leader, plus the drama of his return and his well-trailed intention to launch some new initiative, ensured that all the press anticipation and speculation centred on Jenkins. The ‘Gang’ met four times in each other’s houses during January to formalise their coming together. The first time was at East Hendred on Sunday 11th: not for lunch, unusually, but a business meeting lasting from 3 p.m. till 8 p.m. (though on this occasion Rodgers was absent with a bad back). The second was at Shirley Williams’ Westminster flat the following Wednesday evening (14 January) from 8 p.m. to 11.10, with no mention of dinner. The third meeting on Sunday 18th was due to be at East Hendred again – possibly because it was Jennifer’s sixtieth birthday and there was a family party for her on the Saturday night; or maybe because Shirley Williams was already nearby attending a conference at Ditchley Park. Whatever the reason, this one almost never happened. His new colleagues had their first experience of Jenkins’ (or John Harris’) talent for briefing the press, which had so infuriated Wilson in the 1960s. The previous Tuesday he had lunched with John Cole and Adam Raphael of the Observer; a photographer came to East Hendred on the Saturday, and Sunday’s paper ran a story about the intended meeting, illustrated with a picture of Jenkins standing at his gate looking like the lord of the manor waiting to greet them. Shirley Williams was furious at the implication that he had summoned them as his junior partners and refused to come. Only when the meeting was switched to Rodgers’ house in Highgate was she persuaded to attend; and only when she was finally pacified – ‘with Roy contrite and at his most conciliatory and, of course, disowning all knowledge of the story,’ as Owen wrote59 – were they able to get down to drafting a joint declaration of intent.fn5

  The next day Jenkins flew to Washington for five days to witness (though only on television) Ronald Reagan’s inauguration and give a lecture at Georgetown University. In his absence the Three met again in Highgate to continue drafting, while Michael Foot made a last half-hearted appeal to them to stay with Labour. Jenkins returned on Saturday 24 January just in time to watch television coverage of Labour’s latest special conference (at Wembley), which after a series of chaotic votes adopted an electoral college to elect the leader which gave the unions 40 per cent of the votes and the constituency parties and the MPs 30 per cent each. If they had any last-minute doubts, this was the final push the defectors needed to leave the party. On Sunday morning (25 January), the Gang of Four – with their four ‘sherpas’ – met again at David Owen’s house in Docklands to finalise and issue what immediately became known as the Limehouse Declaration: not yet declaring the formation of a new party, but announcing in nine short paragraphs their intention to establish a Council for Social Democracy as a clear staging post towards that end.

  Their accounts all differ about who contributed what. According to Owen, ‘The best and most elegant words came as usual from Roy Jenkins, the substance of policy came largely from me, the quotable pieces for the press from Shirley and practical sense from Bill.’60 But Rodgers’ recollection was that Owen contributed the least.61 It is generally accepted that the ringing opening sentence – ‘The calamitous outcome of the Labour Party Wembley conference demands a new start in British politics’ – was Williams’ and Rodgers’; and the crucial final sentence – ‘We believe that the need for a realignment of British politics must now be faced’ – was included at Jenkins’ insistence. Over the past two weeks the word ‘realignment’, implying a definite break with Labour, had caused Williams and Rodgers more heart-searching than anything else. Its inclusion, in Jenkins’ view, ‘gave clear notice that we were moving outside a Labour party laager . . . There must be somebody with whom to realign. And the most obvious although not necessarily the only people whom this embraced were the Liberals.’62

  In his memoirs David Owen claimed that the Declaration was still clearly Labour-oriented and not a rallying cry for a centre party; somewhat contradictorily, however, he now (1991) believed that he should ‘in honour’ not have signed it, since he had come to realise that Jenkins’ goal was always merger with the Liberals.63 There was admittedly no mention of cooperation with the Liberals, of proportional representation or indeed of any political strategy at all; the Declaration was purely a statement of principles. So to that extent it was less than wholly candid. Nevertheless the whole thrust of the Declaration is pure Jenkins, explicitly appealing not only to unhappy Labour (and lapsed Labour) activists but to others not previously involved in politics. ‘We do not believe that the fight for the ideals we share and for the recovery of our country should be limited only to politicians. It will need the support of men and women in all parts of our society.’ And again:

  The Council will represent a coming together of several streams: politicians who recognise that the drift to extremism in the Labour Party is not compatible with the democratic traditions of the Party they joined and those from outside politics who believe that the country cannot be saved without changing the sterile and rigid framework into which the British political system has increasingly fallen in the last two decades.

  We do not believe in the politics of an inert centre merely representing the lowest common denominator between two extremes. We want more, not less, radical change in our society but with a greater stability of direction.

  In other words, what Jenkins had called in his Dimbleby Lecture ‘a strengthening of the radical centre’.

  For the rest, the Declaration looked to create ‘an open classless and more equal society [which] rejects ugly prejudices based upon sex, race or religion’. It wanted a healthy mixed economy without frequent ‘frontier changes’ – that is, neither more nationalisation nor privatisation; it aspired to ‘eliminate poverty and promote greater equality’ without either stifling enterprise or excessive bureaucracy; insisted that it was possible to combine high employment with low inflation; and aimed to re-create a self-confident, outward-looking Britain playing its full role in Europe, NATO, the United Nations and the Commonwealth, promoting multilateral disarmament and help for the Third World. Not only the objectives but the very phrasing echoes everything Jenkins had been advocating since the 1950s. The Declaration concluded with a recognition that for many who had given much of their lives to the Labour party the decision to leave it would be ‘deeply painful’, but urged that the need for ‘realignment’ must now be faced.64

  Having finalised the text, they broke for lunch while Debbie Owen typed it up. (The Owens did not have a photocopier, so Oakeshott and McGivan had to find somewhere to get it copied for the press.
There were no copy-shops in those days and Parliament was in recess; they eventually copied it in the Savoy Hotel.) Meanwhile the four leaders were joined by four of the nine Labour MPs who were committed to joining them: Bob Maclennan, Ian Wrigglesworth, John Roper and Mike Thomas.fn6 Then at four o’clock the Gang of Four went out to pose for photographs, standing somewhat awkwardly on a small bridge in Narrow Street in the fading light. So little thought had been given to this photo-call that Shirley Williams had to borrow a blouse from Debbie Owen, while Oakeshott was dispatched across town again to fetch a skirt from her Westminster flat. Jenkins was in his usual dark suit while Owen changed into a smart light one; but Rodgers still wore a casual jumper. Despite the amateurishness of this beginning, however the public response was immediate and overwhelming. They received 8,000 letters of support in the first week, 25,000 in the first month, many of them including small donations, and an instant opinion poll gave the still notional new party 27 per cent support (on top of 11 per cent for the Liberals). The sudden momentum was well caught by a Guardian cartoon showing the four leaders in a small boat hurtling away from Foot and Healey left behind on the pier, borne up by a seal (the seal of public approval!), with Jenkins in the bow holding on to his hat and Rodgers at the stern saying: ‘What do you mean, can’t we slow down a bit? We haven’t even started the motor yet.’65 ‘After Limehouse,’ Jenkins wrote, ‘the Gang of Four or any individual member of it could no more have stopped launching a new party than logs could prevent themselves being swept down a mountain torrent.’66 ‘We found that we had placed ourselves in the leadership of an army already formed and waiting,’ Rodgers recalled. ‘The momentum was irresistible and we decided to bring forward the launch to 26 March.’67

  The public response vindicated Jenkins’ belief that there was huge untapped support just waiting for an outlet, though even he had not anticipated quite this rush; but the scale of it took the others by surprise. There was still a good deal of scepticism in the press. Jenkins’ seniority ensured that he was seen as the leading figure; but his wine-bibbing image invited relentless mockery. Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the Spectator dubbed the embryonic party ‘Lafite – The League of Agreeable Fellows Incommoded by Tiresome Extweemism’ – and repeated Ferdinand Mount’s cutting paraphrase of Jenkins’ Press Gallery speech the previous June: ‘Keep the yobs away from the best claret.’68 Meanwhile it was pointed out that the Gang of Three were just three middle-ranking ex-ministers of limited achievement – one over-promoted and arrogant, one well-meaning but muddled, the third a quintessential political back-room boy. The fact that they had only announced the formation of a Council for Social Democracy (whatever that was) rather than going straight for a new party suggested that they were still hesitating on the brink.

  On 5 February a full-page advertisement was published in the Guardian naming 100 members of the great and good who were pledging their support to the new movement. Nearly half had been active in Labour politics, including four former Cabinet ministers, headed by the once-deputy leader George Brown (now Lord George-Brown), another nine former MPs like Dick Taverne and David Marquand, and several figures prominent in local government, including Frank Pickstock (a veteran of the Gaitskellite CDS in the early 1960s), Clive Wilkinson (current leader of Birmingham city council), George Canning (Jenkins’ longtime agent and then chairman in Stechford, recently Lord Mayor of Birmingham) and Jim Cattermole (his agent even longer ago in Solihull, subsequently a Labour party regional organiser and active pro-European). The rest of the list was heavily weighted towards academics, journalists, retired civil servants and leading figures from medicine, the law and other professions: it included Alan Bullock and Philip Williams, biographers respectively of Ernest Bevin and Hugh Gaitskell; Lord Flowers, rector of Imperial College, London, and Walter Perry, vice-chancellor of the Open University; Sir Alec Cairncross, Jenkins’ chief economic adviser at the Treasury in 1967–9, and Anthony Lester, his adviser at the Home Office in 1974–6; Michael Young, founder of the Consumers’ Association, and Eirlys Roberts, the former editor of Which?; Anthony Sampson of the Observer and Polly Toynbee of the Guardian; Rabbi Julia Neuberger, the actress Janet Suzman and the opera singer Sir Geraint Evans. Notable by their absence, however, were trade unionists: the only current union leader was Frank Chapple – and he, like Clive Wilkinson and one or two others who lent their signatures, ultimately declined to leave the Labour Party.69

  Over the next few weeks two more Labour MPs (John Cartwright and Edward Lyons) and one Conservative (Christopher Brocklebank-Fowler) announced their support; more significant was the number who did not. The SDP was launched with just fourteen MPs; over the next year, as its fortunes soared, a further trickle came aboard, amounting in the end to twenty-nine. It was a substantial breakout, but not a decisive one. The Gang of Four had a list of around eighty Labour MPs whom they would have liked to persuade to join them, ranging from leading members of the Shadow Cabinet like Roy Hattersley and Eric Varley to rising younger moderates like John Smith, Phillip Whitehead, Giles Radice and George Robertson; but all of these elected to stick with Labour and work to turn around the party from within. Without them the SDP had no chance of replacing the Labour Party, as Owen, Rodgers and Williams initially hoped to do. Jenkins congratulated himself on the near-unanimity with which his former ministerial colleagues and PPSs in the Treasury and the Home Office followed him into his new party; he also liked to claim that it was mainly the libertarians who came over and the more socially conservative who stayed put.70 But this only reinforced the impression that it was essentially a party of his friends. If there was a larger group that might have been expected to follow him it was the sixty-nine who had voted for the Common Market in 1971; but of the thirty who were still in Parliament ten years later, only eleven joined the SDP: nineteen – including respected figures like Tam Dalyell and Betty Boothroyd – did not. Nor were all of those who did join particularly pro-European; twenty-two of them had been in the House, but only half of these had defied the whip in 1971. By any analysis, therefore, those who defected were not an easy group to classify. They were in truth a somewhat disparate collection of individuals, some with deep roots in the party, others less so; some with their careers ahead of them, others near retirement; all with their own personal or constituency reasons for choosing to break with Labour. They certainly did not constitute anything near a majority of the Labour right, or of the most able or promising among them.71

  Right at the outset, before the party was even formed, they lost the moral high ground, and arguably missed an opportunity to cash in on the early enthusiasm, by declining to resign their seats to fight by-elections under their new colours. David Owen and one or two others who were confident of their local support were keen to do so. Jenkins with hindsight thought that perhaps some at least should have done, but claimed that since he was not in the House it was not for him to press them.72 Bill Rodgers, however, argued persuasively that Labour would have controlled the timing of any by-elections and would have delayed and staggered them to its own advantage, so that the defectors would simply have been ‘picked off one by one’.73 In fact the example of Dick Taverne at Lincoln in 1973 suggests that most would have been triumphantly returned, which would have given the new party democratic legitimacy and an enormous boost – as well as improving their chances of holding their seats in 1983. As it was, they were vulnerable to the charge of betraying the voters who had elected them as Labour MPs. ‘Renouncing a political allegiance is a defensible political act,’ Neil Kinnock declared five days after the Limehouse Declaration. ‘Making a meal of the hand that fed them is indefensible political morality.’74 In characteristic vein a fortnight later Kinnock denounced the defectors as ‘political lounge lizards’ whose brand of ‘pink Toryism’ would delight every ‘multinational boss, judge and general’ by offering them ‘the malleable Common Market-loving, NATO-worshipping, trade union bashing, PSBR-saving, permanent PR coalition that they have longed for’.75 The day before the SDP finally
launched, it was again Kinnock who moved at Labour’s NEC that the defectors had ‘no moral or democratic right to continue to sit as MPs without presenting themselves again to their electorates’.76 Their failure to do so was not only morally questionable, but bad politics.

  In the meantime the four leaders set about creating a major new party from scratch in just eight weeks. They quickly established a collective leadership with a steering committee, initially numbering fourteen, which they took it in turns to chair, a month at a time. The four of them lunched together every Monday, initially at each other’s London flats or houses, later at an Italian restaurant in Westminster called L’Amico, before the steering committee at three o’clock. But from the beginning there were tensions arising from Jenkins’ natural tendency to assume that he was the senior partner and Owen’s equal determination to resist this assumption. A few days before the first meeting of the steering committee they met at Shirley Williams’ flat to divide up the leadership responsibilities. Owen proposed that he should chair the parliamentary group, Rodgers take charge of organisation and Shirley Williams look after publicity, while Jenkins should be confined to fund-raising. Jenkins was ‘taken aback’, Rodgers recalled, and ‘obviously hurt’, until the other two rejected the suggestion as ‘preposterous’. It was then agreed that Jenkins should take charge of policy, though not entirely: another four-way division gave him responsibility for economic policy while Owen, Williams and Rodgers would take the lead on foreign, home and industrial policy respectively. This was duly accepted at the first meeting of the steering committee on 9 February.77

  Neither the name nor the logo of the party gave much difficulty. They considered calling themselves ‘The Radicals’ or – thirteen years before Tony Blair – ‘New Labour’; but the press had long been calling them the ‘social democrats’ and it was easiest to go along with that. To Edwin Plowden, who thought it would have been better to have retained the word ‘Labour’ in the party name, Jenkins confessed to some misgivings: