Roy Jenkins

by John Campbell

  Jenkins’ time in Brussels was not as much of a liability as might have been expected. The story was told of one man, strongly anti-European, who said he was going to vote for him: when reminded that Jenkins had been President of the EEC, he replied, ‘Aye, but he jacked it in, didn’t he?’23 The Tories tried to make something of his reputation as the godfather of the permissive society by reproducing a letter from Mary Whitehouse alleging that ‘Pornography . . . was legalised by the Obscene Publications Act of 1959, sponsored by none other than Mr Roy Jenkins’: Alec McGivan had to put out a note reminding canvassers that the Bill had been carried with the support of a Tory Home Secretary and that Jenkins did not support pornography or sex shops on every high street.24 Meanwhile Labour banged away at his claret-swilling image: at an eve-of-poll meeting no less a figure than Denis Healey thought to shock the Glaswegians by asserting that Jenkins had brought with him a supply of ‘an Italian wine called Valpolicella’, which he presumably thought would sound wickedly foreign and expensive.25 But all this was froth. The real worry for the Jenkins camp was that, as in Warrington, his message did not seem to be getting through. The Alliance’s national standing had already fallen from the mid-forties to the mid-thirties as a result of the seat allocation row; and the local polls, which had initially shown Jenkins winning, now indicated that he was falling back. Jenkins himself had a filthy cold; the weather, which always affected his mood, was cold and wet; and he was becoming increasingly tense and agitated as he faced a second defeat. The nadir was an NOP poll in the Observer on 14 March, which put him in third place with just 23 per cent, with Labour leading.

  But it was just around this time that the tide began to turn, as the long campaign peaked with a series of ten public meetings, all packed, at which Jenkins was supported by a varying cast of back-up speakers, both SDP and Liberal; the most memorable was on 18 March, a week before polling day, when the four members of the Gang of Four all spoke together on the same platform at Hyndland school and then went out in turn to address another thousand people waiting outside in the moonlight in the frosty playground. The enthusiasm and the seriousness of the audiences were alike astonishing. Jenkins wrote later that the SDP, in the heady twelve months since its launch, had revived the almost defunct tradition of the political meeting: at Hillhead he calculated that around a quarter of the entire electorate came to at least one of his meetings – though it was a measure of the interest aroused that both Benn for Labour and Ted Heath, ambiguously for the Tories, drew similar crowds.26 In the last week the weather and the whole mood changed: the sun came out, the constituency was suddenly gay with purple crocuses and the polls turned up at last. One on 19 March put Jenkins ahead for the first time (by a single point); then in the last days the Glasgow Herald put him 4 per cent ahead, and NOP in the Daily Mail and MORI in the Express put him six points clear (though differing on who was second). In the collective sigh of relief at the Pond Hotel, Jenkins told Celia Goodhart that she could wear her lilac tights again, and was confident enough to brush off as an aberration a final poll showing him third. The last day saw him visibly relaxed, beaming broadly as he ‘cavalcaded’ around the streets in a decorated Land Rover driven by David Astor and plunged into shopping centres to shake hands – Bob Maclennan at his shoulder, Bill Rodgers ahead playing John the Baptist with a megaphone, and Jennifer (her right arm in a sling because of a poisoned finger) gamely shaking hands with her left; and polling day confirmed his perfectly timed spurt to the wire:fn4

  Roy Jenkins (SDP/Liberal) 10,106

  Gerald Malone (Conservative) 8,068

  David Wiseman (Labour) 7,846

  George Leslie (SNP) 3,416

  + 4 others 853

  SDP/Liberal majority

  2,03827

  On a poll of 76 per cent (higher than the General Election) Jenkins took 33.4 per cent of the vote, with a swing of 19 per cent – less than at Warrington, but a greater achievement in that it was won against an ebbing tide. For an advocate of proportional representation it was ironic to win with twice as many votes against him as for; but that was the first-past-the-post system. Nevertheless his victory was widely recognised as a personal triumph. ‘Reckless Roy Comes Out On Top: The Gambler Who Hit The Jackpot’, ran the Daily Mail’s headline; while The Times hailed ‘The Second Coming of Saint Roy’ and reflected a general assumption that the result – proving that he was not just an elder statesman, but still an effective vote-winner – gave him ‘an irresistible claim’ to the SDP leadership.29

  Calman, The Times, 26.3.82 (British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent)

  On a personal level Jenkins’ victory at Hillhead was perhaps the high point of his political life. Achieved on the very anniversary of the SDP’s birth, it seemed to crown the journey he had plotted since the Dimbleby Lecture and to give him at least a very good chance of leading the Alliance into government within the next two years. He drew particular pleasure from the uncanny parallel that by staging a triumphant comeback in a west of Scotland seat he was precisely emulating Asquith, who had gained a similar victory – after losing his seat in 1918 – at a famous by-election at Paisley in 1921. The next day, by chance, Jenkins was due to address the Scottish Liberal conference in St Andrew’s (in Asquith’s former constituency of East Fife), from where he returned via a dinner in Edinburgh to another SDP celebration in Paisley: a day, as he admitted, of ‘almost excessive Asquith pietism’. Unfortunately the precedent was not a good one. Asquith’s victory ‘heralded one of the greatest false dawns in twentieth century politics’;30 and his own victory at Hillhead sadly turned out to be another. Nevertheless Hillhead, and the city of Glasgow as a whole, unexpectedly became one of the two great loves of the last period of his life.

  He and Jennifer did buy a ‘residence’: a small flat in an elegant Georgian terrace on the Great Western Road – ‘the most architecturally distinguished façade behind which we have ever lived’ – and spent about one weekend a month there, plus other visits, so long as he remained the MP.31 Jenkins actively enjoyed Hillhead as he had never enjoyed Stechford. He delighted in showing off the under-appreciated glories of Glasgow to visiting friends (particularly American friends) and celebrated the city in several lectures and articles, culminating in a full chapter in his last book, Twelve Cities, in which he firmly rated Glasgow ‘upon grounds of site, metropolitan atmosphere, industrial history, visual impact, educational and cultural resources and the splendid mixture of early- and late-Victorian exuberance in its architecture . . . as one of the outstanding non-capital cities of the world, almost comparable with Chicago or Barcelona’.32 Despite the appalling redevelopment of the 1960s (for which as Chancellor at the time he took a share of the blame) he judged Glasgow to be ‘architecturally the finest Victorian city in the world’, by comparison with which Birmingham, the largest provincial city in England, was just a manufacturing town – ‘a Detroit to Glasgow’s Chicago’ – while classical Edinburgh was like ‘a splendid salmon laid out on a slab’, handsome but dead.33 Even London he considered ‘a much less European city than Glasgow . . . an essentially suburban city’. He attributed much of Glasgow’s character to its ‘God-given’ site, ranking the Clyde estuary as ‘the most dramatic piece of seascape at the gates of a major city anywhere in the world, with the possible exception’ – he always had to add a qualification – ‘of Vancouver Sound and the Bosphorus’.34 But he also loved (at least at a distance) ‘the cranes of Govan, still to be seen on the drive in from the airport [which] proclaim that this is Glasgow as emphatically as the Eiffel Tower identifies Paris, or the Statue of Liberty does New York, or the bridge and the opera house do Sydney’.35 Above all he admired the ‘quiet self-confidence’ of the people of Glasgow, which he defined as ‘a curiosity about outside things accompanied by a contentment within one’s own skin’.36 He and Jennifer made a number of lasting friends in Hillhead, most notably Donald Macfarlane, a local GP, and his wife Elsa, with whom they continued to stay on their visits to the city after he had l
ost his seat and they had given up their flat.fn5 On another of the criteria by which he judged cities, Glasgow offered at least two restaurants that met his standards: the Ubiquitous Chip off Byres Road (Michelin-starred, despite its unpromising name) and Rogano (with wonderful 1930s decor in the style of a Cunard liner) in the city centre. All in all he derived immense pleasure and took great pride in having been a Glasgow MP: as a collector of political arcana, he also relished the curious distinction that he believed himself to be the only person to have represented in Parliament all three of the United Kingdom’s biggest cities: London, Birmingham and Glasgow.

  Jenkins’ victory at Hillhead might seem to have put his claim to the SDP leadership beyond doubt, with the premiership now firmly in his sights. He received a whole file of congratulations not only from his usual army of friends but from a wide range of political opponents on both sides of the House of Commons, including Julian Amery and Douglas Hurd, Fred Mulley and Tam Dalyell, many of them confidently assuming that he would soon be Prime Minister.38 His old girlfriend Barley Alison looked forward to being able boast that she had known he was going to be Prime Minister when he was still in his twenties;39 while the Oxford political scientist Vernon Bogdanor wrote to reassure him that he was ‘not Asquith at East Fife, but Gladstone at Midlothian in 1880 . . . following which he led three administrations!’40 Yet there were still mutterings within the SDP that he should not be leader. David Owen, Mike Thomas and others still wanted Shirley Williams to stand; and she herself suggested publicly in a speech in East London that Jenkins might perhaps be leader of the Alliance but not of the SDP, urging that the party should not rush into a leadership contest, but stick with the collective leadership: ‘The SDP must not slip towards a hierarchy dominated by a single person, however wise or brilliant.’41 Opinion polls, on the other hand, showed that while Jenkins had decisively replaced Shirley Williams as the best leader of the SDP, the public preferred Steel as leader of the Alliance. These differences were raised explicitly at the steering committee ten days after Hillhead, when Jenkins made it very clear that he did not intend to be marginalised:

  RJ explained that he could see no reason for placing himself in limbo within the SDP by becoming Alliance Leader but not SDP leader. He proposed to be a candidate in any leadership election within the SDP and if defeated in that election he would not be Alliance Leader. He pointed out that the question of a Leader for the Alliance did not arise at this stage. Instead, the Alliance should prepare for a General Election with a candidate for Prime Minister. To discuss an Alliance Leader further now could cause confusion and damage to the party.42

  Unfortunately his return to the House of Commons was an immediate disappointment. He took his seat on the Tuesday after his election, introduced by Bob Maclennan and Dickson Mabon, and made his first intervention, suitably enough, following a statement by Mrs Thatcher about the latest European Council in Brussels in which she reiterated her refusal to make progress on other matters until she got what she wanted on the Community budget.43 Jenkins’ intervention was acidly described by the Tory diarist Alan Clark:

  Thereafter Jenkins, with excessive and almost unbearable gravitas, asked three very heavy, statesmanlike non-party-political questions of the PM. I suppose he is very formidable, but he was so portentous and long-winded that he started to lose the sympathy of the House about half way through and the barracking resumed. The Lady replied quite brightly and freshly, as if she did not particularly know who he was, or care.44

  He never really got any better. In the five years he had been away the House of Commons had deteriorated enormously – as Jim Callaghan had warned him. Instead of the set-piece debates at which he had excelled, climaxing in substantial half-hour speeches from the dispatch box by a minister replying to his Opposition shadow, cheered on by the packed ranks of their usually post-prandial supporters before the ten o’clock vote, the focus had moved decisively to the cheap point-scoring of Prime Minister’s Questions which, he later lamented, ‘bear about as much resemblance to traditional eloquence as a game of snap does to the skills of bridge or chess’.45 At the same time the serious reporting of the business of the House was increasingly replaced by satirical sketch-writing exemplified by Frank Johnson in The Times and Edward Pearce in the Daily Telegraph. Jenkins was not good at cheap point-scoring and he was an easy target for satire. Lacking either a dispatch box to rest his notes on or supportive benches behind him, he had to speak unsupported from the front or second row below the gangway. All third-party leaders – David Steel, David Owen, Paddy Ashdown – have struggled to be heard from this position, but Jenkins was mercilessly heckled by Dennis Skinner, Bob Cryer and others of the Labour awkward squad who usually bagged the front row and sat looking up at him, putting him off his stride with gibes about claret, his Brussels pension or ‘Roy, your flies are undone’. He never found a way of coping with this new style of parliamentary sniping; and the Speaker – his old Welsh rival George Thomas – did too little to protect him. The only good speech he made after his return to the House was against the restoration of the death penalty, a non-party issue which gave him the chance to rehearse familiar arguments from twenty years before.46

  His discomfort was exacerbated by the crisis which erupted out of a clear sky just a week after his election when Argentina invaded and occupied the Falkland Islands in pursuit of its longstanding claim to sovereignty. After the immediate sense of shock at the seizure of British territory, Mrs Thatcher’s decisive reaction in sending a naval task force to recapture the islands saved her reputation and transformed the entire landscape of politics up to the General Election. Jenkins was lucky that the invasion took place seven days after his by-election: had the Argentines moved ten days earlier he would almost certainly have been swept away by the tide of patriotic outrage. As it was, the expectation that his return to Westminster would re-invigorate the flagging momentum of the Alliance was instantly dashed by an unexpected war which not only suspended all normal political controversy about unemployment and monetarism, making it practically certain that the next election would be a landslide for the Tories, but cruelly exposed his particular limitations. Despite his three years in uniform during the war and his liking for military metaphors in his writing, Jenkins was temperamentally utterly unsuited to talking about war, which offended his whole concept of rational international relations.

  He was attending an SDP dinner in Cambridge when news of the invasion broke: his immediate reaction was that it was a serious humiliation for Mrs Thatcher, but it never occurred to him that she would try to reverse it by military force.47 For some weeks he managed to avoid making any reported comment about the crisis at all, leaving it to David Owen, in the Commons and on radio and television, to promise the SDP’s firm support for whatever action was needed to retake the islands. Owen was not only an MP for Plymouth (with its strong naval tradition) with a close interest in defence matters, but temperamentally far more in sympathy with Mrs Thatcher’s belligerent response: he could also, as Foreign Secretary in 1978, claim to have deterred a previous Argentine attempt to threaten the Falklands by sending an aircraft carrier, thus effectively balancing his support for the government with criticism of its negligence in allowing the crisis to occur in the first place.fn6 Jenkins’ first intervention, in a question to the Prime Minister on 20 April, was at once trivial and almost laughably portentous, and was duly guyed by Frank Johnson (‘Jenkins rolls a jowl at the Falklands’) and brushed aside by Mrs Thatcher (‘I must confess I had expected a more fundamental point from the right hon. Gentleman’).49 When finally forced to declare his position, Jenkins naturally condemned the Argentine action and reluctantly supported the sending of the task force. But he continued to urge that some form of negotiated settlement, possibly resulting in UN Trusteeship of the islands, was preferable to military engagement. He kept harking back to Suez, insisting that the most important lessons to be learned from 1956 were to avoid dividing the nation and to preserve international support.50 But thi
s just made him sound like a dinosaur: Suez might seem like yesterday to him, but to most of the voting public it was ancient history, scarcely relevant to the present situation. In 1982 the nation was not seriously divided – despite some disquiet over the sinking of the Argentine battleship, the General Belgrano – and thanks to some skilful diplomacy in New York and Washington (not least by Jenkins’ friend Nicko Henderson, now ambassador in Washington) Britain had UN backing for its position. It might have been different if General Galtieri had shown any willingness to compromise; but so long as he did not, Mrs Thatcher’s determination to expel the invader by force seemed the only option. Nevertheless Jenkins stuck to his pacific line. ‘At the end of the day,’ he warned on 14 May, ‘whether there is more fighting or not, we have to get a negotiated settlement. That is because we cannot indefinitely defend islands 8,000 miles away in a hostile environment.’51 He refused to be carried away by the emotion of the moment in defence of 1,800 islanders, but foresaw the absurd distortion of defence policy which the recapture of the islands would entail for decades ahead.