Roy Jenkins

by John Campbell

  He loathed Mrs Thatcher’s flag-waving jingoism during the war and her triumphalism when it was over. Speaking at a by-election in Beaconsfield a few days before the British forces went ashore on 21 May – an election which a few weeks earlier the Alliance would have hoped to win, but where it could now only hope to come a distant second – Jenkins took the Prime Minister to task for speaking as if a small war in the South Atlantic could ‘regenerate the nation and bring forth the glories of a new Elizabethan age’. This, he said, was ‘dangerous nonsense’, and he accused her of exploiting the war for party advantage: ‘Mrs Thatcher must understand that the Conservative Party is not the nation.’52 Less than three weeks later – actually some days before the Union Jack flew again over Port Stanley – he called for magnanimity in victory and a sense of perspective. Writing in The Times under the headline ‘Our honour upheld: now comes the time for statesmanship’, he ridiculed Churchillian comparisons with the spirit of 1940: ‘We have carried through a limited operation extremely well. That ought to help us not to reach beyond our grasp. We have assuaged our honour. Let us now show foresight in victory.’53

  David Owen by contrast had a good war, lending Mrs Thatcher critical support at every stage and greatly raising his own profile at the same time. Where Jenkins appeared flabby and long-winded, Owen was tough and pithy: quite suddenly he was seen as a serious challenger for the leadership of the SDP. At a meeting of the communications committee on 25 May Shirley Williams worried that only one member of the Gang of Four was getting any media coverage.54 Yet Jenkins’ doubts about the war were more representative than Owen’s. At the steering committee on 14 June – the day Mrs Thatcher announced that the islands were wholly back in British hands – Polly Toynbee, normally a strong Owenite, argued that the party had been too supportive of the government, while John Roper, the party’s Chief Whip, reported that a majority of the MPs backed Jenkins’ line on sovereignty and UN Trusteeship. The committee agreed that it had been a peculiarly difficult time for the party, putting its belief in ‘cool rationalism’ in conflict with its ‘opposition to internal factionalism’; but now that the war was over, it agreed to ‘push for a long-term international solution, and oppose any move towards a “Fortress Falklands”.’55 Owen was in the chair, but Jenkins’ view clearly prevailed.

  As soon as Shirley Williams and Jenkins were both back in the Commons the steering committee had decided to bring forward the contest for the leadership, with the result that the starting gun was fired while the war was still going on. While Jenkins, supported by Bill Rodgers, had hoped that he might be elected unopposed, both Owen and Shirley Williams were determined that the new party’s democratic credentials required a contest, not a coronation which would be seen as a stitch-up. This difference of view was magnified by a row over how the leader should be elected. Having made the case for internal democracy one of his key reasons for breaking with Labour, Owen believed that one-member-one-vote elections should be a matter of principle for the SDP; moreover he believed that Jenkins had agreed to this at their meeting at East Hendred in November 1980. Many of Jenkins’ strongest allies, however, including Rodgers, adhered to the traditional view that a party’s MPs, who observed the candidates at first hand every day, were better placed than the wider membership to judge their qualities. Jenkins himself claimed not to feel so strongly about this; but he also claimed to have no recollection of any undertaking to Owen and allowed himself to be persuaded by his friends, ‘well after I could see that it was both difficult to argue and unnecessary in my own interest’.56 Owen was incensed by what he still called in his memoirs a decade later ‘the shabbiest act that I have ever witnessed . . . His change of mind meant only one thing: he was in so much of a hurry that he could not give a damn for the Party that he had helped found. The SDP was just a disposable vehicle for his ambition to be Prime Minister.’57 In the event the party’s constitutional conference in mid-February – more than a month before Hillhead, when it was still not certain that Jenkins would be eligible to stand – voted to let the membership decide the question by ballot; and they in turn voted decisively for one-man-one-vote.

  Owen’s fury was based partly on the expectation that the MPs were more likely to vote for Jenkins, and the membership for a supposedly more radical candidate, Shirley Williams or himself. In fact the opposite turned out to be the case. When Williams once again declined the heat of the kitchen and Owen determined to stand instead, he won the support of nearly half of the party’s twenty-nine MPs, while Jenkins’ support was stronger among the ordinary members. An exchange of letters between Bill Rodgers and Shirley Williams reveals some of the tensions within the Gang of Four that led her – and a dozen others – to back Owen. Rodgers recalled that the previous August she had agreed that Jenkins would make the best leader and she would not challenge him; but subsequently she had changed her mind ‘in view of a campaign on the part of some of Roy’s friends that was personally damaging to you’. He argued that since she had ‘personally exonerated Roy, and absolutely rightly’, this was not reason to change her mind about his suitability as leader:

  We need someone to pull the party together, achieve a working relationship with the Liberals and lead us in Government if we win. Why should anything that may have been said by Roy’s friends – however mistaken and hurtful to you – invalidate the qualities that . . . led you to support him?

  He went on to say that he had always thought a combination of Roy as leader with Shirley as president was the most powerful for the party, while his own ‘relative advantage’ lay in organisation. ‘It seemed to me that David – for all his high qualities – had lots of time ahead. I hoped that all of us would put the overall interest of the party ahead of self-indulgence.’ He regretted that this was now to be set aside in ‘a contest of personalities with the best interests of the party in second place’:

  Given David’s style and mood and his personal antipathy to Roy, his behaviour is at least predictable. I had hoped that you would see matters in a different light.

  I appreciate that you may decide not to stand against Roy, although you would be a stronger candidate than David. But, if you nominate David or otherwise support him, it will still be a clear breach of our understanding of last summer.

  ‘The Gang of Four,’ he concluded, ‘has been a remarkable achievement and much good has come of it.’ But it would now be much more difficult to maintain a collective leadership. ‘For the first time since the party was launched I am profoundly depressed.’58

  Williams did not reply for more than week, by which time she had announced her nomination of David Owen – not, she explained in her memoirs, because she expected him to win, but because (wrongly as it turned out) ‘I thought he would hold the new Party to the left of centre. I did not want to see the Jenkinsites uncontested.’59

  My dear Bill,

  Thank you for your letter. I’ve kept my word and won’t oppose Roy. I have both respect and affection for him. But one cannot wholly divorce anyone from their friends and supporters . . . I’m not wholly certain that he would not be more influenced by them than by the rest of the four – and that’s why I’ve consistently argued for a collective style of leadership.

  Frankly, I believe there is a perfectly legitimate right for any of us to stand as leader . . . I believe many Party members would believe they had been led up the garden path at the time of the vote on the method of election otherwise . . .

  I hope you won’t be too depressed. I think the Party had to have a contest, and that once the contest is over . . . we will move forward decisively again.

  Yours ever,

  Shirley60

  Owen’s high profile during that Falklands summer made the outcome much less certain than had previously been assumed. Both candidates promised to keep the contest gentlemanly, with no public campaigning and no overt criticism of one another: they were each limited to a 750-word statement which was sent with their ballot papers to all 65,000 paid-up members of the party.
Outwardly the Queensberry rules were pretty much observed. The two principals spoke mainly to meetings of local area parties. But their supporters waged a proxy campaign in the media which was a good deal less squeamish, while Jenkins’ diary shows that he lunched with a good many influential journalists and wrote several newspaper articles implicitly pressing his claim: he also (as Owen saw it) ‘broke his own ban and went on TV, no doubt feeling disadvantaged by my Falklands-related TV appearances’.61 Behind the comradely façade it was a tensely fought contest between sharply opposed personal styles and strategies. The visible contrast was entirely one of image: Owen the young, handsome, brash, impatient challenger, claiming to be the more ‘radical’; Jenkins nearly twenty years older, Home Secretary before Owen was even in Parliament, only sixty-one, but presenting the image of a wise old owl. Jenkins was assumed to be more conservative just because of his age and manner, though real policy differences between them were hard to find, and Owen’s instincts – on the Falklands, for instance, and on nuclear weapons – were in reality more right-wing. Owen’s streak of puritanism, strongly anti-tobacco and personally sparing with alcohol, contrasted with Jenkins’ famous enjoyment of his pleasures. ‘Abrasive David or Rounded Roy?’ was Hugo Young’s summary in the Sunday Times; ‘Bossyboots versus the Drinker’s Friend’ was Alan Watkins’ more memorable encapsulation in the Observer.62

  The one difference of substance between them was over relations with the Liberals: Owen’s desire to protect the distinct identity of the SDP against Jenkins’ vision of ever-closer cooperation leading to eventual merger. There appeared to be a genuine difference of strategy here, with implications for the party’s appeal to the voters: Jenkins wanting to draw support from both sides of the political spectrum, Owen still keener to replace Labour. Edward Lyons, one of the original defectors who decided to back Owen, explained his decision apologetically to Jenkins by arguing that the SDP needed ‘a personality distinct from the Liberal Party . . . and to have a left of centre image attractive to the Labour voter. I am also uneasy that the SDP is becoming the junior partner in the Alliance . . . I am so very deeply sorry.’63 But even here the distinction was more of tone and image than of substance. In an article in the Observer on 13 June Jenkins made it clear that he too saw ‘the historic role of the SDP – and indeed of the Alliance’ as being ‘to push the Labour Party out of the arena of government, and to make ourselves the effective alternative to the Conservatives’. But he saw more clearly than his critics that this required winning Tory votes as well as Labour ones: otherwise, he warned – since the Labour Party could not be expected to disappear altogether – the SDP would simply re-create ‘the scenario of the 1920s’, offering the prospect of political realignment ‘at the price of a period, maybe a generation, of Conservative hegemony’:

  This has been one aspect of breaking the mould which has from the beginning given me pause. I do not wish to repeat this part of the political history of the inter-war years . . . I cannot understand why it is regarded as the ‘left-wing’ strategy, for it is a gift to the Right.

  My view . . . is that it should in the future be perfectly possible over the country as a whole to take approximately two votes from a terminally sick Labour Party for one vote from an inflated Conservative support, to add this to a significant Liberal base, and by doing so create a new radical majority without the penalties of fifty or sixty years ago. This is the correct centre-left strategy. This is the true breaking of the mould.64

  The problem for this strategy was that it had been upset by the Falklands. So long as the Tories under Mrs Thatcher could be presented as being as ideologically extreme and economically disastrous as Labour, it was possible to see the Alliance coming through the middle by taking votes from both. Once Mrs Thatcher’s reputation had been transformed by victory in the South Atlantic, making her re-election a foregone conclusion, the country was indeed set for a period of Conservative hegemony. Since Labour did not implode, but gradually moved back towards the centre, all the SDP and the Alliance could achieve over the next decade was, precisely as Jenkins feared, to split the anti-Conservative vote and entrench that hegemony.

  Owen’s strategy was in practice no different from Jenkins’. Of course he too wanted Tory votes as well as Labour ones: he was in reality just as much of a centrist and he accepted that an alliance with the Liberals was at least temporarily unavoidable. The difference between them was Owen’s barely concealed contempt for the Liberals and his illusion – delusion – that the SDP could become a viable distinct fourth party while keeping the third party at arm’s length. So in fact it came down to a difference of image and personality after all. In their respective statements each underlined his own particular qualities while subtly undermining the other’s. Jenkins led with a reminder of Warrington, Hillhead and the Dimbleby Lecture, to make the point that it was he, not Owen, who had originated the SDP (while ‘those still active in party politics were still wrestling with their loyalties’) and borne the heat of its first campaigns. Similarly Owen began with a reminder that the election was by one-member-one-vote (which he had supported and Jenkins opposed), called for a spirit of adventure, ‘guts’ and ‘drive’ (which by implication Jenkins lacked) and beat a drum for ‘rational patriotism’ (a reminder of Jenkins’ ambivalence on the Falklands). On the necessity of the Alliance both sought to blur their difference by stealing the other’s clothes. Jenkins praised the ‘partnership of principle’ with the Liberals while taking care to stress ‘our distinct SDP philosophy and membership’; Owen emphasised the SDP’s distinctiveness, but was equally careful to mention ‘our principled partnership’ with the Liberals. Insisting, like Owen, that the SDP was ‘a radical party, and must remain one’, Jenkins gave more substance than Owen ever did to what he understood the word to mean:fn7

  But our radicalism does not spring from the need to seek a particular segment of votes. We are radical because the country is in desperate need of change: constitutionally, industrially, socially. We need change that will stick, not the largely irrelevant and too easily reversible changes of recent Governments which have paradoxically left us an almost uniquely hidebound and unadaptive society.

  He listed as priorities tackling unemployment; ‘democracy in the voting system and in industry’; ‘a constructive commitment to Europe’; and ‘our determination to attack poverty and prejudice at home and abroad’. Owen by comparison was wordy, but surprisingly vague: the SDP, he proclaimed, should be ‘determined, practical and imaginative’, yet also ‘open, democratic and classless’. While Owen merely promised to work hard for victory, Jenkins ended with a leader’s authoritative words of encouragement to the troops:

  We have come an immense distance in a very short time. If we keep our nerve and our sense of direction we can make the breakthrough at the next crucial General Election.66

  Jenkins was still claiming the leadership as the Alliance’s obvious Prime Minister in waiting, while Owen was merely challenging for it on the back of his sudden rise to prominence over the Falklands. One Jenkinsite MP, Tom Ellis, warned the party against a ‘khaki’ election ‘in which, as a result of a collective emotional spasm, we elect the wrong leader’.67 Another loyal supporter, Anthony Lester, privately sympathised with Jenkins being faced with ‘Dr Death in his ugly prime. I strongly disagree with the line which he has taken over the Falklands, and deplore his efforts to diminish your standing.’ It was probably too late to curb him now, ‘but I suspect we will all live to regret his lovely war’. The party was currently drifting ‘without captain or rudder or charts or compass’, he lamented, before concluding confidently: ‘Once you are leader that will all change . . . Yours devotedly, Anthony.’68 The trouble was that the case for Jenkins depended heavily on the assumption that the winner had a serious prospect of becoming Prime Minister within the next two years. From the moment this no longer seemed very likely, his claim was severely weakened. If what the SDP was electing was not after all the next Prime Minister but merely an effective le
ader of a minority party for the long haul of opposition over at least another six or seven years, then Jenkins’ age became a liability and his experience of high office irrelevant. On this argument both The Times and The Economist came out for Owen. ‘It has been Dr Owen who . . . has shown the vigour and the ruthlessness needed for the task of storming fortress Labour,’ The Economist concluded. ‘The SDP should take its courage in both hands and send for the doctor.’69

  For a moment Jenkins was afraid that he was going to lose. An NOP poll in the Observer showed that potential Alliance voters – as opposed to the SDP members who were going to make the decision – thought Owen would make a better leader by a margin of 57 per cent to 33 per cent. Significantly, however, they preferred David Steel to either; and this slightly dampening verdict probably contained the clue to Jenkins’ victory. For Steel made little secret that his good working partnership with Jenkins was critical to the functioning of the Alliance, which would be imperilled if Owen were to become SDP leader. Should they be in a position to form an Alliance government after the next election, he would be happy to take second place under Jenkins – but not necessarily under Owen. Other leading Liberals made it still clearer that they fully reciprocated Owen’s unflattering view of them. When Owen, towards the end of the non-campaign, suggested that once proportional representation was achieved the two Alliance parties could go back to fighting each other before possibly forming a coalition as separate parties, Jenkins insisted that such a scenario would fatally undermine the Alliance. The public, he believed, had responded to ‘a partnership of principle’, but would not vote for a cynical ‘marriage of convenience’.70 In voting for Jenkins a clear majority of ordinary SDP members asserted their belief in the positive vision of the Alliance which he had proposed in the Dimbleby Lecture and embodied at Warrington and Hillhead, and which they did not want to see jeopardised. But the margin of his victory, by just 26,256 votes to 20,864 (56:44 per cent, on a 75 per cent poll), was far from overwhelming and carried the seeds of serious strains ahead.