Roy Jenkins
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Jenkins admitted to being relieved by the result and told reporters – with some exaggeration – that he was getting used to ‘winning from behind’.71 It was a sufficient margin to be decisive, without humiliating Owen. On the contrary, Owen was arguably the moral victor: he had certainly established himself as the undisputed leader-in-waiting breathing down Jenkins’ neck. But he had come to believe that he might win; and he was disproportionately depressed by his defeat. A week after the result his fellow Plymouth MP Alan Clark found him ‘still in an agitated state’ and talking of refusing to serve in Jenkins’ shadow team.72 He eventually agreed to carry on as foreign affairs spokesman. But two months later he was still frustrated at losing when he thought he had it in the bag, telling Clark that he now thought he was ‘blown’. His only hope was an early election that would smash both Labour and the Alliance – in other words, a Thatcher landslide – after which he might be able to rebuild the SDP, independent of the Liberals, but drawing on the old Labour Party. By the next year he was afraid that Labour would have recovered and the Liberals have become dominant in the Alliance, leaving him with nothing.73 In this black mood he was an even more difficult colleague than before. Bill Rodgers wrote that Owen went into ‘a prolonged sulk’, obstructing Jenkins’ every attempt to assert his leadership.74 Those smiling pictures of the Gang of Four on the bridge at Limehouse less than two years earlier were a distant memory. With reason Jenkins believed that the leadership contest, far from raising the party’s profile as Owen and Shirley Williams had hoped, did it immense damage that never healed.
Jenkins was sole leader of the SDP for eleven months; but it was an unhappy period, which ended in bitter disappointment, for which he took a large share of the blame. Quite simply, having secured the prize, he turned out not to be a very good leader. Of course there were other reasons, already mentioned, for the Alliance’s failure to recapture its heady momentum of the previous year. With hindsight it can be seen that the SDP was launched at a moment when both the old parties seemed to have rushed to ideological extremes and the established party system really did feel on the brink of collapse, creating an unprecedented opportunity for the sort of radical realignment that Jenkins had proclaimed. But by the spring of 1982 that moment had passed and normality was beginning to be restored. The Alliance was still polling better than the Liberals on their own had ever done, but instead of the 50 per cent they had touched the previous autumn they were back in the thirties, with all three parties roughly level-pegging. At that point a hung Parliament looked the most likely result of the next election, which would probably have meant the Alliance forming at least part of the next government, with the chance to extract proportional representation as the price of its participation, so that realignment was still a real possibility. That prospect evaporated with Mrs Thatcher’s victory in the Falklands. Now the Tories’ rating soared into the forties and stayed there until the General Election, leaving Labour and the Alliance stuck in the mid-twenties scrapping for second place, which instantly destroyed Jenkins’ unique selling point as a wise and statesmanlike alternative Prime Minister to lead the country through a crisis. As an opposition leader he did not cut the mustard: his moderate, sensible policies suddenly seemed platitudinous and his prime ministerial pretensions merely pompous.
In addition Jenkins was exhausted, suffering from what he himself called ‘battle fatigue’ after fighting three strenuous elections in the past year. Four weeks after finally winning the leadership he and Jennifer disappeared for his usual August holiday in France and Italy: one week with Michael and Maxine Jenkins in the Vaucluse, a second with the Gilmours near Lucca and a third with Marietta Tree near Siena, all with the usual flow of English visitors. On holiday he swam and walked and played tennis, but he also slept a lot. Back in England he resumed his running – in Ladbroke Square when in London, or round the tennis court in East Hendred – in an effort to get himself fit for the trials ahead. But he was still overweight, and he was also beginning to suffer from a thyroid condition, not diagnosed until the following year, which left him frequently tired and lacking energy: he still slept in the afternoons whenever he could. The result was that he looked and sounded old, flabby and long-winded on television, which was now – far more than in his 1960s prime – the critical medium of political communication. In the Commons he was ponderous at Prime Minister’s Questions and had few opportunities to make the sort of speeches with which he used to command the House.fn8 Paradoxically he was now a much better performer at public meetings and out on the stump than he was in Parliament. As SDP leader he worked hard in his own way, making scores of speeches around the country, many of them essentially the same speech tailored to his particular audience and the issue of the moment, but others major policy statements to which he gave a lot of thought; he also wrote a great deal of newspaper articles. These were the old-fashioned formats – familiar to Asquith or Gaitskell – at which he still excelled. But he was not good at the quickfire exchange of pithy soundbites that had become the staple of modern politics, at which David Owen – and David Steel – excelled. Nor did Jenkins have the patience or stamina for the more tedious chores of party leadership: as Barbara Castle and others had said when predicting that he would never be Labour leader, he was not interested in organisation and was too shy for back-slapping and morale-boosting. The importance he attached to maintaining his private life (his lunches with women friends, literary dining clubs and country house weekends) had not stopped him being a good minister in the Sixties and Seventies, when he could alternate periods of intense activity with such periods of relaxation that he needed to recover. But the demands of leadership, particularly of a small party challenging to smash the existing mould of politics, were continuous and never-ending, and Jenkins did not have the right sort of energy for it. For all these reasons of personality, temperament and aptitude he was ill-equipped for the position he had striven for, in the circumstances in which he finally achieved it.
One of the chores of leadership was the continuing battle between the two Alliance parties over the allocation of seats, made more fractious by their falling polls. As the early euphoria began to fade, Rodgers warned Jenkins in July that the Liberals in some areas wanted to reopen agreements that he regarded as settled. As it stood, if the Alliance were to win 100 seats, the Liberals would probably win at least sixty of them, yet some Liberal members were ‘militant for more’. Rodgers believed the SDP had made enough concessions and he now had his ‘back to the wall’; Jenkins might need to intervene directly with David Steel to knock some heads together.76 This was deeply distasteful to Jenkins, whose experience at Warrington and Hillhead had given him a somewhat rosy picture of the extent of goodwill between local activists on the ground; but his reluctance to fight the SDP’s corner only confirmed the Owenites’ suspicion that he did not really care about its distinct identity. In September Mike Thomas wrote him a stiff letter warning that any further concessions would threaten the party’s very existence:
What I want to communicate to you is that you are not here dealing with a little political awkwardness that has to be circumvented or overcome, you are approaching a fundamental sticking point, not just for me but, I believe, for many in our Party. I don’t want an Alliance party. I don’t want to be a part of parachuting a few people into the upper echelons of what is essentially the Liberal Party. I want a true partnership between two distinct forces – each of which brings to the Alliance its own strengths and convictions. That is why, for me, the outcome of the negotiations with the Liberals is actually about preserving the capacity of our own party to survive and develop, and thus contribute to a genuine alliance.
‘In common with a substantial proportion of our members,’ he concluded, ‘that is something I feel very strongly about . . . With every step down this slippery slope I feel my energy and enthusiasm sapping away . . . I impute nothing but the best of motives in the approach you are pursuing, but I think you should be clear how it looks from where I am sittin
g.’77
No reply survives: Jenkins always preferred to reply to letters with a phone call or an appeasing private word, rather than on paper. Two weeks later Thomas wrote again, repeating his complaint that the SDP was being left ‘invisible and defenceless in the face of a tide of propaganda for the Alliance’. This time it was Rodgers who replied. He acknowledged that giving up some good seats to the Liberals had been painful, but insisted that the Alliance was overwhelmingly more attractive to the electorate than competing parties and denied that it was a slippery slope to merger:
Perhaps I may add that I think that Roy’s experience over the last few days has taught him a great deal about the difficulties of negotiating with the Liberals. He has become impatient of attempts to re-open agreements (something of which both of us have much experience).78
In the end Jenkins did have to become involved. At the end of September, just before the Liberal assembly, he and Steel exerted their authority to enforce a settlement of outstanding disputes which was accepted in all but a handful of constituencies. Owen thought Jenkins had once again sold the pass. ‘This week,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘Roy Jenkins has finally tipped the seat negotiations across a threshold which could be fatal for the independence of the party.’79 ‘Once again,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘we gave ground in order to avoid a row.’80 Years later Mike Thomas called this moment ‘the death knell of the SDP’.81 It was true that Jenkins was anxious above all to avoid a row which he thought damaging to the Alliance. But an idea of what the SDP negotiators were up against is furnished by the example of Liverpool, Broadgreen, one of three seats where the local Liberals declined to accept the leaders’ ruling and refused to stand down for Dick Crawshaw, one of the first wave of SDP defectors, thereby splitting the Alliance vote and ensuring the loss of a seat he might otherwise have held. The SDP – Jenkins included – were often frustrated by what they regarded as the anarchic character of the Liberals, who prided themselves on their local autonomy; but there was little Steel could do about it and he actually did well to get as many adopted Liberals to stand down for SDP candidates as he did. In the end the two parties fought roughly equal numbers of seats: 311 against 322. Outside the thirty seats the SDP was defending, the Liberals did fight more of those that were judged most winnable. But Bill Rodgers still believed in December 1982 that if the Alliance were to return 100 MPs, the SDP would have between forty-five and fifty-five of them.82 Of course they did not win anything like that number, so the bitter arguments based on over-optimistic expectations turned out to be academic. Nevertheless the arguments were another factor that took much of the shine off the Alliance’s dwindling appeal in 1982–3.
There was another public row at the autumn conference. This was another ‘rolling’ event, which travelled from Cardiff to Derby to Great Yarmouth, but not so successful as the previous year because – typifying the party’s loss of momentum – the train broke down. The row, at Great Yarmouth, was over the old chestnut of incomes policy. Jenkins still favoured a statutory policy, and had got it agreed by the party’s national committee; but Owen did not. In his memoirs he denied that he encouraged his research assistant, Ruth Levitt, to move an amendment opposing a statutory policy; but he applauded her speech vigorously from the platform, so when her amendment was overwhelmingly carried, it was inevitably seen by the press as a calculated challenge to Jenkins’ leadership. Jenkins, by Owen’s account, was ‘incandescent with fury’:
I was summoned to his hotel as if he were a headmaster hauling in an errant schoolboy and I had to listen to a tirade about a ‘petty ploy over an insubstantive issue’ and how ruthlessly, calculatingly, personally ambitious I was. He was so incoherent with rage that there was little point in arguing . . . Despite my repeated apologies he was incapable of listening.
The effect of this episode, according to Owen, was to ‘sever all personal relations between us’.83 In fact relations were already pretty bad, and Owen’s attempts to paint himself as the innocent party do not square with others’ recollection of his behaviour following his defeat in the leadership election. Bill Rodgers wrote that Jenkins tried hard to accommodate Owen, but found his ‘black moods’ difficult to handle. He normally hated confrontation, so the incident at Great Yarmouth was unusual and shows the strain he was under. Rather than risk further unpleasantness he abandoned his intention to put Rodgers in charge of election planning, in deference to Owen’s objection, but failed to appoint anyone else: this was not the action of a strong leader.84 There were other signs of tension within the party organisation (now housed in an elegant Queen Anne House in Cowley Street, five minutes from the House of Commons). In November Bernard Doyle, the previously unpolitical businessman who had been the Gang of Four’s surprising choice as Chief Executive in 1981, tried to resign, saying that his relations with Alec McGivan (the national organiser) and others – he specified Mike Thomas and Christopher Brocklebank-Fowler – were making his position ‘untenable’. He was persuaded to carry on, but complained to Jenkins that the MPs were now (by contrast with the party’s first year) ‘obsessed with infighting’. To restore its momentum the party needed ‘strong political leadership of a visible kind’, which Jenkins evidently was not providing.85
Two weeks later Jenkins tried to give a pep talk to the national committee – an unwieldy body now numbering thirty-six members. With the Alliance’s poll rating now down to just 21 per cent, he told them that ‘the first essential [was] to show buoyancy, optimism and determination’ and still insisted that they must ‘go for the major breakthrough at the next election’. He recognised that one way of dealing with the party’s declining ‘visibility’ in the media would be to ‘go for instant comments’; but typically thought that much of the party’s success had been due to ‘its ability to stand back’. He insisted that there was ‘no question of a merger’ with the Liberals, or of ‘either of them ceasing to exist’. Finally he urged that the SDP should aim to ‘raise the level of political argument . . . and not get involved in day-to-day insults’. He wanted the national committee to be ‘a symbol and vehicle of unity within the party’; and the party to take ‘a very firm line on key issues’.86 Even allowing for the blandness of official minutes, this was an extraordinarily vague and platitudinous call to arms.
A telling comment on Jenkins’ failure as SDP leader – specifically his failure at Westminster, where he should have been at his best – was made by the Daily Telegraph’s parliamentary sketchwriter Edward Pearce, pointing out that he had had behind him a party of thirty MPs, or forty with the Liberals.
If that party had played Parliament hard, if it had attended in full numbers, used questions intelligently, organised its set-piece speeches and generally gone for impact, the outcome would have been very different . . . Three minutes’ harsh irony should have carved up Skinner so that he never walked again . . . With a team forty strong and not short of talent, he could and should have made the Alliance a parliamentary force and a national one.87
Unfortunately the combination of Jenkins’ shattered self-confidence in the Chamber and personal tensions within the Gang of Four, which were reflected right through the parliamentary party, meant that he fluffed the opportunity.
In January 1983, at the beginning of what seemed certain to be an election year, the Alliance held its first joint rally at the Central Hall, Westminster, billed optimistically as a ‘relaunch’. In its own terms it was a considerable success. Jenkins made an excellent speech in which he looked back over the ups and downs of the past three years and insisted that there was all still to play for:
I reject utterly the defeatist view that our correct strategy is to go for a balancing bridgehead in the next Parliament . . . Total victory is perfectly possible. And this, and nothing less, is our objective.
He drew encouragement from an uncanny ‘rhythm of history’ going back 150 years, which suggested that major reforming governments came to power at almost precisely thirty-eight-year intervals.fn9 The Whig government of Lord Grey
, which passed the 1832 Reform Bill, took office in 1830; Gladstone formed his first great Liberal administration in 1868; the landslide election of 1906 led to Asquith’s Liberal government, Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’ and the beginnings of social insurance; and thirty-eight years on again, the great Labour victory of 1945 brought in the Attlee government and the full flowering of the welfare state. Another thirty-eight-year gap naturally pointed to . . . an SDP/Liberal Alliance government in 1983, led – though of course he did not say it – by himself, thereby emulating two of his three great political heroes, Asquith and Attlee! It was an alluring vision with which to inspire himself and rouse the troops, but one has to wonder whether he really believed it.
For the rest he damned the Labour Party on the one hand for its unilateralism, its protectionism, its anti-Europeanism and the leadership’s appeasement of the hard left; and Mrs Thatcher on the other for her ‘immoral’ tolerance of unemployment and her deluded belief that she had made British industry more competitive, ‘while in fact she has destroyed much of it’. He rehearsed once again his ‘detailed, practical, carefully costed programme’ for tackling unemployment, but placed it in a wider context with an additional three-point plan for concerted international expansion, ‘greater flows of finance to the poor world’ and British membership of the EMS, which would help form ‘a tripod of stability’ between the ECU, the dollar and the yen. He ended with a stirring call for ‘radicalism in the cause of reconciliation’ – almost deliberately seeking out those ‘r’s again – and ‘the regeneration of our country’.89 ‘It was the nearest approach to a triumph that I had during that difficult winter,’ Jenkins recalled in his memoirs, ‘and good for morale’: