Roy Jenkins

by John Campbell

  But his health was a worry. In April 1984 he was diagnosed with a thyroid problem, which retrospectively helped to explain his relative lack of energy over the past year. Curiously, this was the same condition that had afflicted Ted Heath in 1973–4 and is generally thought to have explained his tired and uncharacteristically indecisive behaviour in the crisis of his premiership in early 1974. In Jenkins’ case it required six weeks’ rest at East Hendred – a good excuse to stay away from SDP committees, which nevertheless did not preclude fairly frequent visits to London for lunch and other more agreeable purposes. Then at the end of 1984 he developed a serious prostate condition, which required emergency surgery and forced him to spend Christmas in hospital. This operation was not immediately successful, so he had to undergo several more over the next eighteen months before the problem was sorted out in July 1986. These troubles dispelled any lingering regrets he might have had about giving up the leadership in 1983.

  Meanwhile enforced ‘rest’ gave him more time to get back to serious writing. He began by going back to his 1970s idea of back-to-back studies of British Prime Ministers and US Presidents. He had then thought of pairing Stanley Baldwin with Franklin Roosevelt, but now decided there was nothing new to say about Roosevelt, so switched to Harry Truman instead. He had already written a good deal of Baldwin and had somehow made a start on Truman during 1982, but now took the latter up again and finished it in 1984–5 for publication by Collins in January 1986. He then revised and lengthened his 1970s draft of Baldwin, which appeared in a matching format a year later in February 1987. Both were modest little books, only around 200 pages and making no pretence to original research, longer than his biographical essays for The Times, but well short of full-scale biographies. Deftly written, urbane, slightly bland assessments, his long absorption in politics on both sides of the Atlantic reinforcing his own experience of high office, they received respectful rather than enthusiastic reviews. One of the kindest notices of Baldwin was by Enoch Powell in the Daily Telegraph, who had himself written a similar-length biography of Joseph Chamberlain in 1977. ‘I thought it by far the most perceptive review,’ Jenkins wrote to thank him. ‘As Gladstone, I think, said after he had addressed an audience of actors, they (you) understood what I was trying to do.’4 These were not major books, but they got him back into historical writing and whetted his appetite for bigger subjects to come.

  Then he started editing his Brussels diary, which he described as ‘very satisfactory hospital work’.5 In fact he not only cut but polished and quite significantly improved the dictated text, though without seriously misrepresenting its original thrust. He showed it to his agent, Michael Sissons of A.D. Peters (soon to become Peters Fraser & Dunlop), who was enthusiastic and sold it to Collins for an advance of £25,000, to deliver by the end of 1987.6 Jenkins missed that deadline, but the fat volume eventually appeared in March 1989 preceded by three weeks of serialisation in the Observer (which largely focused on his dealings with Mrs Thatcher and the genesis of the SDP, rather than on Europe) and launched with a lavish party at Brooks’s to which Jenkins invited practically everyone mentioned in the text, including a lot of leading Europeans (Schmidt, Andreotti, Ortoli, but not Giscard) and Americans (Henry Kissinger, Robert McNamara), as well as all his usual friends and former colleagues. Crispin Tickell read a draft typescript and objected that it contained too little about what Jenkins actually did as President of the Commission. ‘A casual reader could all too easily conclude that what you were doing was seeing a succession of distinguished people, whizzing about Europe and the world, and wining and dining to agreeable purpose . . . You must be careful to avoid self-parody.’7 This accurately anticipated the response of many of the reviewers. Tom Bower, for instance, in the London Evening Standard, claimed that the words ‘lunch’ and ‘dinner’ occurred 2,000 times in 700 pages.8 It is indeed a shamelessly self-indulgent book, much concerned with the author’s stomach, and at times a little self-important, assuming that minor details of his life are of interest to the reader; but it is also tirelessly curious about the leaders, customs and etiquette of the European diplomatic circus and vividly conveys the frenetic experience of rushing by plane, train or avion-taxi from one capital to another. What it fails to convey, as Tickell rightly complained, is any sense of what it was all for. Some of Jenkins’ friends were embarrassed by the book, thinking that it did not show him in his best light. Nevertheless it sold far better than a more earnest account of European politics would have done, notching up 5,000 copies in the first fortnight, and served as a useful (if substantial) hors d’oeuvre before his memoirs, to which he turned in 1988.

  All the time he kept up an enormous output of book reviews – principally for the Observer, for whom he contributed about six a year (at £400 a time), rising to nine in 1989, but also for the Spectator, Sunday Telegraph and several other papers, including local Glasgow papers or SDP publications if they asked him and he was interested in the book. He mainly covered twentieth-century political history and biography, with occasional excursions into the nineteenth, enabling him not only to keep his encyclopaedic knowledge of the genre up to date, but also to pass lapidary judgement on the memoirs and diaries of practically all his contemporaries. He was a fair-minded reviewer but also a conscientious one, who frequently complained that the excessive length of books made them difficult to hold up in bed and took too many hours to read, and he usually commented on the structure, literary quality and index as well as the content. His own style was becoming increasingly florid, often involving elaborate metaphors so extended as to become distracting and faintly ridiculous. At his best, however, he could summon an excellent pithy image. Martin Gilbert’s 700,000-word final volume of the official Churchill biography, for instance, was ‘a formidable slab with which to seal up the tomb’;9 and he brilliantly saw the disgraced President of Austria (and former Secretary-General of the United Nations) Kurt Waldheim as ‘a tawdry individual who is a sort of national portrait of Dorian Gray, exhibiting all their own [that is, the Austrians’] hidden faults and sins’.10 Such bravura touches illuminate most of his reviews.

  As a connoisseur of political careers he loved drawing carefully shaded comparisons across decades, which would not have occurred to anyone else. Of Selwyn Lloyd, to take one example, he commented that he was ‘among Liverpool barristers not merely well behind advocates like F.E. Smith and Shawcross, but not quite up to Maxwell Fyfe’, before going on to compare him with Edward Grey (one of his few historical bêtes noires):

  They both landed the country in disastrous wars. Grey’s was won after four and a half years of slaughter. Lloyd’s was lost after twenty-four hours of humiliating miscalculation and chicanery. But there the comparison stops, for Grey’s foreign policy under an easy-going and domestically oriented Prime Minister was very much his own, whereas Lloyd’s, under a fretful and externally obsessed one, was very much his master’s.

  He was characteristically generous to Lloyd’s biographer, D.R. Thorpe, who, Jenkins wrote, had entered a plea of ‘guilty but with heavily diminished responsibility because of a mind enfeebled by excessive loyalty and inadequate self-confidence. It can hardly be a ringing exculpation, but I think he achieves it. In any event his Suez chapter is a very good one, fair, convincing and compelling.’11, fn1 Few serious writers got a really bad review from Jenkins.

  Reviewing the first instalment (covering 1963–7) of the voluminous diaries of his former colleague, rival and Notting Hill neighbour Tony Benn, however, he calculated that ‘within the field of Labour history alone, I must have spent at least 250 solid hours of reading time on the combined output of Dalton, Gaitskell, Crossman and Mrs Castle. It has been an agreeable enough way of passing the time, although the precipitate of new information or insight gained per hour of reading time has been fairly low.’13 In fact he enjoyed Benn’s diary and wrote to tell him so. Benn replied equally warmly that he was ‘touched’ by Jenkins’ letter and ‘given your own literary achievements honoured that you enjoyed
the diaries’, adding with typical disingenuousness:

  They were momentous times in British politics – and for those of us who worked together in government. For my part I am really sorry that the disintegration which followed should have so damaged the radical tradition in both the Labour and the Liberal parties – and I still wonder if it was inevitable.14

  Benn may have been less pleased by Jenkins’ review, however, which was a good deal sharper than these courtesies suggested. Benn’s facts he judged to be for the most part ‘wholly accurate’, but he thought he had ‘practically no sense of proportion . . . His description of his early period as Postmaster-General is a manual on how not to be a minister.’ While the class warrior of the Seventies and Eighties was yet to come, he concluded witheringly, ‘Mr Benn in the Sixties emerges as nice, honest, not very clever, but full of gimmicky talent.’15 Like Churchill ensuring that history would be kind to him by writing it himself, Jenkins used his unrivalled platform in the Observer and elsewhere to pass Olympian judgement on his contemporaries.

  As well as book reviews – which were a hobby – Jenkins also kept up a steady stream of topical articles on issues of the day, usually with a historical perspective, often on constitutional questions, for the Observer (which paid £2,000 a time), The Times and other papers. A.D. Peters additionally got him a lot of lucrative bookings on the conference and after-dinner speaking circuit, for which he was always willing, if the money was good enough. In October 1988, for instance, he was invited to address Honeywell Computers on the single European market for a fee of £1,000. (‘They certainly ought to pay more,’ he wrote to Sissons. ‘But, as you say, I cd. do it.’)16 Sometimes he was too greedy. When invited to speak to a City audience on ‘Europe and the City’ in 1989 he asked for £2,000–2,500, which was more than they were prepared to pay. He may have been boasting when he told Woodrow Wyatt in 1987 that he could get £10,000 a time for lectures around the world. (‘He says he has a very good agent,’ Wyatt commented enviously. ‘He must have.’)17 An international conference in Finland in 1990 (where he would have appeared with Boris Yeltsin) dropped him when he asked for £7,000; but he did get £5,000 the previous year for a speech in Frankfurt. With no City directorships or international consultancies of the sort other former leaders and Chancellors enjoyed, Jenkins nevertheless racked up a substantial income from speaking as well as writing to keep himself in claret in these years.

  But he also found time to read a lot purely for pleasure, and listed what he read meticulously. On his 1983 summer holiday, immediately after giving up the SDP leadership, for instance, he got through ten books, some admittedly for review (Gaitskell’s diary, Richard Shannon’s biography of Gladstone), some memoirs not for review (A.L. Rowse, John Mortimer), but also novels by Brian Moore, William Boyd, Simenon (in French), Clive James and Dick Francis; and he continued to keep up with contemporary novels, particularly by women writers.18 When the John Menzies bookshop asked him, as part of a promotion, to list twenty favourite books, fifteen of those he offered were fiction. His choice comprised some familiar favourites (Anthony Powell, Proust, Evelyn Waugh and Trollope) and some classics (George Eliot, Hardy, Austen);fn2 several modern British women (Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Rosamond Lehmann, Iris Murdoch), two more British men (E.M. Forster and Aldous Huxley) and two Americans (Scott Fitzgerald and Willa Cather). Of the other five, three were biographical collections (Churchill’s Great Contemporaries, Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, Harold Nicolson’s Some People), only one straight history (D.W. Brogan’s The Development of Modern France) and one architectural (Pevsner on Oxfordshire).20 It was in some ways a safe list; but it is a good guide to the furniture of his mind.

  Of course, in recording the amount of time Jenkins had for reading and writing one must remember that he lived, by most people’s standards in the late twentieth century, an extraordinarily pampered life. All his domestic needs were taken care of: at home Jennifer (with some help) organised his meals, his clothes and the shopping, cooking and laundry – chores with which other husbands were increasingly expected to help. When they had lunch guests at East Hendred the only thing Roy was responsible for was the wine (and in winter the wood for the fire). Away from home he stayed in hotels or with friends – frequently in the British Embassy – and ate in restaurants or one of his clubs. If he had a lot of time to read and write, it was because there was literally nothing else he was required to do except eat, drink and talk. In October 1987 he spent a recuperative long weekend at a health spa in Hampshire, where he presumably ate and drank rather less than usual. Over the five days, as well as a lot of swimming, saunas and massages, he recorded that he read or wrote (including newspapers and letter-writing) for an average of nine hours a day: forty-six hours in total.21 But the pattern of his life was not very different at other times. Wherever he was, at home or staying with friends, the household revolved around him: he would emerge for meals, tennis or croquet, a walk or a drive, but the rest of the time he spent alone reading or writing, like an old-fashioned bachelor academic whose college took care of all his practical arrangements. He unquestionably worked hard, and fast; but if one is inclined to be astonished at his literary and journalistic output, one needs to remember the extraordinarily tolerant support team – primarily Jennifer – who made it possible.fn3

  Jennifer remained remarkably tolerant of his girlfriends, too, who continued to be an accepted and central part of his life – though by this time, following his prostate operation in 1984, the physical element had almost certainly waned. Whatever else he was doing, he still usually contrived to have lunch with Caroline Gilmour at least once a fortnight and often weekly, at a variety of London restaurants (the White Tower in Fitzrovia was one favourite, a French restaurant in Holland Park Avenue called La Pomme d’Amour another) and with Leslie Bonham Carter almost as frequently. He would also often call in for an hour or two at the Ferry House, the Gilmour house on the Thames at Isleworth – particularly handy for Heathrow – or the Bonham Carters’ house in Victoria Road, Kensington. Both Caroline and Leslie would also come to Kensington Park Gardens or to East Hendred when Jennifer was not there, and sometimes when she was. There was nothing secretive about these visits. Jennifer knew all about them – she would often drop Roy off at the Ferry House and meet up again later to drive back to East Hendred – and so did Ian Gilmour and Mark Bonham Carter, who had long ago accepted the position, and both had extramarital relations of their own. Once a year Roy and Caroline would spend a weekend together in Scotland, staying with trustworthy friends on the way up or down. It was a remarkably Edwardian arrangement – aristocratic or Bloomsbury – which was possible because all those concerned had several houses and of course there were no mobile phones enabling – nowadays virtually requiring – spouses to keep constant track of one another. It was, in a favourite Jenkins word, very ‘civilised’, so long as no marriage was threatened and there was no scandal, which there never was.fn4

  Jenkins was not exactly open about these relationships, but he was not apologetic or dissembling about them either. In a feature in The Times in 1993 in which various public figures were asked to describe ‘My Perfect Weekend’ he declined to say who his perfect companion would be, since everyone else ‘cloyingly’ named their husband or wife, ‘whether or not that would be true’.24 In his own books he was uncensorious of his subjects’ sexual irregularities, and in reviews he often criticised biographers who brushed them out of sight. He usually declined to answer questions from students who asked him about politicians’ mistresses; but in the last year of his life he gave a revealing answer to one correspondent who asked him about Churchill’s unusual marital fidelity and wondered about other post-war Prime Ministers, compared with at least two notably randy American Presidents. Reflecting on ‘the absence of British Kennedys and Clintons and the propriety of post-war Prime Ministers’, Jenkins thought Eden was ‘the only exception I could put up. Maybe they would have been more interesting had they been less narrowly focu
ssed on politics, although Eden is not an encouraging example.’25 The clear suggestion is that an affair or two would have made certain recent Prime Ministers less one-dimensional.fn5

  In an interview he gave a few years earlier to Sarah Bradford in connection with her biography of Jackie Kennedy, Jenkins speculated on why Jackie did not marry his friend David Harlech – British ambassador in Washington during the Kennedy years – after JFK’s assassination:

  My view is, having known both of them quite well, that if Jackie had asked him to marry her he probably wouldn’t have been able to resist it but . . . he had a very good sense of self-preservation and he had a very good hedonistic calculus . . . My view is that he would have had the sense to see that life married to Jackie would have had a lot of disadvantages and wouldn’t really have suited him.26

  Whether or not this is true, the phrase that Jenkins here applied to Harlech – ‘hedonistic calculus’ – perfectly described his own approach to life, which governed not only his relationships with women, but his enjoyment of all his other pleasures, which could have threatened his marriage and arguably did damage his career. With Jennifer’s long-suffering acquiescence he calculated that he could enjoy his food and drink and women and clubs and high society and still stand a good chance of becoming Prime Minister, if the political cards had fallen right. If he was required to give up all his other pleasures in order to get to Number Ten, that was a price he would not pay. He thought that he could ‘have it all’ – and very nearly succeeded. If in the end he failed, he reckoned that he enjoyed his life a good deal more than most of those who did make it. ‘Hedonistic calculus’ was a principle which did not let him down.