Roy Jenkins

by John Campbell

  In the hour of her third victory, Mrs Thatcher claimed to be horrified by Jenkins’ defeat. ‘A man of such great distinction and stature. It was dreadful,’ she told Woodrow Wyatt, adding characteristically: ‘It tells you something about the Scots.’106 She immediately offered him, through Wyatt, the second consolation of a peerage. He had some doubts about accepting it, partly because he did not want to be on a party list (‘He’s very vain, you know,’ Mrs Thatcher remarked) and partly because, from Mr Balfour’s Poodle onwards, he had been pretty scathing about the Lords and he retained some admiration for those historical figures who had remained plain ‘Mr Gladstone’ or ‘Mr Chamberlain’ to the end of their days. He had said nothing, however, that made it actually hypocritical to accept and, like most ageing politicians, he wanted to retain a foothold in Parliament. He was also pleased to able to pay tribute to his old constituency (not Stechford, which he had represented for twenty-six years, but Hillhead, which he had represented for just five) and his birthplace by taking the title Baron Jenkins of Hillhead, of Pontypool in the County of Gwent. (He had to be known as Lord Jenkins of Hillhead to distinguish himself from an existing Labour peer, Lord Jenkins of Putney.) His elevation was announced in July, but did not take effect until December, when he was introduced into the Upper House by Jo Grimond and Jack Diamond, following – of course – a good lunch with Jennifer and all three children and their spouses plus Mark and Leslie Bonham Carter, the Grimonds, the Diamonds, John Harris and his wife, and Sir Alexander Cole, Garter King of Arms, who had facilitated his choice of title. Characteristically Jennifer declined as far as possible to be known as Lady Jenkins, preferring to stick with her own title, awarded in 1985, as Dame Jennifer.

  No sooner was the election over than David Steel – determined not to be pre-empted by an Owen veto, as in 1983 – proposed an early merger of the two Alliance parties; and Jenkins immediately backed him, using a Sunday lunchtime radio interview to put his view (which was also Bill Rodgers’ and Shirley Williams’) ‘firmly but non-provocatively’ on the record before Monday’s meeting of the SDP national committee.107 Unfortunately Steel’s somewhat clumsy initiative irritated a number of the SDP hierarchy who felt that he was making a crude takeover bid. Most of Jenkins’ closest friends and supporters agreed with him in seeing merger as the natural way forward; but all four (initially) of Owen’s surviving parliamentary colleagues, most of the SDP peers and both the party’s trustees (David Sainsbury and Leslie Murphy), as well as his devoted band of (mainly female) admirers on the national committee, still clung to their separate identity – though Charles Kennedy fairly quickly switched sides to join the pro-merger camp. Jenkins was deeply depressed that the venture which had been launched with such optimism should have descended to such bitter squabbling. ‘Rarely, even in the voluminous history of family feuds,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘can there have been such unrelenting argument over the details of a will while the whole inheritance was manifestly being allowed to slip down the drain.’108 But after three ‘horrible’ meetings over the following weeks Owen was able to carry an 18:13 majority against merger and for a referendum of the membership in early August.

  ‘I have a nagging feeling that I ought to have done more to transcend the mood of destructive bitterness which seized the party,’ Jenkins reproached himself with hindsight. ‘I ought to have done something, though exactly what it was I still do not know.’109 In truth he underestimated the strength of opposition to something that seemed to him so obviously right. What he did was to write several newspaper articles putting the case for merger, while privately trying to win round those of his old friends – notably Bob Maclennan and Jack Diamond – who were opposed. In the Sunday Times on 12 July he wrote of his distress at the division in the party, but insisted that he was not dismayed because he was so sure that the creation of a single party with a single leader was the only way to protect and build on what had been achieved. ‘I always saw the SDP as a catalyst which would change the face of British politics and not just as a like-minded sect.’ Steel might have been a bit precipitate in forcing the issue, he conceded, but he was only voicing the feeling of every Alliance committee room. Two General Elections had shown how hard it was for a third force to crack the two-party monopoly. ‘The idea of that challenging force achieving anything if it is itself split into a third and fourth force is simply preposterous.’ Of course there were minor differences between the two halves of the Alliance; but ‘the only certain way of having no policy differences’, he sharply reminded the Owenites, ‘is to have a party so exclusive that it is little more than a private army. But private armies do not win great political campaigns.’ To do that a party needed to make a wide appeal, as the Alliance had done in 1981–2. ‘I am as proud of the SDP as anyone,’ he concluded, ‘but it is its capacity for political creativity, not for narrow exclusivity, which excites my enthusiasm. Neither Britain nor the SDP should be isolationist.’110

  Bob Maclennan – not at all a natural Owenite, but in his quiet way one of the most loyal Jenkinsites going right back to 1966 – wrote three days later that he hated finding himself on the opposite side of the argument. ‘As you probably know from your experience with Hugh Gaitskell over Europe it is bitter indeed to disagree profoundly with those whom you love and admire.’ But he believed the Alliance could be saved only by ‘managed convergence’, not by ‘enforced merger’.111 He saw no more hope for the survival of a separatist SDP than Jenkins did. But merger would not work either if it was forced too soon. ‘I think it still lies within your power to save the Alliance by proposing something short of full merger . . . Surely there is an alternative? Must the fate of the Alliance be decided by the Ultras?’112 The problem for Maclennan and others who wanted to carry on as two parties primarily in order to avert the break-up of the SDP was that Owen was happy to split the SDP – as early as 17 June he was proposing an ‘amicable divorce’113 – so long as he could still lead his own pure SDP uncompromised by the despised Liberals and Jenkinsites, who in his view had plotted from the beginning to betray it. No compromise was possible because Owen did not want one.

  A revealing insight into Owen’s essentially solipsistic thinking emerges from his response to John Grigg, who wrote begging him not to withdraw into ‘bitter isolation’ and copied his reply to Jenkins. ‘Why does it have to be bitter?’ Owen wrote. ‘And I’m not even sure I will be all that isolated.’ Ironically he deplored Grigg’s ‘lack of historical perspective’. Who could predict what would happen three or ten years ahead? He was still only forty-nine and could afford to wait. ‘I’d like to be proved wrong, but if it turns out that the new merged party is the Liberal Party writ large, maybe my being on the outside could help restore the credibility of the centre?’ (What did he mean by that?) Even if he agreed to join the merged party, he argued, he would not carry with him a lot of dedicated SDP activists. ‘These people are essential – they are not dining room social democrats, they are the backbone of the SDP. What is on offer is for me to lead a party that has no backbone. No thanks, it is simply not for me, and all my family agree.’114

  The eventually agreed wording of the ballot paper offered a choice between (Option 1) supposedly seeking to negotiate ‘a closer constitutional framework for the Alliance, short of merger’ or (Option 2) ‘a merger of the SDP and the Liberal Party into one party’. But this was disingenuous, since Owen’s whole purpose since 1983 had been to resist closer relations with the Liberals and it was dishonest to pretend that a closer partnership was what he intended now. Nevertheless the apparent reasonableness of Option 1 persuaded a substantial minority of SDP members – afraid of the consequences if the party’s biggest hitter chose to walk away – to vote for it. Following a bitter public campaign in which each side accused the other of wishing to destroy the party they both professed to love, the result, declared on 6 August, was a clear but far from overwhelming majority for merger: 25,897 to 19,228 (57:42 per cent) on a very respectable 77 per cent turnout. Owen promptly res
igned the leadership, but quickly made clear his intention of leading a rump party that would claim to be the continuing SDP. This was a claim that Jenkins thought preposterous. The minority was ‘uncomfortably large’, he told the party’s autumn conference at the end of August; nevertheless the result was decisive. If the vote was to be ignored, how could the party retain the principle of one-member-one-vote – the very principle of which Owen had been the great champion – at the heart of its constitution?

  It must be accepted that a majority vote is a majority vote. Those who contributed to . . . that result cannot within any practice or theory of one member one vote be treated as the dissidents, the deserters, the disrupters – and the minority as the sole repository of the true faith. Once that simple democratic principle is fully and freely accepted, then I believe the difficulties can be unravelled.115

  One at least of Owen’s supporters recognised this truth. Bob Maclennan – the co-author of the SDP’s constitution in 1981 – accepted the result and reluctantly took on the leadership in order to negotiate the merger that the majority had voted for. This was a messy process with which Jenkins was thankful not to be involved, but it eventually resulted in the emergence of a new party, initially called the Social and Liberal Democrats, but soon simply the Liberal Democrats.fn19 After all the ructions within the SDP there was some speculation, when the negotiation was complete, that the Liberals might at the last minute baulk at giving up their historic identity. Jenkins was in America promoting his Truman biography, but he was pressed to fly back to speak at the special Liberal assembly convened to approve the marriage. ‘Houston,’ he noted in his memoirs, ‘is the one city in the US from which you can fly to Europe after a dinner speech.’ Catching a midnight flight to Paris and changing again at Heathrow to fly on to Manchester, he was on his feet in Blackpool seventeen hours after he had sat down in Texas.118 In fact his dash was unnecessary, as the Liberals backed merger by an overwhelming margin of nearly six to one. But at least he was able to celebrate the moment over dinner with Ming and Elspeth Campbell, Ludovic Kennedy and the Goodharts.

  In The Times he looked forward with satisfaction to an ‘honest marriage’ of the two parties, noting that ‘nearly all the best features of the SDP constitution have been accepted’, while the potential difficulty over nuclear weapons had been resolved with a statement ‘in no way tinged with British or Western unilateralism’ that Hugh Gaitskell would have had no quarrel with. Altogether, he believed, the merger negotiations had produced ‘a satisfactory prospectus for an electable left-of-centre alternative to Thatcherism’, such as the SDP had always aimed at providing, free of the dogmas of both left and right, but with the emphasis firmly towards the left:

  A controlled economy is not much use at producing consumer goods. But ‘the market’, in terms of protecting the environment or safeguarding health, schools, universities or Britain’s scientific future, cannot run a whelk stall. And if asked which is under greater threat in Britain today, the supply of consumer goods or the nexus of civilised public services, I unhesitatingly answer the latter.

  It was not a question of choosing socialism over capitalism, or regulation over freedom, he insisted. ‘It was precisely to free the British people from that false two-dimensional choice that we were created . . . I hope that this weekend we can lay the foundations for returning to a period of effective challenge. Unless we do, I fear that the middle ground of British politics will be barren and chaotic for many years to come.’119

  The middle ground remained chaotic for another two years while the Liberal Democrats struggled to establish themselves under the fresh leadership of Paddy Ashdown, and the rump SDP predictably failed to make any independent headway and finally wound itself up after coming a humiliating seventh behind the Monster Raving Loony Party at the Bootle by-election in 1990.fn20 Jenkins welcomed its demise, insisting once again that Owen’s party was not the SDP, which had voted democratically to merge in 1987 into the new party in 1988, but ‘a loose cannon crashing around the deck of a warship’. With the field to themselves he now hoped that the Liberal Democrats could move on. Having demonstrated his continuing commitment by taking on the leadership of the Lib Dem peers in 1988, he now saw two possible roles for the party in the 1990s, depending on whether Labour’s move back towards the middle ground enabled it to win the next election. ‘If it does win,’ he wrote in the Observer, ‘which I would prefer to a fourth dose of Thatcherism, there will be need for a liberalising force on its flank. If it loses, there will be need of an alternative challenger for the future.’ The ambition was more modest than in 1981, but he believed the Lib Dems now had ‘a better chance to perform one of these roles’.121

  Meanwhile he used the House of Lords – plus a steady output of newspaper articles and letters to the press – to maintain his wholesale excoriation of Thatcherism. The Upper House suited him very well as a platform where he could deliver magisterial, somewhat lofty speeches to a respectful audience of his similarly ennobled contemporaries, free of the heckling of the Commons. He made his maiden speech during a debate on taxation in February 1988, pointing out characteristically that it was actually his second maiden speech in that chamber, since when he was first elected to the Commons the Lower House was still sitting in the Lords while its own chamber was restored after its bombing in the war. Recalling that earlier maiden speech, on Stafford Cripps’ 1948 budget, he explicitly recanted his youthful enthusiasm for penal taxation – ‘my certainties have perhaps become a little less angular over the passage of four decades’ – but still disputed the currently prevailing view that ‘the supreme duty of statesmanship is to reduce taxation’. There was certainly no virtue in taxation for its own sake, he conceded. ‘But a decent fiscal rectitude is a great deal preferable to a Gadarene rush to tax reduction at all costs’ – as should be clear from the experience of the United States, which had managed in seven years to reduce itself from ‘the world’s greatest and richest economy . . . to the world’s greatest debtor’. (‘Keynes, the alleged father of permissive finance,’ he added in an article in The Times on the same theme a few weeks later, ‘would have turned in his grave at the improvidence of Reaganomics.’)122

  There is no doubt . . . about the ability of a low-taxation, market-oriented economy to produce consumer goods, even if an awful lot of them are imported, far better than any planned economy that ever was or probably ever can be invented. However, I am not convinced that such a society and economy, particularly if it is not infused with the civic optimism which was in many ways the true epitome of Victorian values, is equally good at protecting the environment or safeguarding health, schools, universities or Britain’s scientific future.123

  Jenkins deliberately got that relatively uncontroversial maiden speech out of the way in order to be able to move a serious resolution the following week condemning the Prime Minister’s relentless centralisation of power to Whitehall generally and herself personally. This speech – consciously echoing John Dunning’s famous motion of 1780 (directed at George III) that ‘the influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing and ought to be diminished’ – was described by the historian of Whitehall, Peter Hennessy, as ‘a tour de force on the condition of institutional Britain’.124 In addition to his previous criticism of Mrs Thatcher’s abuse of Cabinet government and her intolerance of such independent centres of influence as the Church of England, the universities and the BBC, he focused in particular on the emasculation of local government, recalling that when he became a young MP the town clerks of cities like Birmingham were powerful, austere figures, ‘the guardians of legality and the near equals of the permanent secretaries in Whitehall’. Their autonomy had been severely reduced by the reorganisation of local government by the Heath government in 1973; but the Thatcher government, by its rate-capping of ‘loony left’ councils in London, Liverpool and elsewhere, had driven the process much further:

  They have used every weakness of local government as an excuse for making it still weaker a
nd every political extravagance, by a few authorities, as a reason for also penalising the responsible ones and transferring still more power to the centre. The result has been a degree of civic degradation . . . which it would be difficult to imagine being imposed in any other democratic country.

  It was inconceivable, he suggested, that President Reagan or President Mitterrand could simply abolish the mayors of Washington or Paris, as Mrs Thatcher had abolished Livingstone’s GLC.125 London was now unique among the capitals of the Western world in having no single elected voice.fn21

  In other speeches in 1988–90 Jenkins defended the Foreign Office against Mrs Thatcher’s style of ‘megaphone diplomacy and government by indignation’ (‘Each morning we read, by courtesy of Mr Bernard Ingham and the lobby system, a daily report on a kind of Richter scale about the force of the previous day’s volcanic eruptions’);127 moved an amendment to the government’s reformed Official Secrets Act attempting (unsuccessfully) to allow a ‘public interest’ defence for whistle-blowers;128 and another – also rejected – to postpone for a year the introduction of student loans to allow anomalies in the legislation to be ironed out. In the course of this speech, commenting on the flood of ill-thought-out legislation in the government’s third term, he reflected on ‘the fatal frenzy which seizes governments when the basis of their support becomes ever narrower’ – likening the present situation to the Callaghan government’s nationalisation of ship-building in 1976 (which to his shame he had voted for in his last days as a Labour MP).129 But his most contemptuous dismissal of the government’s record over the previous eleven years came when he moved a resolution in March 1990 condemning Nicholas Ridley’s handling of the Fayed brothers’ contested takeover of Harrods (an ‘emporium’, he was careful to point out, that he did not himself patronise):