We live in a society which is increasingly awash with money. I grow ever more sceptical of the alleged economic achievements of this Government. Curing inflation was supposed to be the centrepiece, but our exceptionally high rate is now pointed to almost with pride . . . by the Prime Minister as a still compelling reason for not entering the ERM . . . Thrift was made the theme of the recent Budget. But if this is the desideratum, the Government have presided over a decade of disaster. Savings have collapsed and have been far more than outweighed by erecting the maximum use of personal indebtedness into a socially compelling way of life. The core of the achievement, such as it is, is that this Government has made some people rich and, as some of them are articulate and grateful, they have elevated this into a national triumph.130
Above all Jenkins kept up continuous pressure on Mrs Thatcher over Europe, charging that her increasingly undisguised hostility to all things European worked consistently against the national interest and risked leaving Britain more isolated than at any time since Suez. In January 1988 he was scathing about her failure to reappoint Lord Cockfield, the British Commissioner who had been largely responsible for driving the single market, on the ground that he had supposedly ‘gone native’ in Brussels:
She wishes British industry to have the benefit of a large single market, and would like to exercise a political leadership role within it. But her self-righteousness and instinctive nationalism makes it difficult for her to see that these objectives can only be achieved on a basis of give and take and respect for both the legitimate self-interest and the European idealism of others.131
By refusing to join the ERM, keeping Britain out of moves towards a common currency and a European Central Bank – both ‘serious probabilities for the Nineties’ – he asserted repeatedly that she would damage British industry and endanger the pre-eminence of the City, repeating the historic errors of 1951, 1955–7 and 1978. ‘We could soon find ourselves relegated to the de facto status of a second-rank member,’ he lamented in December 1989, ‘almost as though we had stayed in Efta. It was not for this that we went through the long struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, picked ourselves up after two de Gaulle rebuffs and fought through the referendum campaign of 1975 to the outcome of a massive pro-European majority.’132 ‘Europe is now moving so fast,’ he wrote a month earlier, following Nigel Lawson’s resignation and the removal of Geoffrey Howe from the Foreign Office, ‘that exclusion is more damaging and its subsequent rectification more difficult. Mistakes could be made in the next couple of years (against the better judgement of most senior members of the Cabinet) for which this country will pay long after Mrs Thatcher has ceased to be responsible for their consequence.’133 He consoled himself, however, that the Prime Minister’s ‘increasingly shrill determination to turn her back on nearly 30 years of Conservative commitment to Europe’ was so clearly out of step with her own senior colleagues that it must eventually provoke a split in the Tory Party comparable with the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 or Joseph Chamberlain’s tariff crusade in 1903. ‘I find it difficult to believe that our politics have become so supine that she will be allowed to do so without a degree of political turbulence comparable with those two dates 153 and 86 years ago.’134
Here Jenkins almost seemed to anticipate Mrs Thatcher’s overthrow; yet he could not quite believe it would come through a revolt of her own party. The government, he wrote in the spring of 1990, was exhausted but still dangerous, passing legislation that no one wanted – the poll tax, electricity and water privatisation, student loans – all whipped through Parliament ‘to save the face of a First Minister whose self-righteous stubbornness has not been equalled, save briefly for Neville Chamberlain, since Lord North’. Tory MPs voted tamely for policies they did not agree with, making the government ‘an inverted pyramid of foolish dogmatism’. But retribution would only come through ‘a great electoral revolt’, which he feared ‘may well go too far’ – presumably back to Labour.135 In the Independent in April he likened the seething discontent in the Tory Party to the febrile plotting against Wilson in 1968, when ‘I was the Michael Heseltine of the situation’, which signally failed to unseat Wilson and led only to the election of Ted Heath.136
He could only welcome Mrs Thatcher’s belated agreement to join the ERM – forced on her by John Major and Douglas Hurd during the Tory Party conference in October 1990 only because she could not afford to lose another Foreign Secretary and another Chancellor – but insisted that she had finally done it at the worst possible time for the wrong reasons at the wrong exchange rate. (‘During the 138 months when Britain was outside the ERM,’ he later calculated, ‘the system had worked satisfactorily and quietly . . . Of these months at least 130 in my view would have been better points of entry than the one which, largely for reasons of internal party politics, was eventually chosen.’137 A month later in the Lords he equally welcomed Geoffrey Howe’s lethal resignation speech, which ‘almost precisely endorsed’ everything he had been saying for several years past about Mrs Thatcher’s counterproductive xenophobia.138 Eight dramatic days later she was gone, deserted by nearly half her MPs and abandoned by her Cabinet. As a result, Jenkins wrote in the Observer, ‘November 1990 will undoubtedly rank as one of the classical crisis months in British political history’, comparable to December 1916 or May 1940. Mrs Thatcher would live in history, if only for her longevity and her sex. But, he asked, what ultimately did she achieve? ‘Judged by all the hard criteria, inflation . . . balance of payments, investment, prospects for growth, Britain remains as it was in 1979 a second-rate economy in danger of falling into the third rank.’ Despite her pious talk of thrift and self-help, the government’s most consistent success had been high consumption ‘achieved by a steady policy of living above our means’. She had downgraded the public service in every sphere, yet increased centralisation; and, despite her boasts, she had not increased Britain’s influence in the world.139 Altogether his final verdict on her premiership was almost wholly negative.
But he was not impressed by Major, either. For a time he gave the new, almost unknown Prime Minister the benefit of the doubt, hoping that his professed ambition to put Britain ‘at the heart of Europe’ signalled a real change of direction. But he was soon pressing Major too to be more positive towards Europe, insisting that the federal European ‘superstate’ Mrs Thatcher was now warning about from the back benches was a fantasy. Europe, he believed, would ‘never become an analogue of the United States because its people have not turned their backs on their countries of origin, have not been through a melting pot, and do not have a common language’. At the same time it was still not clear where he would draw the line between federalism and pooled sovereignty, since he went on:
On the other hand Britain being effectively part of the dynamic Europe which has evolved since 1985 will undoubtedly involve some substantial pooling of an increasingly elusive sovereignty and also significant elements of federalism, some of which are indeed there already . . . National identity is not an issue. Some considerable merging of sovereignty is.140
He still believed in maintaining the momentum of ‘ever closer union’ and still refused to say where he thought that evolution should end.
More than anything he simply wanted Britain to be part of the process, wherever it led – not, as so often in the past, grumbling from the sidelines. In the run-up to the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in December 1991 he was afraid that Major would try to finesse the issue, like Wilson in 1970–75, by opting out of the Social Chapter and moves towards a single currency in order to appease his party critics, when the experience of the 1975 referendum showed that the public would respond to a clear cross-party lead, using Labour and Liberal Democrat support (Labour having performed another U-turn on Europe) to overcome Tory opposition. ‘Put country before party, Mr Major,’ he urged in the Observer, begging the Prime Minister to commit Britain now to joining the single currency from the start. A ‘poultice for the Tory party’ was not the same as the national
interest.141
As the 1992 General Election approached, Jenkins was in no doubt that he wanted to see the Tories thrown out, if only on the ground that thirteen years of one party was enough. A decade earlier, he reflected in another Tawney lecture, the SDP had been formed to bring some stability to the see-saw swings of two-party politics; now the country was suffering from the opposite problem, ‘desperately needing a change of government yet half frightened to achieve it’. The Tory government was like ‘a sad old dog needing to be put out of its misery’.142 Single-party rule, he wrote in the Observer, was bad for democracy, bad for civil servants and bad for the government itself:
It is bad for governments to be able to behave as incompetently as this one has done since 1987, both in its handling of the economy and in the shambles of its legislation (poll tax on and off, Broadcasting Act, Football Spectators Act and various educational nonsenses) and still get away with it.143
The electorate, he believed, wanted change but did not fully trust Neil Kinnock. This gave the Lib Dems – now firmly established under Ashdown’s ‘Action Man’ leadership, winning by-elections again and back to 20 per cent in the polls, with the Conservatives and Labour neck-and-neck at around 37 per cent – ‘considerable relevance and opportunity’. It was vital that they should do well in order to ‘oil the rusty springs of change’ and act as a midwife to constitutional reform.144, fn22 Shrewdly he suspected that a Labour government elected in 1992 was likely to be too cautious rather than too radical, drawing a characteristic parallel with the 1930s:
I think its loss of ideological conviction and its desperate search for respectability has made it more likely, in the field of economic policy at least, to model itself more on Philip Snowden than on Franklin Roosevelt.
History taught that in the hung Parliament of 1929–31 MacDonald and Snowden should have heeded the ideas of the Liberal ‘Yellow Book’ promoted by Lloyd George and Keynes at the 1929 election and not the conventional prescriptions of the City. The Lib Dems could not deliberately campaign for a hung Parliament, which in any case he warned was ‘not an easy hand to play for the third party . . . Nevertheless, while it is by no means necessarily a bonanza for the third party it may well be in the interests of the country and may well be the hand that we have to play.’146 In that eventuality, he told Paddy Ashdown, the Lib Dems should insist on at least four ministers in the Cabinet: Ashdown himself, Steel, Ming Campbell and Alan Beith.147 As so often before, however – and again in the future – the Liberal dream of exerting influence by holding the balance was not to be.
For most of the campaign – in which Jenkins played almost no active part – the likeliest outcome did seem to be either a small Labour majority or a hung Parliament. Either way Jenkins was by no means alone in anticipating the end of Tory rule. At The Club – the most Establishment of all the dining clubs to which he belonged, founded in the eighteenth century by Dr Johnson and friends – those present on 31 March, ten days before polling day, placed bets on the outcome: only three out of twelve predicted a Tory victory. Jenkins predicted a Labour majority of thirty.fn23 In fact Major was returned with a much-reduced but still clear overall majority of twenty-one, while the Liberal Democrats won only twenty seats (on 18 per cent of the poll). Tory hegemony was thus confirmed for another Parliament; Labour still had some way to go before it would be trusted with government again, and the Lib Dems were no nearer breaking the mould than the Liberals had been in 1974.
Roy and Jennifer watched the results in Kensington Park Gardens with Hayden and Laura Phillips, the Bonham Carters and Bill and Sylvia Rodgers. Rodgers told Hugo Young that he and Jenkins were ‘both depressed by the results as they came in. We didn’t want another Tory government. But we thought Kinnock no good as a potential PM.’149 In fact – unless he was being completely hypocritical – Jenkins had higher hopes of Kinnock than this suggests. A week after the election, when Kinnock had resigned the Labour leadership, he wrote him a remarkably sympathetic and generous letter (remarkable considering how mercilessly Kinnock had mocked him a decade earlier):
Dear Neil,
May I send you a note of greeting and sympathy? I thought you fought a very good campaign. I would have been happy to see you Prime Minister, and I think you might have made a very considerable one. I also thought you handled things well on the dreadful night.
I hope you find satisfactory things to do. In my experience people who do not become Prime Minister are often happier than those who do. The misfortune is sometimes for the country, not for the individual!
Yours ever,
Roy150
The result of the 1992 election meant that those who had warned back in 1981 that the only effect of the SDP would be to perpetuate Tory rule had been vindicated for a third time. Jenkins had recognised the risk, but hoped the Alliance could make a sufficient breakthrough to negate it. He was almost more disappointed by this failure than he had been in 1983 or 1987. In the next Parliament he would begin to think seriously about some form of reunification of the centre left to harness what he still believed was an anti-Conservative majority in the country just waiting to be mobilised.
Meanwhile, in September 1991, he had published his long-planned memoirs. In the Introduction he confessed that he had been reluctant to put pen to paper from fear that there was ‘inevitably a touch of “ending up” about it’.151 In fact he had another full decade of active life ahead of him. But as a compulsive writer and avid consumer of others’ memoirs he never doubted that he would one day write his own. ‘Of course,’ he told Robin Day in a television interview in 1966, ‘one always thinks about one’s autobiography. One has to live on something when one’s retired.’152 As a reader, he was sceptical of the value of most political memoirs. Reviewing Hugh Dalton’s third volume in 1962, he wrote that ‘the fallibility of elderly memory and most men’s desire for self-justification combine to erect a fairly thick screen between the reader and events as they actually happened’, and he had not changed that view in the intervening thirty years; but he thought Dalton an exception, because he was ‘at least half a diarist’.153 Jenkins himself had never kept a regular diary, except for his four years in Brussels. But from 1964 onwards he had dictated a note of every major episode in his career soon after the event; and he had also kept meticulously detailed engagement diaries since 1945, in which he recorded not only all his engagements but exactly how long they lasted, as well as everything else he had done that day – how far he had walked, run or swum; journey times; whom he had lunch with and where; even the weather – so that he could (as can his biographer) reconstruct with extraordinary precision what he was doing every day of his adult life. That at least gave him a framework for accurate recollection, though he was well aware, as he told the Royal Society of Literature in 1972, ‘how quickly and almost inevitably a film of retrospective wishful thinking clouds the memory’.154
The possession of all this primary material, however, and his forty years’ experience as a biographer in knowing how to use it, lent his book, when he finally came to write it, a quality of reflective detachment almost unique among politicians’ memoirs. A Life at the Centre, as he chose rather banally to call it, is a genuine auto-biography – a biographer turning his skills upon his own life almost as if it were someone else’s, able to balance the record of what he thought at the time with the longer perspective of hindsight. As a result he can often be attractively self-deprecating: the older man shaking his head at the follies of the younger, while not seeking to deny them. At the same time there is an undoubted vein of vanity in the book: as in the European Diary an assumption – perhaps inevitable in any autobiography – that quite small details of his life are of interest to the reader, and an unshakable self-satisfaction (notwithstanding the self-criticism relating to specific episodes) that his views have been broadly consistent and right all along.
Coming to autobiography for the first time, he was uncertain of the right tone of voice, so rather than start at the beginning with his chil
dhood, he began with the easier part and plunged in (in Italy in the summer of 1988) with his first appointment to ministerial office in 1964, followed by the next dozen years of high-level politics under Wilson: the Home Office, the Treasury, the civil war in the Labour Party over Europe and his failure to become Prime Minister. Only then did he go back to Pontypool, Oxford, Hugh Gaitskell and his years as a semi-detached backbencher in the 1950s, before revisiting Brussels – the least compelling part of the book, perhaps because he had covered it so recently in his published Diary – and going on to the excitement and disappointment of the SDP, writing (as was his habit) in various locations and holiday homes around Europe and finishing in the autumn of 1990. For the first time, apart from a couple of minor exceptions, he abandoned his longtime publishers Collins, mainly because the personnel had changed – neither Mark Bonham Carter nor Ian Chapman was still there – and took this book to Macmillan, from whom Michael Sissons managed to extract the huge advance of £130,000.155 A Life at the Centre was launched with a party at Brooks’s on 11 September to which, as usual, practically the whole liberal establishment was invited.
The general tone of the book was urbane and generous, even to political opponents and rivals. Jenkins did not gloss over his sharply critical view of Wilson over the European issue, but on reflection was much more understanding of the difficulties he had faced. He allowed himself a few digs at Denis Healey, Jim Callaghan and Tony Benn; but the one person he could not forgive, since their dispute was so recent and the damage inflicted on his most cherished project so painful, was David Owen. He pulled no punches in his account of the way Owen’s vanity, impatience and self-deluding intransigence had destroyed the idealism and unity of the SDP and then of the Alliance. By chance Owen’s own enormous memoir, Time to Declare (at 800 pages one-third longer than Jenkins’, covering a far shorter career) was published almost simultaneously, so the press coverage of both books focused heavily on what each said about the other. Owen maintained that he had not intended to rehearse his quarrel with Jenkins in such detail, but that having seen Jenkins’ criticism of himself in proof he felt obliged to sharpen his own account, defending his own actions and setting out his charge that Jenkins had used the SDP dishonestly as a vehicle for his own ambition and should have joined the Liberals in the first place.156 By the time his book came out his rump SDP had folded, so it was inevitably seen as an overlong and unconvincing justification of his essential failure, by comparison with Jenkins’ elegant retrospect of a life well lived.fn24
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