In his final chapter, entitled ‘Establishment Whig or Persistent Radical?’, Jenkins attempted to sum up his own career, acknowledging that his hedonistic tastes and social life might have sometimes given a false impression but insisting that his views had all along remained consistently radical. He placed himself, for instance, clearly to the left of both Jim Callaghan and Denis Healey, let alone David Owen, and summarised his abiding convictions in a single paragraph:
My broad position remains firmly libertarian, sceptical of official cover-ups and uncompromisingly internationalist, believing sovereignty to be an almost total illusion in the modern world, although both expecting and welcoming the continuance of strong differences in national traditions and behaviour. I distrust the deification of the enterprise culture. I think there are more limitations to the wisdom of the market than were dreamt of in Mrs Thatcher’s philosophy. I believe that levels of taxation on the prosperous, having been too high for many years (including my own period at the Treasury), are now too low for the provision of decent public services. And I think that the privatisation of near-monopolies is about as irrelevant (and sometimes worse than) were the Labour Party’s proposals for further nationalisation in the 1970s and early 1980s.158
Did he, looking back, regret having devoted so much of his life to politics? He certainly believed that he had been too narrowly focused on politics as a young man, first at Oxford and then as a young MP, when he was ‘too much of a party loyalist, thinking more about the game than about the merits of issues’. But he believed that he found a better balance from the mid-1950s, when his second career as a writer gave him ‘both the material and the intellectual detachment to treat party machines with scepticism’. From this time onwards he believed that politics, ‘not always taken in excessive doses’, had given him ‘more satisfaction than I could have obtained from any other way of life’:
It has inevitably produced its ration of boredom, pettiness, frustration, exhaustion and dismay, but less I think than I would have found in any profession or other occupation. And to offset these low points there has been greater variety and stimulus, a more frequent sense of widening horizons, at least as many friends, and a wider acquaintanceship both with people and with places than I would have been likely to find elsewhere.
He believed that his Home Office reforms in the 1960s had been significant and worthwhile. His stint at the Treasury, on the other hand, while important and largely successful at the time, left no comparable legacy. (‘Economic management by its very nature leaves no footprints in the sand. The tide of the next Chancellor washes them away.’) Paradoxically he thought his contribution in opposition to helping secure Britain’s entry to the EEC would have ‘a longer-term effect’; and he believed the creation of the EMS during his time in Brussels would prove ‘not merely durable but seminal’. The SDP had sadly proved less durable, ‘although not necessarily less seminal’. Altogether he felt he had had more influence on events than he could have realistically hoped for when he embarked on a political career, and hoped he had done more good than harm. ‘But I do not feel certainty about this, for my beliefs have become much less dogmatic and my outlook far more relativist than at the beginning.’159
Finally he asked himself whether he regretted not having been Prime Minister, when the opportunity had several times seemed to be within his grasp. There had been moments in 1968–9 and again in 1972–3 when a more determined effort on his part might have snatched the prize; alternatively, had he kept his head down in 1971–2, finessed the European issue and retained the deputy leadership, he might have been well placed to succeed Wilson in 1976. There was also ‘a brief flickering moment’ in 1981–2 when the early success of the SDP seemed to give him another chance. The fact that he raised the question showed clearly that he did at least half-regret his failure. Judging his career against earlier ‘nearly men’, he consoled himself that ‘some non-prime ministerial politicians – Joseph Chamberlain, Ernest Bevin and R.A. Butler, for example – put more imprint on British politics than did, say, Campbell-Bannerman, Anthony Eden or Alec Home’. Nevertheless he quoted Melbourne’s remark that it was ‘a damned fine thing’ to have been Prime Minister, even if only for two months. ‘It puts one in a sort of apostolic succession of forty-nine men and one woman descending from Walpole, for which no amount of explaining how narrowly or even honourably it was missed is a compensation.’ (Gaitskell, he characteristically added, was ‘a considerably greater man than either of his two immediate Labour successors, yet there is no contesting the fact that because he was out of that list and they are in he has become more quickly forgotten by those who did not know him.’)160
Yet he insisted that he did not really regret that he was not on the list, since he suspected that he would not actually have enjoyed it very much. He valued too many other things more, and lacked the single-minded ambition of those – he mentioned Napoleon, Lloyd George and Churchill – who craved power for its own sake and were at ease with it. ‘Although I think that I was a decisive and even an adventurous politician at various stages in my life, and had more sensible views about how to lead a government than many of those who have actually done it, I nonetheless lacked at least one of the essential ingredients of a capacity to seize power.’fn25 He was sorry to have let down those who had looked to him as their leader. But looking around him at the afterlives of those who had been Prime Minister – this was a theme he was to develop more strongly as the 1990s went on – he was not inclined to envy them. He had had a good life, with ‘a lot of friends and a lot of interests’. He had been ‘married for forty-six years to the same wife’ and was on ‘good and even close terms’ with his three children. These, he coolly reflected, ‘are not negligible fixed points. There are also seven grandchildren who have so far brought much more pleasure than pain.’ ‘It seems to me,’ he ended, ‘that I would be inexcusably churlish if I concluded with any note of complaint against fate, or events, or almost anyone with whom I have been closely associated.’162 The characteristically precise qualification of that final ‘almost’ can surely only have been aimed at David Owen.
A Life at the Centre received mainly generous reviews – a good many of them, it must be said, written by his friends – and is now regularly named, with Denis Healey’s The Time of My Life, as one of the two best political memoirs of recent years. Most reviewers praised Jenkins’ historian’s perspective and his ability to laugh at himself and admit his own mistakes. John Grigg in the Times Literary Supplement, for instance, called it ‘a marvellous account of high politics by a participant writing with honesty, irony and sustained narrative verve’;163 while Anthony Quinton in the Spectator thought Jenkins ‘a confident commentator on his own performance . . . He is not afraid to praise himself and earns the right to do so by unfudged self-criticism.’164 But several regretted the absence of any serious discussion of political ideas or much personal revelation;fn26 and some – mainly Labour writers who could not forgive the SDP – thought him insufferably self-satisfied. The historian Ben Pimlott admired the writing, but criticised Jenkins’ ‘arrogance to believe that the world could be his oyster on his own terms’;166 and John Smith – then Shadow Chancellor, soon to succeed Kinnock as Labour leader, a Gaitskellite right-winger who had declined to join the SDP – was caustic about Jenkins’ disloyalty to the party that had made his career: he did not fight to save the party he loved, Smith charged, because he did not love it, but was all along an ambitious careerist solely interested in furthering his own career.167, fn27 Between these poles, Peter Hennessy, writing in the Times Educational Supplement, was perhaps the most objectively laudatory:
These are beautifully written recollections. The vocabulary, the quality of the language, the mixture of weighty judgements lightened by phrases glowing with characterful insight into other figures, paragraphs infused with the spirit of place and (unexpectedly this) sections of truly brilliant comic writing, make A Life at the Centre a deeply pleasurable read.170
A Life a
t the Centre marked the end of Jenkins’ active political career. But it marked a new beginning of his career as a writer. The next decade would see him move on to three more big biographical books (two of them highly praised bestsellers) as well as two or three slighter ones, exercising continuing political influence behind the scenes. He was by no means finished yet.
* * *
fn1 ‘This is a model biography of a middle-rank politician,’ he concluded. ‘I would count myself very lucky if I were eventually done by someone as balanced, sympathetic and well-informed as Mr Thorpe.’12
fn2 Here again he loved classifying. He read Middlemarch ‘properly’ for the first time in 1988, and judged it (in the TLS) ‘a great novel, more penetrating than Thackeray, less circumscribed than Austen’. Its only fault was that the two stories did not really fit together: ‘It is like one of those old big railway stations where one half has been built by one company and one half by another.’19
fn3 In 1994 he fell off a table when attempting to change a light bulb. Luckily he did not hurt himself, but he was deterred from attempting anything similar again. One friend wrote mock-sympathetically that there was ‘something endearingly risible in . . . the thought of you attempting to change an electric light’.22
fn4 The press, or certainly a large number of journalists, must have known about his relationships, but nothing ever appeared even in the gossip columns. In June 1983, for instance, just a week after the General Election, the Times Diary carried a trivial item reporting that Jenkins had been seen drinking white wine with his cheese at the three-Michelin-starred Chelsea restaurant La Tante Claire. But it omitted to mention that his lunch companion was Caroline Gilmour.23
fn5 Jenkins never had much time for John Major as Prime Minister. But he might have thought him less one-dimensional if he had known about Edwina Currie.
fn6 As an unapologetic Keynesian, Jenkins spoke, with J.K. Galbraith, at an event in Cambridge to mark Keynes’ centenary in December 1983. Much of his contribution was a rehash of his biographical essay in Nine Men of Power, but he also stressed Keynes’ Liberalism and claimed his posthumous support for the Alliance. (‘The Alliance was made for him. I wish he were here to help make it.’) So-called ‘crude Keynesianism’, he conceded, might have had ‘some limitations, but it was a great advance on crude pre-Keynesianism’. What was needed now in Downing Street and the White House, he concluded, was ‘some of the rational panache which Keynes showed nearly fifty years ago. We may not see his like again, but let us at least hope that the world economy is not ruined by his denigrators.’34
fn7 Jenkins frequently found himself in these years speaking in the House immediately after Heath, and taking much the same line as the ex-Prime Minister, as he ironically acknowledged in March 1985. ‘I do not know what effect losing the leadership of the Conservative party is said to have had on his temper, but it has had a remarkably good effect on the sense and sweep of his judgement and view of the world.’38
fn8 In fact Mrs Thatcher did support a considerable extension of majority voting as part of the Single European Act – something she later regretted.
fn9 In a sentence that he cut from the letter as published, Jenkins was more specific about his criteria for authorising surveillance: ‘To avoid euphemism . . . I would probably have signed a warrant against Mr Scargill, not because of the strike, but because of his stated general desire to overthrow our system of government, and refused them against Mrs Ruddock, Monsignor Kent, Ms Hewitt or Ms Harman.’56 Joan Ruddock and Bruce Kent were leading anti-nuclear campaigners; Patricia Hewitt and Harriet Harman – later model Blairites – were then seen as Labour left-wingers.
fn10 Just before the 1985 conference Clive Lindley edited a selection of Jenkins’ writings and speeches about the making of the Alliance, entitled Partnership of Principle. Starting with the Dimbleby Lecture and his speeches at Warrington, Llandudno and Hillhead, it also included his Tawney lecture and an introduction based on his New Democrat article.
fn11 Reflecting in his memoirs on his own and Owen’s different view of the Liberals, Jenkins concluded sagely: ‘He essentially regarded the Liberals as a disorderly group of vegetarian bearded pacifists . . . I treated them as the statesmanlike heirs of Gladstone and Asquith. The truth was no doubt somewhere between the two, but I am sure that my method pushed them in the right direction from an SDP point of view, and that his pushed them in the wrong direction.’ He regretted having failed to engage successfully with Owen in this period, but it had become ‘an extraordinarily difficult thing to do. If one spoke softly . . . he interpreted it as weakness. If one spoke harshly he took deep umbrage. I have never tried to work closely with anyone with whom it was so difficult to talk things out.’69 In 1987 – after the election – Jenkins told Woodrow Wyatt that the trouble was that ‘David must either be an acolyte or have acolytes. He can be nothing in between. He cannot deal with equals.’70
fn12 It was probably with a view to his eligibility for the Chancellorship that Jenkins decided in 1972, when given an honorary doctorate, that he should take his MA, which he had never done. He wrote to Christopher Hill, the Master of Balliol, hoping it could be awarded in absentia with little fuss, ‘as I do not relish the faint ridiculousness of a middle-aged baptism’.73
fn13 The novelist Anthony Powell – an ardent Thatcherite – was initially inclined to vote for Jenkins, ‘not only as a friend, as also most suitable for the job’. But he was so disgusted by the university refusing Mrs Thatcher a degree that he was ‘unwilling to lend public support to anyone even moderately tainted with Leftism like Roy’. He also objected to Mrs Goodhart telling him how to vote between two Balliol men.77 His journal does not reveal how he did vote.
fn14 In 1991 Jenkins had to deal with a cross letter from Prince Philip complaining about being misquoted in the new Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations. Jenkins could only reply that: (a) Oxford University Press was independent of the university and (b) he was used to being misquoted himself; but he could not resist pointing out to his opposite number that the recent Cambridge Guide to English Literature had received terrible reviews.83
fn15 He marked his own seventieth birthday in November 1990, for instance, with a dinner for ninety at Brooks’s – all real friends, no-one ex officio, so no David Owen, and no Shirley Williams either, though she sent two bottles of claret; David Steel was invited, but could not come. The seating plan was interesting. At an E-shaped table, Charles, Cynthia and Edward each sat at the head of one arm, with Roy in the middle of Edward’s side, Jennifer on Cynthia’s. Roy’s immediate companions were Marie-Alice de Beaumarchais on his right, Frankie Donaldson on his left and Caroline Gilmour opposite him, with Nicko Henderson, John Grigg, Jeremy Hutchinson and Claus Moser the other men within talking distance, and Leslie Bonham Carter one place beyond John Grigg. Noel Annan spoke and Roy replied. Jakie Astor commented on the ‘spontaneous and prolonged applause’ for Jennifer.88 A week later there was a second celebration in New York with a company including Arthur Schlesinger, J.K. Galbraith and Marietta Tree; and in December Ian Aitken of the Guardian hosted yet another dinner at the Garrick Club, at which the company was mainly journalists – Robin Day (who gave the main speech), Peter Jenkins, Alan Watkins, Tony Howard, Charles Wilson, Bill Keegan, Hugh Cudlipp, Frank Johnson – but also included Bill Rodgers, Anthony Lester, Graham C. Greene and Peter Parker. It was a cosy world.
fn16 ‘As the Chancellor of Oxford University, married to the Chairman of the National Trust’, he joked in 1989, he feared that he and Jennifer ‘must jointly be one of the most predatory couples in Britain, and I am increasingly amazed that anyone any longer dares to ask us anywhere.’99 Jennifer had joined the board of the National Trust in 1985 and was its chairman from 1986 to 1990.
fn17 Jenkins was urged to make capital of the already widespread allegations of corruption surrounding Galloway, specifically concerning his stewardship of the charity War on Want, of which he had been general secretary since 1983. But he refused t
o stoop to such tactics.
fn18 The five surviving SDP Members were David Owen, Bob Maclennan, John Cartwright, Charles Kennedy and Rosie Barnes.
fn19 Jenkins would have preferred to retain the word Alliance in the party’s name. ‘We ought to have called ourselves “The Alliance of Liberal and Social Democratic Parties”, or “The Alliance” for short’, he wrote in his memoirs. ‘This would have linked us in to the substantial reservoirs of goodwill which survived from past campaigns, as well as making it much more difficult for the rump Owenite party to confuse legitimacy by appropriating the SDP name to themselves. Instead we called ourselves the Social and Liberal Democrats (SLD) and spent eighteen months of identity crisis compounded by trying to escape from the herbivorous and unrespectful sobriquet of “Salads”.’116 On the other hand he told Paddy Ashdown in September 1989 that ‘he had always been rather in favour of Liberal Democrat’ and was happy to use that name.117
fn20 ‘It was perhaps appropriate,’ Ivor Crewe and Anthony King concluded in their history of the SDP, ‘that what one journalist had dubbed “the Monster Raving Ego Party” should in the end have been destroyed by the Monster Raving Loony Party.’120
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