Roy Jenkins
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fn21 In a later speech on the folly of the poll tax – after it had been abandoned by the Major government at a cost of at least £10 billion – Jenkins commented tartly that ‘if anyone in local government had been able to pursue their dogmas with a tenth of the reckless determination of the former Prime Minister and her accomplices . . . they would have been surcharged to and over the edge of personal bankruptcy.’126
fn22 In the same article he voiced his fear that another five years of Tory refusal to concede devolution to Scotland would lead to the growth of separatism, as in Ireland in the late nineteenth century. ‘It would be a supreme irony, but even more of a supreme tragedy, if in the fourth quarter of this century it were to produce the same severance along the Scottish border. Yet five more intransigent years would carry a real danger of that.’145
fn23 The winner, ironically, was a non-politician, the banker and former chairman of the Stock exchange, Sir Nicholas Goodison, who scooped the £60 pot by guessing a Tory majority of seventeen.148
fn24 On the second day of the Liberal Democrat conference in Bournemouth the booksellers reported, perhaps unsurprisingly, that they had sold 450 copies of A Life at the Centre, but only five of Time to Declare.157
fn25 In a book review written at just the time he was writing this conclusion, Jenkins contrasted Austen Chamberlain’s gentlemanly failure to become Prime Minister with the success of his half-brother Neville, ‘a good narrow Conservative who looked on most of his opponents as “dirt” and hence qualified to get to the top in a way that Austen never did’.161
fn26 John Grigg commented knowingly that Jenkins’ reticence about private matters left plenty for his biographers. Quintin Hailsham, conversely, actually managed to refer to Jenkins’ ‘impeccable private life, married to the same wife for 46 years’.165 Was this discreet Establishment solidarity, or did he really not know about Caroline and Leslie?
fn27 The book was published in America in 1993 under the title Memoirs of a Radical Reformer, with a few thousand words substituted or rewritten for the American audience. Truman had sold disappointingly in the States, Jenkins wrote, so this book needed to do well ‘if my literary New York life was not to lag well behind its political and social counterparts’.168 An interesting review in the New Yorker (by Adam Gopnik) called him ‘by the brutal standards of American politics a failure’. What Gopnik thought striking was that Jenkins, ‘though a much worse failure in domestic politics than he is inclined to admit, was a much greater, and more prophetic, success as an international administrator than he is inclined to recognise’.169
23
History Man
‘ONE OF THE most difficult feats for a successful politician,’ Jenkins wrote in one of his biographical essays in 1998, ‘is to manage a semi-retirement so that it gives at least as much satisfaction as, and maybe more happiness than, the battles to which it is a postscript.’1 This was a theme to which he recurred frequently in his later writings: among twentieth-century Prime Ministers he reckoned only Attlee and Macmillan had achieved it (and he was probably wrong about Macmillan). Jenkins never achieved the topmost rung of the ladder, but he considered that he had managed for himself a pretty satisfactory final decade.fn1 While still maintaining an astonishing output of journalism, he took his serious historical writing to a new level with two full-scale, prize-winning and bestselling biographies of the two biggest beasts in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British politics. The Chancellorship of Oxford still gave him a dignified, fulfilling but not-over-demanding public position; while he was still able to exercise considerable political influence behind the scenes in trying to achieve vicariously some of the long-term objectives he had been unable to complete in his own career. And right to the end he was able to keep up the same inexhaustible social whirl on the interface between the political, literary, diplomatic and academic worlds: lunching, dining and corresponding continuously with everyone who mattered in the liberal establishment, including not only his contemporaries and old friends as they gradually thinned out, but a remarkable range of new younger friends as well. Despite increasing health problems, it was an object lesson in how not to be diminished by advancing age.
In a satirical profile in 1998 Boris Johnson poked fun at ‘the Duke of Omnium and Lord High Everything Else, Lord Jenkins of Hillhead, Baron Pontypool in the County of Gwent, Chancellor of Oxford University and holder of just about every gong going from the Robert Schuman Prize to the Legion of Honour (Senegal) and the order of the Infante Henrique (Portugal)’.4 But the award that set the seal on Jenkins’ status as the grand panjandrum of the British Establishment was the Order of Merit in 1993. This is the most coveted honour because it is awarded personally by the Queen to leading figures from the arts and sciences, the military and the public service. There are just twenty-four members at a time and vacancies are normally filled within a year or two of a member dying. Very few politicians receive it, fewer still who have not been Prime Minister: Lloyd George, Churchill, Attlee and Macmillan all got it, and Mrs Thatcher was awarded it within weeks of stepping down in 1990. The next four recipients were the opera singer Joan Sutherland, the scientist Francis Crick, the director of the Royal Ballet, Dame Ninette de Valois, and the mathematician Sir Michael Atiyah. Jenkins was awarded it in December 1993 along with the painter Lucian Freud, filling the shoes of Oliver Franks and Solly Zuckerman. This was exalted company, which could hardly fail to feed his sense of self-importance. He recorded 167 letters of congratulations, plus another 102 verbal expressions of pleasure. Bill Rodgers and Mark Bonham Carter organised a celebratory dinner – for eighty-four invited guests – at Brooks’s. Only the Sunday Times pooped his party by running an anonymous profile blaming Jenkins for the permissive society and generally judging him a pompous overrated failure.5
In January 1995 Roy and Jennifer celebrated their golden wedding with a relatively small lunch – just twenty-five – at the Savoy (where they had held the original reception fifty years before). It was mainly a family occasion (the wine bill included thirty-two Coca-Colas), but the guests also included the Rodgerses, the McIntoshes, the Donaldsons and Roy’s oldest boyhood friend from Pontypool, Hugh Brace, who had spent his life working for the Patent Office and wrote gratefully a few days later:
It would have been so easy, after the war, when our paths were manifestly destined to be so divergent, for our friendship to fade and lapse. That it did not was entirely due to initiatives on your part.
He also paid tribute to Jennifer’s selfless support of Roy while raising the family and pursuing her own career:
You have between you a mighty synergy, the attributes of each enhancing the effectiveness of the other; above all you have forged a strong bond of love and affection fortified by tolerance and good humour.6
Nine months later Jenkins spoke at Denis and Edna Healey’s golden wedding. After ironically recalling their rivalry (and Healey’s maddening one-upmanship) from Balliol onwards, he somewhat daringly described Denis and himself as ‘two remarkably uxorious politicians’, exceeded only by Gladstone, Lloyd George (‘a bit shaky on other marital aspects’), Baldwin, Alec Home and Harold Wilson ‘and by practically no-one else’.7 Devoted to Jennifer though he undoubtedly was, everyone in the room must have known that he was at least as ‘shaky’ on some aspects of marriage as Lloyd George, so it was a cheeky claim, which came close to being publicly exposed six months later in a television programme made by the master of televised political biographies, Michael Cockerell. Cleverly subtitled Roy Jenkins: A Very Social Democrat, this was for the most part an affectionate and admiring portrait – most memorable for a sequence showing Jenkins getting his daily exercise by walking purposefully around the tennis court at East Hendred for exactly forty-five minutes (‘Shorter would be too short and longer would be a waste of time’). Cockerell and his producer Alison Cahn spent a good deal of time filming at East Hendred. Roy and Jennifer were therefore upset – Jennifer particularly – when they saw an early cut of the programme in whi
ch Cockerell made explicit reference to Roy’s girlfriends.
At their request some changes were made before it was broadcast on 26 May 1996. Photographs of Caroline and Leslie were dropped and a new section added emphasising Jennifer’s career. ‘Everyone who has seen the programme has said she comes across as a very appealing, and strong, personality,’ Alison Cahn wrote to Jenkins three days before transmission. ‘We did try our best to make a fair and honest portrait of you.’8 Not cut, however, was a section of interview in which Cockerell asked Jenkins directly about his lovers. Momentarily thrown, he nevertheless recovered and parried the question skilfully by saying that it was generally better not to admit or deny these things: it was ‘ungallant’ either way. Pressed on whether he was not worried that he might be found out, he replied calmly: ‘No, I don’t think I’ve done things I’m ashamed of.’ Jennifer too was impressively unfazed. ‘Everybody’s marriage goes up and down. It’s not true we’ve never had a disagreement, but we’ve certainly never had a serious rift.’9 Their combined sangfroid successfully killed the story. But the advance publicity for the programme had sparked a flurry of wide-eyed speculation, mainly focusing on ‘Princess’ Lee Radziwill – almost the only time Jenkins’ girlfriends were openly mentioned in the press. Roy and Jennifer felt that Cockerell had betrayed their hospitality. To their surprise, however, most of the feedback from friends was strongly positive. Shirley Anglesey thought the programme ‘very good . . . much better than the gossip columnists had led us to expect’.10 ‘You were so amusing, witty and good-tempered throughout,’ Elizabeth Longford assured Roy. ‘You handled it perfectly.’11 And Christopher Audland (former deputy Secretary-General of the European Commission) wrote warmly: ‘The picture which came through was very much the genuine Roy we both know: straightforward, witty, understated, reflective and wise. How little you have changed over the years.’12
In the light of these reactions Jenkins wrote again to Cockerell generously revising his earlier complaint. ‘Truth and fairness constrain me to say that the great majority of our friends and friendly acquaintances who have seen the programme . . . think it was a favourable and interesting portrait,’ he acknowledged. This was ‘well short of a unanimous view’, but the minority who dissented did so mainly on what he called ‘Hattersley grounds’: that it trivialised politics by focusing too much on personality:
Jennifer and I, as you will be aware, were not at all happy, particularly with the advance publicity, which mostly appeared between our seeing the first version and the public showing. We both also thought that to go back to that old mountebank Abse . . . [verb illegible] the same story out of which he has made a metier for the past 30 years, was boring. It would have been better to have had some serious opponent, Tebbitt [sic] or Benn say, analysing my weaknesses. All this led us to feel that we had perhaps been too forthcoming and reposed too much confidence in you and Alison.
However there is no doubt that at the time we enjoyed working with you, that you showed yourself a very skilful interviewer, giving full and favourable opportunities to both Jennifer and me, that the photography was excellent, and that on balance a strong and on the whole helpful impression was left on many people’s minds. And, of course, subjects are far from necessarily the most detached or best critics of portraits.
Yours ever,
Roy13, fn2
Not until after his death did anything more appear in the press about his lovers.
By now Jenkins had settled confidently into his role as Chancellor of Oxford. He understood perfectly the limitations of his function and never tried to exceed them, seeing himself as a constitutional monarch – the dignified face of the university’s government – with no power but the right to be consulted, to encourage and to warn. (‘Why does Oxford need a Chancellor?’ Macmillan once asked, and answered: ‘Because without one there could not be a Vice-Chancellor, and without a Vice-Chancellor there would be no-one to run the university.’)15 In his fifteen years Jenkins worked with four Vice-Chancellors: Patrick Neill, a lawyer (1985–9), who was in post when he was elected; Richard Southwood (1989–93), a zoologist; Peter North (1993–7), another lawyer; and finally Colin Lucas (1997–2003), a historian whom he was influential in appointing and the one with whom he got on best. He had little say in the two earlier appointments, which were relatively uncontested; but in 1997 he thought neither of the front-runners up to the job and took the initiative in widening the search to approach Lucas, then just forty-seven, who had been Master of Balliol since 1994 (a plus point, naturally) but was not an Oxford insider as he had made his name in Chicago. Jenkins saw him as a moderniser, and Lucas was widely recognised as a good appointment. Jenkins was also instrumental in extending the Vice-Chancellor’s term from four years to five; but he failed to persuade Lucas to continue for a second term. At the time of his death he was chairing the committee to choose Lucas’ successor. He would have liked to go for Alison Richard before she was pinched by Cambridge, and would probably not have supported the ill-starred choice of John Hood, which was made after his death.
Jenkins got on perfectly adequately with Neill, Southwood and North, but he formed a particularly close partnership with Lucas: they shared the same historical interests and Lucas consulted him more than his predecessors had done. They would talk informally on the phone, lunch together in local pubs or at East Hendred and became good friends. Lucas found Jenkins easy to talk to and full of shrewd advice, a ‘consummate politician’ with ‘great powers of accommodation and persuasion’, always looking to steer sensible change by agreement without losing sight of the objective, and came to rely on him more and more.16 Within the wider Oxford community Jenkins in turn relied for advice primarily on the former Master of Balliol, Anthony Kenny; the philosopher Bernard Williams; and the historian Keith Thomas. In the book of essays edited by Thomas and Andrew Adonis after his death, Kenny wrote that Jenkins, compared with his two most activist predecessors, ‘worked much harder for the University than Chancellor Macmillan ever did, and inspired much more affection than Chancellor Curzon ever did. He has a good claim to have given more to Oxford than any other twentieth-century Chancellor.’17
A good example of his style was the question of whether Somerville should follow other former women’s colleges and admit male undergraduates and fellows. In 1992 the governing body voted to do so; but opponents of the change, both present students and alumnae, objected that they had not been consulted and appealed formally to Jenkins in his ex officio capacity as Visitor of the college. Jenkins considered the case carefully before delivering an even-handed judgement, ruling that the college had acted perfectly legally, but should have consulted more widely first: he proposed a year’s delay, by which time a lot of the heat had gone out of the controversy. The first men were then admitted without fuss in 1994. He also played a discreet role, with others, in persuading the Oxford and Cambridge Club (in Pall Mall) to admit lady members. He was less successful, however, in attempting to persuade the University Press to reverse its decision to cease publishing poetry.18
In 1996 Jenkins got involved in a public spat with the historian Alistair Horne, who wrote to The Times accusing Oxford of cravenly refusing a bequest from a German industrialist, Dr Flick, on the grounds that the money was tainted by his grandfather’s association with the Nazis, attributing the decision to a ‘gang of politically correct trendies’.19 Jenkins responded with a withering demolition of Horne’s ‘misleading ignorance’, pointing out that the university’s Ethics Committee had actually accepted the bequest: Flick had withdrawn it, regrettably, in the face of outside criticism, ‘whipped up mostly by those of tenuous connection with Oxford’. ‘This has been an isolated unhappy incident,’ he concluded, ‘in the university’s extremely successful record of fund-raising over the past seven-and-a-half years.’20 Horne apologised, after which Jenkins characteristically invited him to lunch at an Oxfordshire pub much nearer Horne’s house than his own. ‘I have to say I came with some trepidation,’ Horne wrote, ‘but
left having enjoyed every second of it! . . . We seemed to cover an immense amount of ground, and I don’t think I found myself disagreeing on any point.’21 This is a good example of Jenkins’ way of smoothing over disagreements over lunch.
He continued to enjoy the ceremonial side of the Chancellorship, though he struggled with the correct modern pronunciation of the Latin in his formal speeches, which he rehearsed laboriously with the Public Orator beforehand. ‘His conscientious efforts were not always rewarded with success,’ Kenny noted, ‘and the audience could perceive a sense of relief and a quickening of pace as he arrived at the final unvarying part of the formula: auctoritate mea et totius Universitatis . . .’22 He particularly enjoyed the awarding of honorary degrees to visiting statesmen. When Bill Clinton, early in his presidency, came back to Oxford, where he had been a Rhodes scholar in the Sixties, to receive an honorary degree, Jenkins made the most of the occasion. Evangeline Bruce – wife of the former US ambassador in London and one of his coterie of American lady friends – wrote to him: ‘You set the tone from the start – all was so sumptuous and orderly and yet not pompous. Beautiful, too. The Clintons, it was clear, felt loved and consequently at their most charming and receptive.’ Even a noisy demonstration outside the Sheldonian merely gave the President the opportunity for ‘a graceful reference to the home of free speech’.23 The Times reported acidly that if Clinton’s often cool view of Oxford was revived by ‘the plummy condescension of Lord Jenkins’, it did not show.24 Jenkins was keen to milk every opportunity to raise Oxford’s fund-raising profile in the States. In subsequent years he likewise entertained and honoured Mikhail Gorbachev, Václav Havel and the President of Ireland, Mary Robinson, as well as cultural luminaries like Seamus Heaney and David Hockney.fn3