Finally, he continued to appear regularly as a panellist on Any Questions? on Radio 4 and Question Time (now chaired by David Dimbleby) on BBC1, where he invariably gave good value. ‘It is a relief to a chairman,’ Dimbleby wrote to him after one appearance in 1994, ‘to know that he can turn to a guest confident that something funny or of substance or both will ensue.’65 In 2001 he was invited to appear on the satirical panel game Have I Got News for You?, where he would have been subject to merciless ribbing at the hands of Angus Deayton and Ian Hislop; he was tempted, but sensibly declined.66 Back in 1989, however, he was a guest on Desert Island Discs, then hosted by Sue Lawley. His choice of records was thoroughly middlebrow, but autobiographically honest. His taste in music was not sophisticated, though he was happy to go to Covent Garden when invited and often had opera playing while he was writing. Along with pieces of Elgar (Enigma Variations), Haydn (the ‘Oxford’ symphony), Verdi (Un Ballo in Maschera), Saint-Saëns (Samson and Delilah) and Hamish MacCunn (The Land of the Mountain and the Flood) he picked the ‘Soviet Airman’s Song’ (which reminded him of Oxford and the war), the Glasgow Orpheus Choir singing ‘We’ll Keep a Welcome in the Hillside’ and the theme from Chariots of Fire (which reminded him of campaigning in Hillhead). His book was Who Was Who and his luxury, inevitably, a case of claret.67 He never pretended to be what he was not.
In September 1992 the Major government, unexpectedly re-elected just four months earlier, suffered a catastrophic humiliation when it was forced to leave the ERM, which Britain had finally joined only two years before. Its reputation for economic competence never recovered, though it staggered on for a full parliament until finally put out of its misery in 1997. In newspaper articles in the Independent and the Daily Telegraph Jenkins naturally blamed this ‘crushing defeat’ for Major’s proclaimed ambition to put Britain ‘at the heart of Europe’ not on the wisdom of having joined in the first place, but on Mrs Thatcher’s stubbornness in refusing to join when the going was good, and then joining at the worst possible moment and at the wrong rate just before her fall. ‘The defeat lies in the fact we have added another and peculiarly dismal chapter to the almost incredible story of the mismanagement of our relations with the continent of Europe over the past 40 years.’68 In the Telegraph he compared the fiasco unfavourably to the 1967 devaluation, which by comparison with ‘the sad farce of last Wednesday could almost be described as elegant’. Writing as a former Chancellor, he concluded that Norman Lamont should resign, as Callaghan had done in 1967 and as he himself would have done in 1968 if the balance of payments had not come right, since his moral authority would have been exhausted. Lamont had ‘never been strong on moral authority’ and would be ‘completely bereft of it’ in the future, ‘wholly dependent on Mr Major’s attempt to protect him’. ‘To be the creature of the Prime Minister,’ he warned, ‘is never good for a Chancellor.’ Though the failed policy was actually more Major’s than Lamont’s, he did not think Major should resign since Prime Ministers – with the exception of Eden after Suez – did not resign for failure. The hard rule was that ‘Departmental ministers . . . should pay the price of abject departmental failure.’69, fn7
Nevertheless Jenkins soon decided that Major was not fit for his high office, either; and for the next four and half years he pursued him relentlessly and very personally. ‘Looking back on nearly half a century in Parliament,’ he declared that autumn, ‘I have never seen this country worse governed than it is today . . . Neither in breadth of personality, nor in depth of knowledge and expertise, is the Prime Minister up to the job.’ There had been bad periods before. ‘But the present utter inadequacy of both men and measures is unique.’72 He condemned not only Major’s feeblenesss towards Europe, but also ‘the weak and whining jumping from improvisation to improvisation which has recently passed for economic policy’,73 and the ‘ultimate dogmatism’ of rail privatisation, driven by ‘the very small minority of partisan activists . . . completely insulated from the wider body of supporters whom they are supposed to represent’, which he again likened to the Callaghan government pushing through the nationalisation of the docks in 1976.74 In January 1994 he widened his critique to lambast the whole frenetic, inbred culture of modern politics:
The unwanted upheaval of rail privatisation, the threat of yet another local government reorganisation . . . and the actuality of the seventh education bill and the fifth criminal justice bill within a decade, demonstrate not calm continuity but flailing and ineffective restlessness . . . If governments concentrated on using well the period of power they have already won rather than accepting any humiliation for themselves and any misfortune for the country provided it comes right on the night of the quinquennial decision, politics and politicians might not be held in as low esteem as is currently the case.75
Was this just an ageing politician moaning about his successors, or did he have a point? The experience of the last twenty years has tended only to vindicate his view.
He was particularly scathing about Major’s rash proclamation of ‘Back to Basics’, which predictably collapsed in a flurry of sexual and financial scandal. ‘No-one with any sense of history or realism,’ he wrote in the Telegraph, ‘can pretend that sexual purity has been the outstanding characteristic of great political leaders, or that its absence is consequently a sensible disqualification for high office.’ Churchill and de Gaulle were outstanding exceptions; but Gladstone once said that of the thirteen Prime Ministers he had known, eleven were adulterers:fn8
So there is no room for mounting high moral horses about sexual peccadilloes. Indeed, it would be more plausible to argue that the energy and charisma which are necessary for successful leadership (and sadly lacking today) are mostly accompanied by an unusual sexual drive which has rarely contained itself within monogamous bounds.
Major, he allowed, could not be held responsible for his third-rate colleagues. But he was responsible ‘for having opportunistically and thoughtlessly adopted a slogan which was disastrously ill-suited to the rather louche band he had to lead . . . This casts further doubt on whether the Prime Minister, so signally lacking in either touch or luck, is not also fatally hobbled by a lack of judgement and shallowness of personality for the effective leadership of a government.’76
‘The sense of a decadent political scene, a decadent Government and a decadent party hammers away at the mind,’ he wrote in June 1993, recalling for comparison the last days of other governments – Balfour in 1903–5, the Hoover administration in the United States in 1930–32, the Callaghan government in 1976–9 – which had run out of steam long before the electorate put them out of their misery. The problem was that while the Tories were exhausted and discredited, incapable of tackling the serious issues facing the country, there was no credible alternative ready to take over. Labour, now led by John Smith, enjoyed massive leads in the polls, but still did not look like an alternative government; it was the Liberal Democrats under Paddy Ashdown who were once again winning by-elections (Newbury and Christchurch in 1993, Eastleigh in 1994). Hence Jenkins believed that ‘a convincing alternative Government will not emerge without a substantial measure of Labour and Liberal Democrat co-operation’, which would have to be imposed on the parties from the bottom up. Otherwise there was ‘an uncomfortable likelihood that many of us will live the rest of our lives under Conservative governments’.77 He now looked to unofficial tactical voting by the electorate to determine the balance between the opposition parties. ‘But whatever that balance may be, and however firmly the official parties, as is their wont, reject formal collaboration, the voters will in my view try very hard to construct an unofficial anti-Tory front.’78
Jenkins had already identified Tony Blair as his best hope for bringing this about before John Smith suddenly died on 12 May 1994. Anthony Seldon in his biography of Blair states that the two men had no significant contact before Blair wrote to Jenkins ‘out of the blue’ asking his advice on economic policy, and that they had no serious meeting before mid-1994.79 I
n fact they had already been in touch at least eighteen months earlier, when Blair was still Shadow Home Secretary and looking back to Jenkins’ famous tenure of the Home Office in the 1960s as the model of what a reforming Labour Home Secretary – tough both on crime and on its social causes – could achieve. He was also frustrated by Smith’s resistance to what he saw as urgently necessary modernisation of the party. On the second day of 1993 Jenkins invited the Blairs to lunch at East Hendred (with Dick Taverne and his wife, which suggests the way he was already thinking). Thanking him both for lunch and for his ‘very kind’ letter, Blair wrote: ‘There are times, at present, when a very cold breeze seems to be blowing around my ankles! However I live in hope that a sensible debate will break through.’ He added that he had not read A Life at the Centre, but would love to do so. ‘I suspect it would be more than a little illuminating.’80 Jenkins duly sent him a copy.
When Smith died and Blair outsmarted Gordon Brown to snatch the Labour leadership the following July, Jenkins immediately hailed him, in The Times, as ‘the most exciting Labour choice since the election of Hugh Gaitskell in December 1955’ – the highest praise in his book – quite explicitly seeing him as the man to forge a united moderate/progressive front and realise the thwarted ambition of the SDP. Blair’s emergence, he wrote, gave new hope to ‘the great number of the non-socialist public who are now longing for a change of ministers’. It was ‘the alienation of this Gaitskellite constituency’ which had led directly to ‘the long period of Labour’s unelectability’. In order to reverse that exclusion he urged Blair to seek friendly relations with the Liberal Democrats, ‘within whose ranks are many whose thoughts and instincts are very close to his own’. It would require at least two Parliaments to repair the damage done by the Tories, and Labour was unlikely to be able to win two consecutive terms on its own. In the meantime he warned Blair not to lead Labour any further down the road of embracing the free market. Good work had been done by Smith and Kinnock in jettisoning nationalisation and other left-wing policies. ‘But the market cannot solve everything and it would be a pity to embrace the stale dogmas of Thatcherism just when their limitations are becoming obvious.’81 Within hours of Blair’s confirmation as leader Jenkins was already worried that Blair might take Labour too far to the right.
Jenkins was not alone in thinking that Blair’s emergence changed the whole picture. Bill Rodgers and Shirley Williams were almost as quick to echo his enthusiasm, and over the next couple of years as ‘New Labour’ systematically ditched most of the last remnants of ‘Old Labour’ policies – towards Europe, defence, trade unions, the public sector, free markets and internal party structure – a steady stream of lesser figures who had defected to the SDP returned to Labour. Roger Liddle was just one who wrote to Jenkins explaining that he was rejoining Labour because Blair had re-created the excitement of the early SDP and he wanted to help. ‘Hope this doesn’t upset you too much. For most of the past quarter century I’ve regarded you as my political leader and mentor. It’s because Tony is so clearly the man to carry forward the torch you’ve held high that I’ve determined on this course.’82 Jenkins, Williams and Rodgers knew they could not do the same without letting down all those who had followed them into the Liberal Democrats. But they were all equally keen not to let narrow party allegiances obstruct the election of a left-of-centre government. ‘We . . . are interested in Big Politics’, Rodgers told Hugo Young only weeks after Blair’s election (but after Roy and Jennifer had spent some days with Bill and Sylvia in Tuscany). ‘Many Lib Dems are interested in Little Politics.’83 It was awkward for the Lib Dems, having struggled for five years to establish their own identity, now to have their senior leaders openly praising the leader of a rival party, which called into question their very raison d’être. But from the moment he became leader in 1988 Jenkins had forged a close relationship with Paddy Ashdown. ‘I hardly knew him at the time,’ he wrote later. ‘But I had the instinctive feeling that he had the stuff of leadership in him.’84 Over the next five years, Jenkins as leader of the Liberal Democrat peers strongly supported Ashdown’s leadership; so that in 1994 Ashdown needed little convincing to abandon the party’s previous stance of ‘equidistance’ between Labour and the Tories and quickly threw his effort into positioning the Lib Dems as the junior partner in an informal anti-Tory alliance, as Jenkins had long advocated.fn9 Jenkins now devoted himself to acting as a ‘bridge’ to bring Blair and Ashdown together. ‘I think Tony treats me as a sort of father figure in politics,’ he told Ashdown in October 1995. ‘He comes to me a lot for advice, particularly about how to construct a Government.’86 Nothing could have flattered Jenkins more than the opportunity to act – like Lord Melbourne with the young Victoria – as mentor to a young leader with no experience of government who was very likely to be the next Prime Minister.
That September – just before Blair’s second party conference as Labour leader – Tony and Cherie lunched again at East Hendred, this time with two of their children (Euan and Nicky, then aged eleven and nine), with Edward and Sally Jenkins and their children making it a family occasion. Jenkins sent Tony away with an advance copy of Gladstone, which Cherie wrote the next day he had ‘already started’.87 This was the start of a deliberate strategy to get Blair to read some history, which as a law student he had barely done and now regretted.fn10 Jenkins was keen to impress on Blair the idea that now gripped his mind: that whereas the division of the centre left between the Liberals and Labour after 1918 had allowed the Conservatives to be the dominant party for most of the twentieth century, a reunion of those forces – by means of an electoral pact, potentially leading to a coalition government and possibly even a merger of the two parties, reinforced by proportional representation – would enable them in turn to dominate the twenty-first century, making the Tories the minority party. Blair was excited by this vision, and his enthusiasm was shared by some (but crucially not all) of his close allies, notably Peter Mandelson and the pollster Philip Gould. Both Mandelson and Roger Liddle in their 1996 book The Blair Revolution and Gould in The Unfinished Revolution (1998) made it one of the central planks of New Labour, explicitly acknowledging Jenkins’ influence. Converting this ambitious vision into reality became known to Blair, Ashdown and their respective advisers as ‘the project’: their secret conversations were recorded in exhaustive detail in Paddy Ashdown’s diaries, and a joint commission headed by Robin Cook (a rare supporter of PR on the Labour side) and Bob Maclennan for the Lib Dems was set up to look at possible areas of agreement on constitutional reform – not just PR, but devolution, human rights, freedom of information and House of Lords reform. The fatal trouble was that neither leader took his own party into his confidence. Most Lib Dems would probably have swallowed some arrangement in return for a definite commitment to proportional representation. But most of Blair’s senior colleagues – most critically Gordon Brown, John Prescott and Jack Straw – wanted nothing to do with either the Lib Dems or PR. Over the next two years both Jenkins and Ashdown allowed themselves to be blinded by Blair’s plausible assurances to the fact that he was never going to be able to sell the idea to his party.
In particular they persuaded themselves that Blair was serious about PR, when in truth he was never fully convinced. Jenkins simply could not believe that someone so sensible on most other subjects could fail to see the case for PR. In October 1995 he thought Blair’s position ‘rather “unthought-through” and “ill-considered”’, but still believed he was ‘moveable’.89 ‘I will do what I can to put pressure on him,’ he promised Ashdown. ‘It is a ridiculous position. He must realise how much is at stake here.’90 Ashdown in turn convinced himself that ‘the overwhelming majority of New Labour favoured PR’ and that Blair recognised it as the key to securing a two-term government.91 The next month, after lunching with Mandelson who assured him that Blair was indeed ‘moving’ on PR, Jenkins again told Ashdown that he ‘would really press this matter home with Blair’.92
The fundamental problem, w
hich Jenkins strangely failed to see, was that Blair, while wholly sharing his ambition to heal the Labour/Liberal divide to create a ‘progressive’ majority that would keep Labour in power for two or three parliaments, had no strategic interest in conceding proportional representation, which would only preserve the Liberal Democrats’ existence as a separate party. Blair frankly wanted to draw the Lib Dems into his ‘big tent’ in order to swallow them up – Labour supporters of ‘the project’ actually called it ‘the hoover strategy’ – whereas the Lib Dems had no wish to be swallowed, so they were bound to make PR their absolute condition for cooperation. The two parties’ interests were in this respect incompatible.93 That Jenkins failed to grasp this was not just the wishful thinking of an old man in a hurry. It was also consistent with the fact that he had always seen the SDP (and by extension the Lib Dems) as essentially a catalyst to the restructuring of the centre left, not as a long-term end in itself. Almost subconsciously, perhaps, while campaigning to break the mould, he had really always hankered to get back to the two-party system which had prevailed in his prime from 1945 to 1975 and previously in the High Victorian/ Edwardian period that he loved as a historian. Once, when Robert Harris asked if he thought Labour and the Lib Dems would one day merge, he replied unhesitatingly: ‘Oh yes. Absolutely.’94
In January 1996, as part of his mentoring effort to prepare his pupil for the realities of government, Jenkins gave a dinner at Kensington Park Gardens to enable Blair and his chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, to meet the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robin Butler, and four more top mandarins. Beforehand Butler sent Powell some background on those invited, who included two future Cabinet Secretaries, Andrew Turnbull and Richard Wilson, and Hayden Phillips, now Permanent Secretary at the Department of National Heritage. ‘While I am entirely content to defend this occasion if necessary,’ he cautioned, ‘I hope it will remain private.’95 ‘I found it hugely interesting and even enjoyable!’ Blair thanked Jenkins afterwards. ‘I will get your ratings of the various people when we next meet – though I am not sure I was quite able to judge.’96 ‘It was an excellent opportunity for Tony to meet the key Permanent Secretaries prior to the opening of official contacts later this month,’ Powell wrote. ‘He was, as you could tell, impressed. Tony has also firmly registered your points about electoral reform.’97 For his part, Jenkins thought Blair ‘more impressive than some of the permanent secretaries’ – though Jennifer more shrewdly sensed he was not really very interested98 – and hoped that he was indeed ‘becoming convinced intellectually’ on PR, though still afraid that it would split the Labour party.99 Richard Wilson (then Permanent Secretary at the Home Office) wrote to thank Roy and Jennifer for a memorable evening, which could easily have been awkward. ‘It was very good of you to take so much trouble to oil the wheels of the constitution and very helpful.’100
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