Roy Jenkins

by John Campbell

  Jenkins delivered, as he had intended, a powerful and authoritative case for major change. He disappointed the Electoral Reform Society and diehard Liberals who had long campaigned for nothing less than STV – the only fully proportional system – partly because the fourth criterion of his remit effectively required him to retain a majority of single-member constituencies. He recognised that AV was not proportional and could produce anomalies, but thought its defects could be compensated for by AV Plus, and did not believe that there would be a serious difference in esteem between the two types of MP. Nor did he accept that AMS was too complicated for the British voter to understand. He accepted that his recommendation was a compromise; but he was concerned more with political realism than with theoretical perfection, and judged that AV Plus was a system that Blair should be able to get the Labour party to accept, while retaining enough of the existing system to satisfy both Labour and Conservative traditionalists.

  At first Blair still gave out encouraging signals. In March 1998 he told Ashdown that the government would accept the Jenkins Report, ‘provided it contains what we think it will’. At the same time, however, he said it would be ‘a Cabinet decision which we will take together’ – a pretty clear warning, in view of the known opposition of his most powerful colleagues.127 In July – by which time rumours of Jenkins’ conclusions were beginning to leak out – Mandelson acknowledged that the report would split the Cabinet 50:50, but reported that Blair was still confident he could ‘bring them round’;128 and Andrew Adonis (now working in the Number Ten Policy Unit) told Jenkins that ‘the electoral reform waters are starting to move fast’.129 In the Daily Telegraph Boris Johnson – possibly to spook his mainly Tory readers – pretended to foresee ‘The Final Twiumph’ of Woy. After a lot of gentle mockery of his ‘air of drawling, whiggish, Lafite-swilling, toff totty-chasing, de haut en bas benevolence’, he suggested that everything Jenkins wanted to see was coming about. ‘Wherever one looks, the political landscape is suffused by his froglike beam.’ The Prime Minister was his faithful pupil:

  And if proportional representation is endorsed, what a stunning triumph for Woy . . . If and when Britain joins EMU, the final piece of the Jenkins jigsaw will be in place; a liberal, devolved Britain, densely integrated into a federal Europe and with the constitution gerrymandered so as to keep the Tories out.130

  It was not to be. Jenkins put the finishing touches to his report in Tuscany in August and presented it to Blair in September, still believing that he had come up with a politically acceptable middle way. But Blair was already warning Ashdown that he could not get it past the Cabinet: the best he could do was welcome the report, but postpone the promised referendum until after the next election. Ashdown correctly took this to mean that ‘the project is dead in the water’.131 Jenkins agreed that it was ‘a very bad moment’, but tried not to give up hope. Lunching with Giles Radice – who thought him ‘a phenomenon’ for his age: ‘He still looks like a sleek and worldly porpoise, though his complexion is more claret-coloured than ever’ – he was pleased with his report, but admitted to being worried about its reception: he wanted Radice to lobby for it, but Radice thought it too complicated.132 He was not alone. As well as the dyed-in-the-wool defenders of FPTP, other commentators like the psephologist Peter Kellner in the Evening Standard dismissed it as an unholy mess:

  Such a semi-proportional system will be difficult to sell to the electorate, for it looks like a fudge. There is a case for proportionality, and a case for a system that elects MPs for individual seats as now; but it is hard to detect a principled argument for a system that is not quite proportional and not quite constituency-based.

  Giving people two votes, Kellner believed, would lead to ‘utterly perverse outcomes’, which would be bad for democracy. ‘Lord Jenkins should think again.’133

  When the report was finally published in late October, Blair duly thanked its author, but made it very clear that nothing was likely to come of it in the foreseeable future:

  This is just the beginning. But at least now the advocates of change have a coherent proposition to argue for.

  I’ve spoken to Paddy. I’ve said to him we have to build greater support within Government for the notion of cooperation and its value, first; & then construct the support for change. I’m sure that is right.

  Meanwhile, again, thank you. It will be a great contribution to the reshaping of British politics in the way we want.

  Yours ever, Tony134

  There was some press support. In the Observer Andrew Rawnsley hailed the content of Jenkins’ report as well as its inimitable style:

  Roy, his prose as plummy as his complexion, begs to be teased. But his report is a work of high seriousness with the capacity to transform our democracy. Where most Government-commissioned tracts are dry and unpalatable, this is elegant and witty, full-bodied with metaphor and succulent with allusion, suffused with history, scholarship and common sense, and richly deserving of all the praise that has been lavished on its author.135

  But for the most part it ran into the same sort of entrenched hostility to change that sank the AV referendum in 2012. In the Commons, Straw made no pretence of welcoming the report, but openly mocked it, ‘playing to the Tory gallery’ as Ashdown complained. Jenkins watched the beginning of the debate on television, but soon ‘turned it off in disgust’. Ashdown protested to Blair, who apologised for Straw’s ‘outrageous’ negativity and promised to get Alastair Campbell to put out ‘a strong counterspin’. But with ‘an overwhelming majority of the Cabinet’ now against any form of PR, Blair’s warm words were worthless.136 A few days later Blair and Ashdown issued a joint statement announcing continuing cooperation on constitutional reform; and over the following months Jenkins carried on promoting his scheme in articles and interviews, in public speeches and at private dinners – a fund-raising dinner for the Make Votes Count campaign at the Reform Club, dinner with leading businessmen at Brooks’s – but he was bitterly aware that his baby was effectively stillborn.

  Willson, The Times, 26.10.98 (British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent)

  In January 1999 Ashdown announced his resignation of the Lib Dem leadership after ten years in which he had brought the party from its fractious birth to the largest third-party representation for seventy years and a sniff, at least, of power. In the Evening Standard Jenkins paid generous tribute to him and denied that ‘the project’ had been a failure. New Labour, he claimed, had been most radical in precisely the area – devolution – where the Lib Dems had had most influence: proportional representation had been accepted as the method of electing the Scottish and Welsh Assemblies, the European Parliament and the Mayor of London, so that the retention of FPTP for Westminster alone had become increasingly anomalous. ‘I am still hopeful that the October Report of my Commission will not be allowed to slumber for too long.’ Meanwhile, if the government would only grasp the challenge of joining the euro – his next great cause – ‘the fruits of the Ashdown policy will be plain for all to see’.137

  His preferred choice for the succession was Ming Campbell, of whom he had always thought highly, probably thinking Charles Kennedy was still too young.fn14 Ashdown was ‘absolutely livid’ with Jenkins for tipping Campbell off about his intention to resign so that he could declare his candidacy quickly.139 But Campbell was not sure he wanted to stand – he had his eye on the Speakership, asking Jenkins to sound out Blair to see if it was a realistic possibility140 – and in the end did not, so Kennedy it was. In a millennium article for the Sunday Express Jenkins wrote that Blair had lost ‘an exceptional ally’ in Ashdown and would now have to work out a new relationship with his ‘different but highly talented’ successor.141 Kennedy was bound to pull back a bit from the close – if ultimately unconsummated – relations Ashdown had formed with Blair, but he hoped the Lib Dems would nurse no bitterness against the government. ‘Charles takes things with calmness and humour,’ he wrote in the Independent. ‘There’s quite a lot to be said for both qu
alities – and they’re rather appealing to the electorate.’142 It was still, he told a correspondent who asked him why he did not go back to Labour, ‘the main remaining object of my life to promote a close Lib–Lab relationship’.143

  To that end he made a point of cultivating several of the 1997 Labour intake whom he regarded as promising and congenial. There are in his papers a remarkable number of letters thanking him for lunch or other kindnesses. He wrote to congratulate the German-born (and then pro-European) Member for Edgbaston, Gisela Stuart, for instance, on her appointment to the government.144 He declined to give an interview to Stephen Twigg’s research assistant, pleading too many such requests. ‘On the other hand I have a great interest in and admiration for you, and would like to know you better. Would you come and have lunch with me one day?’145 (Twigg was chair of the Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform.) Other Labour figures with whom he maintained regular lunching relations were Giles Radice, Peter Mandelson (whom he practically adopted as his political son and staunchly supported in all his political and personal difficulties) and Derry Irvine – whose expensive refurbishment of the Lord Chancellor’s apartments in the House of Lords he publicly defended, even though he privately thought him ‘arrogant (although with a fair amount to be arrogant about) and very politically unstreetwise’.146 He was even reconciled to Roy Hattersley. But he remained on ‘thoroughly bad terms’ with Jack Straw.147

  The postponement of any early prospect of PR, however, was just one of several areas in which New Labour disappointed him. Wearing his Oxford hat, he had hoped that the Blair government would bring a more positive attitude towards the universities; but it quickly appeared that its main concern was with attacking the ‘elitism’ of Oxford and Cambridge, maintaining the Tories’ squeeze on funding while simultaneously announcing an unrealistic goal of enabling half the country’s school-leavers to go to university. Jenkins was all in favour of widening access – never forgetting that he himself had got to Balliol from a very ordinary school in Pontypool – but he was an unrepentant believer in the national importance of maintaining the standing of the two ancient universities (and one or two others, such as Imperial College, London) among the top dozen in the world. One of the first acts of the new universities minister, Tessa Blackstone, however, was to announce that the government would no longer pay student support to the Oxbridge colleges, but henceforth only to the university. Jenkins immediately used his access to Blair to send him a ‘stiff note’ complaining about the lack of consultation, pointing out that the colleges were not all wealthy and that starving them would damage the whole ethos and quality of Oxford and Cambridge. Blair promised to look into the issue – ‘My loins are now girded up. I shall see what I can do’148 – and did impose some modification of the policy; but the colleges still lost about one-fifth of their income over the next ten years.149 Jenkins protested to Blair again in May 2000 when Gordon Brown made a singularly ill-informed speech highlighting the case of a state-school pupil from Tyneside, Laura Spence, who had failed to win a place at Oxford despite having ten A* GCSEs and four predicted As at A-Level, attributing it to ‘old school tie’ prejudice against the state sector. ‘Nearly every fact he adduced,’ Jenkins fumed in the House of Lords, ‘was false.’150 In an article in the Mail on Sunday he pointed out that Laura Spence was one of twenty-three candidates with equally good grades competing for five places. Which did Brown think Magdalen should have rejected to accommodate her? Oxford was already working hard to widen its social base and in the past five years had exactly reversed the private/state-school proportions from 53:47 per cent to 47:53 per cent. Of course there was still some way to go. ‘We just have to hope that the grandstanding over the last few days . . . will not set back the progress we are making to encourage the brightest and best candidates – whatever their background – to apply to this country’s top universities.’151, fn15 Blair was embarrassed, and there was tacit acceptance that Brown had blundered; but six weeks later Jenkins still thought it ‘intolerable that . . . no withdrawal or apology has been forthcoming from him or any other member of the Government’.153

  While pleased by the swift introduction of Scottish and Welsh devolution and the creation of an elected mayor for London, he was unimpressed by the government’s proposed reform of the House of Lords, which he thought half-baked and illogical. In December 1998 he emphatically denied a newspaper report that he now wanted to chair a commission on Lords reform. ‘I completed the last task with relief,’ he wrote to the editor, ‘and one commission is more than enough in two years.’154 Though he approved of the removal of most of the hereditary peers, he did not favour an elected second chamber that would rival the Commons, still less a partially elected one, as the government eventually proposed, which he thought ‘a total nonsense’. Since joining the Upper House he had realised that it actually functioned a good deal better as a check on the executive than did the Commons, which had sunk so low in popular esteem that it was ‘little more than an electoral college for the choice of the government of the day’. He would really have preferred a wholly nominated House, appointed not by the Prime Minister but by an independent body, with more cross-benchers and no guaranteed government majority.155 (In 2000 he criticised Blair’s ‘shoal of not very distinguished nominations’ – widely derided as ‘Tony’s cronies’: ‘Even if you leave out some of the more rococo edges of Harold Wilson’s lavender list,’ he wrote in the Spectator, ‘I think they were better nominations than this lot.’)156 By 2002, however, he had come to the view that it was too late for a wholly appointed House. So in one of his last speeches in the Lords he argued for a small regionally elected House of no more than sixty, to sit not in the present chamber ‘with its gilt, its red and its flummery’, but in ‘a nice cosy utilitarian council chamber’. He confessed that he would personally rather the House could have stayed roughly as it was, with more restrictions on patronage. ‘But I am sure that we should face the logic of one course or the other and not fish around in the ill-thought-out and muddled middle.’157

  More generally Jenkins was disappointed by New Labour’s illiberalism, as Blair and his successive Home Secretaries, Jack Straw and David Blunkett, tried to ensure that they could not be outflanked by the Tories on the right. Straw he judged to be no improvement on his predecessor, Michael Howard. (‘He gives the impression that there is hardly a liberal bone in his body.’)158 More than thirty years after his own liberal heyday at the Home Office Jenkins reaffirmed his libertarian approach to social policy in the Evening Standard in March 2001:

  Libertarianism, which I define as allowing people to order their lives and choose their own patterns of behaviour – social, sexual, recreational – unless there is a clear case that by so doing they impinge upon the rights, not just the prejudices, of others, should be a central purpose of a radical government.

  He was critical, among other things, of the government’s restriction of the right to trial by jury, the ‘emasculated’ Freedom of Information Bill, Straw’s failure to do anything about ‘the appalling conditions in the prisons’ and ‘the kneejerk irrationalism of both major parties’ avoidance of any sensible discussion of the law about cannabis’.159 Personally he voted in the Lords for equalising the age of consent for gays and for repealing the notorious Clause 28 prohibiting the ‘propagation’ of homosexuality – unsuccessfully on both occasions.160 But above all he condemned the government for wasting so much time and energy on trying to ban fox hunting to please some of its backbenchers. ‘I am not a great fox-hunter,’ he told Boris Johnson – perhaps unnecessarily – in the Spectator. ‘I’m not a fox-hunter at all, but I believe even more strongly that if people want to do it, why the hell shouldn’t they do it?’161 ‘If the unspeakable want to pursue the uneatable,’ he wrote in the Independent, ‘they should be free to do so . . . It shows an extraordinary order of priorities to push large numbers of people onto the wrong side of the criminal law on the basis of such a flimsy and socially divisive case.’162 Banning hunting wa
s ‘a final act of illiberalism’. Even at a late stage in its passage through Parliament, he urged just before the 2001 election, it would be an act of statesmanship on Blair’s part to abandon it.163

  Despite these disappointments he remained determined not to lose faith in Blair’s potential to be a great Prime Minister. Increasingly he believed – and asserted in innumerable articles and lectures – that the supreme test of Blair’s historic calibre was whether he had the guts to defy the Europhobe Tory press and take Britain into the euro. This became the last great – and, as it now seems, doomed – mission of his final years. In Gladstone Jenkins had written that ‘The frequent menace of old age is that it imprisons its victim in a departure lounge of life’ – he credited the ‘starkly memorable phrase’ to Robin Day – ‘awaiting with a mixture of apprehension and impatience the announcement that the aircraft is ready’; but that the aged Gladstone’s belief that he had one last cause to fight ‘was a tremendous prophylactic against senile futility’.164 Seeing Britain into the euro was just such a cause for Jenkins as he neared his eightieth birthday as Irish Home Rule had been for Gladstone. Just as with electoral reform, he allowed himself to be too easily taken in by Blair’s assurances that he really wanted to join. But as early as October 1997 he was already afraid that Blair was letting Gordon Brown control the timing, and he believed Brown’s five economic tests were spurious. ‘You are in great danger of having this issue of Europe undermine your government,’ he warned Blair, ‘just as it did for so many prime ministers before you, including Mrs Thatcher. But if you “seize this moment, then you can shape events and not have events shape you”.’ When Blair argued that public opinion was strongly hostile and he needed time to turn it round, Jenkins riposted that negative opinion polls could be turned around by clear leadership, as the pro-Marketeers had shown in 1975. ‘Look, I will be very blunt with you on this. You have to choose between leading Europe or having Murdoch on your side. You can have one but not both.’165