A third, even younger friend was Andrew Adonis, whom Jenkins appointed in 1998 his official biographer – a remarkable act of faith considering the importance he attached to biography and the fact that Adonis had never written anything of the sort.fn28 But having done so, he took Adonis closely into his confidence. ‘When you put posterity in my hands, as it were,’ Adonis wrote, congratulating Jenkins on his birthday, ‘I had no idea that we would see so much of each other; still less that we would become such friends. It has been one of the great pleasures of the last 2 years to me. It might even lead to a better book.’242 So it might have done; but Adonis got drawn so deeply into government under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown that he eventually passed the project on.
Roy and Jennifer continued to entertain prodigiously at East Hendred, mixing old and new friends eclectically together. ‘It was like turning up to a tutorial at a professor’s house,’ one guest, Tina Brown, recalled after Jenkins’ death, ‘and finding in the small garden a convivial little band of living legends, mixed with the younger critics, historians and novelists he collected and the invariable visiting American enjoying a pre-lunch Martini.’243 It is invidious to take any particular company as typical; but to take just two examples, on 14 March 1994 it comprised the architectural historian and diarist James Lees-Milne and his wife, with Clarissa Avon (Anthony Eden’s widow) and Jenkins’ then publisher Roland Philipps and his wife; and on 23 July 1997 the historians David Cannadine and Linda Colley (both then in their forties) with the former chief government statistician Sir Claus Moser with his wife, and Donald and Elsa Macfarlane from Hillhead. In 1997 Jenkins noted that they held no fewer than fifty-five of these lunch parties at East Hendred – but only five dinners, which were usually for old friends who were staying, like Ronald and Doreen McIntosh, the Angleseys or the Macfarlanes. Altogether they entertained 257 people that year, with Roy at the head of the table pouring an abundance of superb claret, while Jennifer – with help from a local woman – supervised distinctly plain and exiguous food. You lunched at East Hendred for the wine and the conversation, not for the food.
Jenkins’ own eightieth was spoiled by his illness. The major event was to have been a dinner at the Reform Club organised by Bill Rodgers, Celia Goodhart and John Grigg on 13 November 2000, two days after his actual birthday. Jenkins only reluctantly accepted, a few days before going into hospital in October, that it would have to be postponed. He was out of hospital and sufficiently recovered to have a family lunch party at East Hendred on the day (and watch The Jewel in the Crown on television in the evening). The dinner was then rearranged for 7 March 2001, when it was attended by 118 guests comprising practically the whole of the liberal establishment (Paddy Ashdown called it ‘the project at dinner’).244 There were very few Tories – Ted Heath, Madron Seligman and Peter Carrington – and few Labour: just Peter Mandelson, Derry Irvine and Giles Radice. (Tony Blair was invited but could not make it: he promised a dinner at Chequers instead, but this never took place. ‘It’s rather like his approach to electoral reform or joining the euro,’ Jenkins complained. ‘No follow through.’)245 But there was a wide range of others from every period of Jenkins’ life, from his boyhood friend, Hugh Brace, to his current secretary Gimma Macpherson with her husband, and his Harley Street heart specialist and his wife. There were twelve tables and Jenkins himself carefully composed the seating plan, placing Marie-Alice de Beaumarchais again on his left and Jean Kennedy Smith (sister of Jack, Bobby and Ted Kennedy) on his right, with Henry Anglesey, Thomas Bingham, Derry Irvine, Iona Carrington and Penny Hastings at the same table. On Table 2 Jennifer was flanked by Ted Heath and Arthur Schlesinger; Charles, Cynthia and Edward each hosted a table, while the other seven were headed by John Grigg, Paddy Ashdown, Celia Goodhart, Bill Rodgers, Ming Campbell, Crispin Tickell and Jeremy Hutchinson. Caroline Gilmour and Leslie Bonham Carter were both on Table 12 (the closest to Table 1), with Laura Phillips, Liz Stevens, Peter Carrington, Nicko Henderson, Dick Taverne and Peter Mandelson. Bill Rodgers acted as master of ceremonies and John Grigg, Shirley Williams and Arthur Schlesinger (with a message from J.K. Galbraith) spoke, before Jenkins made a ‘refulgent’ reply, elegantly accepting the praise of his devoted friends.246 It must have been difficult not to think of Toad’s speech at the end of The Wind in the Willows.
A more ambiguous view of his life’s achievement was voiced in an ironic birthday tribute by Hastings’ successor as editor of the Daily Telegraph, Charles Moore – Margaret Thatcher’s official biographer – who saw Jenkins as (after Mrs Thatcher) ‘the second most successful British politician of modern times’, since he had seen most of what he had believed in come to pass. Britain was now irreversibly a ‘liberal’ society in his meaning of the word, in Europe and governed by a Labour government not dominated by the trade unions. This, Moore suggested from his High Tory perspective, was all due to Jenkins more than any other single person: ‘True, the whole thing is pretty ghastly, and far from the “civilised” polity he wanted. But that is not because of any personal failing: it is simply because he is, by and large, in the wrong.’ On this argument Moore should perhaps have made Jenkins the most successful politician of modern times; alternatively he should have blamed Mrs Thatcher for the state of the country. Even he, however, could not help acknowledging Jenkins’ Trollopian integrity:
In persona, though clearly self-regarding and de haut en bas, he is also amused, self-critical, unbitter and detached. He is one of the few retired senior politicians who do not seem warped or broken by the career they have chosen.247
By now Jenkins had almost given up regular reviewing. But he still made an exception for books he wanted to read or authors he wished to help – for instance, he asked to review the posthumously published fourth volume of John Grigg’s biography of Lloyd George in February 2002; and late that year he agreed to review a book on the Asquiths for the Sunday Telegraph. But he was still writing compulsively himself and still planning new books. In September 2000 – while still writing Churchill – he agreed to write the entry on Harold Wilson for the new Dictionary of National Biography, a major undertaking of around 12,000 words for which he reread both Pimlott and Ziegler. (He also contributed several shorter DNB entries, on Dilke, Tony Crosland, Mark Bonham Carter and David Harlech, though he declined several other subjects, including Woodrow Wyatt.) In 2001–2 he wrote the Introduction to a new edition of Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples; another for a Folio Society volume on the 1980s; and a short essay on Churchill and France for a book on the centenary of the Entente Cordiale; as well as a still considerable output of occasional journalism.
His first book idea to follow Churchill was a semi-autobiographical study of European–American relations illustrated from his own experience of the Kennedy administration and his time in Brussels, to be called – fancifully – The Bermuda Triangle. In a draft prospectus he admitted that his lifelong love affair with the United States had not retained its ‘pristine enchantment’ in recent years, nor was he impervious to the ‘frustrations and pettiness’ of Europe; but he still believed it important to try to bridge both the Atlantic and the Channel and had had great pleasure over the years in trying to do so.248 This project he abandoned, however, in favour of what he called ‘a very lightweight book . . . on 12 cities which have either been intertwined with my life or have peculiarly aroused my interest and enthusiasm’.249 This gave him the excuse to revisit several of his favourite places, with Jennifer or various friends, in order to write about them. The Twelve Cities of its title comprised three British (Cardiff, Birmingham and Glasgow), two American (New York and Chicago) and seven European (Paris, Naples, Bonn, Brussels, Dublin, Barcelona and Berlin). It is an exceptionally self-indulgent book: a rambling, digressive mixture of autobiography, name-dropping, architectural description and potted history, held together only by Jenkins’ amateurish enthusiasm. Like The Chancellors it is characterised to the point of self-parody by his compulsion to classify and compare everywhere by reference
to somewhere else, assuming that the reader is a well-travelled man of the world like himself, familiar with all the places he cites as points of comparison. It is quite engaging in its way, but a book for connoisseurs of Jenkins’ late style only. It was published in the autumn of 2002 to reviews that were generally more polite than enthusiastic.fn29
Before he finished that, he had agreed to revisit an old ambition by writing ‘a 50,000 word booklet’ on Franklin Roosevelt for a series on US presidents being edited by Arthur Schlesinger.252 His last book, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was actually rather tauter and less self-indulgent than some of its predecessors. But twenty years earlier he had backed off Roosevelt because he thought there was nothing new to say about him; and what interest this late essay contains lies less in what it says about Roosevelt than what it says obliquely about Jenkins himself. His fascination with FDR’s family background and American class distinctions is characteristically overdone; but most intriguing are his reflections on Roosevelt’s infidelities within what was nevertheless a strong marriage. First, he doubts whether Eleanor ‘ever experienced any intense heterosexual desire, even at the height of her commitment to Franklin’.253 As a result, some of their friends thought it ‘amazing’ that Franklin did not ‘stray’ earlier. ‘However, stray he did, not casually but romantically, and in an underlying sense not temporarily but to the very end of his life.’254 Eleanor’s discovery that he had a mistress – ‘which sophisticates like Alice Longworth thought she should certainly have been expecting in view of the contrasting attitudes to relaxation and pleasure between herself and her husband . . . did not destroy the marriage . . . but it changed its nature’:
The relationship had never been physically passionate, although on Eleanor’s side it had been deeply romantic . . . Thereafter it became a powerful political partnership, but almost a limited liability one.255
Here Jenkins could have been writing about his own marriage. And again, weighing the possibility that Franklin had a second girlfriend at the very end of his life: ‘It might . . . be a mistake to assume that Roosevelt, who could keep so many political balls in the air at one time, would have found two ladies (plus a wife) an impossible challenge.’256
Then, in the last pages he wrote before he died, Jenkins included some unusually specific detail about FDR’s heart disease and the remedies prescribed to control it:
Eventually it was agreed that he should take digitalis, cut back his smoking to six cigarettes a day, eat less, and take a short, sharp bout of exercise after lunch. He did as he was told, but never asked a question. Perhaps he did not want to know; perhaps he trusted fate, or God; perhaps he did not care.257
When he wrote this, Jenkins did not know how close to death he was himself; but he certainly knew that he had many of the same symptoms and might not have very long. For years Jennifer had been trying to get him to eat and drink less. He occasionally went on the wagon or limited himself to white wine (which he never thought really counted); he sometimes went without dinner; and he was diligent about taking carefully recorded quantities of exercise. But he refused significantly to compromise his lifestyle; he chose to enjoy his life rather than seek to prolong it by eschewing his pleasures. He had no expectation of an afterlife and his attitude to death was much the same as Roosevelt’s.fn30
‘Roy glows with the happy certainty of a life well-lived,’ John Mortimer wrote in a late profile in the Sunday Times.259 Donald Macintyre, interviewing him for the Independent in the autumn of 2002, equally found him to be ‘an inspiritingly undisappointed man’.260 When John Major asked him over lunch if he ever regretted not having been Prime Minister, he was tempted to ask if Major regretted that he had been.261 Likewise he refused to regret the SDP. ‘One, we came near to spectacular success. That was worth the effort even though we did not quite achieve it. Two, I do not think that the Labour Party would have been dragged back from the wilder shores of lunacy without the shock of the SDP. I had higher hopes than that but at the lowest, we achieved that.’ One regret he did admit to was the inability of himself, Tony Crosland and Denis Healey to work together in the 1970s to keep the Labour Party from lurching left in the first place. This was the theme of a group biography of the three of them entitled Friends and Rivals, published by Giles Radice in 2002. Jenkins thought the book ‘fair and generous’ and did not dissent from its thesis: he accepted that it had been difficult for the other two, both slightly older than him and arguably better qualified, to accept him as leader, in the way that people like Douglas Jay and Frank Soskice in the previous generation had accepted Gaitskell. He thought his failure to gain their allegiance was ‘as much a criticism of me as it is of them’. Having initially described Crosland as ‘an immensely close friend’, he paused and corrected himself. ‘No. I was an immensely close friend of his. He was the senior partner, that was the trouble. That’s the parallel with Brown and Blair.’262
He watched the falling-out of Blair and Brown with some sympathy for the latter, despite his decisive role in keeping Britain out of the euro. Jenkins thought Brown had done well, ‘admittedly in favourable circumstances’, in maintaining a strong economy, and he was entitled to be ambitious. ‘Most senior politicians tend to be motivated by a good deal of personal ambition. They wouldn’t be senior politicians if they weren’t. So I don’t bitterly criticise him for that.’ But Brown would now do better to settle for having been a dominating Chancellor rather than a ‘tail-end Charlie’ Prime Minister. There was ‘an incredibly strong pattern’ of Prime Ministers coming at the end of a long period of government by their own party being an anticlimax: Rosebery after Gladstone, Chamberlain after Baldwin, Eden after Churchill, Home after Macmillan, Major after Thatcher – ‘and I wouldn’t exempt Jim Callaghan after Wilson’. ‘I rather wanted to be PM,’ he reflected, ‘and I suppose I would have been a tail-end Charlie.’263
He was dismayed by Britain tagging along behind the Americans’ disastrous slide towards war in Iraq, which was the subject of his last speech in the Lords on 24 September 2002. He still professed his ‘high regard’ for Blair and was ‘repelled by attempts to portray him as a vacuous man with an artificial smile and no convictions’, which reminded him of ‘similar attempts by a frustrated Right to suggest that Gladstone was mad, Asquith was corrupt and Attlee was negligible’:
My view is that the Prime Minister, far from lacking conviction, has almost too much, particularly when dealing with the world beyond Britain. He is a little too Manichaean for my perhaps now jaded taste, seeing matters in stark terms of good and evil, black and white, contending with each other, and with a consequent belief that if evil is cast down good will inevitably follow. I am more inclined to see the world and the regimes within it in varying shades of grey. The experience of the past year, not least in Afghanistan, has given more support to that view than to the more Utopian one that a quick ‘change of regime’ can make us all live happily ever after.
He worried about the Americans’ ‘vast preponderance of power and feeling that this gives it a right and a duty to arbitrate the world’ without reference to international opinion or the United Nations, and questioned the connection between Saddam’s alleged ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and the atrocities of 9/11. ‘When we have embarked on a policy of taking out undesirable regimes by external armed force,’ he asked, ‘where do we stop?’
There are a number of regimes which either have or would like to have nuclear weapons. I, and I guess the majority of your Lordships, would much rather they did not have them. But it would be difficult to justify a policy of taking them out seriatim with either common sense or international law.
‘I am in favour of courage,’ he concluded, ‘but not of treating it as a substitute for wisdom, as I fear we are currently in danger of doing.’264 These were his last words in Parliament.
That autumn he made his last foreign trip, taking the Eurostar to Brussels on 8 October, where he stayed the night at the British Embassy before going on by train to give a Churchill Memor
ial lecture in Luxembourg the next day, followed by a reception and dinner; then on to Zurich to speak again about Churchill at another dinner, after which he and Jennifer spent a week together in Venice before flying home. He also spoke at an Enigma conference at Christ Church and to a Barclays private clients’ dinner, where he was ‘a huge draw’ and delivered a ‘magisterial treat’.265 At the end of October there was a dinner at the Athenaeum marking the centenary of the Order of Merit, followed next day by a service at the Chapel Royal and lunch at Buckingham Palace attended by most of the surviving members.fn31 A few days later Jenkins wrote to thank the Queen for a ‘splendid celebration’ and the ‘great privilege’ of sitting next to her for part of the time. ‘Looking back I am, if I may say so, greatly impressed by your benign buoyancy on what cannot have been a very easy day.’ At the very end of his life the boy from Abersychan could even patronise Her Majesty; and he did not waste the opportunity for a little self-promotion: ‘As you were kind enough to allow me to meander on for several minutes about my little book on Twelve Cities, I thought that I might be permitted to send you a copy in the hope that one or two of them might catch your eye.’267
Ten days after this he had a recurrence of heart trouble and had to go back into hospital, regretfully cancelling several more engagements, among them dinner with the Churchill Society of Toronto, from where he had been planning to go on to Montreal and New York. He was booked to appear on Any Questions? on 6 December, but had to cancel. On the 16th he lunched for what turned out to be the last time with Robert Harris. ‘Mentally he was as sharp as ever, but physically he was manifestly ailing, hoarse-voiced, and walking with the aid of a stick. He said he was going into hospital straight after Christmas for electric shock treatment on his heart, and then immediately changed the subject.’ They arranged to meet again in the New Year.268 His last public act, just before Christmas, was to join with Geoffrey Howe, Peter Carrington and Douglas Hurd to sign a letter protesting at The Times’ refusal to publish a pro-euro letter from eleven retired ambassadors (organised by Nicko Henderson) in response to an anti-euro one they had published previously.269 He was still working six or seven hours a day to finish Roosevelt and reading as voraciously as ever. Among the last books he read were Orlando Figes’ Natasha’s Dance, Garret FitzGerald’s Reflections on the Irish State, Bernard Williams’ Truth and Truthfulness and a complex French novel (A Life’s Music by Andreï Makine), all newly published, plus Anthony Powell (again) and Elizabeth Jane Howard. On Christmas Eve he sent Tony Benn a postcard praising his latest volume of diaries.270 On 3 January 2003 he lunched with Michael Sissons at the Hare and Hounds in West Hanney to talk about his next book, which was to be nothing less than a full-scale biography of President Kennedy. Sissons had no sense that Jenkins felt he might not live to write it. But two days later, on Sunday 5 January, Jennifer rang to say that he had died at nine o’clock that morning.271 It was an enviably painless passing. His last words to Jennifer were to ask for ‘two eggs lightly poached’. When she came back with them he was gone.272
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