RIP: Lord Jenkins of Hillhead OM
Goodbye to the Great Grapefruit
There was much that was comical or just plain irritating about the late Roy Jenkins. Whilst speaking in public, his upward-facing hand would often make strange grasping motions in the air, as if, as was often remarked, he were a squire goosing the housemaid. He could not pronounce the letter “r”, and often affected to describe things as “agweeable” or “disagweeable”. (As one obituarist pointed out this week, his pronunciation of the word “rancour” was an endless source of amusement, while as the title of this article reminds us, much fun was also had with his pronunciation of the "Great Breakthrough" towards which he aspired to lead the SDP.) His lesser writings were littered with pointless lists: “X was the fourth most important politician since the war, but the sixth-most highly-educated”, etc.
He was often dismissed as lazy (obviously untrue in view of his written output) and many of his obituarists have claimed his image as a claret-obsessed sybarite was an affectation — if so, it was a foolish image to adopt. It may have played well with the liberal/media establishment, but it never gave him any mass public appeal. One looks in vain at Jenkins’ career for evidence that he ever had any the knack of knowing what would go down well with the “ordinary” voter — a gift which Thatcher, Major or Blair have all had in their prime. More likely, the “image” was reality, and he did not want the job of Prime Minister badly enough to achieve it — he once indeed confessed that he would have enjoyed it more after it was over than at the time.
My abiding memory of Jenkins is his appearance on BBC “Question Time” in the autumn of 1993. Revelling in his role as the elder statesman of the 1990s, he launched into an interminably pompous explanation of how in Britain we underrated the public sector and overrated the “pwivate” (which may have been what the public wanted to hear in the 1990s, but is in fact pretty nearly the opposite of the truth). One of his fellow panelists was Norman Lamont, who had been sacked as Chancellor the previous May. Although Lamont paid generous tribute to Jenkins’ own record as Chancellor, a generation earlier, Jenkins was rude enough, in the course of a condescending critique of everything that was wrong with the Government’s economic policies, to tell him to his face that he had not been “up to the job”. What Lamont said in reply I do not exactly recall, except that it drew attention to Jenkins’ failure to reach the top of British politics and to the absurd deference with which he was now treated, and ended in a request that he “grow old gracefully”, preferably elsewhere. Memory can be unreliable, but my clear recollection is that Jenkins’ face turned the colour of a beetroot. Even Lamont in his memoirs, where he generously claims that Jenkins “flattened” him, states that Jenkins “grew angry” and refused to talk to him afterwards. Well, if you can’t take it, as they say, don’t dish it out.
Jenkins grew up in Pontypool, South Wales, although it would have taken a pretty acute ear for accent to have recognized the fact. His father was a former miner and Labour MP, who with the passion for education characteristic of the “respectable” working class of that era, was determined that the young Roy should go to Oxford. The Labour Party maintained an iron grip on all public life in South Wales — Parliament, councils, trade unions, appointments to educational positions — and it is worth remembering that Roy Jenkins grew up not on the wrong side of the tracks but very much part of the local Labour aristocracy. Sadly his father succeeded too well at making his son into an Englishman, and on his death Roy was not seriously considered for his father’s old seat.
The young Roy Jenkins was a callow youth, who later to confessed to having been more upset, as he took his Finals in June 1940, at his second defeat for the Presidency of the Oxford Union than by Fall of France. One gets the impression that his Oxford contemporaries Crosland and Healey could never quite take his 1960s prominence seriously. He did get a First in PPE after some serious last-minute swotting. The Captain Jenkins of wartime photographs seems little more than a boy in uniform, and important as his codebreaking work must have been, it is hard to imagine him being entrusted with serious responsibility for the lives of men in combat, unlike Major Healey or Lt-Colonel Heath. He was not selected for a winnable Labour seat even in the 1945 landslide. When he did become an MP, in a 1948 by-election, he was often compared to a twentysomething peer’s son, sitting for a pocket borough in some previous century.
But late starters often have staying-power, and in Jenkins’ case he was to be active into his eighties. He stood at every General Election, except 1979 when he was away in Brussels, between 1945 and 1987, and in three by-elections (winning Southwark in 1948, losing Warrington in 1981 but winning Hillhead that same year). Surprisingly for a man who seemed most at home in rural Oxfordshire, he successively represented the three major cities of London (Southwark: 1948-50), Birmingham (Stechford: 1950-76) and Glasgow (Hillhead: 1981-7) in the House of Commons.
During the 1950s Jenkins was a Gaitskellite. He supported his leader’s plans to modernize the Labour Party by dropping Clause Four, but was appalled by Gaitskell’s opposition to Macmillan’s bid to enter what was then called the Common Market. Gaitskell’s death in 1963, and the advance of Harold Wilson, the candidate of the Left, to the leadership was a blow, and it seemed unlikely for a while that he would continue with politics at the highest level. On Labour’s return to power in 1964 he was a junior minister (for Aerospace), and refused the first Cabinet job (Education) he was offered.
Jenkins’ reputation was built on his tenure as Home Secretary (1965-7). Most of his reforms — relaxation of the law on divorce, abortion, homosexuality, censorship, the introduction of parole — would have happened anyway sooner or later, but would not have been introduced so early or with such panache. Those who hark after a mythical Golden Age of morality and non-existent crime, and who blame Jenkins for the loss of this happy state, can look for such views in other articles. These changes are now part of the fabric of society, and now that modern technology (by making contraception so easily available and by removing the need for heavy lifting from almost all kinds of paid work) has so banished basic biological realities from the lives of women, it is silly to pretend that the preservation of outdated laws would serve any beneficial purpose. Nor is it easy to see what good censorship would serve in the Age of the Internet. The introduction of parole is a trickier one, but then those who complain that 14% of violent criminals reoffend on parole, should perhaps stop to reflect that 86% by definition don’t. One particularly silly obituary of Jenkins claimed that a result of parole “three policemen were shot dead in a London street, a crime unheard-of for 100 years”. Well, Derek Bentley must have been hanged for something else then. It is of course true that those with money are cushioned from the worst evils, whilst crime and illegitimacy are of most harm to the poor. But laws are of little use in stopping deep-seated social change. The perceived failure to come to terms with such change may have helped the Conservatives electorally in the 1980s (although, except for Section 28, little attempt was ever made to turn the clock back) but in more recent years has been one of the main causes of the Tories’ lack of appeal to anybody under the age of forty.
After becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer (Crosland had wanted the job, but had to be content with the Board of Trade) at the end of 1967 Jenkins emerged as the leading figure in the government, a status helped by his superb parliamentary debating skills. After the devaluation of the pound in 1967 there was little alternative but to reap the benefits by what are now called “prudent” policies (“two years’ hard slog” as was said at the time). The Labour government was desperately unpopular for much of that time, under attack from left-wing students and unions, and beset by fears, absurd in retrospect, of a 1931-style landslide defeat. With Callaghan in eclipse after his own Chancellorship had ended in devaluation, Jenkins would have been the favourite to replace Wilson as Prime Minister. He was never to rise so high again. His prudent Chancellorship won him high praise, but cost Labour a narrow and unexpected defeat in the 1970 election.
Opposition saw Jenkins out of step with the direction the Labour Party was now taking. He and his followers voted with the Tory Government for its paving motion on joining the Common Market; Callaghan positioned himself more sensibly with his infamous “non, merci beaucoup” speech. Jenkins’ role as Deputy Leader of the Labour Party was now untenable, and he resigned in 1972. When Labour returned to office in 1974 Callaghan got the job Jenkins had wanted — Foreign Secretary — leaving him with a return visit to the Home Office. Jenkins led the successful 1975 Referendum Campaign to keep Britain in the EEC, but his future in the Labour Party was limited. He scored only 56 votes in the leadership election in 1976, which made Callaghan Prime Minister. With Healey secure at the Exchequer and Callaghan’s old crony Crosland now Foreign Secretary (how often the paths of those Oxford contemporaries seem to cross), Jenkins’ escape to Brussels to be President of the European Commission must have come as a relief. But then again, Barbara Castle at the time criticised him for his “political daintiness” and it can perhaps be seen as giving up and abandoning a struggle at Westminster which he had lacked the vigour to win. There is an irresistible parallel with Rab Butler, whose early career showed a smooth progress to the Exchequer when it depended on promotion on merit by his seniors, but whose struggle with equals for the Premiership led to failures by increasingly wide margins.
At Brussels Jenkins was the first activist President since de Gaulle had trimmed the wings of that post back in the 1960s. He helped to set up EMS, the precursor to EMU. It is only fair to say that nobody in Britain (or in many other places) ever voted for any of this, and that those like Enoch Powell who pointed out the direction in which European integration was leading were loudly rubbished by the likes of Jenkins and Heath. There is, in a democratic country, something deeply dishonest about this approach. There is every indication that Jenkins found Thatcher’s pursuit of a budget rebate in the early 1980s an embarrassment and an obstruction to his pursuit of compromise and ever-greater unity.
Jenkins returned to British politics at the start of the new decade, appalled by the extremism both of the Bennite Labour Party and of the Thatcherite Conservatives. We are told nowadays that the SDP was the precursor both to New Labour and to today’s Liberal Democrats — but it would be truer to say that Jenkins (and Williams, Rogers and Owen and the Labour MPs who defected with them) almost delivered Labour to Tony Benn. If Jenkins had stayed in British politics and had given Healey his full endorsement for the leadership, might not Labour have reformed itself sooner? Is it too much to think there might have been a degree of jealousy or animosity in Jenkins’ attitude? But he did think he was going to “break the mould” He won a by-election at Glasgow Hillhead, an eery echo of his hero Asquith’s brief return to Parliament (1920-24) for the Glasgow seat of Paisley. Oddly, Hillhead had formerly been a Conservative seat — how long ago the Orange Tory vote in Glasgow now seems. It is easy now to forget how shaky the Thatcher government looked in 1981 — even Edward Heath had delusions of returning to power in some kind of centrist government. The 1983 election put paid to such dreams, and (almost) to the SDP, who won almost as many votes as Labour, but only six seats.
Jenkins, mercilessly barracked by Denis Skinner, had never regained his old mastery of the Commons. David Owen (whose claim to fame, ironically, was that he had become Foreign Secretary, the job Jenkins had wanted, after Crosland’s sudden death in 1977) replaced him as SDP leader. Owen was (and who can blame him) “suspicious of a kind of automatic sogginess which you come across in many aspects of British life” and promised to bring to the SDP a “spirit of adventure, ‘guts’ and drive”. No prizes for guessing who that was aimed at. The 1980s were Owen’s moment of glory, and his populist, pro-nuclear, lukewarm-on-Europe views, not to mention his preference for clearcut “strong” solutions, were the antithesis of much of what Jenkins stood for. Jenkins was still a Keynesian and loathed Owen’s move towards Thatcherite economics. But he was yesterday’s man. In 1987 he lost his seat to George Galloway, who has been a friend to Iraq ever since. He became a life peer and Chancellor of Oxford University.
In old age Jenkins achieved more lasting fame as a writer than as a politician. Some of his books, written earlier in his career, are still useful, if a little dated: his biography of Sir Charles Dilke, Mr. Balfour’s Poodle (the story of the House of Lords’ opposition to the Edwardian Liberal governments), and his 1980s biography of President Truman. At the time of his death, he was said to be starting work on a biography of President Kennedy, whose horizontal exertions make Dilke’s Warren Street antics seem positively tame. His 1998 anthology The Chancellors contains useful material on such important but otherwise overlooked figures as William Harcourt, Robert Horne, Reginald McKenna and Sir John Anderson). His memoirs, A Life at the Centre (1991), are elegantly written and worth a read, which is more than can be said for the tedious and instantly-forgotten outpourings of most politicians.
But his three major biographies are better on people and dinner parties than on ideas. His Asquith (1964) is pretty thin on the evolution of new Liberalism, or the causes of the Liberal decline. I remember, even as an A-Level student, being disappointed at the thinness of his coverage of the 1912-14 Irish imbroglio. While this may give a clear and perhaps deliberate impression that Asquith regarded the whole mess as something best left to resolve itself, it is surely not wrong to suggest that Jenkins regarded the literally murderous passions of Irishmen (both Orange and Green) as too “disagweeable” to be worth spending time on or explaining properly. Gladstone (1995) is particularly thin on Gladstone’s High Tory beliefs of the 1830s (so well-covered by the late H.C.G. Matthew) or, indeed, the tortuous process by which (equally well-covered by Richard Shannon), without ever adopting Lockean classical liberalism, Gladstone argued his views into a “Religious Nationality” form of Liberalism. Even his rightly-praised Churchill (2001) is far stronger on Churchill’s record as a Liberal cabinet minister under Asquith than on his right-wing views of the 1930s, his sympathy for Franco and Mussolini, and even his private contempt for the “consensus” policies adopted by the postwar Conservative Party.
What of Jenkins’ own core belief — that the Liberal-Labour split had given the twentieth century to the Conservatives? For a start, one has to ask just what the Liberal Party is for. In its heyday it stood for a distinct sectional interest — nonconformists — and specific ideas: religious tolerance, free press, abolition of slavery, equality of all classes before the law, peace and international law abroad. The sectional interest is now irrelevant and the ideas are now accepted by almost everybody in the western world. It is hard to see just what connection the modern LibDems have with this tradition.
Looking back over periods of Conservative success, it can be seen that most of them were owed more to Labour extremism than to any failure of Labour and Liberals to combine. During the inter-war years Labour were unelectable, neither of their two governments lasting longer than two years. By the 1930s (when Labour were seriously planning to pass an Enabling Act, giving themselves absolute lawmaking power) the Conservatives were scoring over 50% of the vote, so a Lib-Lab coalition would have made no difference. During the Conservative rule of the 1950s the Liberals were a negligible quantity, with a handful of seats and not many more votes — the narrow Conservative victory in 1951 was actually owed to the Liberals’ lacking the money to contest all seats (there had been a General Election the previous year as well), causing their voters to vote Conservative. The 1980s were also a time of Labour extremism: it was said at the time that there was a natural anti-Labour majority, and that people voted SDP in by-elections and Conservative at the General Election. Jenkins’ thesis always was rubbish — an excuse for a progressive party of the Left in which the trade unions would have less influence and middle-class technocrats like Jenkins would have more.
What, then, is Jenkins’ relevance for politics today? His last campaign, to introduce PR, was a failure: he was consulted by Blair, then fobbed off. This caused him to denounce Blair as a “second-rate” intellect, a comparison which obviously says more about Jenkins’ view of himself than it does about Blair. But if Jenkins the man had become an irrelevance, it should not be supposed that his views were. Jenkins, as David Owen realised twenty years ago, epitomised a certain strand of liberal opinion which puts negotiation and compromise above leadership, and which, beneath the pretence of “civilised” tolerance, is in fact very intolerant of those who do not share its views. Views like those of Jenkins very much dominate the television news nowadays (with other points of view usually being derided as “extreme” and given inadequate airtime), which when they are the same as those of the government is not a healthy state of affairs.
What of the views themselves? Those who believe that health and education must be provided by the public sector indefinitely, with endless amounts of taxpayers’ cash thrown at them (not the view of the late Jo Grimond, it should be said) will find much comfort in them. So too will those who believe that Britain has more in common with continental Europe than with the English-speaking world, and that the world’s fourth-largest economy cannot survive without being buried in an undemocratic, business-stifling superstate, and that the public must be systematically misled and bullied into going along with each step of the way. The rest of us still have our work cut out.
James Steerforth works in the City.
James Steerforth, January 14, 2003 10:39 AM