Roy Jenkins: a well-rounded life

Reviewed by Shirley Wiliams
JONATHAN CAPE, 832pp, £30
Tablet bookshop price £27                  
Tel 01420 592974

This biography is as substantial as its subject. John Campbell draws extensively on press comments and articles, personal letters from and to friends and colleagues, Parliamentary debates, books and diaries. The century  Jenkins lived through was a century of words. Few people had a greater or more sensitive appreciation of words, written and spoken, and few enjoyed them more.

He was a brilliant and prodigious writer, and that description stands on his gravestone before any other. His devotion to writing went far beyond cogent and pointed articles and comments to massive, authoritative biographies of Gladstone and Churchill. He was fascinated by the lives of the great politicians who preceded him, particularly Asquith. 

Jenkins did not only write about history; he made history. He was a radical Home Secretary, a rarity in that authoritarian and dismal department. He was a successful Chancellor of the Exchequer at a time of financial crisis; he was the president of the European Commission who manoeuvred it into having a significant role in the big decisions Europe had to make; he was the co-founder of a new party, in large part in his own image; he was a broad-minded and energetic Chancellor of the University of Oxford (a job he loved) and an untiring political reformer. He somehow enveloped all of this and more in a fulfilled and satisfactory life in which creature comforts, good food and wine, stimulating friendships, and new intellectual and geographic landscapes all had their role.

Jenkins was also highly controversial. Mrs Thatcher, whose enthusiasm for free markets did not always extend to freedom of information or freedom from established convention, deplored the emergence of the permissive society in the 1960s. This was as much the product of new developments in the theatre, the arts, architecture and science as it was the creation of the Home Secretary. Jenkins was astute in supporting backbench MPs like Leo Abse or Liberals like David Steel in bringing forward libertarian legislation on homosexuality, censorship, legalised abortion and the abolition of capital punishment. His own contribution lay in legislation against gender and racial discrimination, and other fields. But there is no doubt that Jenkins shook up a restless society and in doing so offended traditional institutions, among them the Churches. What he did not do was to denigrate or dismiss serious argument on the other side.

Liberal though he was, Jenkins was no softie. Faced with the Birmingham pub bombings of November 1974 in which the IRA killed 21 people, he arrived in the city on the same day, went to see the wrecked building, met with the police and senior councillors, and made clear to the fearful local Irish community that retaliation against it would not be tolerated. He put huge pressure on the police to find those responsible as quickly as possible.
He was born into the land of Labour heroes, the Welsh mining valleys, and his father Arthur was one of them – briefly a miner, then a union official, then a miners’ MP, and ultimately private secretary to Clement Attlee. Arthur Jenkins was a renowned figure in his homeland, and Jenkins grew up as heir to Labour’s inheritance, along with Aneurin Bevan, Jim Griffiths and other great Welshmen and women. On to this inheritance was grafted his academic achievements, becoming a Balliol undergraduate, and entering into that Oxford Parnassus of effortless superiority before he or his fellow students had actually achieved anything. This extraordinary legacy went far to explain the apparent contradictions in Jenkins, on the one hand the lifelong commitment to social democracy, equality and human rights, and hatred of discrimination in all its forms, on the other, the delights of club and country-house life, and civilised and hedonistic friendships with cultured men and women, that at first sight seemed so much at odds.

Roy’s values and beliefs were never compromised by his lifestyle. Tony Benn once described Roy – and the two men were quite good friends – as “wildly ambitious”. If so, he was very bad at it. In 1969, when Roy had proved himself as a brilliant Minister; again in 1973 when the British economy was under massive strain from the miners’ strike; and then in 1976 when Harold Wilson retired as Prime Minister, the scene seemed set for a bold coup by the man who was probably more admired than anyone else in politics. But each time Jenkins, despite his very clear blueprint for the future and a posse of devoted and talented followers, could not quite summon up the will to strike. Even among his admirers, he was seen as more prophet than fighter, a man whose reason and fair-mindedness made him see too many sides of every argument. He lacked the driven single-mindedness of a Thatcher or a Callaghan. After all, life in all its richness had so much more to offer.

Jenkins was also a shy man. He was not attracted to the strobe-light shallows of being, in the contemporary sense, “a celebrity”. His fastidiousness and subtlety rejected that. He could flourish in the company of friends, or of fellow campaigners or even in monumental debates where the issues, not the personalities, were central. On the stump, in election campaigns, it would take him several days to overcome his yearning for privacy. Once overcome, however, he was a brilliant campaigner, losing his shyness in projecting his beliefs. To see him conducting seminars on the streets of Warrington, running up the long tenement stairs of Glasgow’s Hillhead, and reaching for a European vision among the rain-soaked hundreds who flocked to his referendum meetings was to see a man for whom self-importance and pomposity were irrelevant.

His sense of history had provided Jenkins with an illuminating guide to the future of his country and his continent, that rested on a passionate commitment to individual freedom and tolerance. And long before the likes of Thomas Piketty and Joe Stiglitz, Jenkins foresaw that continuing economic growth would reward the owners and controllers of capital far more than honest business people  and skilled workers, that capitalism would devour its own, and that inequality would become so extreme that it would threaten democracy itself.

I remember at one lunch in his home at East Hendred, Jenkins holding forth confidently and unstoppably. “Roy,” his wife, Jennifer, said, “you are being insufferably pompous.” The effect was instant; he simply stopped. Jenkins turned to Jennifer, a woman of integrity and understated courage, for advice on all the hardest decisions he had to make. She, and their children, were a key part of what made Roy, for all the lampooning of the media, unquestionably a great man.