READERS OF John Campbell’s new biography of Roy Jenkins might be surprised by the revelation that the architect of the permissive society and bon vivant devoted “a month reading little except books by and about [Cardinal] Newman” in 1990.Jenkins, then chancellor of Oxford University, had been asked to give a lecture on Newman to mark the centenary of his death: “I must have taken leave of my senses in accepting,” he said. But when he turned to Newman’s sermons, the former Labour deputy leader found himself “held spellbound in the grip of his prose”. Anthony Kenny, then master of Balliol, whom Campbell identifies as having been “discretely active” in the campaign to elect Jenkins as chancellor in succession to Harold Macmillan, to