Roy Harris Jenkins, Baron Jenkins of Hillhead (11 November 1920 – 5 January 2003) was a British statesman and writer who served as President of the European Commission from 1977 to 1981. At various times a Member of Parliament (MP) for the Labour Party and the Social Democratic Party (SDP), and a peer for the Liberal Democrats, he was Chancellor of the Exchequer and Home Secretary under the Wilson and Callaghan governments.
The son of Arthur Jenkins, a coal-miner and Labour MP, Jenkins was educated at the University of Oxford and served as an intelligence officer during the Second World War. Initially elected as MP for Southwark Central in 1948, he moved to become MP for Birmingham Stechford in 1950. On the election of Harold Wilson after the 1964 election, Jenkins was appointed Minister of Aviation. A year later, he was promoted to the Cabinet to become Home Secretary. In this role, Jenkins embarked on a major reform programme; he sought to build what he described as "a civilised society", overseeing measures such as the effective abolition in Britain of both capital punishment and theatre censorship, the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality, relaxing of divorce law, suspension of birching and the liberalisation of abortion law.
Following the devaluation crisis in November 1967, Jenkins replaced James Callaghan as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Throughout his time at the Treasury, Jenkins oversaw a tight fiscal policy in an attempt to control inflation, and oversaw a particularly tough Budget in 1968 which saw major tax rises. As a result of this, the Government's current account entered a surplus in 1969. After Labour unexpectedly lost the 1970 election, Jenkins was elected as Deputy Leader of the Labour Party in 1970. He resigned from the position in 1972 after the Labour Party decided to oppose Britain's entry to the European Communities, which he strongly supported. When Labour returned to power following the 1974 election, Wilson appointed Jenkins as Home Secretary for the second time. Two years later, when Wilson resigned as prime minister, Jenkins stood in the leadership election to succeed him, finishing third behind Michael Foot and the winner James Callaghan. He subsequently chose to resign from Parliament and leave British politics, to accept appointment as the first-ever (and so far, only) British President of the European Commission, a role he took up in January 1977.
After completing his term at the Commission in 1981, Jenkins announced a surprise return to British politics; dismayed with the Labour Party's move further left under the leadership of Michael Foot, he became one of the "Gang of Four", senior Labour figures who broke away from the party and founded the SDP. In 1982, Jenkins won a by-election to return to Parliament as MP for Glasgow Hillhead, taking the seat from the Conservatives in a famous result. He became leader of the SDP ahead of the 1983 election, during which he formed an electoral alliance with the Liberal Party. Following his disappointment with the performance of the SDP in the election, he resigned as leader. He subsequently lost his seat in Parliament at the 1987 election to Labour's George Galloway, and accepted a life peerage shortly afterwards; he sat in the House of Lords as a Liberal Democrat.
Jenkins was later elected to succeed former prime minister Harold Macmillan as Chancellor of the University of Oxford following the latter's death; he would hold this position until his own death sixteen years later. In the late 1990s, he served as a close adviser to Prime Minister Tony Blair and chaired a major commission on electoral reform. In addition to his political career, he was also a noted historian, biographer, and writer. David Marquand described Jenkins's autobiography, (1991), as one which "will be read with pleasure long after most examples of the genre have been forgotten".
Early life (1920–1945)
Born in Abersychan, Monmouthshire, in southeastern Wales, as an only child, Roy Jenkins was the son of a National Union of Mineworkers official, Arthur Jenkins. His father was imprisoned during the 1926 General Strike for his alleged involvement in disturbances. Arthur Jenkins later became President of the South Wales Miners' Federation and Member of Parliament for Pontypool, Parliamentary Private Secretary to Clement Attlee, and briefly a minister in the 1945 Labour government. Roy Jenkins' mother, Hattie Harris, was the daughter of a steelworks foreman.
Jenkins was educated at Pentwyn Primary School, Abersychan County Grammar School, University College, Cardiff, and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was twice defeated for the Presidency of the Oxford Union, but took a first-class degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE). His university colleagues included Tony Crosland, Denis Healey and Edward Heath, and he became friends with all three, although he was never particularly close to Healey.
In John Campbell's biography, A Well-Rounded Life, a romantic relationship between Jenkins and Crosland was detailed. Other figures whom he met at Oxford who would become notable in public life included Madron Seligman, Nicholas Henderson and Mark Bonham Carter.
During the Second World War, Jenkins received his officer training at Alton Towers and was posted to the 55th West Somerset Yeomanry at West Lavington, Wiltshire. Through the influence of his father, in April 1944, Jenkins was sent to Bletchley Park to work as a codebreaker; while there he befriended the historian Asa Briggs. Attlee then granted Jenkins access to his private papers so that he could write his biography, which appeared in 1948 (Mr Attlee: An Interim Biography). The reviews were generally favourable, including George Orwell's in Tribune.
In 1950, he advocated a large capital levy, abolition of public schools and introduction of a measure of industrial democracy to nationalised industries as key policy objectives for the Labour government. Here, Jenkins advocated the abolition of large private incomes by taxing them, graduating from 50 per cent for incomes between £20,000 and £30,000 to 95 per cent for incomes over £100,000. He later described this "almost Robespierrean" pamphlet as "the apogee of my excursion to the left". In 1953 appeared Pursuit of Progress, a work intended to counter Bevanism. Retreating from what he had demanded in Fair Shares for the Rich, Jenkins now argued that the redistribution of wealth would occur over a generation and abandoned the goal of public school abolition. He also opposed the Bevanites' neutralist foreign policy platform: "Neutrality is essentially a conservative policy, a policy of defeat, of announcing to the world that we have nothing to say to which the world will listen. ... Neutrality could never be acceptable to anyone who believes that he has a universal faith to preach". Jenkins argued that the Labour leadership needed to take on and defeat the neutralists and pacifists in the party; it would be better to risk a split in the party than face "the destruction, by schism, perhaps for a generation, of the whole progressive movement in the country".
Between 1951 and 1956, he wrote a weekly column for the Indian newspaper The Current. Here he advocated progressive reforms such as equal pay, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, the liberalisation of the obscenity laws and the abolition of capital punishment. Mr Balfour's Poodle, a short account of the House of Lords crisis of 1911 that culminated in the Parliament Act 1911, was published in 1954. Favourable reviewers included A. J. P. Taylor, Harold Nicolson, Leonard Woolf and Violet Bonham Carter. After a suggestion by Mark Bonham Carter, Jenkins then wrote a biography of the Victorian radical, Sir Charles Dilke, which was published in October 1958. Between 1955 and 1958 Jenkins served on the Board of Governors of the British Film Institute.
During the 1956 Suez Crisis, Jenkins denounced Anthony Eden's "squalid imperialist adventure" at a Labour rally in Birmingham Town Hall. Three years later he claimed that "Suez was a totally unsuccessful attempt to achieve unreasonable and undesirable objectives by methods which were at once reckless and immoral; and the consequences, as was well deserved, were humiliating and disastrous".
Jenkins praised Anthony Crosland's 1956 work The Future of Socialism as "the most important book on socialist theory" since Evan Durbin's The Politics of Democratic Socialism (1940). With much of the economy now nationalised, Jenkins argued, socialists should concentrate on eliminating the remaining pockets of poverty and on the removal of class barriers, as well as promoting libertarian social reforms. Jenkins was principal sponsor, in 1959, of the bill which became the liberalising Obscene Publications Act, responsible for establishing the "liable to deprave and corrupt" criterion as a basis for a prosecution of suspect material and for specifying literary merit as a possible defence.
In July 1959, Penguin published Jenkins' The Labour Case, timed to anticipate the upcoming election. Jenkins argued that Britain's chief danger was that of "living sullenly in the past, of believing that the world has a duty to keep us in the station to which we are accustomed, and showing bitter resentment if it does not do so". He added: "Our neighbours in Europe are roughly our economic and military equals. We would do better to live gracefully with them than to waste our substance by trying unsuccessfully to keep up with the power giants of the modern world". Jenkins claimed that the Attlee government concentrated "too much towards the austerity of fair shares, and too little towards the incentives of free consumers' choice". Although he still believed in the elimination of poverty and more equality, Jenkins now argued that these aims could be achieved by economic growth. In the final chapter ('Is Britain Civilised?') Jenkins set out a list of necessary progressive social reforms: the abolition of the death penalty, decriminalisation of homosexuality, abolition of the Lord Chamberlain's powers of theatre censorship, liberalisation of the licensing and betting laws, liberalisation of the divorce laws, legalisation of abortion, decriminalisation of suicide and more liberal immigration laws. Jenkins concluded:
<blockquote>Let us be on the side of those who want people to be free to live their own lives, to make their own mistakes, and to decide, in an adult way and provided they do not infringe the rights of others, the code by which they wish to live; and on the side of experiment and brightness, of better buildings and better food, of better music (jazz as well as Bach) and better books, of fuller lives and greater freedom. In the long run these things will be more important than the most perfect of economic policies.</blockquote>
In the aftermath of Labour's 1959 defeat, Jenkins appeared on Panorama and argued that Labour should abandon further nationalisation, question its connection with the trade unions and not dismiss a closer association with the Liberal Party. In November he delivered a Fabian Society lecture in which he blamed Labour's defeat on the unpopularity of nationalisation and he repeated this in an article for The Spectator. His Spectator article also called for Britain to accept its diminished place in the world, to grant colonial freedom, to spend more on public services and to promote the right of individuals to live their own lives free from the constraints of popular prejudices and state interference. Jenkins later called it a "good radical programme, although...not a socialist one".
In May 1960, Jenkins joined the Campaign for Democratic Socialism, a Gaitskellite pressure group designed to fight against left-wing domination of the Labour Party. In July 1960 Jenkins resigned from his frontbench role in order to be able to campaign freely for British membership of the Common Market. At the 1960 Labour Party conference in Scarborough, Jenkins advocated rewriting Clause IV of the party's constitution but he was booed. In November he wrote in The Spectator that "unless the Labour Party is determined to abdicate its role as a mass party and become nothing more than a narrow sectarian society, its paramount task is to represent the whole of the Leftward-thinking half of the country—and to offer the prospect of attracting enough marginal support to give that half some share of power".
During 1960–62, his main campaign was British membership of the Common Market, where he became Labour's leading advocate of entry. When Harold Macmillan initiated the first British application to join the Common Market in 1961, Jenkins became deputy chairman of the all-party Common Market Campaign and then chairman of the Labour Common Market Committee. At the 1961 Labour Party conference Jenkins spoke in favour of Britain's entry.
Since 1959, Jenkins had been working on a biography of the Liberal Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith. For Jenkins, Asquith ranked with Attlee as the embodiment of the moderate, liberal intelligence in politics that he most admired. Through Asquith's grandson, Mark Bonham Carter, Jenkins had access to Asquith's letters to his mistress, Venetia Stanley. Kenneth Rose, Michael Foot, Asa Briggs and John Grigg all favourably reviewed the book when it was published in October 1964. However, Violet Bonham Carter wrote a defence of her father in The Times against the few criticisms of Asquith in the book, and Robert Rhodes James wrote in The Spectator that "Asquith was surely a tougher, stronger, more acute man...than Mr. Jenkins would have us believe. The fascinating enigma of his complete decline is never really analysed, nor even understood. ... We required a Sutherland: but we have got an Annigoni". John Campbell claims that "for half a century it has remained unchallenged as the best biography and is rightly regarded as a classic". After the 1964 general election Jenkins was appointed Minister of Aviation and was sworn of the Privy Council. While at Aviation he oversaw the high-profile cancellations of the BAC TSR-2 and Concorde projects (although the latter was later reversed after strong opposition from the French Government). In January 1965 Patrick Gordon Walker resigned as Foreign Secretary and in the ensuing reshuffle Wilson offered Jenkins the Department for Education and Science; however, he declined it, preferring to stay at Aviation.
Home Secretary (1965–1967)
In the summer of 1965, Jenkins eagerly accepted an offer to replace Frank Soskice as Home Secretary. However Wilson, dismayed by a sudden bout of press speculation about the potential move, delayed Jenkins' appointment until December. Once Jenkins took office – the youngest Home Secretary since Churchill – he immediately set about reforming the operation and organisation of the Home Office. The Principal Private Secretary, Head of the Press and Publicity Department and Permanent Under-Secretary were all replaced. He also redesigned his office, famously replacing the board on which condemned prisoners were listed with a fridge.
Following the 1966 general election, in which Labour won a comfortable majority, Jenkins pushed through a series of police reforms which reduced the number of separate forces from 117 to 49. The Times called it "the greatest upheaval in policing since the time of Peel". His visit to Chicago in September (to study their policing methods) convinced him of the need to introduce two-way radios to the police; whereas the Metropolitan Police possessed 25 radios in 1965, Jenkins increased this to 2,500, and provided similar numbers of radios to the rest of the country's police forces. Jenkins also provided the police with more car radios, which made the police more mobile but reduced the amount of time they spent patrolling the streets. His Criminal Justice Act 1967 introduced more stringent controls on the purchase of shotguns, outlawed last-minute alibis and introduced majority verdicts in juries in England and Wales. The Act was also designed to lower the prison population by the introduction of release under licence, easier bail, suspended sentences and earlier parole. Addressing a London meeting of the National Committee for Commonwealth Immigrants he notably defined Integration:
Before going on to ask:
And concluding that: