June 22, 2015

Finest Hour 118, Spring 2003

Page 09

Our distinguished honorary member Roy Jenkins died on January 5th at the age of 82. The most important postwar British politician not to become prime minister, he came from the South Wales mining region, the son of a leading Labour MP who had been Parliamentary Private Secretary to Clement Attlee and a junior minister in the closing stages of Winston Churchill’s wartime coalition government. Young Roy obtained a first class degree at Oxford and then joined the Army, where he worked for a time among the Bletchley Park code-breakers.

He was elected to Parliament in 1948, but had to wait until Harold Wilson’s Labour government in 1964 before achieving office. Briefly Minister of Aviation, he was promoted to the Cabinet as Home Secretary and became an avid liberal reformer, notably in the field of homosexuality and abortion laws which were central to the permissive society (which he termed the “civilised society”). He then became Chancellor of the Exchequer and was successful in steering the economy from crisis to calmer waters, an achievement which gave him a good chance to succeed Harold Wilson. But his party lost the 1970 election and the opportunity was lost with it.

Although he returned to office as Home Secretary in 1974, he left the government for a four-year term as President of the European Commission. He worked energetically and was determined to be recognised everywhere as a head of state, as his fascinating book, European Diary, makes clear.

The book contains at least one hilarious story. Following a European summit meeting in London, all the heads of government attended a Buckingham Palace reception. Jenkins found the Queen talking (in French) to President Giscard d’Estaing and joined the conversation. After a while the Frenchman drifted away and Jenkins and Her Majesty continued to talk to each other in French for several minutes before they both realised the absurdity of the situation.

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Back home Jenkins became disillusioned by Labour’s lurch to the left and hostility to Europe; he and three other prominent Labour figures (Shirley Wiilliams, David Owen and Bill Rodgers) formed the breakaway Social Democratic Party. Although he was eventually elected under the SDP banner in the Glasgow constituency of Hillhead, and became party leader, the SDP was weak and felt obliged to fight the next election in an alliance with the Liberal Party, later merging with it, eventually to become today’s Liberal Democrats. By this time Jenkins had (in 1987) been defeated and was elevated to the peerage as Lord Jenkins of Hillhead; in this capacity he became party leader in the House of Lords, a role he filled for the next nine years.

In 1987 he was elected Chancellor of Oxford University, a post he held until his death and which gave him the greatest satisfaction; and in 1993 was appointed to the Order of Merit. Throughout his career he was a regular author of political biographies and other major studies, notably on Gladstone, Asquith and Attlee. It was felicitous that his last major work was Churchill, published to great acclaim in 2001. (See his account of writing the book in FH 113 and our review in FH 114.) Finest Hour’s editor said he didn’t think there had been a Churchill biography remotely close to Jenkins’s special vantage point and understanding. This made the book an invaluable contribution to the whole picture. An eminent Churchillian indeed.
—Paul H. Courtenay