Roy Jenkins had a fascinating life. Born in 1920 in Abersychan, a mining community in Wales, he came from a strongly “Labour” family—his father, Arthur Jenkins, was a leading official in the Union of Mineworkers, eventually becoming a member of Parliament. Jenkins himself was elected to Parliament at the age of 28, working his way up the Labour ladder to become Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1967 under Harold Wilson’s first government. He was widely regarded as Wilson’s successor when Labor returned to power in 1974 after losing unexpectedly in 1970. However, Jenkins’ centrist and pro-European Union views caused him and the party to grow disenchanted with each other, and he never really attained the position of power than he held ten years before. In 1977 he accepted the position of President of the European Commission, a step down from real power, but from which he could observe European leaders like Valery Giscard d’Estaing, Helmut Schmidt, and Margaret Thatcher in their relatively unguarded moments, In 1981 he returned to politics when he helped form the “Social Democratic Party”, which briefly seemed to hold the possibility of breaking the monopoly of power held by the Labour and Conservative Parties, before falling to pieces in the face of Maggie Thatcher’s triumphant Conservatives, pushed forward first by the “glorious” Falklands war and then by her successes in both domestic and foreign policy.
I first “discovered” Jenkins early last year, when I read his biography of four-time British prime minister William Gladstone, which I discussed in a long post last March. While reading Jenkins’ biography of Gladstone, I “discovered” that I had read three previous biographies written by Jenkins, one of Herbert Henry Asquith (prime minister, 1908-1916) and one of Churchill, which I discussed in a lively post titled Winston Churchill, Total Homo, and, many years earlier, Charles Dilke, an obscure (in the U.S.) Victorian Liberal politician who many thought might have become prime minister until he was caught up in a lurid sex scandal. I became fascinated by Jenkins and read several “minor” works by him before getting my hands on his extensive autobiography, A Life at the Centre (1991), along with John Campbell’s Roy Jenkins: A Well-Rounded Life (2014).
One can wonder who was the more remarkable man, Roy or his father Arthur. Arthur Jenkins, born in 1884, went “down in the pits” at the age of 12, but his intelligence allowed him to escape, obtaining a job with the miner’s union at the age of 15. He pursued formal education with remarkable tenacity, at a time when opportunities for working class youth like himself were almost non-existent. He finished his education at the Sorbonne, making himself reasonably fluent in French in the process, with the result that their home, as his son proudly tells us, was lined with the classic works of European literature, either in the original French or French translation.
The son was even more aggressively upwardly mobile than the father, for even though Arthur Jenkins served in Parliament for many years, he remained “the miner’s friend”, remaining proudly working class in his outlook. But Jenkins, to an almost shocking extent, left all of that behind, despite spending the great majority of his active political career within the Labour Party.
Like many ambitious men, Arthur Jenkins married upwards, taking as his wife Hattie Harris, the daughter of a steelworks manager. For whatever reason, Roy was an only child, and the focus of his father’s ambitions, who was determined to see his son at Oxford. Fortunately for both, Roy was primed for upward mobility at an early age—earnestly copying out a large-scale street map of “the City”, the central part of London where everyone who counted lived, and memorizing all the streets, so he could, so to speak, hit the ground running.
In 1935, when Roy was 15, his father was elected to Parliament, allowing Roy to put his map to good use. He spent a great deal of time listening to debates—which were taken with immense seriousness in the UK, reported in great detail in all the London papers, which circulated throughout the country. All of his adult life, Jenkins began almost every day with a ritual reading of “the papers”.
Jenkins loved Oxford, and particularly his “college”, Balliol, which dates back to the 13th century. He seems to have been entirely devoid of class-consciousness. He was surrounded by the sons of the elite—graduates of famous elite “public schools” like Eton and Harrow that were more than legend in his time—and never seems to have felt out of place. He speaks at one point of being warmed by “great open fires, with hods of coal borne across the quadrangle by ancient servitors.” Couldn’t the young gentlemen perhaps better have carried the coal themselves?1 But then their hands would get dirty. One might think that the son of a coal miner might feel a bit guilty under such circumstances. But apparently not.
In his autobiography, Jenkins claims, not too convincingly, that there was “something in the air of water” in Abersychan that helps Welshmen lose their accent. Norman Podhoretz, writing more honestly in his (often derided) memoir, Making It, remarked on the fact that he unconsciously lost his “Lower East Side” accent as an adolescent, even though most of his friends did not. Because subconsciously he wanted to go “Uptown”. He didn’t want to be a WASP, but he wanted to talk like one.
Having read Roy’s “big books”, I began searching for his minor ones, obtaining a collection of his essays to round out my reading. Well, never read your heroes’ essays, amirite? Because one of the essays I read was a “personal” essay (never write a personal essay, amirite?) on wines. It turns out that Roy was a serious oenophile, though he makes the pretty horrible confession that he only knows what he’s drinking when he looks at the label. He then goes on to brag about all the “great” wines he’d consumed at any number of elaborate bashes he attended, particularly when president of the European Commission, but at that point I’d stopped reading, sickened by what I had learned.
The thing is, I have a particular dislike of oenophilia—and, indeed, “connoisseurship” in general—descanting, so to speak, on the subject in several posts, condemning it as the narcissism, not of small differences, but of invisible ones, which Roy all unconsciously illustrated for me. For if you can’t tell the difference between a $10 bottle and a $10,000 bottle, why the fuck go for the ten grand, if not for a mere gluttony of privilege?
According to Campbell’s biography, Roy got himself much laughed in 1989, after his attempt to reshape British politics had unfortunately failed, when he published a memoir, European Diary 1977-1981, recounting his tenure at the EC. It was, embarrassingly, very largely an account of memorable banquets he’d attended as part of his “job” (which paid £200,000 a year, twice the prime minister’s salary), a volume surely someone labeled Dining Out in Paris and Brussels.2
Such ritualized, routinized gluttony, in the name of “civilization”, banally recreating Europe’s aristocratic past, which wasn’t all that great the first time around, turns my Puritan stomach. I will have a good many complimentary things to say about Jenkins in the rest of this piece, but here is the heart of my complaint about Roy: Elites are at once inevitable, necessary, and dangerous. They are bureaucratic organisms whose “natural” goal is their own self-preservation and growth. Particularly unattractive and dangerous are the development, which always occurs, of ritual affirmations of solidarity and value of the organization itself, which are always likely to become the very purpose of the organization. And, to an American, the earnest aping of Europe’s bygone aristocratic masters—who, after all, got their heads chopped off for a reason—appears particularly repulsive.3
The dangers of Establishment self indulgence were nicely, and a bit surprisingly, examined in Steven Spielberg’s film The Post, dealing with the Washington Post’s ultimate decision to publish the “Pentagon Papers”, exposing the massive hypocrisy and dishonesty with which the Johnson Administration conducted the Vietnam War. The film shows, in its best moments, the liberal Washington “Establishment”, in the form of Post publisher Katherine Graham, struggling to “process” the fact that loyalty to “old friends” is sabotaging the country: “You want me to turn my back on Bob McNamara? After all we’ve been through? We can work this out, but not in public! I just can’t do that to Bob! And Margaret! I can’t do it! I just can’t!”4
The systemized, standardized consumption of ostentatious privilege is the psychic mortar that holds an uncritically self-affirming elite together. Jenkins left the EC far too early to be held responsible for the debacles that followed after the EC became the European Union, yet the atmosphere of pseudo-aristocratic good fellowship in which he clearly reveled and helped sustain, was good grease for the skids that followed.
It is remarkable to me that even when he was at Balliol (because we’re going back there) Jenkins was a confident sybarite, eagerly recommending vintages to anyone who would listen. Even more remarkably, as far as I can tell, no one ever called him on it. Surely someone must have sneered at this vulgar little “risen from the ranks”, but if they did so they did it quietly. In his later years, Jenkins was often ridiculed for his “posh” accent, but never, as far as I can tell, for sounding “common”.5
More important even than wine (one assumes) to Jenkins at Oxford was a passionate sexual affair with Anthony Crosland, two years his senior and also several rungs up the social ladder, attending the prestigious Highgate School.6 The affair, which Jenkins, unsurprisingly does not discuss in his autobiography, must have given him final assurance that society’s petty rules and regulations, seemingly hemming every aspect of our lives, only apply to us if we let them.
Crosland, like Jenkins, would go on to become a prominent member of the Labour Party, serving with Jenkins in Wilson’s second cabinet. He was surely the “top” in the relationship, and it must have come as a stunning shock to him when Jenkins suddenly left him—for, of all things, a woman! (Mary Jennifer Morris, to be specific.) Whom he would eventually marry! For a top to lose his bottom to a woman—well, a top could surely sink no lower.
Jenkins graduated from Balliol directly into the army, where he served at the legendary “Ultra” program at Bletchley Park, not in the glamorous role of code breaker, but using the “broken” codes (which had to be broken every day) to translate the German messages. The actual codebreakers would transmit the results of their work to translators like Jenkins as either “dead certs” or “moral certs.” According to Jenkins, “dead certs” always worked, while “moral certs” never did.
Jenkins was elected to Parliament in 1948, after the first heady rush of the first “real” Labour government in 1945, but still early enough to believe he was “on the side of history,” and, thanks to his ancestry, intelligence, and ambition, soon made his way close to the inner circles of power. However, that all changed in 1951, when, stunningly, the Labour Party lost control of Parliament to the Conservatives—thanks entirely to the vagaries of the British electoral map, since Labour won significantly more votes than the Tories.
In the 1950s, a member of Parliament from a safe seat whose party was in the minority had remarkably little to do, particularly if he/she found the minutiae of party politics tedious, something that was emphatically true of Jenkins, which quite probably marked him as an “also ran” in the prime minister sweepstakes from the start, despite all his other gifts. Unlike a member of Congress, Jenkins was under zero pressure to please his constituents: an “MP” was a grand, remote figure, who hardly could be expected to bother with the petty details of his constituents’ simple lives.
Jenkins put this freedom to very good use, among other things taking a tour of the United States courtesy of an foreign outreach program that was the brainchild of right-wing Senator Karl Mundt, with whom Jenkins surely had little in common. On the trip, Jenkins demonstrated his knack for impressing people, of convincing them that he was someone who was both pleasant to know and important to know, someone who, in ten years’ time, would be someone who counted. He became good friends with another young man on the way up, John Kenneth Galbraith, who a number of years later would bring Jenkins into one of the most magic of all circles, that of the Kennedys. Jenkins never got to know JFK well at all, but he knew Robert F. Kennedy quite well, which, of course, would hurt his reputation in the UK not at all. After JFK’s death, he became a member of perhaps the most magic circle of all, a personal friend of Jackie Kennedy, playing tennis with her, receiving long, affectionate, hand-written notes from her, and even having an affair with her sister, “Princess” Lee Radziwill, who obtained her title by marrying the Polish nobleman Stanisław Albrecht Radziwiłł.
Such jet-setting bon vivantisme lay in the future, but Jenkins early discovered the joys of adultery—entirely hetero, from all accounts. In order to finance the life to which Jenkins was determined to become accustomed, he turned to that traditional resource of the impecunious gentleman, his pen—or, more prosaically, his typewriter. One of his best friends at Oxford had been Mark Bonham Carter, a grandson of Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith, who became a bit—or even more than a bit—of an obsession with Jenkins. Carter went to work for what was then Collins publishing house (now HarperCollins LLC), one of the largest in London. In 1954 Jenkins published his first book, Mr. Balfour’s Poodle, a very inside book—fully intelligible, I suspect, only by someone who served as an MP in the fifties. Mr. Balfour’s Poodle is the story, almost unknown in the U.S., of the struggle of Asquith’s Liberal government to end the House of Lords’ power of veto over legislation passed by the House of Commons, more than a little similar to the current struggle in the U.S. to eliminate the Senate filibuster, a battle finally won by the Liberals in 1911. The title refers to a gibe delivered by Lloyd George to the Conservative Party’s leader, Arthur Balfour, while in debate: “[The House of Lords] is the right hon. Gentleman's poodle. It fetches and carries for him. It barks for him. It bites anybody that he sets it on to. And we are told that this is a great revising Chamber, the safeguard of liberty in the country.”
Jenkins’ friendship surely allowed him to get a publisher (Collins, of course) on favorable terms, as well as access to a great deal of “inside” information. There is a fascinating discussion of a secret attempt by the Liberals and Conservatives to settle all their differences in one grand package that would pass both houses while leaving the Lords still in possession of their veto. Such grand schemes almost invariably fail, both because the public reaction to such a deal would almost surely be stupefied disbelief and because parties very often prefer live issues that they can use to rally supporters than actual legislation, which never delivers everything that is promised. Still, it is very interesting to know what the parties’ “bottom lines” were in 1911.
The big issues for the Liberals were taxation of land, which of course assaulted the privileges of the aristocracy directly, and “Home Rule” for Ireland which, in my ignorant American’s opinion could never be achieved peaceably.7 The Conservative’s bottom line is more interesting: a military draft and a large standing army, both unprecedented in peacetime, policies that the Conservative Party had never advocated in public. It’s “remarkable” to me both that this is what the Conservative Party was “really” thinking and that they thought, for even a moment, that such a package could even be presented to the public without provoking an hysterical backlash.8
The bulk of Mr. Balfour’s Poodle is devoted to a deep discussion of the actual parliamentary maneuvering that got the bill through the House of Commons and ultimately enacted into law, thanks very largely, Jenkins tells us, to the patient but unrelenting leadership of Lloyd George, which he records in unrelenting detail. I have read several more general histories of the period, which dwell far more heavily on Asquith’s struggles to receive assurance from the king—first Edward VII and then George V—that, if necessary, he would appoint enough new lords to create a favorable majority in the Lords. But Jenkins is far more interested in what happened in the House of Commons.
Four years later, Jenkins would publish a much more saleable political study, Sir Charles Dilke: A Victorian Tragedy, a study that, I strongly suspect, reflected what would be Jenkins’ true, though hidden agenda—hidden until 1981 and the forming of the Social Democratic Party—a “reform” party for the UK similar to the Democratic Party in the US, rather than an avowedly socialist party that Jenkins clearly, though again secretly, regarded as tied to a useless ideology based more on class envy than economic reality. Charles Dilke was a leading light of the Liberal Party in the UK in the late 19th century, an advanced “radical” whose career was ruined in 1885 thanks to his involvement in a scandalous divorce case, during which he was publicly accused of having been in bed with two twenty-something sisters at the same time. Apparently, most of the charges against Dilke weren’t true, but he was involved in an adulterous affair with the girls’ mother, and, in large part due to an ill-advised counter suit, Dilke’s reputation was ruined.
Well, in the repressed 1950s, what could be more pleasant than a good chuckle over those naughty Victorians? Jenkins made a good deal of money off this book, but neither he nor Campbell remark on what really interested Jenkins—the “what if” question. What if Dilke’s career hadn’t been ruined? What if Dilke—young, confident, competent—had been available to take over the leadership of the Liberal Party from the “Grand Old Man”, William Gladstone, who, in 1885, had split the party by taking up the cause of “Home Rule” for Ireland?9
Some have argued that Gladstone, then in his late 70s, had taken up the Irish cause because he needed a “passionate” issue that would stir his spirit without disturbing his “classical liberal” principles, which generally rejected the “radical” ideas advocated by Dilke and others for government intervention to remedy social injustice. Dilke, more than 30 years Gladstone’s junior, could have been the man to lead the Liberal Party into a full partnership with the working class. Instead, with Dilke out of the way, the clearly dominant “junior man” in the Liberal Party was Dilke’s fellow radical, Joseph Chamberlin,10 who would instead lead the split of the Liberals, leaving the party over the issue of Home Rule and forming the “Liberal Unionist Party”, thus ensuring the rule of the Tories until the disasters of the Boer War brought the Liberals back in in 1905.
Actually, at the time Jenkins was writing his biography of Dilke, a “real Dilke” seemed to be emerging in the Labour Party, Hugh Gaitskell, who won leadership of the party in 1955 over intense left-wing opposition and struggled unsuccessfully to eliminate the Labour Party’s pledge to pursue nationalization of all major industries. Jenkins admired Gaitskell intensely, but was deeply disappointed when Gaitskell led the party against British membership in the European Community, which ultimately failed in the face of De Gaulle’s veto.
Jenkins, as he so often was, was ahead of his time in recognizing that Great Britain was no longer a great power, that she could no longer go it alone. It was not so much that Britain had shrunk—though she had—but that her rivals had grown. The empire was lost, and the “Commonwealth of Nations” was no substitute, if only because independent nations had no desire to be exploited by the “Mother Country”. It is “interesting” that both left and right wing Brits are often intensely suspicious of both Europe and the United States, somehow convinced that Britannia still doesn’t need anyone.11
Unfortunately for Jenkins, there was far worse to come. In 1963, with Gaitskell poised to lead Labour to victory in the next election, whenever it would be, Gaitskell suddenly died, leaving leadership of the party to Harold Wilson, then considered a leftist, though he later tacked right. Left out of both Jenkins’ and Campbell’s discussion of the 1964 election, which Labour barely won, is a tremendous, hidden scandal that reflects disastrously on Harold Wilson, which I described in an earlier post occasioned by my interest in Jenkins, jauntily titled Winston Churchill, Total Homo, drawing on a diverting little book by Michael Bloch, Closet Queens Some 20th Century British Politicians (2015), which I stumbled across while “researching” Jenkins’ youthful affair with Tony Crosland. Bloch discusses two notoriously indiscreet MPs, Robert Boothby (Conservative) and Thomas Driberg (Labour), who were involved with Britain’s notorious Kray twins, two gangsters who were, most unattractively, leading figures in “Swinging London”. I’ll simply quote from that post:
Harold MacMillan had resigned as prime minister in October 1963 as a result of the Profumo scandal. In early 1964, the Conservative leadership gained information on Boothby and Driberg’s involvement with the Krays. In July 1964, the Sunday Mirror, a Labour paper, obtained a photo of Boothby with the Kray twins. The Mirror ran a story about a Tory peer involved with gangsters without naming names, which were then supplied by foreign papers not subject to the UK’s ever-convenient libel laws. However, the Labour Party was so fearful that pursuit of the case could also expose Driberg and destroy their chance of winning an upcoming election that Labour Party leader Harold Wilson, through his attorney Andrew Goodman, encouraged Boothby to sue the Mirror (for printing the truth) and then leaned on the Mirror to take a dive, which cost the Mirror £40,000, damaged the cause of free speech in the UK, and kept the Krays out of prison for another five years. If the full story had come out in 1964, one can wonder what would have been left of the British political system.
In fact, the full story doesn’t seem to have come out until 2009. The Wikipedia entries on Boothby and the Krays discuss this story, but it doesn’t appear in the entries on Wilson, or Goodman, or the 1964 British election. Jenkins happened to know Driberg fairly well, and gives an amused, “knowing” sketch of his foibles, ignoring the darker areas.12 Whether he knew the details of this arrangement is hard to say. If he did know him, how could he not be appalled at Wilson’s mendacity?
Harold Wilson may have been bad for press freedom in the UK, but he was good to Roy Jenkins. Jenkins became a member of Wilson’s cabinet and rose steadily. As Home Secretary, which is sort of like our Attorney General, Jenkins began the long process of essentially secularizing Britain’s civil and criminal code, making it possible for ordinary people to obtain divorce, for example, and made a good start towards the ultimate decriminalizing of a wide variety of sexual offences. He also worked to reduce racial discrimination, something that was not all popular with the “real” working class, who were often very loud in support of a “whites only” policy.
Jenkins' achievements as Home Secretary eventually allowed him to reach the position of Chancellor of the Exchequer, the second most prestigious post in the cabinet after Foreign Secretary. This was a heady time for Jenkins. Remarkably (well, to an American, at least), parliamentary business was still conducted to a great extent in a near-Victorian manner. Three- or four-hour speeches were out, but hour-long speeches were very much the order of the day, and Jenkins excelled at these gentlemanly exercises in elegant exposition and cut and thrust. As both he and Campbell tell it, he was rarely bested in parliamentary combat.
Wilson was not always personally popular, and Jenkins was frequently mentioned as his successor/replacement, but, according to Jenkins, he lacked the visceral hunger for office that would give him the drive to push Wilson out of office absent a “crisis” of some sort. He must have been pleased when Wilson sought entry into the EC in 1967, though De Gaulle again refused to allow it. When Wilson called an election in 1970, Labour was widely expected to win easily, but the Tories came back in instead.
Labour’s defeat suggested that it was time for a change in the leadership, but the mood of the party had shifted strongly on the issue of EC membership. Jenkins argued for membership passionately, and lost heavily. The left was growing stronger in the party, and both Jenkins’ manner and his policies were hated by many. Jenkins temporized on his position within the party, continuing to follow Wilson’s lead, now against EC membership, instead of leading a full “centrist” revolt that would seek to gain complete control of the party, disappointing those in the party who wished he would.
As Campbell describes it, Jenkins was at this point living in a bit of fantasy world regarding the make-up of the British Labour Party, saying that the old “cloth cap” days were dead, when in fact the defiantly “cloth cap” unions still provided the majority of the votes. It is “remarkable” that Jenkins, who as a teenager knew through his father all the famous labor leaders of the time, in his autobiography mentions none of them of his own generation, and apparently never socialized with them. He was far more comfortable with the old, moneyed elite. In his biography of Gladstone he remarks amusedly of Gladstone’s habit, in his later years, of unthinkingly accepting the hospitality, for months at a time, of his wealthy admirers, summering, and wintering, aboard elegant yachts, or in charming castles or chateaux. Even more amusing, however, is that Jenkins, as he quite innocently tells us, was doing the same thing even before he ever held cabinet rank. From the 1950s onwards, he routinely spent his summers living in the grand style in either France or Italy, in elegant townhouses or charming villas almost invariably provided by “friends”. Jenkins loved Europe, and loved the “continental” lifestyle enjoyed by wealthy Victorians and Edwardians, explicitly aped by Harold MacMillan in the fifties as a way of pretending that neither of the two world wars had happened.
It was Jenkins’ passionate embrace of the “public school” lifestyle that particularly embittered his relations with the Labour left, who wanted to uproot the public schools, as symbols of the privilege they hated. Jenkins, naturally, sent his children to public schools, if for no other reason than to obtain the celebrated, hated “public school accent”.
Labour, Wilson, and Jenkins all came back in in 1974, but this time around things were less happy. Jenkins had lost ground in the intervening years, and he never reached the position he had held in the first Wilson government. Apparently, his refusal to demand that Wilson give him the Exchequer a second time convinced many centrists who had previously looked to him for leadership that he would never make the fight necessary to win control of the party. While in the second Wilson government Jenkins feuded frequently both with the left-wingers and the British labor unions, which were becoming increasingly desperate to maintain employment levels in what were in fact doomed industries, coal in particular. Wilson resigned suddenly in 1976 and Jenkins was one of six candidates to replace him. Coming in third, behind both James Callaghan (the winner) and left-winger Michael Foot, Jenkins apparently felt “rejected”, though it’s a bit hard to understand why, because Callaghan was also widely recognized as a “moderate”, and clearly the candidate who had Wilson’s support, while Wilson openly disliked Jenkins, sneering at him for being “more socialite than socialist” in his lifestyle, and even accusing him (correctly) of having an affair with Ann Fleming, which strikes me as pretty dirty pool, despite the fact that Ann, the granddaughter of an earl, was a notorious “socialite”, the widow of Ian Fleming and, before that, married (successively) to two lords. But, dirty pool or not, there’s no doubt that Jenkins’ determination to pursue his “socialite” lifestyle ensured that he spent all his free time with people who couldn’t help his career, and gave Labour moderates another reason to believe he wasn’t cut out for the top spot.
In 1977, Jenkins gave up and accepted the presidency of the European Community, a quasi-ceremonial, quasi-bureaucratic role which put him in the position of the facilitator of the EC, “arranging” things between the heads of government (or, in the case of France, head of state) who made the real decisions. Jenkins’ vantage point gave him an excellent perspective on the EC’s many problems, even though he believed in it passionately.
In one way, Jenkins got himself out of Labour politics “just in time”, for it was under Callaghan’s leadership that Britain endured its 1977-1978 “Winter of Discontent”. Callaghan, like Jenkins a Gaitskellite, was Chancellor of the Exchequer before Jenkins in Wilson’s first government, being forced to resign when a parliamentary blunder on his part, which, under the circumstances, might have been unavoidable, caused a huge run on the pound. He rehabilitated himself in 1970 by moving left to help block legislation proposed by the Wilson government to limit the power of labor unions to call and enforce strikes. When Wilson first became prime minister in 1964, he spoke of the “white heat of technological change,” reflecting the old socialist notion of enlisting “science” to transform society, but the precise opposite proved to be the case. Germany and Japan, their industrial plants destroyed in the war, rebuilt them according to American principles of mass production, something Britain and France never learned. Once the postwar boom of the fifties and sixties ended, Britain fell increasingly behind.
Inflation was always a problem for the British economy in the 1970s, even before the Arab oil embargo in 1973 stifled the postwar boom. Labour had come in 1974 after the Conservatives under Ted Heath had failed to deal with a strike by the nation’s coal miners. British labor unions were “obsessed” with keeping wages ahead of inflation, as well, of course, as preventing unemployment. Neither Wilson nor Callaghan had the courage to challenge them directly—and, in any event, their governments surely would have collapsed if they had. As the British economy deteriorated, the unions became more and more desperate in response. “Wildcat” strikes, called illegally by union locals against the will of the national leadership, became common, and in the “Winter of Discontent” the British economy ground almost to a halt. The Callaghan government quickly lost a vote of no confidence, resulting in its painful defeat in the 1979 election that ushered in the reign of Thatcher.
It’s easy to believe that Jenkins did not much miss his previous life in British politics, even though he was effectively now a “servant”, the major domo of the European Community, and necessarily subservient to the political leaders who made the real decisions, which effectively meant pleasing French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing and West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. From my stunningly ignorant vantage point, it appears that the original EC was founded on a union of necessity between France and Germany: Germany needed France as a “beard”, to make its actual leadership of Europe to appear “international”; France needed Germany to pretend that it was still a “great power”. The real cement of the union was the willingness of German industry to subsidize French agriculture and “rural France” in general, which is only now fading, along with rural areas all around the world, thanks to the “white heat” of the new globalism.
According to Jenkins, the “case” for increased European political integration received a boost from the election of Jimmy Carter to the American presidency in 1976. Schmidt was deeply disappointed in Carter, dismissing him as a political naïf who would not stand up to the Soviets.13 If “Europe” wanted to guarantee its own survival, it would have to develop institutions that would let it function effectively as a unit. It was under Jenkins’ leadership (with d’Estaing and Schmidt’s approval, of course), that the “European Monetary System” was set up, making Jenkins, one might a bit unfairly say, the grandfather, or perhaps great-grandfather, of the Euro.
It’s unfair to blame Jenkins for what has become the European Union. When Britain joined in the 1970s, there were only six other members: Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, with Italy as the sole “problem child.” Later, Jenkins reluctantly agreed to membership for both Spain and Portugal, to ensure stability for those countries, recently emerged from quasi-fascist political cocoons. Yet he did believe in the promise of a real “United States of Europe”, one that would function as an economic whole and, in particular, be a match in technological innovation with both the United States and Japan, which proved to be entirely too optimistic. The great barriers of language and such “parochial” traditions as religion and “history”, as well as economic disparities, made it impossible for the EC/EU to either act “decisively” or accept sweeping change. The great transformations of the digital era that would emerge in the closing years of the 20th century would leave Europe painfully in the dust.
Jenkins’ dream of a social democratic Europe that could “stand up” to both the United States and Japan largely reflect, I think, the ideas expressed by John Kenneth Galbraith’s once-famous book, The Affluent Society. Written in the 1950s, Galbraith essentially took for granted the steady economic progress that the U.S. had enjoyed, really, since its entry into World War II. Liberals disliked the fifties in large part because they weren’t needed. Capitalism seemed to be solving the age-old problem of poverty all by itself, without any direction from “above”. So Galbraith invented a new problem, a moral one, really, that of private affluence and public poverty:
economic theory has managed to transfer the sense of urgency in meeting consumer need that once was felt in a world where more production meant more food for the hungry, more clothing for the cold and more houses for the homeless to a world where increased output satisfies the craving for more elegant automobiles, more exotic food, more erotic clothing, more elaborate entertainment—indeed, for the entire modern range of sensuous, edifying and lethal desires.
The “need”, as Galbraith saw it, was to take money away from private individuals, who were spending it on such “vulgar” things as elegant automobiles, exotic food, and erotic clothing—making them, in effect, “behave themselves”—and spend it on the truly edifying—great public works that would enrich the lives of everyone, though particularly those who lived in large cities, like Galbraith and his friends.
One can wonder how much Jenkins objected to either “exotic food” or “erotic clothing”, but Galbraith’s moral was clear: the reins of society needed to be taken away from those who put profit above all and given to those who put humanity first. By the seventies, of course, the steady economic progress of the early post-war era had vanished, but the dream of a society ruled by a socially conscious moral and intellectual elite—people whose lives were not devoted to profit—lived on.
It was Margaret Thatcher, of course, who shattered that dream in Great Britain, as Ronald Reagan shattered it in the U.S.14 Because his tenure as EC president lasted until 1981, Jenkins had the opportunity to observe Thatcher in relatively nonconfrontational settings. His “portrait” of her is remarkably guarded. He frequently suggests, though he does not say so outright, that her “thoughts” were a constant, incoherent outpouring of resentments and fixed ideas that bore only a coincidental relation to reality. Yet, since he was writing in 1991, at time when Thatcher was clearly the most consequential prime minister of the postwar era, he could hardly call her a disaster.
Jenkins returned to British public life in 1981 to help found the Social Democratic Party as a member of the “Gang of Four”, which included three other Labour politicians, David Owen, Bill Rodgers, and Shirley Williams, as an alternative to the now militantly left-wing Labourites. Despite its thin leadership and limited resources, the party, or at least the idea of a “new party”, was briefly greeted with a great deal of enthusiasm. Thatcher’s austerity program, which was generating massive unemployment in its efforts to eliminate inflation, was deeply unpopular, and many people still believed that Thatcher’s Hayekian devotion to the idea of a self-governing economy was literally “insane” and a guaranteed recipe for economic collapse.
It took three tries for Jenkins to win a seat as the first Social Democratic MP, and he had only seven days to savor it. On April 2, 1982, Argentina invaded the “Falkland” Islands. Thatcher surely realized that if she surrendered the Falklands, worthless though they were, her career would be in ruins, damned by the harshest of judgments—that she was a woman in a man’s job. Sexism apart, Thatcher was responsible for the whole mess. Unlike Reagan, who only talked about cutting spending (while increasing it massively), Thatcher did cut spending, even spending on defense. She was warned that her cuts might encourage the Argentine “colonels” to bolster their popularity with a patriotic war, but, one imagines, she simply could not imagine mere “Latins” taking on the British navy.
Thatcher unsurprisingly took a great deal of pleasure in wrapping herself in the Union Jack while dismissing critics as “traitors”. Sadly, it worked all too well. The British public wallowed in a patriotic frenzy and swallowed Maggie’s “splendid little war” whole, much as the American people were do to in our “first” Iraqi War (but not the second). Moreover, the economy was recovering. In 1983, Maggie’s Conservatives won a crushing victory.
I have always felt (unkindly) that Jenkins and the other moderates formed the Social Democratic Party because they preferred to lose to the Conservatives rather than endure the combined “leadership” of the unions and the left-wingers who catered to them, while the unions and the leftists hated the moderates so much that they preferred to lose to the “Tories” rather than compromise with the moderates. I also suspect that Jenkins and the others were (very secretly) happy to leave to Thatcher the task of destroying the political and economic power of the unions, something could not possibly accomplish on their own, and which she accomplished with delight. There is no question that Britain would remain “ungovernable” as long as the unions continued to hold the power to disrupt the economy virtually at will. It had to be taken from them, and surely only the Tories could do it.
Though Jenkins clearly dreamed of a “center-left” majority, it’s hard to imagine that such a majority could summon the will to tame the unions. Jenkins’ “real” bottom line, one could say, was the destruction of “Old Labour”, and, ultimately, he didn’t care how it was done. In splitting Labour he gave the Tories a very real opportunity to win a decisive majority, and Thatcher, precisely the person capable of wielding such power without hesitation or remorse, obtained it, in large part thanks to the “good luck” of the Falklands War.15
Publicly, of course, Jenkins and the rest had to insist that splitting the left was their greatest fear, but, that, of course, was precisely what they were doing. Jenkins held onto his seat during the Tories’ big win, but it proved to be little comfort. He found that the Parliamentary “style” had changed radically in four years: hour-long exercises in elegant irony were out; sound bites were in. He struggled manfully to take on Thatcher, but, for all his efforts, never laid a glove on her, and was left pawing in the wind. Only five years older than Maggie, he seemed to be a relic from a prior generation.
Up until 2008, the Thatcherite neoliberals, now so universally despised on the Left, seemed to have won every battle. But now everything has been turned up and down several times, with first the massive rejection of the global economy, the massive assertion of state power to protect vulnerable populations—essentially those dependent on declining portions of the economy, principally manufacturing and agriculture—and now the massive impact of the COVID-19 epidemic.
It’s fair to say that both “Thatcherism” and “Jenkinism” have taken a beating. The notion that free markets are essentially infallible, that, regardless of short-term “inefficiencies”, they are in the long run inherently self-correcting and that significant state intervention is inherently misguided and destructive, has not stood the test of time. Instead, it’s quite clear that free markets are quite capable of driving the entire world economy right off a cliff, and it was only massive state intervention that spared the world a new and worse “Great Depression”.16 At the same time, “government”, and particularly the European Union, did not do all that well either.
As I’ve said, Jenkins cannot be blamed for what the EC became—its very nature was deeply reshaped by the collapse of the Soviet Union (which was, after all, one reason for its very existence) and the subsequent decision to expand as deeply into central and eastern Europe as possible. Yet his belief in the infallibility of enlightened planning was reflected in the EC/EU’s subsequent history, and played a major role in the disasters to come.
Jenkins loved “Old Europe” as he loved “Old England”. He loved the great architecture of the past—surely his deepest aesthetic pleasure17—and he loved the sense that it provided a stage for life lived to the fullest extent, a life explicitly “beyond” the ordinary, life lived with a certain panache and even self-indulgence both appropriate and “necessary” to allow the human spirit to ascend the heights. I suppose this sounds a bit grand—Jenkins, as I keep saying, doesn’t “look grand” at all—but his dedication to the conspicuous consumption of an aristocratic life style strongly implies his devotion to the idea of the rule of a privileged, yet unselfish and unsordid elite—very much the opposite of both the old conservative fuddy-duddies and the new partisans of unlimited greed brought in by Margaret Thatcher. They would live in the old, high style but they would earn it, by their devotion to the people. Sadly, they proved too enamored of their own power and their notion of what the people ought to want rather than what they did want.
Back in 2017, Johns Hopkins professor Matthias Matthijs wrote an excellent article for Foreign Affairs, Europe After Brexit A Less Perfect Union, detailing what went wrong.18 All the “big” decisions were taken long after Jenkins had left, but they still reflected his mindset: an enlightened elite would weld Europe into a single economic power that would stand equal to the United States and Japan (soon to be replaced by China as the “Asian Adversary”). It was not considered “dangerous” to transfer so much economic control over Europe to unelected bureaucrats because good policy could always be determined by experts. In fact, the advantages of eliminating mere “politics” was considered a positive, a notion very similar to Jenkins’ belief that he could ignore “cloth cap” values and prejudices when formulating Labour Party policy.
I believe European elites felt enormous guilt at the way they had let down “the people” from 1914 through 1945, subjecting them to one nightmare after another, and believed they had largely “made up” for this with Europe’s famously generous welfare state. As I wrote in an earlier post, both agreeing and disagreeing with her recent book Twilight of Democracy, explaining the drawbacks of the current system:
The European welfare system is too generous to begin with, set up in the fifties and sixties when an unprecedented economic boom—due largely to the fact that Europeans were working rather than murdering one another, as they had in the first half of the twentieth century—and a socially cohesive population accepting the “rules of the game” without question combined to make such generosity feasible. We no longer have 4% growth, and there is no good reason to believe that we ever will again. Populations are aging, and are much less cohesive. Muslim immigrants in particular are in societies whose mores they often not merely misunderstand but reject and sometimes despise. As Matthias Matthijs demonstrated in [Europe After Brexit], bringing Eastern Europe into the EU triggered population flows that create problems, particularly in times of severe economic hardship, that may often result in vicious and irrational prejudice, but are not prompted by prejudice alone.
Roy Jenkins was always a liberal in the “best sense”, in the belief that the great achievements of past civilizations bestow upon us the inestimable gift of freeing our spirits from the here and now, giving us the opportunity to achieve emotional satisfaction in an unselfish rather than a selfish manner, and also a liberal in the modern political sense, a “faith” I both share and regard with a great deal of skepticism. In his historical writing there is more than a bit of escapism, a longing to somehow believe that the big “wrong turns” in British history could have somehow been avoided, which I confess I don’t see. It will probably be the turn of Americans to write such histories, but that doesn’t seem to have arrived just yet. If it does arrive, let’s hope it does so quietly.
World War Oneish Afterwords
In an earlier post, I accused Jenkins of blaming British participation in World War I on Sir Edward Grey, foreign minister at the time. Well, it seems that I made that up, because he certainly doesn’t do so in his biographies of Asquith and Churchill, which naturally dwell on this episode in great detail. Since both Churchill and Asquith, his two heroes, backed Grey to the hilt, it’s hard to see how he could hold Grey responsible. In fact, he doesn’t seem to imagine how either the war itself, or British participation in it, could have been avoided, and it was that event, far more than anything else, that turned Britain from the world leader into a near also-ran.
1. I have read several British memoirs in which the author has chuckled over the sight of some ancient servant, hobbled with arthritis and age, laboring under some burdensome, menial task. Poor old guy! No rest for the weary! Ha, ha, ha!
2. If my little gag here passes you by, let me explain that, back in the 1930s, legendary English socialist/moralist George Orwell described his self-imposed life as a proletarian in a very nice little book, Down and Out in Paris and London. The EU (then the EC) is headquartered in Brussels.
3. Diderot, who lived when the aristocrats were still very much in control, remarked that the elaborate fashions of his time made people look like marionettes rather than humans. Reattaching the strings strikes me as a bad idea.
4. This takes place in a very nice “birthday party” scene at Graham’s estate, with fifty-something rich folks all dressed up and trying as hard as possible to pretend they’re still undergraduates at Harvard or Princeton.
5. I understand that this did happen to Margaret Thatcher, who “lost it” once in the heat of debate. Apparently, Thatcher, born a little bit higher up on the social ladder (which subjected her to far more scorn in some circles), had to labor consciously to achieve a “better” accent/vocabulary. (See Wikipedia’s take on “U and non-U English” You can hear Jenkins speak on many clips available via YouTube. He doesn’t sound all that “posh” to me, which shows you how much I know.
6. Graduates of Highgate are known, appropriately enough, as “Old Cholmeleians”. (Don’t ask.)
7. I expressed these views in my review of Jenkins’ biography of Gladstone.
8. Both parties had strongly encouraged the British people to believe that a plethora of dreadnaughts was all that Britain needed to keep the Hun at bay. (At least so I have argued here, though you have to search for it.) I think the British electorate would have rejected the idea of a peacetime draft with complete horror, and, in addition, that the tax burden of supporting both a big navy and a big army would prove untenable in peacetime, as it proved for Germany. Arguments to the contrary rely on hindsight, which is as irrelevant as it is irrefutable.
9. David Nicholls titled his 1995 biography of Dilke The Lost Prime Minister.
10. Chamberlain, an intensely ambitious man, would later split the Conservative Party over the issue of protectionism, driving Winston Churchill into the Liberal Party. Chamberlain was, one could say, a Churchill or Lloyd George who never found his moment, perhaps because the right one was never available.
11. The grounds for disagreement are endless, and often contradictory, but the result is always the same: a scornful rejection of the “foreigner”. “Brexit” is only the latest manifestation of this attitude.
12. Driberg was absurdly, and unpleasantly, “eccentric”, both a very active and exploitative homosexual, fond of young criminals, aggressively pro-Soviet (quite possibly an amateur spy), and a showily “devout” High Church Anglican. He was, unsurprisingly, a friend of Evelyn Waugh. Jenkins appears to have found this more entertaining than he should have. After the Krays were convicted of murder in 1969, Driberg frequently campaigned to allow them more privileges while in jail. Jenkins unsurprisingly makes no mention of this.
13. Carter, when he came into office, in fact did believe that men of good will could solve any problem, and that, at least since the death of Stalin, the Cold War had very largely been a misunderstanding. Since Carter had a strong tendency to see all of his policy views as outgrowths of his moral convictions, he also had a strong tendency to regard any criticism of those policies as, in effect, an assertion that he was not a moral person, something that he necessarily took personally. Virtually everyone who ever met Carter also said he could not trust anyone who was not from Georgia (USA), something of a limitation when conducting international affairs.
14. Well, until Sleepy Joe Biden emerged as the Ronnie Slayer.
15. Thatcher, in my opinion, played a very significant role in ending the Cold War, helping convince Reagan that Soviet Premier Gorbachev was a man to be trusted. One wonders if she would ever have been in a position to play such a role if she hadn’t inadvertently prompted Argentina’s invasion of the Falklands, thanks to her Albionic arrogance, and then exploited it shamelessly in a pointless, bloody “Great Patriotic War”. There is no “law” of unintended consequences, but there is a great likelihood of them.
16. It is significant, I think, how few of the “great capitalists” were willing to acknowledge that free markets had in fact failed. In the wake of the Great Meltdown, multi-billionaire Michael Bloomberg, surely a highly intelligent and well-informed man, handed out standard right-wing boilerplate blaming the government for everything, deliberate and shameful mis- and disinformation from a man who surely knew far better.
17. Jenkins fancied himself a “student” of the novel of manners, which I snobbishly reject as affected, though there is very little in his own narratives that strikes me as “affected”. He never harps on the public school backgrounds of his subjects—at least, not for long. He likes to show off his knowledge of architecture, but not of the “great” families of England. He very much liked receiving awards and accolades, but in his biographies he does not harp (much) on the various “orders” and distinctions that were so much a part of traditional English society, though this is less true of his shorter pieces directed at an exclusively British audience, where, I believe, a confident command of these intricate subtleties, so often expressed in heraldic initialese, is considered the quintessential hallmark of a true chevalier. Such preciousness is common in the “higher” reaches of American society as well. Franklin Roosevelt said that his failure, at Harvard, to win acceptance into the “Porcellian” final club, which had accepted both his father and his distant cousin Theodore, as the greatest disappointment of his life—greater, presumably, than being turned down by the first woman he proposed to, Alice Sohier. (According to Geoffrey Ward, in Before the Trumpet, Roosevelt “misremembered” the failure of this courtship dramatically.)
18. Matthijs has written a more recent piece, bravely attempting to describe what the EU should do next.
