ROY JENKINS: The death of Roy Jenkins, at the age of 82, ends a career of classic distinction and manifold paradoxes. In British Labour administrations, he held two of the three great offices of state; later, he became the first, and so far only, British president of the European Commission.
He was the prime mover in the creation of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), and its first leader. He became chancellor of Oxford University, and was awarded the Order of Merit.
He was also an accomplished biographer and award-winning journalist: his mellow, reflective and often funny autobiography, A Life At The Centre (1991), will be read with pleasure long after most examples of the genre have been forgotten - of his biographies, the best remembered are likely to be Gladstone (1995) and Churchill (2001).
In the phrase of his contemporary and rival Denis Healey, Jenkins was a politician with a hinterland. He liked good wine, good food, good talk, good books and fiercely competitive croquet - and he did not care who knew it. With his patrician manner and stylish epigrams, he seemed, by the end, to epitomise an easy-going whiggery and measured rationality that had almost vanished from the political culture. Yet this persona concealed at least two other Jenkinses, each more complex and less comfortable than the first.
One was a mercurial, emotional, surprisingly vulnerable Celt. It was this figure - the Jenkins of Abersychan and Pontypool - whose incandescent rhetoric at a never-to-be-forgotten meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party in 1971 ripped apart the leadership's sophistries over entry into Europe; who seemed, for a brief but brilliant moment, to embody a rallying of defiant social democracy against a new dark age of ideological fundamentalism; and who inspired more loyalty and affection from his own circle - as well as more exasperated indignation from his enemies - than any recent left-of-centre politician, with the possible exception of Aneurin Bevan.
Alongside that, however, ran a tough and dedicated professional, instinctively at home with the levers of power.
As much as any aristocratic grandee, Jenkins had high politics in his blood. He was born in Abersychan, into what he once described as the "working-class squirearchy". His father, Arthur Jenkins, was a Monmouthshire miner, who went down the pit at the age of 12, rose to the presidency of the South Wales Miners' Federation, and became MP for Pontypool and Clement Attlee's parliamentary private secretary.
Jenkins himself went to Abersychan grammar school, studied for six months at University College, Cardiff, in 1937, and won a first in PPE at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1941. His war service in the Royal Artillery (1942-46) included a period as a Bletchley codebreaker. He stood unsuccessfully for parliament in Solihull in 1945, and, in 1948, was elected as Labour MP for Central Southwark, at the age of 28. From 1950 to 1976, he represented Stechford, Birmingham.
Following Labour's return to power in 1964, he became aviation minister. The next year, at the age of 45, he was the youngest home secretary since Winston Churchill; at 47, he was chancellor of the exchequer - and the second most powerful member of the cabinet.
It is hard to recapture the excitement that Jenkins generated in the first of these two great offices, or the authority that enveloped him in the second. In part, they derived from a characteristic mixture of public flair and private assiduity. As a backbencher, he had not been a particularly outstanding debater. But he knew that the key to political power lay in mastery of the dispatch box; and, once a minister, he turned himself into the most accomplished and deadly gladiator on the Labour frontbench.
Yet style was less important than substance. As home secretary, Jenkins epitomised the mood of 1960s Britain, in revolt against stuffy conservatism and insularity. No doubt, the decriminalisation of homosexuality and abortion - the two great 1967 reforms of his time in office - were bound to come. In any case, they were achieved through private members' bills, not government measures. But without Jenkins's adroit and resolute support in the background, the bills would never have reached the statute book.
The treasury was a harder row to hoe. There, Jenkins's task was as simple as it was forbidding. After three years spent clinging to an overvalued exchange rate, the government had, in 1967, been forced to devalue. As Jenkins knew better than most, it had done so at the wrong time and in the wrong way. But that was now irrelevant; all that mattered was to make devaluation work - a task that required a policy of harsh austerity, followed with unyielding determination until the balance of payments moved into the black.
When the government went to the country in the summer of 1970, "surplus Jenkins" was Labour's greatest electoral asset. The party lost, but when the new House of Commons assembled, he was triumphantly elected as Labour's deputy leader, under Harold Wilson. It seemed only a matter of time before he inherited the leadership, and after that, the prime ministership.
It was not to be. As things turned out, the 1970 deputy leadership election marked a watershed - not only for Jenkins, but for British politics in general. Hitherto, he had been an insider: a wielder of power and taker of decisions. But, unrecognised by him, the system was beginning to dissolve. The long, post-war boom was spluttering to an end. The Keynesian social democratic consensus was beginning to fragment - and, in an extraordinary display of doctrinal recidivism, both great parties were retreating to the dogmatisms of the past.
For Jenkins, the inside track was gradually closed off. To remain true to himself, he had to become an outsider, a radical rather than a whig. His tragedy - and the tragedy of the British centre-left - is that he never quite completed the transition. Yet, by one of the greatest paradoxes of his career, he was to become a more significant force in British and European politics in the unhappy, sometimes anguished, years when he was shifting to the outside track than he had been as the eagerly rising insider of the 1960s.
The shift began with his defiant refusal to bow to the anti-Europeanism that engulfed Labour in the early 1970s. Above all, he saw that he would betray his conception of political leadership, and deny the sense of history that underpinned it - that, in one of his favourite condemnatory phrases, he would be "falling below the level of events".
So, in the decisive vote on the principle of British entry into Europe in 1971, Jenkins led 68 pro-European Labour MPs into the Conservative government lobby, defying a three-line whip and a five-to-one vote at Labour's annual conference. It was the most spectacular party split since the second World War, but it gave the European cause a cushion of moral authority without which it would almost certainly have foundered.
In a moment of weakness, later regretted, Jenkins stood again for the deputy leadership. On the second ballot, he narrowly beat Michael Foot, only to resign six months later, in March 1972; he felt the shadow cabinet's support for a referendum on Britain's European membership implied wings of the party campaigning against each other in the country, making life impossible for pro-European MPs.
When Labour unexpectedly won the 1974 election, Jenkins returned glumly to the Home Office, but he felt increasingly out of place in a cabinet that seemed to him incapable of standing up to either the unions or the Labour left. In the summer of 1975, he led the Yes campaign in the referendum on community membership to a two-to-one victory, but it was only a momentary shaft of light in the encircling gloom. When Wilson retired from office in 1976, he came third in the first ballot for the leadership, behind Foot and James Callaghan: sensing that Labour MPs were in no mood to forgive the splitter of five years before, he then withdrew, and Callaghan won the second ballot.
As consolation prize in January 1977, he left Westminster for four years as president of the European Commission in Brussels. Despite misgivings and missing the Commons during his Brussels years, Jenkins left a more enduring mark on European politics than had any British politician since Ernest Bevin.
Two achievements stand out. First, he slowly managed to reassert the political role of the Commission and its president - reversing the slide in their authority which had continued since de Gaulle clipped the wings of the first president, Walter Hallstein, in the mid-1960s. This meant little to the general public, but was critically important for Europe's future. Had Jenkins been content with the technocratic role of his immediate predecessors, the much more spectacular activism of the Delors presidency in the 1980s would have been impossible.
And, secondly, with a mixture of boldness and adroit diplomacy, he put the project of European monetary union - moribund since the currency upheavals of the mid-1970s - back on the agenda. After much persuasion, an initially sceptical Helmut Schmidt was converted, not to full-scale monetary union, but at least to the creation of a zone of currency stability in Europe. The result was the European monetary system, which laid the foundations for the European Single Act of 1985, the European Union of the 1990s, and the single currency of today.
Jenkins's Commission stint had another result as well. From his Berlaymont eyrie, he could survey the British scene - and even take judicious soundings on the way in which it was developing - while preserving an enigmatic silence about his own intentions. He was increasingly appalled by what he saw. A tide of sectarian bitterness seemed to be sweeping across British politics, engulfing the Labour Party he had once hoped to lead, and endangering everything he stood for. He slowly sensed there was a battle in the offing, from which he could not stand aside.
He broke his silence in the 1979 BBC Dimbleby lecture, appealing to the "radical centre" to save the country from the sterilities of left and right. Few political speeches have had a more electric impact. Jenkins had thought the unthinkable - and said it. In doing so, he transformed the framework of Labour Party debate. For the first time since the 1931 split, a senior Labour politician had defied the taboo that made the very idea of secession to the centre inconceivable.
The lecture took time to produce results. The explosion came in 1981, when Jenkins and the so-called "Gang of Three" - Shirley Williams, David Owen and William Rodgers - set up the SDP, and ushered in a decade of party turbulence unequalled since the 1920s.
IN A sensational by-election that summer, Jenkins narrowly missed capturing Warrington, one of Labour's safest seats, for the new party. In March 1982, he was elected for Glasgow Hillhead, after a campaign of packed public meetings reminiscent of the age of Gladstone and Lloyd George. At the beginning of July, he defeated David Owen for the SDP leadership by 26,300 votes to 20,900. The veteran insider, it seemed, had become an even more successful outsider.
But appearances were deceptive. Even before Hillhead, the SDP had passed its zenith. In April 1982, the outbreak of the Falklands war gave an immense boost to Mrs Thatcher and her government, and did commensurate damage to all the opposition: in May 1983, at the start of the general election, the SDP-Liberal Alliance stood at only 17.5 per cent in the Gallup poll, against the Conservatives' 49 per cent and Labour's 31.5 per cent.
The SDP emerged with slightly more than 25 per cent of the popular vote - the highest third-party share for 60 years. But, for the SDP, if not for the Liberals, any result short of a breakthrough was a failure - and, in the Commons, it had only six seats out of the Alliance's skimpy 17. Henceforth, its trajectory could only point down. Jenkins emerged from the campaign tired, ill and demoralised. No sooner were the votes counted than David Owen threatened to force a leadership election unless Jenkins gave it up forthwith. With an almost audible sigh of relief, he resigned.
Henceforth, the history of the SDP was the history of David Owen's demonic energy, unsleeping will and strangely unrooted radicalism. Shirley Williams and William Rodgers had lost their seats, and Jenkins and Owen were the only two of the old Gang of Four still sitting in the Commons. But Jenkins sat as an elder statesman, not as a political force. Owen dictated policy, and personified the SDP in the eyes of the public. He was alarmed by Owen's drift to the right on economics, and appalled by his brusque contempt for the party's Liberal allies, but, in public, he permitted himself only the occasional, heavily coded warning.
In the 1987 election, he, too, lost his seat. In the bitter and destructive split over relations with the Liberals that followed, he was the leading champion of the merger between the two parties the following year. After the inevitable transition to the Lords, he became leader of the Liberal Democrat peers. He made some notable speeches, and continued to champion the European cause; after the fourth consecutive Conservative victory in 1992, he also championed closer relations between the Liberal Democrat and Labour parties. But the non-political hinterland - writing, the Oxford chancellorship, family and friends - loomed ever larger. For all practical purposes, his career as a political mover and shaker had ended.
On four points the verdict of history seems plain. As home secretary, Jenkins did as much as any other single person to make Britain a more tolerant and civilised country to live in. As leader of the Labour Europeans, he played an indispensable part in taking Britain into what is now the European Union. As president of the European Commission, he played an equally indispensable part in overcoming the forces of monetary disintegration that threatened to wreck the community.
With the SDP, he failed in his stated aim of breaking the mould of British politics. But the territory he staked out in his Dimbleby lecture is the territory New Labour came to occupy 15 years later. The SDP's purpose was to create a broad-based social-democratic party, capable of speaking to middle England. In that, at least, it succeeded. The fact that the party was called the Labour Party does not detract from the achievement.
Jenkins is survived by his wife, Dame Jennifer, whom he married in 1945, their sons Charles and Edward, and daughter Cynthia.
Roy Harris Jenkins, Lord Jenkins of Hillhead: born November 11th, 1920; died January 5th, 2003.