Roy Jenkins, who has died at the age of 82, was the “nearly man” of modern British politics, the potentially outstanding leader Britain never quite had. Yet though this statesman and prolific writer was thwarted in his ambition to become Britain’s prime minister, he hugely influenced his country’s political and social evolution.
As home secretary in the Labour government of the 1960s, Jenkins helped to usher in the “permissive society” by liberalizing the laws concerning divorce and homosexuality. As a champion of the European Union in the early 1970s, he played a conspicuous part in turning Britain into a partner of France and Germany as a member of the common market. And as the founder of the Social Democratic Party in 1981, he launched a political initiative which, while of limited success in itself, can now be seen to have prepared the way for the emergence of New Labour, for the brand of centrist politics prosecuted by Britain’s present Prime Minister Tony Blair.
For a time, Jenkins was one of Tony Blair’s mentors. Far more of a liberal than he ever was a socialist, Jenkins defected from the Labour Party because he feared that it had fallen into the hands of left-wing fanatics bent on pursuing equality at the expense of liberty. In Tony Blair, he seems to have sensed that he had found a kindred spirit, a high-minded young politician who shared his own social democratic values and who was equally fervent in the cause of the European Union. But if the two men stayed on polite terms, relations between them had perceptibly cooled by the time of Jenkins’ death. Nothing if not supercilious (he had, to be fair, much to be supercilious about), Jenkins loftily concluded that his New Labour protégé was the possessor of a ‘second-rate intellect’.
In truth, what united Jenkins and Blair was always outweighed by what divided them. Preoccupied with “image”, with “spin” and soundbites, opinion polls and focus groups, Blair is unmistakably a creature of the media age, a politician whose whole approach is barely distinguishable from that of a salesman. Jenkins, by comparison, was a political dinosaur, an old-fashioned parliamentarian who worried about issues of principle and nursed a devout belief in the virtue of rational argument. The US-style practice of marketing policies as though they were so much merchandise was anathema to him; his political speeches and writings were remarkable both for their elegance of expression and their intellectual rigor.
The product of a relatively humble background in south Wales (his father was a coal miner who became a Labour MP), Jenkins went to Oxford and converted himself into a facsimile member of the British upper class. It was said that he made even alumni of that educational bastion of the British establishment, Eton, feel inferior. But in latter-day Britain, the patrician class to which Jenkins assimilated himself was already losing not just its old prestige but its very raison d’etre. In the brash new British society of recent years, Jenkins inevitably cut an awkward, if not ludicrous, figure. With his Olympian manner and sonorous speech, he might have stepped straight out of the Victorian age. Certainly, he would have been much at home among the imperial grandees of yore, settling the fate of nations over port and cigars in some Pall Mall gentlemen’s club.
The paradox of Jenkins career was that, for all his forward thinking, he was forever looking backwards. His books were principally concerned with the great figures who bestrode the British political landscape during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His acclaimed biographies of the British Prime Ministers William Gladstone and Winston Churchill sprang from a fervent engagement with their subjects’ lives and times. It was as if, through his zealous historical labors, Jenkins was endeavoring to experience the days when Britain remained a great power and British leaders still loomed large on the world stage.
To be sure, Jenkins was under no illusion that Britain could any longer lay claim to great power status. His crusading on behalf of maximum participation by Britain in the European Union was rooted in his belief that by itself Britain faced a melancholy future as an isolated, marginalized, increasingly irrelevant off-shore island. So voluble was he, indeed, about the desirability of the completest possible absorption of Britain into Europe that even some of his fellow pro-Europeans were afraid that the outcome for which he was pressing was likely to mean the destruction of Britain’s political and cultural identity.
Yet by this stage the destruction of much that made Britain what it was is an accomplished fact. Jenkins’ critics were perhaps a little tardy with their “Euroskeptic” reservations. It was, it must be said, ironic that in the week of the death of this famous exponent of “civilized’ values”, the British media was much taken up with the mounting evidence that Britain is now afflicted by a rampant gun culture, with firearms crimes escalating at a chilling rate. Such a regressive turn of events would have seemed like the stuff of dystopian fantasy in the 1960s when, as home secretary, Jenkins was aspiring — not without success, it appeared — to make Britain a more humane place.
Somebody once jibed that Roy Jenkins’ brainchild, the Social Democratic Party, was an attempt to reconstitute the genteel, if class-bound, Britain of bygone times — that it stood for a “better yesterday”. It was a jibe that could equally well have been directed at Roy Jenkins himself, the “progressive” British politician who became steadily more immersed in his country’s past.
— Neil Berry, a London-based freelance journalist since 1980, is the author of “Articles of Faith: The Story of British Intellectual Journalism”.
Arab News Opinion 13 January 2003
