A writer and a statesman

As a biographer John Campbell is a man who certainly likes to get close to his subjects. He has laboured for five years over his new life of Lord Jenkins of Hillhead — the late Chancellor of Oxford University and former Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer, who figures in most lists of ‘the best Prime Minister we never had’.

After being invited to undertake the official biography of the former Labour and SDP politician, who died in 2003, by his widow Dame Jennifer, Campbell was to all but move into the Jenkins family home in East Hendred.

There, he was to find a huge archive of papers, diaries, documents and letters carefully stored in the attic, all subsequently handed over to Oxford’s Bodleian Library, which represented gold dust for any biographer.

“I was able to stay in the house, with only Jennifer there. Sometimes when she went to London she left me there on my own working on the papers. It is something not every biographer is able to do, being able to live in his subject’s footsteps, as it were.”

Mr Campbell, who has previously written major biographies of Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher, was in many ways the obvious man to write the official life, having been “an enthusiastic foot solder in the SDP,” the centralist party Roy Jenkins created and was to lead.

It also turns out he was once a neighbour of the man who transformed so many aspects of national life without reaching 10 Downing Street, shortly before the Jenkins family set up home in East Hendred. As a schoolboy living in Ladbroke Square in London, Campbell recalls in the mid-sixties seeing Jenkins, the then Minister of Aviation in the Labour Government, playing tennis with the then Education Secretary Tony Crosland with their wives, on what was then the largest communal garden in London, whose assets included a soggy grass court.

It was in Ladbroke Square that Labour MPs began to comment on Jenkins’s mock-Edwardian lifestyle, with lunches, dinner parties and taste for a claret. But after obtaining their home in what was then a Berkshire village in 1965, the politician would never have to worry again about photographers capturing his somewhat eccentric serving action.

He and Jennifer bought St Amand’s House, in East Hendred at auction in Abingdon. Mainly 18th century, it offered both a cellar and grounds big enough for both a tennis court and croquet lawn. It was said the house was bought with proceeds from his book on H.H. Asquith, the Liberal Prime Minister with whom Jenkins closely identified, who had lived and died two miles down the road in Sutton Courtenay.

The house’s cluttered appearance and lack of grandness surprised visiting Labour cabinet colleagues like Barbara Castle and Richard Crossman. “For the rest of his life it provided an escape from London where he could relax, but also entertain friends and colleagues,” observes Campbell.

It certainly meant Jenkins was perfectly situated on becoming Chancellor of Oxford University in 1987, allowing him to attend all sorts of university and college events and still sleep in his own bed every night.

Roy in his East Hendred library in 1987

The prospect of years of officiating at degree ceremonies in the Sheldonian, heading processions through Oxford in a golden robe and persuading rich alumni to part with cash, might have daunted a figure even with Jenkins’s commitment to the university. The fact the job on the face of it, offered little real power, leads you to wonder about its appeal to a man who had previously served as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary and President of the European Commission.

But a year before his death, aged 82, Lord Jenkins told me: “Of all the offices I have held, the university Chancellorship has given me the greatest ratio of pleasure to pain. You do not rule the university, as some imagine; you reign over it.”

Campbell goes further. “Above all, perhaps, nothing would have give more pleasure to his father, who had been so determined that Roy should go to Oxford, than that he should finish up as Chancellor of the university. In Arthur’s book, that probably beat being Prime Minister; while Jenkins himself took great satisfaction from having attained the one coveted prize that Asquith’s glittering career had missed.”

Arthur Jenkins emerges as an extraordinary man, who left school aged 12 and spent a dozen years at the coalface in South Wales, before becoming a Labour MP, Parliamentary Private Secretary to party leader Clement Attlee, and was briefly a minister in the 1945 government before his early death.

But crucially he had won a miners’ scholarship — worth £30 a year — to Ruskin College, the college founded in Oxford offering working men the opportunity of an education. Although not part of the university, it apparently did not stop Arthur considering himself an Oxford man. And it meant that ensuring that his only son followed him to Oxford was an obsession.

Campbell quotes from a letter written by Roy Jenkins at the age of eight-and- a- half. “This Witsun we decided to go to Oxford so that I could deside whitch (sic) college I wanted to go to.”

Jenkins arrived there just before the Second World War, joining the most political generation in history. Denis Healey and Ted Heath were both at Balliol, with his friend and future Cabinet colleague Tony Crosland was at Trinity. At Oxford, Jenkins founded the Democratic Socialist Club, becoming one of the star speakers at the Oxford Union, where he failed by just four votes to become President, the launching pad for so many glittering political careers.

Chancellor of Oxford in 1998

Decades later he confessed to the extent of his student ambition.

“I have often been shocked looking back, to think that in June 1940, I was almost as cast down by defeat for the presidency as by the fall of France.”

Extracts from the letters between Jenkins and the bisexual Crosland, heavy with homoerotic undercurrents, appear to have uncomfortable echoes of Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited.

But in Roy Jenkins (Jonathan Cape £30), it is the revelations about Roy Jenkins’s busy and complicated love life that are causing the biggest stir.

He had an affair over decades with Caroline Gilmour, wife of his friend Ian Gilmour, later a Conservative Cabinet minister.

Another long relationship began in 1963 with Leslie Bonham Carter, the wife of another close friend.

In Labour circles it will all perhaps reinforce his image as a social-climbing dandy, lampooned as a class traitor who came to love the company of duchesses on the cocktail circuit, rather than as one of the great Home Secretaries, whose reforms — legalising homosexuality, allowing easier abortions, abolishing stage censorship and taking the first steps to outlaw racial discrimination — transformed the ethos of British life and remain the most lasting achievements of the Wilson governments.

But in Campbell’s view he just was not prepared to change to maximise his chances of succeeding Harold Wilson as Prime Minister. “He would have liked to become Prime Minister but only on his own terms.”

He certainly found greatness as a biographer of Prime Ministers.

In his later years he produced major lives of both Gladstone and Churchill, the latter completed after undergoing heart surgery and on which he worked for up to seven hours a day at the age of 80.

On his gravestone in East Hendred, Jennifer chose the simple epitaph “Writer and Statesman”.

Campbell reckons he would have like that order of words.

He surely would have approved of the subtitle of his own official biography: “A Well-Rounded Life.”