On the Friday before his death, it is reported that Roy Jenkins signed a new book deal to produce a one volume biography of President John Kennedy. One of the many sorrows of his passing is that we have been robbed of what would no doubt have been the finest account of Camelot since Arthur Schlesinger's A Thousand Days. For as every obituary has made plain, Lord Jenkins was more than a politician. The typical minister's barren backyard was in his case a bristling hinterland suffuse with travel, history, and above all biography. And what made Roy Jenkins's oeuvre so engaging was its shameless political agenda.
Jenkins began writing in 1958 with a biography of the nineteenth-century liberal MP Sir Charles Dilke. With great aplomb, he effortlessly conjured up the politics of Victorian liberal-radical chicanery with its seamless flow of dinners, country houses and dalliances. Jenkins lingered extensively on the "exciting menus" that were served up at Dilkes's house in Sloane Street as he thrashed out deals with Joseph Chamberlain and William Gladstone. The disgrace of Dilkes's divorce and the tragic end of his career were all dealt with in fine detail. But with his eye on high society and a hint of his future split from the Labour party, Jenkins glided over the working-class constituency which always provided the bedrock of Dilkes's political support.
After Dilkes, Jenkins produced his most critically acclaimed work - a life of the early twentieth-century Liberal prime minister, Asquith. And as with so many authors before him, he fell head over heels in love with his subject. Jenkins was never one to avoid the finer things in life - provoking the cruel comment from one fellow cabinet minister that "the only thing Roy ever fought for was a table for two at the Mirabelle" - and Asquith's combination of patrician air and society wife proved irresistible.
Asquith (like Jenkins) was "the epitome of the Balliol man"; he was "cultivated" and "brilliant". From the grinding toil of the Labour back-benches in the 1960s, with all that trade unionism and class politics, the wit and beauty of the 1900s was entrancing. From the drudgery of Labour party conferences, Jenkins transported himself back to the clubs, dinner parties and gossip of Edwardian England. As with his history of Dilkes, political ideas and disputes make only fleeting appearances. In the closing chapter, more space is given to Asquith's candidacy for the Oxford chancellorship than his support for the government in the general strike.
It was a good three decades before Lord Jenkins of Hillhead (as he had by then become) returned to the art of political biography. After his many years as a frontline politician, as a Labour chancellor of the exchequer and home secretary, president of the European Commission, founder of the SDP, and finally chancellor of Oxford University, Jenkins finally felt able to take on the greatest liberal of them all, William Ewart Gladstone. Where previously he had marvelled at Asquith's society politics, Jenkins now felt at home with the Grand Old Man. Both had entered parliament in their 20s (following their fathers); both had been successful chancellors; and both had renounced their past allegiances to form new political parties that attracted the middle-class intelligentsia.
Once again, Jenkins focused relentlessly on the historical ephemera - Gladstone's ability to drink a bottle of champagne alone; his strange relationship with prostitutes - and ignored the more fundamental (and complicated) issue of his religion and political philosophy. More interestingly, the early days of Gladstone as a Peelite Conservative were gently excised in this ferociously liberal reading of his political career.
But the significance of Gladstone was that it marked the culmination of Jenkins's Whig genealogy. From Dilkes to Gladstone to Asquith flowed a liberal (sometimes patrician) tradition of Whig politics that constituted the centre-left before the regretful birth of the Labour party. Jenkins happily regarded himself as the natural inheritor of Asquith and this brand of Whig politics. His split from Labour and the creation of the SDP was a desperate and ill-conceived attempt to rebuild precisely that style of dinner-party, Asquithian liberalism.
In his final work of biography, Jenkins even had the artful gall to recast the reactionary conservatism of Winston Churchill in the glowing light of a Marlborough Whig. There was plenty of the young Churchill as the radical Liberal and far less on the unattractive racism and hard line Toryism of the 1930s.
Yet Jenkins's real ambition was to anoint a dauphin for the Whig crown. And anyone who has read Tony Blair's 1995 Fabian Society speech The Radical Coalition, which barely a year into his leadership stressed how progressives "must value the contribution of Lloyd George, Beveridge and Keynes and not just Attlee, Bevan or Crosland", can understand how Roy Jenkins might well have died a happy man.
