Roy Jenkins(1920–2003)

Roy Harris Jenkins was born at the terrace house at Snatchwood Road, Abersychan, in the Monmouthshire mining valley above Pontypool, on 11 November 1920, the only son of Arthur Jenkins, a Cwmavon coal-miner who became (after the General Strike of 1926 and a long Labour-movement apprenticeship) the Labour MP for Pontypool from 1935 to 1946 and parliamentary secretary to Clement Attlee through the wartime coalition, and Hattie Harris. The father was a foundational figure of the South Wales Labour political establishment of the inter-war period: a Workers' Educational Association evening-class graduate, a Pontypool town councillor, a junior parliamentary private secretary to Attlee in the Labour leader's wartime opposition role. The boy was schooled at Abersychan County School and at the Welsh national workmen's-institute scholarship system that brought him to University College, Cardiff for a year in 1937, then to Balliol College, Oxford in 1938 on a Welsh-county-council exhibition scholarship to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics.

Oxford in the late 1930s and the wartime Bletchley Park years gave him the foundational career network. He was at Balliol with Edward Heath, Tony Crosland and Denis Healey (the four together became, on every subsequent biographical account, the dominant generation of the post-war British political establishment); he took the PPE degree first-class in 1941, was commissioned an officer in the Royal Artillery, was posted in 1944 to Bletchley Park as a junior cryptanalyst on the German military-intelligence section, met his future wife Jennifer Morris at a Bletchley dance in late 1944, and married her at the Bletchley register office in January 1945. He stood unsuccessfully for the Labour seat of Solihull at the 1945 general election (lost by a small margin to the Conservative Martin Lindsay), and was returned for Southwark Central at the April 1948 by-election following the death of the sitting Labour member. He was twenty-seven and was the youngest member of the post-war Attlee parliament.

He held the Southwark Central seat through 1948 and 1950, lost it at the 1950 general election (boundary reorganisation), and was returned for Birmingham Stechford at the 1950 general election. He held Stechford for twenty-seven years, through to 1977. The major posts came at Harold Wilson's first ministry from 1964. He was Minister of Aviation 1964-65 (small portfolio, secured Concorde and the European Airbus consortium), Home Secretary 1965-67, and Chancellor of the Exchequer 1967-70. The Home Secretaryship of 1965-67 produced what remain the foundational social-reform statutes of late-twentieth-century British public law: the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965 (took the death penalty for murder off the British statute book), the Sexual Offences Act 1967 (partial decriminalisation of consensual male homosexual acts, on the Wolfenden Report basis), the Theatres Act 1968 (abolition of the Lord Chamberlain's stage-licensing power), the Race Relations Act 1968 (foundational anti-discrimination legislation), and the Divorce Reform Act 1969 (no-fault divorce on irretrievable breakdown). The package was, by every subsequent assessment of the period, the single most consequential nine months of social-reform legislation in post-war British political history, and was driven through by Jenkins personally against substantial Labour-backbench and Conservative opposition.

The Chancellorship of 1967-70 had to absorb the 1967 devaluation of sterling and the consequent fiscal-discipline package. He took the pound down from $2.80 to $2.40 in November 1967 (the devaluation Wilson had been resisting for two years), put through three deflationary budgets across 1968 and 1969, and brought the public finances into surplus by 1969-70, the only Labour Chancellor of the post-war period until Gordon Brown to deliver a budget surplus in a calendar year. The political price was Labour's loss of the 1970 general election to Edward Heath. He served as deputy leader of the Labour Party under Wilson in opposition from 1970 to 1972, resigned in April 1972 in protest at the party's commitment to a referendum on European Economic Community membership (he was the foundational figure of British pro-European Labourism), and led the Labour pro-European campaign through the 1975 referendum that returned a two-to-one Yes vote.

He left British domestic politics in 1976 to become the fourth President of the European Commission at Brussels. He served the four-year Commission term from January 1977 to January 1981, oversaw the negotiation of the European Monetary System and the start of the Greek and Iberian accession processes, and returned to Britain in 1981 to find the Labour Party under Michael Foot drifting further left than he was prepared to stay with. He co-founded the Social Democratic Party with David Owen, Bill Rodgers and Shirley Williams at the Limehouse Declaration of 25 January 1981, won the Glasgow Hillhead by-election of March 1982 as the first SDP MP to win a seat (he had previously been Stechford MP, the seat he had lost in 1977 when he left for Brussels), and was SDP leader from 1982 to 1983. The SDP-Liberal Alliance won twenty-six per cent of the popular vote at the 1983 general election but only twenty-three seats under first-past-the-post. He lost Hillhead in 1987 to George Galloway's Labour, was raised to the peerage as Baron Jenkins of Hillhead, and spent the remaining sixteen years of his life on the biographies that became the second register of his reputation: *Gladstone* (1995), *Asquith* (1964 and revised), *Churchill* (2001), each in turn the standard contemporary biography of its subject. He died at his home at East Hendred in Oxfordshire on 5 January 2003, eighty-two years old. The Jenkins name in its English-side catalogue is the patronymic of *ap Iankin*, son-of-John (Welsh dialect), compressed into the surname across the Welsh Marches and the south Wales coalfields; he carried it from a Abersychan mining-family house into the post-war British political establishment and into the late-twentieth-century historical-biographical canon.