Roy Jenkins(1920–2003)

Roy Harris Jenkins was born in the Monmouthshire mining valley above Pontypool on 11 November 1920, the only son of Arthur Jenkins, a Cwmavon coal-miner who became Labour MP for Pontypool and parliamentary private secretary to Clement Attlee. He won a Welsh-county scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford in 1938 to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics.

At Balliol he was with Edward Heath, Tony Crosland and Denis Healey, the generation that would dominate the post-war British political establishment. He took a first in 1941, was commissioned in the Royal Artillery, served as a cryptanalyst at Bletchley Park, and entered the Commons at a 1948 by-election as the youngest member of the Attlee parliament.

He held Birmingham Stechford for twenty-seven years. As Harold Wilson's Home Secretary from 1965 to 1967 he drove through what remain the foundational social-reform statutes of modern British public law: the abolition of the death penalty for murder, the partial decriminalisation of consensual homosexual acts, the abolition of theatre censorship, the Race Relations Act and the Divorce Reform Act, the most consequential nine months of social-reform legislation in post-war British history, carried through against opposition on every side.

As Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1967 to 1970 he absorbed the 1967 devaluation and brought the public finances into surplus by 1969 to 1970, the only Labour Chancellor before Gordon Brown to deliver a calendar-year surplus. He was the leading figure of British pro-European Labourism, leading the Labour campaign in the 1975 referendum that returned a two-to-one Yes.

He left domestic politics in 1976 to serve as the fourth President of the European Commission, oversaw the creation of the European Monetary System, and returned in 1981 to co-found the Social Democratic Party with David Owen, Bill Rodgers and Shirley Williams, winning the Glasgow Hillhead by-election in 1982. Raised to the peerage as Baron Jenkins of Hillhead, he spent his last sixteen years on the biographies, Gladstone (1995), Asquith and Churchill (2001), each in turn the standard contemporary life of its subject. He was given the Order of Merit in 1993 and died at East Hendred in Oxfordshire on 5 January 2003, eighty-two years old. The Jenkins name, the Welsh patronymic son-of-John, he carried from an Abersychan mining family into the post-war British political establishment and the historical-biographical canon.