THE CHATEAU LA FITE SOCIALIST
How miner’s son Roy Jenkins swapped the Valleys for vintage claret and tennis parties with the aristocracy — to the disgust of many in his own party
HE WAS the Labour Home Secretary who became known as the father of the permissive society. But as a brilliant new biography reveals, Roy Jenkins was also a social climber who used Oxford as a launch pad for an indulgent existence involving the finest food and wine, and the company of society’s most exalted aristocrats . . .
WHEN standing in 1981 for the predominantly working- class seat of Warrington as candidate for the newly formed Social Democratic Party, Roy Jenkins claimed in several interviews that he liked ‘very simple food’ such as shepherd’s pie and fishcakes and mostly drank ‘rather cheap wine’.
This simply wasn’t true. His preference was for Michelin-starred restaurants and the very best vintage clarets. He was a noted bon viveur and wine connoisseur, and proud of it. Trying to dumb himself down for the voters of Warrington was a rare lapse for a self-assured politician who generally never pretended to be what he wasn’t.
The son and grandson of miners, raised in the South Wales coalfield — his trade union father was actually imprisoned during the General Strike of 1926 — Jenkins had an impeccable Labour pedigree. It was of the sort romantic class warriors from Hampstead and Holland Park such as Left- wing Labourites Michael Foot and Tony Benn would have given their eye-teeth for.
But from the very start, he never attempted to play on his background. At Oxford University, friends urged him to make more of it when standing for office in the Union, but he refused. ‘The poor are poor,’ he told them. He didn’t want ‘any sobstuff ’ to promote his cause. He would not act up to the part.
All his adult life, he indulged in expensive pleasures, delighted in high-born company and presented an air of lordly entitlement. As a Labour politician (until he defected to the SDP), this left him open to charges of hypocrisy and betraying his roots. He didn’t care. He was what he was, and that was that.
His origins, anyway, were less horny-handed than many imagined from his Welsh valley roots. His father had been a miner, certainly, but there was never any question of his son following him down the pit. By the time Roy was born in 1920, Arthur Jenkins was already a full-time union official on a middle-class salary, chairman of the Pontypool Labour Party and a county councillor.
When Roy was 14, Jenkins Snr was elected MP for Pontypool. He quickly became Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) to the party leader, Clement Attlee, and held that position throughout World War II when Attlee was deputy Prime Minister. He was then briefly a minister in the Labour government that triumphed in the 1945 election.
In short, Roy was born into a Labour elite that saw itself confidently on the way to becoming the new governing class in Britain. His father, moreover, was also gentle, bookish and resolutely un-militant — all characteristics that he passed on to his son.
NOR was home a back-toback terrace, but a wellappointed villa with a live-in maid, a garden to play cricket in and a motor car waiting outside. There, Arthur and his wife, Hattie, frequently entertained senior parliamentary colleagues for the weekend, socialist legends such as Attlee, Arthur Greenwood, Herbert Morrison and Hugh Dalton. Roy thus grew up knowing Cabinet members as family friends.
As well as politics, the young Roy was habituated very early to taxis, hotels and restaurants. Every summer there were holidays at the seaside. Arthur took Roy on his travels for work — to Cardiff, London and abroad to Brussels and Paris.
Aged 14, Roy wrote a detailed account of a trip to London which included breakfast on the train. ‘The kipper being one of the best that I have ever tasted,’ he wrote, indicating that food was something he already took very seriously.
So, too, was education. Arthur Jenkins had won a miners’ scholarship to Ruskin College, Oxford, which had been crucial to his success. He was determined that his son should follow him to the university; Roy sat the scholarship exam and was offered a place to read PPE (philosophy, politics and economics) at Balliol.
He went up at the beginning of October 1938, a month short of his 18th birthday. He was soon, a contemporary recalled, developing a taste for Balkan Sobranie cigarettes and Chateau Margaux.
He could not afford to drink wine regularly until after the war. Then, with his Army service as Captain Jenkins behind him and aided by his economics degree, he took a job in a state- run banking organisation harnessing City finance to fuel the economic growth that post-war Britain badly needed.
With a decent salary coming in, the phone numbers of several favourite London restaurants began to appear in his diaries, including the White Tower (Muswell Hill 2181) and Boulestin (Temple Bar 7061).
In 1951, Roy was elected to Parliament as a Labour MP and shortly after that began working a day-anda- half each week as a financial consultant for the John Lewis Partnership, more than doubling his parliamentary salary.
This income, in turn, was outstripped by the money he earned from writing books and articles for newspapers. He was soon well enough off to afford a house in Notting Hill, west London.
With a dining room that could seat a dozen, dinner parties began to play a central part in his lifestyle. He and his wife, Jennifer, made a point of entertaining a wide circle of friends from the political, literary and diplomatic establishments.
The square where they lived had a large, communal garden with a grass tennis court, so Sunday afternoon tennis parties, followed by tea, became another feature of their social life.
Since the house boasted a wine cellar, Jenkins recalled how ‘I changed from buying wine at the offlicence on the day of a dinner party to buying it in advance’.
He concentrated on collecting
clarets, and prided himself on knowing his Bordeaux from his Burgundies and being able to tell their year from just a sip. He had no time for white at all — except champagne.
All in all, his was an increasingly grand lifestyle — and it shocked MP Bill Rodgers, Oxford-educated but still close to his Liverpool roots, when he first experienced lunch with the Jenkinses in 1956.
With sherry beforehand, brandy after and Roy’s ‘studied’ personal manners, ‘it is so different from the environment of most Labour supporters (as also 99pc of the population)’.
UndeteRRed, Jenkins made a point of widening his circle beyond the narrow world of politics. He took to collecting dining clubs — Brooks’s, the Literary Society, the Beefsteak — and accepting invitations to weekend parties, like some edwardian grandee. It was noted early on — with amusement by his friends, more critically by many in the Labour Party — that he had a weakness for aristocracy, which led to accusations that he was a social-climbing snob. there was some truth in this. He took visible pleasure in moving in socially exalted circles a long way from his upbringing in Pontypool.
As a historian, he was also fascinated by class, and the subtlety of its gradations. But, as he grew grander himself, this could become faintly ridiculous and, for one whose political leanings at one stage led him to seek to abolish public schools, he was curiously intrigued by etonians and Wykehamists.
But he had no respect for aristocrats as such and was quickly bored by people he considered to be stupid, or merely privileged.
Reminded many years later that he was always ‘very fond of ducal drawing rooms’, Jenkins replied: ‘Yes, but I was always very choosy about which dukes.’
the fact is that he liked the company of clever people of any class. But he especially enjoyed the social ease and sophistication that the well-born and well-connected tended to possess.
He undisguisedly preferred the company of those who shared and — through their possession of country houses — helped to feed his increasingly expensive tastes. there were those who claimed that his upper- class friends looked down on him as a sort of Labour mascot. A case in point was Ann Fleming, a dazzling hostess who, though a thoroughgoing tory and a crashing snob, enjoyed catching Labour politicians in her net.
According to the publisher George Weidenfeld, she liked Roy ‘for his urbane conversation and slightly deferential affection’.
But this was not so for the likes of John Jacob (‘Jakie’) Astor, who owned a big house in Bedfordshire, and from 1961 let the dower house to Roy and Jennifer for holidays and weekends, with use of its large park, including tennis court and swimming pool, where Roy could play at being a country gent.
In his party, however, the vultures were circling. Increasingly, too many of his colleagues, while acknowledging his ability, felt he barely belonged in the Labour Party at all.
A newspaper profile after the 1959 election noted that ‘much though the Labour leaders enjoy good parties, there are some rank-andfilers who feel, after observing Mr Jenkins hobnobbing with a duchess or in company with Princess Margaret, that he may be too socially successful.’
even Labour’s upper-middleclass leader, Hugh Gaitskell, who himself mixed happily in tory circles, was worried that Roy wasn’t showing ‘ a proper humility to ordinary working people’.
JenkInS ignored the carping and carried on eating and drinking to his heart’s content. He belonged to the most exclusive clubs and dining clubs in London and lunched with some member of ‘the great and the good’ almost every day of his adult life.
When in government, his officials had to leave his diary clear in the middle of the day. He never ate a sandwich at his desk. Colleagues such as Barbara Castle sneered, but he believed this break actually made him a better minister. It was the same in the evening. He would often have an official dinner, or a speech to make; but he also dined out privately — sometimes with Jennifer, often without — a couple of times a week.
Occasionally, he went on the wagon or limited himself to white wine (which he never thought really counted). He sometimes went without dinner; and he was diligent about taking exercise.
But he never made any apology for enjoying good food, the best wine and large cigars, and refused to compromise his lifestyle. He chose to enjoy his life rather than seek to prolong it by eschewing pleasures. When he left the Labour government after failing to be elected leader in succession to Harold Wilson, a farewell dinner was given by a group of his closest male friends, hosted by Jakie Astor and Victor Rothschild. there was only one ex-Labour man among them, and they drank Chateau Lafite Rothschild 1945. It was an aptly symbolic way to say goodbye to Labour politics. He was in Brussels for the next four years as President of the european Commission, where he enhanced his reputation for fatcat wining and dining.
this rebounded on him when he returned to Uk politics and was forming the breakaway SdP.
His winebibbing image led one wag to suggest it should be called the Lafite Party — standing for League of Agreeable Fellows Incommoded by tiresome extweemism’.
For all the jibes, however, the way he chose to live his life chimed with his political sentiments. He had no time for class hatred and disliked the mean-minded Labour extremists who wanted to level everything down. As the son of a sometime miner, he was both acutely aware of class origins and determined to transcend them. He believed in achieving a more equal society through greater prosperity, not endlessly punishing the rich.
And though the Lefties were quick to condemn him, the voters did not, returning him to Parliament nine times in 29 years without a
break. And not, as he himself pointed out, ‘ among rolling pastures or leafy suburban avenues but in one of the most industrial seats in Birmingham’.
As for working-class Warrington and the SDP cause in 1981, one sceptical commentator on the campaign trail mocked Jenkins’s incongruously patrician accent as he strolled round a shopping centre.
What, he asked, did the people make of this ‘grand, stupendously distinguished but largely incomprehensible magnifico . . . who introduced himself with a courtly bow of his smooth shiny head’ and wooed them with that incomparable voice, ‘beside which Sir John Gielgud sounds like rough trade’?
But he concluded, to his surprise, that people rather liked him. There was a charm about Jenkins that was irresistible.
And so he continued to entertain prodigiously at his country home in Oxfordshire. In 1997, he and Jennifer held no fewer than 60 lunch and dinner parties, with Roy always at the head of the table pouring an abundance of superb claret.
When in hospital near the end of his life, he even had a supply of half-bottles of claret smuggled into his bedside. His son, Edward, suggested that rather than a statue or a scholarship as a memorial to him, they should endow a scheme to provide half-bottles to all patients in NHS hospitals.
In 2003, aged 82, Roy Jenkins died simply and peacefully at home, though with food on his mind even then. His last words to Jennifer were to ask for ‘two eggs lightly poached’. When she returned with them, he was gone.
ExtractEd from roy Jenkins: a Well-rounded Life, by John campbell, to be published by Jonathan cape on March 27 at £30. © 2014 John campbell. to order a copy for £25 (including p&p), call 0844 472 4157.