It’s taken me several months to read this magnificent authorised biography of Roy Jenkins. I thought I knew all there was to know about the man whose tenure as Home Secretary heralded the so-called ‘permissive society’ and went on to lead the SDP, but I was wrong. My bedtimes are no longer things I look forward to as much, now I have completed this wonderful journey which lasted 750 pages. Some say it’s not worth publishing books of that length any longer, as we all have the attention span of a flea. How very wrong. This book has something to savour on virtually every page, whether John Campbell is relating a childhood take or yet another falling out with Dr David Owen.
John Campbell has written biographies of Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher, but neither of those touches the quality of his latest tome. He is clearly an admirer of Jenkins, but a not uncritical one, as the chapters on the SDP illustrate. He brings his subject to life in a way few would have thought possible, and doesn’t hesitate to include passages which Jenkins, were he still alive, would have found acutely embarrassing.
Like most others I was quite shocked at the extent of Jenkins’ philandering, which he clearly thought quite normal. It makes one wonder how it was kept out of the press, as it was clearly known to many at the time. His wife, Jennifer, seemed to accept it or if she didn’t she treated it with some degree of resignation. It’s not even in the category of ‘what the eye doesn’t see won’t hurt you’. Some of his various conquests even joined the Jenkins’ for regular dinners. Caroline Gilmour, wife of Iain, seems to have been ‘the one’ Jenkins was truly in love with. Even this didn’t phase the ever tolerant Jennifer, who seemed to adopt the line of ‘great men have needs’…
No book is perfect, but this one comes pretty close. I suppose we could have done without the constant references to the details of the numerous book review Jenkins wrote, and a tighter edit could have reduced the page count by 100 pages possibly, but that is to carp unnecessarily.
I don’t know how many copies this book has sold. I suspect not what it should have done, but it ought to go down in the pantheons of political biography as one of the very best. Whoever John Campbell chooses as his next subject will be very lucky indeed.
