The biographer's tale

Roy Jenkins's Asquith was my first political biography. I read it, stuck in boarding school at the age of 15, during the winter of discontent. I remember the sense of excitement and awe as the story unfolded, and my admiration in equal measure for Asquith himself and Jenkins the statesman-biographer. I recall the date because I reached the last chapter and Asquith's condemnation of the general strike, his last political act, just as the campaign of strikes and union intimidation paralysed Britain in the spring of 1979. It seemed to me at the time that the winter of discontent marked the final destruction of Asquith's liberal idealism, and I was puzzled by Jenkins's continuing allegiance to the Labour party. Nonetheless, I immediately went on to read Mr Balfour's Poodle, Jenkins's account of the struggle between Asquith's government and the reactionary House of Lords, and immersed myself in political history.

Such were the seeds of an association which ultimately led to my becoming Jenkins's biographer. The historical and political strands were to intertwine to an improbable degree. On the historical side, Mr Balfour's Poodle sparked in me a fascination with the House of Lords and the remarkable blend of radicalism and tradition which characterised Gladstone and his successor 20th-century Liberal and Labour reformers. In time, this became the subject of my doctoral thesis, published as an academic monograph in 1993.

By then I knew Jenkins slightly from political and Oxford connections. But we had never had a proper conversation and it was with surprise bordering on amazement that in October 1994 I received a handwritten letter out of the blue from him - sent to the Financial Times, where I was then industrial correspondent - praising my monograph. He ended, endearingly, with the remark that he had read it while writing his biography of Gladstone "at the instigation of Mark Bonham-Carter and found it as enjoyable as it was profitable - to me, I mean, probably not vastly so to you, I fear" (which was true enough).



The letter and my reply led to lunch a month later, appropriately under Gladstone's statue in the National Liberal Club dining room. The conversation flowed back and forth across 19th and 20th-century politics. "Tony Blair has made a first-rate start," he said. "Good bold decisive moves on the run at the outset, which is invariably the key to success in politics." We agreed that Blair's election as Labour leader might come to be seen on a par with the assembly in Willis's Rooms in June 1859, which formed the mid-Victorian Liberal party as a broadly-based progressive governing party that lasted two generations. The lunch went so well that over coffee I plucked up courage to remark that I had long had at the back of my mind the idea of writing the Jenkins biography. "Well," he replied with his Cheshire cat smile, "I have been having the same idea myself." With precision and emphasis he explained that he wanted a biographer who was "a generation or more younger than me, empathetic but with detachment, able to tell a tale well - and it must be written by the Berlin rules." I had never heard of the "Berlin rules" - this turned out to be a reference to the agreement between Isaiah Berlin and his biographer Michael Ignatieff of full access to papers and interviews, so long as the biography did not appear in the subject's lifetime. That was fine by me, I said at once.

Somewhat deflatingly, what followed was a further letter in his crab-like hand - all his personal letters and books were written by (left) hand in almost indecipherable script - which ended: "I will take seriously the proposition you were good enough (that is almost Gladstonian!) to put to me. I hope you will not mind my taking a few years to think it over." And by years he meant years. We met only four times over the next three years. One lunch in 1995 was to have a bearing on my own career, but there was no further discussion of the biography until December 1997 when I broached the subject again. This time there followed a swift new year lunch invitation to East Hendred with my wife to meet his wife Jennifer. Agreement was pronounced as we got up to leave.

"Here's a key to the house," he said as we got into the car. "Come and go as you please to look at the papers, even when we are not here." With that disarming gesture began many a (mostly freezing cold) day and occasional week in the loft, cellar and study of St Amand's House, East Hendred, sorting through piles of barely arranged papers. He offered no guide and rarely inquired after progress. Two prize finds in the voyage of discovery were the diaries of Roy's father stashed in Krug champagne boxes at the bottom of a cupboard - continuous from 1912, when Arthur Jenkins was a young Welsh miner with dreams of a better life, until his death in 1946 as a minister in Attlee's government - and piles of wartime letters from Jennifer, Tony Crosland and many others, stuffed in unmarked envelopes under the stairs.

I assumed our relationship would continue cordial but distant. But two events set it on an entirely different track. The first was that East Hendred lunch itself. The main topic of conversation was not his biography but his next book. He had just finished his somewhat recherché essay collection The Chancellors, on all 19 chancellors of the exchequer between Randolph Churchill and Hugh Dalton, and was thrashing around for a new subject. Another set of essays - on cities, or chancellors of Oxford University since the Duke of Wellington - was on his mind; so too were single lives of Macmillan or Balfour, "both somewhat underestimated." I suggested Churchill instead, tentatively at first, but by coffee I had convinced myself and got a long way towards convincing Roy - as he had by now become - that this was a feasible project, now that Martin Gilbert's printed volumes of the Churchill papers were available. Churchill was not only a fitting progression from Gladstone, but would also fill a huge biographical gap, since no good single-volume life was then available. It should also be easier to accomplish because Churchill came without religion (never Roy's strong suit) or Gladstone's fearsome complexity of motive and expression.

Within a day or two, Roy was on the phone to say that Churchill was "growing on me" and discussing his proposed reading schedule. "I'll also call Mary Soames [Churchill's daughter] to see what she thinks" (she was strongly encouraging). From then on, barely a week passed without some communication on Churchill. The draft chapters started arriving in the post at regular intervals from April 1999. Barely a day passed without another 800 or so words written, and by late September 2000 he had completed 35 chapters, reaching 1942. The approach to the second world war had slightly unnerved him - "it's like approaching Mount Popocatepetl from a distance, knowing that before long you are going to have to try and get up it somehow" - but there was no writer's block or slowing of pace.

A different block then intervened, in the form of a heart-valve operation Roy had to undergo on 13th October. He had convinced himself that this would put him out of action for only a week or two. But the recovery took far longer, and during the first few days in the Wellington hospital in St John's Wood, his condition and morale were so poor that he wasn't sure he would finish the book at all. I was a regular visitor - by now he had become one of my closest friends - sharing half bottles of champagne, which his consultant permitted as "the best medicine in his state." On my first visit, he asked whether I would finish the book for him "if I can't do it." I parried this as best I could, but it introduced a new complicity between us, and most of my weekends thereafter were immersed in the manuscript and later the proofs. But that was nothing compared to the renewed energy which Roy brought to the writing when out of hospital. Between early December and 3rd January, when we met for a first editing session at East Hendred, he had completed another 20,000 words. He continued at that pace until, on 27th February, he phoned to say he had written the final words, comparing Churchill with Gladstone, "at 9.45 last night, having done 4,200 words on Sunday and Monday and 82,000 since 7th December." "And now," he added, "I have to get on to my Dictionary of National Biography essay on Harold Wilson: I'm not yet sure what I shall say… but as you know I will be fairly favourable."

As well as that 10,000-word essay on Wilson, two further books, Twelve Cities and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, were largely completed in the remaining 22 months of Roy's life. Our penultimate phone conversation, four days before his sudden death, was devoted to his plans for his next book: a biography of John F Kennedy, "who, with his circle, were for me the glamour of the 1960s, and whose reputation is I think in need of re-rating upwards." He had already agreed terms with his agent Michael Sissons, including a 2006 publication date. On the morning of his death he was re-reading Ted Sorensen's biography of JFK.

So my observation of Roy's literary life, in its final phase, was close. However, the literary was only the first thread of our relationship; it intertwined with a second, political strand which was equally unexpected at the time of the "vetting lunch" as his biographer at East Hendred in January 1998.

I had become a strong supporter of New Labour, moving across from the Liberal Democrats in 1995 after Tony Blair replaced clause IV of Labour's constitution. Roy had been encouraging when I had mentioned my intention to switch party: "In terms of leadership, Labour and the Liberal Democrats are now basically the same party, so at your age you should join the larger one," he said, despite his own commitment to the Liberal Democrats. But in 1998 I was not expecting an early move away from writing and journalism - I was a columnist on the Observer - hence the desire to nail down the Jenkins commission. However, within a month I was approached about joining Tony Blair's policy staff, and by May had moved into a tiny office on the second floor of Downing Street overlooking the garden - a room which had been part of the No 11 flat when Roy was chancellor and which his father had often slept in during the war when parliamentary private secretary to Attlee (who lived in No 11 as deputy prime minister).

Roy played no part in instigating the move, but he said I should accept, something I had already resolved to do. Yet once in No 10, I became both an observer of and periodic conduit in perhaps the closest and most fascinating friendship of recent times between a prime minister and a political giant from a previous generation. On becoming Roy's biographer, I had assumed that his political career was long over, and that in that respect I would be chronicling the past as a historian. In fact, there were still five years of political career to come, beginning with his report on electoral reform, commissioned by Tony Blair and Paddy Ashdown, which was his main preoccupation throughout 1998.

By mid-1998, we were frequently meeting for lunch or dinner. Our lunches mostly rotated around clubland - Brooks's, sometimes the Reform, the National Liberal or the Athenaeum, particularly its garden terrace in the warm summer. The lunchtime conversation took on a pattern almost as standard as the fare: political and social gossip over the champagne and hors d'oeuvres, moving on to Churchill or Roy's other writing during the main course and claret, and then, by the dessert and coffee (if there was time), I would try to steer the conversation to two or three biographical points I had thought about beforehand. Despite one or two early attempts, I did not manage to secure a single structured interview for the biography; it was to be interview by luncheon. After lunch it was an equally hit and miss process of noting down the results after dashing (often late) to meetings in Downing Street.

The Blair-Jenkins relationship will be a big theme of my forthcoming biography. Suffusing it all was Roy's passionate continued commitment to the political game and the goals of his political life, which he identified intimately with the success of Tony Blair. Roy's sustained political and emotional engagement constantly surprised me; so too the range of his preoccupations, whether Europe, Lib-Labbery, electoral reform, cabinet personalities, Iraq or Oxford (to name the first few which come to mind), all of them informed by a dense web of knowledge and contacts assiduously maintained across politics, the media and the establishment at large. By 9.30 each morning, as well as a good chunk of Churchill reading and writing, he had scoured all the broadsheets - more thoroughly than I - and was often on the telephone with some point or other. He attended the Lords most afternoons and was an amusing raconteur of its doings. Politics retained the capacity to make him angry - more angry, I suspect, than under the Tories because he felt he had the capacity to influence it for the better. I was increasingly struck by the extent to which his relationship with Blair mirrored his relationship, 40 years earlier, with Hugh Gaitskell, whose photograph dominated the East Hendred dining room. In both cases, loyalty, admiration, frustration and disillusion vied in equal measure.

When I phoned Tony Blair, on a Sunday morning, to tell him the sad news of Roy's death, he was in a meeting on Iraq and I said I would happily draft a tribute. It was an hour or two before I got back with something, by which time Blair had written his own tribute in longhand, which went out unchanged. "Roy Jenkins was one of the most remarkable people ever to grace British politics," it began. "His influence on politics was as great as many who held the office of prime minister. He had intellect, vision and an integrity that saw him hold firm to his beliefs of moderate social democracy, liberal reform and the cause of Europe throughout his life. Even those of us who disagreed with the decision to form the SDP admired the way he never wavered from the view that the British people should have the chance to vote for a progressive politics free from rigid doctrine and ideology and one that stood in the tradition of Lloyd George, Keynes and Beveridge as much as Keir Hardie, Attlee and Bevin… He was a friend and support to me and someone I was proud to know as a politician and as a human being. As his brilliant biographies demonstrate, he had extraordinary insight and a naturally unprejudiced mind. He was above all a man of reason. I will miss him deeply."

And what of my view of him, as the relationship of biographer and subject developed? In one respect my view changed fundamentally. I had thought him a bit of a dilettante, and that this had been his critical weakness as a politician and also in his later writing career. It took only a few weeks of engagement with him on Churchill and Blair to realise that dilettantism was the opposite of the truth. Roy was a dedicated professional, but not in one sphere alone. Politics, literary endeavour and his wide social circle were pursued with a passion and assiduity which few devote to any one of those activities. It was the sum of these parts which made him what he was. Churchill, Roy liked to say, "combined a puritan work ethic with a great capacity for pleasure, even self-indulgence, a combination I find very attractive."

I soon realised the extent to which his success and lifestyle, including his constant travelling, were made possible by Jennifer's support, forbearance and identification with his political and literary projects. Equally important was a perpetual campaign to extract maximum value from time - his diaries parcel out the days in quarter hours like Gladstone's, including the time of waking and starting work (rarely after 6am in his later years) - together with supreme economy of effort. A standard criticism was that he sought the palm without the dust - both in politics ("all Westminster, no grassroots," in one barb) and in his writing, where apart from Asquith and Dilke he never wrote a book requiring archival research. But economy of effort was not absence of effort: the effort was widely spread, but could also be focused on a single immediate object in great bursts. He became a formidable local campaigner when this was essential to success in his SDP by-elections and his continued survival in his Hillhead constituency. So too with his later writing. Gladstone and Churchill could not have been written without the published archival endeavour of others, yet neither book was remotely a one or two-source work. In each case his mastery of a wide range of published material and his capacity to weave it together with his first-hand political and social experience, and (mostly apposite) application of analogies from one context to another, helped to produce compelling and fresh narratives.

The valuation of one senior politician by another gave some of his best insights and judgement. I recall him reading aloud, with great verve, this passage he had just written on Churchill the day after the fall of France in 1940: "There was a routine war cabinet at 12.30, and Cadogan [the foreign office permanent under-secretary], with the faint air of disapproval which he always employed when dealing with the political activities of politicians, wrote: 'Winston not there - writing his speech.' He might as well have complained that Lincoln did not apply himself to some minor piece of White House business on the morning of the Gettysburg address."

Equally engaging were his social judgements, the fine calibration (from one whose life had been spent experiencing the gradations of class) vying with self-parody. In Roy's last review, of Colin Clifford's The Asquiths, Asquith is described as being born "unstably in the middle middle class," and he observes, "Asquith's first family was a remarkable brood. They were not entirely free of the alcoholism which (speaking from a by no means puritanical position) I regard as one of the most consistent 20th-century legacies of both British prime ministers and US presidents to their children: one Lloyd George offspring, one Baldwin, most Roosevelts, one Attlee, several Churchills and Macmillans amount to a formidable alcoholic roll call. The children of those who just missed the highest office - Joseph Chamberlain, Rab Butler, Quintin Hailsham - seem to be somewhat steadier, which could be regarded as one of nature's compensations."

It is hard to think of anyone but Roy Jenkins who could have conceived such a passage. It was of a piece with his benign tolerance for his cartoon and gossip column image. "All first-rate politicians are figures of fun: better to be a figure of fun than not a personality at all," he would say. He took huge pleasure from Craig Brown's send-up of Twelve Cities in Private Eye just before his death - "Twelve Tube Stations… Hainault is, one might almost suggest, the most oxymoronic of tube stations, being on the Central line but very far from central…" But for all the self-parody, and the extraordinary accent, there was little pretence about Roy. His "pretensions" were for real: he really did understand wine, with a keen eye for a bargain, and he really had read Proust, twice.

I also came to understand that it was wrong to think of Roy's three spheres - politics, writing and social life - as separate. For Roy, biography was politics by other means, as was a large part of his social life. One of his favourite metaphors for his career was that it had an "upper" and "lower" case: writing was the "upper case" before 1964 and after 1983, and politics the "upper case" for the two decades in between. But in truth, the great game of politics was upper and lower case throughout; apart from enforced war service, it was the main preoccupation of his life from adolescence until death. Roy was a player when he could be, a critic when he couldn't, and a historical observer of politics, with a biographer's flair and commitment, throughout. The only change across the different phases of his career was the balance between forms of political engagement. All his biographical subjects were politicians, all but two of them (Truman and FDR) British parliamentary politicians of the mid-Victorian age and after, performing on the stages of Westminster, Whitehall, and mostly Oxford, which he knew and loved so intimately.

My most enduring impression is one of intensifying admiration for Roy's professional steadfastness and boldness, with an immense strength of political personality. We usually agreed, though not always. On many of the social reform concerns of mine, he evinced an indifference, and in some cases a conservatism, which made conversation pointless. Yet on the big issues of the day, and a number of constant preoccupations including Europe, relations with the US, and political alignments at home, his view was always definite and often passionate, informed by liberal and internationalist principles essentially unchanged since his prewar Oxford days. He could be maddeningly dismissive of detail (as opposed to anecdote), although perfectly capable of mastering it. But at his best, he had the four qualities necessary for the successful liberal political leader - rational optimism, a deep humanity, a bold plan for the future and perseverance.

I came to appreciate well the boldness and courage which characterised his periods as home secretary, chancellor, president of the European commission and creator of the SDP, for I unexpectedly saw it at first hand in the production of Churchill. It was a perilous enterprise, daunting in scale and almost fatally terminated by ill health. Roy was 77 at the outset and 80 at publication. He had been very uncertain about taking it on and at times I felt guilty for having urged it upon him, which bound me still more closely to the project and to him. But once he had embarked upon the project, apart from the immediate aftermath of his heart operation, he never flinched, rarely doubted his judgement and capacity, and set and met a regime of work and deadlines which I found astonishing. By the end there were frayed nerves all round: his brilliant copy editor Peter James announced that he could not go through the same again. But none of us doubted that it was a monumental achievement: the best one-volume life of Churchill, a stimulus to liberal political idealism every bit as powerful as Asquith 40 years earlier and of far wider appeal.

Roy also had a sense of proportion - a rare quality in politics - and was especially strong on the rebound, when so many fail. Etched on my mind is one of his last public lectures, on Churchill at the Guildhall. The lecture itself was his standard canter through Churchillian themes. But then came the questions. What, asked the first questioner, did Lord Jenkins make of the recently published diaries of Alanbrooke, Churchill's chief of imperial general staff, with their critical comments of the great man's capacity as war leader? Without even stopping to consider, Roy responded that Alanbrooke also wrote much praise of Churchill, which needed to be seen alongside his reactions to his leader's "often exasperating behaviour." "However," he continued, "the difference between Alanbrooke… and Churchill is summed up by their respective reactions to Pearl Harbour at the end of 1941. Alanbrooke, who had been worried about a Japanese attack on British positions, recorded: 'O dear, so we have wasted 72 hours of intensive staff work on a false appraisal.' Churchill simply said: 'So we have won the war after all.' Which was the great statesman?"

Roy was in the statesman's mould, worthy of his own closing words on Asquith: "He had always been faithful to liberal, humane ideas, and to civilised, even fastidious, standards of political behaviour. He never trimmed for office… And with him there died the best part of the classical tradition in English politics."