The Reason Why

Why did Roy Jenkins decide on another major biography in his old age. (It was published when he was eighty-two, the year before he died.) John Campbell explains.

”Later that year (1994) he attended another Churchill conference in Edinburgh, where he criticised ‘this new school of revisionists who are so anxious to denigrate him’ – specifically Clive Ponting (‘dreary obsessional nonsense’), John Charmley (who ‘argues a false case in a way that is nevertheless worth reading’) and Andrew Roberts (whom he thought ’too keen on getting headlines’ by quoting Churchill out of context). ‘But while I reject, and as time goes on rather contemptuously reject, all these denigrations, I do not believe … that Churchill should be treated too reverentially’. Here was the starting point for his own book.

He had known Churchill, if only slightly, having been introduced to him by his father in 1941 and having overlapped with him in the House of Commons for sixteen years; as a young man he heard two of Churchill’s wartime speeches from the public gallery. More important there were, in a modest way, several parallels between his own career and Churchill’s. Not only had he held two of the same great offices, as Home Secretary and Chancellor, but he too was a writer/politician who had supported his family all his life by his books and journalism as Churchill did. Jenkins too had switched parties – though in his case only once. The Times even pointed out that they both suffered from mild speech impediments. And there was another similarity. ‘ I was … increasingly struck by Churchill’s extraordinary combination of an almost puritan work ethic with a great capacity for pleasure, even for self-indulgence. I found that combination rather attractive’ – for the obvious reason that it mirrored his own ‘hedonistic calculus’. ‘I understand Churchill better than I did Gladstone,’ he confessed in one of the dozens of lectures and interviews he gave after the book came out, so that having previously pronounced Gladstone to be ‘the most remarkable specimen of humanity’ ever to have been Prime Minister, he ended up revising his opinion:

I now put Churchill with all his idiosyncrasies, his indulgences, his occasional childishness, but also his genius, his tenacity and his persistent ability, right or wrong, successful or unsuccessful, to be larger than life, as the greatest human being ever to occupy 10 Downing Street.”

(Roy Jenkins; A Well-Rounded Life, John Campbell, 2014)