Lord Roy Jenkins

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 30:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty nine.

Speaker 30:11

And the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:30

My Castaway this week is a politician and a writer. The son of a South Wales miner, he first entered the House of Commons more than forty years ago and rose to hold high office, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Home Secretary twice in the Labour Governments of the sixties and seventies. But then he left British politics altogether to become this country's first President of the European Commission.

Presenter0:52

Four years later he returned the time had come, he thought, to form a completely new party.

Presenter0:58

All this, however, is not the career of a straightforward political heavyweight. His intellectual credentials have earned him the Chancellorship of Oxford University, and his love of literature and fine wine have always given him a distinctive, some would say, superior, air. He is, of course, Roy Jenkins, or, more properly, Lord Jenkins of Hill Head, who, despite rumours far, prefers, I think, a good burgundy to a claret. Is that not right?

Lord Roy Jenkins1:24

No, that's not very true. I quite like Burgundy, but I don't know anything about it.

Presenter1:29

I presume that the origin of of you and and the claret is really to do with the fact that you enjoy conviviality, good conversation, good company.

Lord Roy Jenkins1:37

Yes, I suppose I do enjoy talking.

Lord Roy Jenkins1:41

Talking, sometimes over meals, not always talking not wholly seriously, more than any other relaxation talking in a conversational sense, not not speech making. I've never tremendously enjoyed speech making.

Presenter1:53

And not cocktail party going, which I presume four years in Brussels would have um

Lord Roy Jenkins1:56

I presume

Lord Roy Jenkins1:59

I managed to avoid that evening in Brussels. I avoid it very much if I can. Can't equate that with talking, because you can't hear what anybody else is saying.

Presenter2:08

So how do you contemplate the uh the casting away of you? Do you have a a practical bone in your body? Could you cope on a desert island?

Lord Roy Jenkins2:17

I think I might cope better than many people who know me think I would cope, but that's not saying a great deal. I would certainly be bad on the ground that I'd be lonely.

Lord Roy Jenkins2:28

I would be bad on the ground that I'm I'm not very handy.

Lord Roy Jenkins2:32

On the other hand, I think I have a certain amount of resilience and a certain capacity to um

Lord Roy Jenkins2:38

Make the best of things even if they are not terribly good, and a certain um

Lord Roy Jenkins2:43

Irrational optimism sometimes. So I have two two qualities which would be helpful and two which wouldn't be.

Presenter2:50

What's your first record that you'd like with you on the island?

Lord Roy Jenkins2:53

Well, I think um my first record ought to take me back to my Welsh um childhood.

Lord Roy Jenkins2:59

I was born, brought up, went to school in Wales, and both my both my parents were Welsh. But we were, in a sense, Border Welsh and non Welsh speaking.

Lord Roy Jenkins3:09

And, of course, my um life has been semi detached from Wales. I've been away from Wales most of the time, but I retain a very strong affection for it, and the tune I have chosen, I think, perhaps expresses that semi detached position. It's a choral version of We'll Keep a Welcome in the Hillside.

Speaker 43:29

I'll give the Lord sign.

Speaker 43:34

Keep up and keep the land.

Speaker 43:39

It's not the

Speaker 43:45

You come home sweet home again.

Speaker 43:51

The unfamiliar spine

Speaker 43:57

For your return we honor it praise.

Speaker 44:03

Goodness away from you.

Speaker 44:10

Come for it.

Presenter4:16

We'll keep a Welcome in the Hillside sung by the Morriston Orpheus Choir.

Presenter4:21

Lord Jenkins, I said you were the son of a miner, but your father, Arthur Jenkins, was more than that, wasn't he? He was a union official and eventually the local MP.

Lord Roy Jenkins4:30

He was a miner until about a year after I had been born. In other words, I can't remember his being a miner, but he was then what was called a miner's agent, which was, as you say, a union official for many years after that, and a county councillor, and a fairly prominent figure in politics, and he then became a member of Parliament when I was fourteen.

Presenter4:49

So it was a very busy and and rather cultured household, was it, that you lived in, with these politicians coming by. Even Clement Attlee, I think, at one point.

Lord Roy Jenkins4:56

Even Clementa?

Lord Roy Jenkins4:58

My father was parliamentary private secretary to him, so there was quite a close relationship there. Yes, there were a lot of books in the house. There must have been a thousand books in the house, I would think.

Presenter5:08

But was it an ordinary little Terraced Valleys house the same as the rest of them?

Lord Roy Jenkins5:13

No. The house I was born in, from which we moved after about two years, was a terraced house set up above a road a bit bigger than what one would think of as a minor's cottage, but not much. Then we moved to another one rather similar and then, um, after I've become Member of Parliament, we moved two miles from Abbasuccan to Pontypoole, and there we did live in a lodges detached house.

Presenter5:39

Yeah. And you had a major Yeah.

Lord Roy Jenkins5:40

Yeah.

Lord Roy Jenkins5:41

Yes, of course that was um

Lord Roy Jenkins5:43

That was much easier to have in the 1920s and 30s than it is today.

Presenter5:49

But but these were the years, as you say, of the twenties and thirties when there was great poverty. I mean, obviously y you never really wanted for anything.

Lord Roy Jenkins5:56

Your family. No. My parents obviously weren't rich, but in those days in South Wales, to have a regular income.

Presenter5:57

Nothing.

Lord Roy Jenkins6:03

said one another apart, and in a slightly privileged position. But they certainly weren't rich, though you're absolutely right, I never wanted for anything. But sometimes when I think back to the proportion of um

Lord Roy Jenkins6:15

of his income which my father must have spent on sending me to Oxford he paid for it entirely and sending me quite lavishly too um must have been formidable.

Presenter6:24

Um

Presenter6:27

Te tell me about your mother. You were the apple of her eye, I think, weren't you?

Lord Roy Jenkins6:32

I'm not sure I was the apple of her eye more than I was the apple of my father's eye. I suppose I did have a lot of attention, maybe an excessive amount of attention, lavished upon me as as a child, and I think I had a good and close relationship with both of them. They were very different from each other, but my mother wasn't in any way a sort of stay-at-home figure. She was

Lord Roy Jenkins6:52

She was very active lady. They were both very active in the local community.

Presenter6:57

and they wanted nothing but the best for you.

Lord Roy Jenkins7:00

I suppose that's a my father had a particular view about my going to Oxford. He'd been there at Ruskin, which was not part of the university as such, but he'd been he'd been very much influenced by those year or two years there, and it certainly, I think, his strongest single desire was that um was that I should be fully a part of the university.

Presenter7:22

So he must have been very proud when you got a place at Balliol.

Lord Roy Jenkins7:25

I think he was, yes.

Presenter7:27

Shall we have your second record?

Lord Roy Jenkins7:28

Well, my second record is an odd choice. It's

Lord Roy Jenkins7:33

I think called the Soviet Airmen Song, and I've chosen it for two reasons, because it it it recalls those Oxford days. I remember very vividly driving to a University Labour Federation conference with Tony Crossland, who finished up as Foreign Secretary, and Leo Pliatzki, who finished up as a permanent secretary, and Tony Crossland, who was a great singer, singing this tune a great part of the journey, so far as I can remember. And it also expresses a slightly sort of infantile leftism. We weren't at all, in fact, pro-communist, but one liked those old left-wing tunes, and this comes back to me over many years as a sort of eccentric, half-joke tune, which recalls that journey in the midst of my Oxford period and those two very striking figures travelling with me.

Speaker 48:24

Our proud machines obey our every order. There is no flight, our pilots do not stir. We form an iron ring above our borders. The workers' first great squadrons of the air.

Speaker 48:43

Fly higher and higher and higher.

Speaker 48:48

I remember the Saul is the first time.

Speaker 48:53

And every propeller is rolling

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Sing the U.S. guitar

Speaker 49:12

Every prophet is glorious.

Speaker 49:17

And I love it.

Presenter9:20

The Soviet Airmen song with the Foden's Motor Works band, as sung then in the thirties by Tony Crossland. Oxford was then an intense in an intensely political phase.

Lord Roy Jenkins9:31

Yes, Oxford.

Lord Roy Jenkins9:33

The thirties was a very political decade compared with the twenties in Oxford, and also I was much concentrated on university politics, in some ways more so than I would be ideally looking back now. I greatly enjoyed my Oxford time, but I do a little less politics and a little more of other things with perfect hindsight.

Presenter9:54

But did you totally assume, then, that politics was your future?

Lord Roy Jenkins9:59

During most of my time at Oxford one didn't assume anything about the future, because right from the time I went to Oxford, the beginning of nineteen thirty eight, one was obviously going to be in a war in a very short time. Nobody s really seriously doubted that. It was just a question of when it came. And then the the the latter part of my time at Oxford was actually during the war, because I'd gone up rather young. I um stayed and completed um uh my full schools, my full final examination in nineteen forty one, and then went straight into the army after that.

Presenter10:29

So you didn't, at that stage, nurse hopes of one day being Prime Minister?

Lord Roy Jenkins10:34

I don't, to be honest, think I ever contemplated the prospect of being Prime Minister as such. That seemed a very remote way. Getting the House of Commons was about the limit of my ambition at that time.

Presenter10:43

Huh.

Presenter10:46

You did, though, contemplate the prospect of being President of the Oxford Union, but that didn't happen, did it? You just missed.

Lord Roy Jenkins10:52

I I was defeated twice, actually. I was defeated the first time by five votes, and the second time by more. That sometimes happens on second attempts. And I was very disappointed. I've always tried to use it later in life as a as a lesson for trying to keep one's sense of proportion. I was defeated for the um

Lord Roy Jenkins11:13

Presidency of the Oxford Union.

Lord Roy Jenkins11:16

German Nazi troops were rushing across Western Europe, rushing through northern France. Paris and France fell about two weeks afterwards. And I horrified, looking back, to think that when that result came out and victory was snatched away from me from five votes,

Lord Roy Jenkins11:35

Not absolutely sure for a moment. I didn't think it was more important than what was happening in France. And I'm always tired after that.

Lord Roy Jenkins11:43

to try to say to myself that things that you get very worried about and very personally concerned about in the context of history, or even in the context of your life as a whole, don't amount to all that much.

Presenter11:55

So we have some more music.

Lord Roy Jenkins11:56

Yeah.

Lord Roy Jenkins11:57

Yes, we we now have the theme from Elgar's Enigma Variations, which um which take which reminds me of the war, not the war at Oxford, but the war when I'd gone into the army. And I remember playing a record, an old seventy-eight record of this, over and over again in Nissenhut on on Salisbury Plain in the summer and autumn of um and through into forty three, summer and autumn of forty two three.

Presenter13:23

The theme from Elgar's Enigma Variations played by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pierre Monteur.

Presenter13:30

Going back to your your political beginnings, you you um after the war j uh when your father died, you tried uh for his seat, didn't you, but you didn't get it?

Lord Roy Jenkins13:39

I was the runner up, and goodness I was lucky not to get it. The reason I say I was lucky is that I would have been compared all my life as a Member of Parliament for Pontypool with him, and compared unfavourably, and also, looking back, hereditary seats.

Lord Roy Jenkins13:56

It's enough having one hereditary chamber without having two hereditary chambers. And I have no I have no regret about that at all.

Presenter14:04

But finally, when you were twenty-seven years old, you did get a seat in the house. Where was that for?

Lord Roy Jenkins14:09

That was for a tiny little postage stamp of a constituency of South London called Central Southwark. It was just round the Elphenton Castle. It had a very small electorate. I remember that in the 1945 election when I was beaten it was quite difficult to get beaten as a Labour candidate in the 1945 election. I polled 21,000 votes and lost. Then I fought this by-election three years later and polled 8,000 votes and won by 2 to 1, which shows you how small the constituency had become. Those people had moved out of those inner London areas to a very substantial extent. And their three seats went into one at 1950. And as a result of this, I had to move and I then went to Stetchford Division of Birmingham, which I sat for for twenty-seven years.

Presenter14:51

The sketch work

Presenter14:54

Hmm.

Presenter14:55

You had also married by then, and Clement Attlee was godfather to your first child, and so there you were on the threshold of a political career with the Prime Minister as a as a family friend. It all must have seemed too good to be true, really.

Lord Roy Jenkins15:10

Yes, perhaps perhaps in a way it did. And I was I was sort of set, if you like, perhaps uh too much, I indicate that in relation to Oxford, on a tram line political career, straight down the tram lines to the depot, as it were, and too orthodoxly political. That's my view a bit of myself at that stage in life. Delighted to be in the House of Commons, pursuing, taking a fairly rigid party line, full of confidence in party certainties. But I had no other occupation. I had no professional training of any sort, no particular ability. And I

Lord Roy Jenkins15:48

I began to teach myself to be a writer.

Presenter15:50

Because in fact of course the the tram lines didn't quite lead straight to the depot did they because uh i they were opp it was the opposition depot constant opposition

Lord Roy Jenkins15:57

Well if they did straight to the depot, the tram was going very slowly at any rate because it took me sixteen years after I got in the House of Commons before um before I had office, before I was offered office of any sort.

Presenter16:10

It was a swift rise to high office, though, wasn't it? Nineteen sixty five Home Secretary, and then in'sixty seven, Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Speaker 416:17

Hmm.

Presenter16:18

I saw a a a marvellous analogy, um I don't I don't know if it was yours that steering the British economy is like riding a bicycle along a cliff edge.

Lord Roy Jenkins16:27

Well, the theory of this, it is my analogy, it's based on my view that there are unequal risks.

Presenter16:27

Well those

Lord Roy Jenkins16:34

and that you are bound, in a sense, to stare slightly on the more cautious side, quite rationally, on the ground that if you get it wrong one way, you fall over the cliff edge and plunge down three hundred, six hundred, a thousand feet whereas if you get it wrong the other way, you give your elbow a nasty bruise. And there is therefore a certain inequality of risks, and one's justified if one's doing it in staring a little close to the inside rather than to the outside.

Presenter17:03

Some more music, I think.

Lord Roy Jenkins17:04

I think that um I would now like to have Maria Kallas singing an Aya from Samson and Delilah.

Lord Roy Jenkins17:12

and by Saint Sans. And this is chosen not because it particularly reminds me of anything, but just because I think it is a very beautiful in a slightly lush way, but a very beautiful piece of music.

Speaker 417:23

A tour qui comber pour tour es merce au cure.

Speaker 417:46

En sou frequence de la dire fair. Delision

Speaker 418:07

Outrelotra.

Speaker 418:13

Before the Lord

Presenter18:23

Maria Callas singing Pranton qui commence from Sampson and Delilah by Saints with the French National Radio Orchestra conducted by Georges Pretre.

Presenter18:34

It was, of course, Lord Jenkins over the Labour Party's policy on Europe.

Presenter18:39

and it was officially against entry into the common market that you resigned from the front bench in nineteen seventy two. Was that, would you say, the beginning of your separation from the Labour Party?

Lord Roy Jenkins18:50

Looking back, yes, that that was um fairly decisive from the beginning of the separation, because I began increasingly to feel the

Lord Roy Jenkins19:00

Times were out of joint for

Lord Roy Jenkins19:03

my relationship with British politics in some ways. I'd I'd got disenchanted with the party game.

Presenter19:10

So is there a feeling in hindsight that at that point your chances of ever leading the Labour Party were also scuppered?

Lord Roy Jenkins19:17

No, I didn't see the separation as being permanent at the time. I can only in the way that you can sometimes, if you look at something from a distance, you can see things which you hadn't seen when you look close up against them. I see that it was so, and certainly my decision to resign the deputy leadership, which I don't regret,

Lord Roy Jenkins19:35

That ended my really strong prospect of leading the Labour Party, which I suppose was pretty strong.

Presenter19:40

But in fact you did have one last go, didn't you, of trying to gain the leadership. That was in in 1976 when Wilson resigned.

Lord Roy Jenkins19:46

When Wilson resigned.

Lord Roy Jenkins19:50

It was absolutely clear to me that that one should contest it, because I had a a band, they weren't quite as many as they'd been, but a lot of supporters who were good enough to be very dedicated, and who had been training for this fight for some time, and although I think they probably realised as much as I did that the time for victory had somewhat receded. None the less, when you've been training something for a long time, you you want to fight the battle.

Presenter20:14

Have to see it through.

Lord Roy Jenkins20:14

And we fought the battle. The margin of defeat was between James Callagher and me was not overwhelming. If fifteen votes had swung from him to me, I suppose it would have worked um that would have made the difference. But, none the less, it was pretty obvious during that campaign that he was going to win and I was not.

Presenter20:30

And of course you already had the the Presidency of the European Commission.

Presenter20:36

at that time in your back pocket, as it were.

Lord Roy Jenkins20:39

I suppose that's so, yes. I don't think that was generally known, but it is true that I had been asked first by Harold Wilson well, I dismissed it, because I as I put it in something I wrote the other day, I reached for an old gramophone record and said, No, no, I want to stay in British politics but then I thought it over and decided that if the result of the leadership contest in seventy six was as I rather feared it would be, I thought I might

Lord Roy Jenkins21:04

They both find it more satisfying and more useful to go to Brussels.

Presenter21:09

Which you did. But it goes without saying that you would, of course, have preferred to have been Prime Minister of Great Britain.

Lord Roy Jenkins21:15

I think anybody what did Melbourne say about it? It's the even if it's only for two months, it's the finest thing it's a thing no Greek or Roman ever was, he rather inconsequentially said. But I think it's that that is certainly true.

Presenter21:29

Shall we um reach for another old gramophone record?

Lord Roy Jenkins21:32

Well, let's have one which does remind me of my

Lord Roy Jenkins21:37

Very strongly of my early days in Brussels. It's again rather like the Enigma variation, something which I played very frequently at a particular time, and that's the um well, I played the whole opera, that's Verde's Ballarin Mascara, but it's the prelude, which um has this particular um reminiscent quality for me, because in my early days in Brussels I was rather a stranger to the bureaucracy of the community, and I sometimes thought that

Lord Roy Jenkins22:06

In my first month or so there were things going on in the background which I didn't wholly understand, and this the music here, I think, very much captures that atmosphere.

Presenter23:15

The prelude to Verdi's Un Ballo in Masquera with the national Philemonic conducted by Sir George Schulte.

Presenter23:23

Well, as President of the of the European Commission you debated and dined with Europe's brightest and best. Juscard Destin, Helmut Schmidt, they were in office when you first went. misses Thatcher came later. Which of the leaders did you most admire?

Lord Roy Jenkins23:36

Schmidt. Helmut Schmidt, the Chancellor of Germany. Schmidt, like all of us, had his faults, but he was the most constructive statesman, certainly of Europe, but I think of the world, in those years of the late seventies, my time as President of the Commission. He was also agreeable, interesting, bit unpredictable, bit moody, but he was also agreeable to deal with.

Presenter23:58

and stubbed his cigarettes out on the Queen's best china.

Lord Roy Jenkins24:01

Well, we all have our f we all have our eccentricities.

Lord Roy Jenkins24:05

Sure, I've done some things as bad as that at times, and so have most people.

Presenter24:09

You had um dealings with President Carter too, didn't you? What what did you think of him?

Lord Roy Jenkins24:13

I thought Carter was um

Lord Roy Jenkins24:16

He was a very nice man a highly intelligent man. He had, I think, um two, um perhaps three deficiencies. One, he was not able to project himself in a leadership role.

Lord Roy Jenkins24:28

Well. To I'm not sure his judgment of people was always very good.

Lord Roy Jenkins24:33

That was certainly a difficulty, and while he was highly intelligent in dealing with any one issue, I don't think he managed to see issues in relation to each other, and therefore to see policy as a whole piece.

Presenter24:45

And did you feel that that misses Thatcher understood those things, and that she grasped the whole policy, as it were?

Lord Roy Jenkins24:52

Mrs Thatcher has doesn't need me to tell you great qualities of determination, of nerve, of not caring what other people think about her. This gave her in her dealings with Europe some advantages, but some pretty heavy disadvantages too. As an advocate, for instance, I saw her as an advocate for Putin's budgetary case in which we wanted to pay less money, and on the whole she was right. But as an advocate, she had this great quality of determination to win.

Lord Roy Jenkins25:20

But she did not have the quality of understanding the case against her, of seeing how things looked from other people's point of view.

Lord Roy Jenkins25:27

And she did not really have the quality of deciding when what you were saying was counterproductive from the point of view of our audience, when you were boring them more than you were persuading them.

Presenter25:36

So did you have to jump in and save her from her cell?

Lord Roy Jenkins25:36

But did you have to jump in and save have to

Lord Roy Jenkins25:38

I remember one occasion that nobody could save Mrs Thatcher from herself. She would be much more determined to be herself and to go on. However, she basically had right on her side on this issue, but she was not as persuasive an advocate as she could have been.

Presenter25:56

I see in your diaries that to be fair to the Prime Minister you say she is a nice person without pomposity.

Lord Roy Jenkins26:02

Yes, I think she she is without pomposity. And I remember having a making a joke at at one expense, a sort of tease with her. Um and I can't s wouldn't say she absolutely roared with laughter about it, but she didn't take any umbrage about it. She um she doesn't take umbrage.

Lord Roy Jenkins26:17

In my experience in those days she does not mind if you speak to her as robustly as she speaks to you, and even have a little tease occasionally.

Presenter26:26

Your sixth record, please.

Lord Roy Jenkins26:28

My sixth record is the theme music from Chariots of Fire.

Lord Roy Jenkins26:34

And this again is a record which I've chosen for a very special reason. When I came back from Brussels I plunged into British politics to founding the SDP and within four months of leaving Brussels I fought a by-election in Warrington which seemed a very unpromising seat though it turned out more promising than we expected and we went round in a great van as one did and we went round to this music.

Presenter27:29

The theme music from Chariots of Fire composed, arranged and performed by Van Gerdis.

Presenter27:35

Roy Jenkins back on the Hustings in Warrington and later more successfully in Glasgow Hillhead with the STP.

Presenter27:42

What, apart from your own return to this country, w was the signal for you that the moment had come for the take off of that new party?

Lord Roy Jenkins27:51

Two things happened, and the both parties plunged in what seemed to me extremist directions the early days of the Thatcher government.

Lord Roy Jenkins28:00

plunged deep into recession, into unemployment, and the Labour Party went on an excursion round the wilder shores of extremism, symbolized by the defeat of Dennis Healey for the leadership Callahan Went Michaelfoot, who was a left wing figure and seemed a left wing figure in those days, but there were great numbers of policy issues which came up, too.

Lord Roy Jenkins28:20

And so this, I think, sparked it off and created a position in which there were quite a number of other figures Shirley Williams and Bill Rogers, David Owen, who were willing to break as well.

Lord Roy Jenkins28:33

And that was important to have some support to begin with. But what of course was most remarkable is that once we'd come into the public domain in January 1981 was the tremendous response which one got. So from that day when we, as it were, put our heads a little nervously above the parapet, there was no stopping the momentum which led on to the formation of the new party two months later.

Presenter28:57

So your party was born very much out of moderation. I wonder if you've had thoughts about all of that since and and wondered whether you actually can create a new party out of moderation?

Lord Roy Jenkins29:08

We created a new party, and things worked extremely well until the mess which has set in, unfortunately, since the nineteen eighty seven election. But we we very nearly, to an extent which far exceeded my expectations, we very nearly got the breakthrough on the run, as it were. And had we succeeded, I have no doubt at all that we would have had an effective alternative to this present government of Mrs Thatcher, to a far greater extent than we've had from anybody else since.

Presenter29:37

And for you has all hope of that now been lost?

Lord Roy Jenkins29:42

No, I don't think any hope of that is now lost for a moment. I think there are certain tides in history, and there was a great tide which we nearly carried on to victory in 1981, 82, even through into 1983. I think circumstances have been less, mostly less favourable since. And as I say, we've made rather a mess of things since 1987. But I think there is a remarkable indication of how much people would today like to vote in great numbers for exactly the sort of movement which I, with others, tried to launch in 1981.

Presenter30:17

So do you believe in hindsight then that perhaps the the the timing was not right then and and perhaps the SDP might have stood a better chance now than when you formed it?

Lord Roy Jenkins30:26

Now I think the timing was was right and we were right to go ahead, and as I say we were as near as we could be making the full success, and I think something substantial remains.

Presenter30:37

But the centre ground is now you described it just now as a a bit of a mess.

Lord Roy Jenkins30:42

I'm afraid it is. But I hope we can put it together.

Presenter30:45

Your seventh record, please.

Lord Roy Jenkins30:47

My seventh record, um

Lord Roy Jenkins30:49

It takes me on to the next political phase, but not only political, and that is a Scottish record, because I won the Hillhead um division of Glasgow and sat in Parliament for Glasgow for five years and immensely enjoyed that connection with Glasgow, and it's the overture de Hamish McCunn's The Land of the Mountain and the Flood.

Presenter32:10

The Overture to Hamish McCunn's The Land of the Mountain and the Flood, conducted by Sir Alexander Gibson with the Scottish National Orchestra. Well, Lord Jenkins, the time has almost come to uh cut the tow rope and cast you away to the shore. Will you, as you um step on to the island, feel a sense of of relief that the pressure is now off, or a sense of frustration because you've still got so much to achieve?

Lord Roy Jenkins32:33

Well, one might begin with a sense of relief, but I guess a sense of frustration would set in fairly soon. What I always find is that the periods I most enjoy are those when one suddenly has a relaxation of pressure, after a period in which one's tried to achieve something and hopes one's got it done. But then, very soon, when the relaxation of pressure is off, one begins to want to do other things again.

Presenter32:57

And will you as you sit brooding under the palms, will you relive any specific part of your life and do it better? Or?

Lord Roy Jenkins33:03

Um

Lord Roy Jenkins33:05

Of course one's bound to have regrets and one can see a great number of things one can do better. I can hardly think of anything which I couldn't do a bit better if I had it again uh over again. But I'm not sure I would, if you see what I mean. I think one's done things as one has and if one's set about doing it in a terribly planned way, saying I'm going to learn from every little mistake, I'm not going to put my foot over that trace, I'm going to be more careful, I think one might do it worse.

Presenter33:33

You you wrote of a great friend of yours, Hugh Gateskill, that he had an overriding public purpose, which was to lead both his party and his country towards rational, responsible, and philosophically coherent social democracy, in which he passionately believed.

Presenter33:48

Is that also true of you?

Lord Roy Jenkins33:51

I'd like to think it was.

Lord Roy Jenkins33:53

You asked me which was the European statesman I admired most, and I said Schmidt. But undoubtedly the greatest influence on my life, who was both a close friend, even though he was half a generation older than me, thirteen years, on my life, is Hugh Gaitskill.

Lord Roy Jenkins34:07

So I'd like to think that my purposes were as close to his as possible.

Presenter34:12

Or is there an element of you to return to your earlier phrase?

Presenter34:16

in which you have always been to some extent

Presenter34:19

more semi detached than that description.

Lord Roy Jenkins34:22

I think Gatescoll perhaps had more passion than I at any rate show in public, and I think that on the whole was a strength to him.

Presenter34:29

You say you don't show it in public, but you have it nevertheless, you imply.

Lord Roy Jenkins34:32

I think we all have a certain amount of hidden passion.

Presenter34:36

Shall we have your last record?

Lord Roy Jenkins34:38

My last record is um

Lord Roy Jenkins34:41

Haydn's Symphony, The Oxford Symphony.

Lord Roy Jenkins34:44

Which is an obvious choice is um

Lord Roy Jenkins34:47

Well, I have ended up as, in some senses, Chancellor of the University of Oxford.

Presenter35:52

Haydn's Symphony in G number ninety two, the Oxford, played by the Concertgebau Orchestra of Amsterdam, conducted by Sir Colin Davis.

Presenter36:01

Now we come to the difficult bit, which is uh you must decide which of those records would be more important to have than any of the others, Lord Jenkins.

Lord Roy Jenkins36:11

Well, I think the choice lies between

Lord Roy Jenkins36:14

Maria Callas singing the

Lord Roy Jenkins36:16

Piece from Sand Sauce.

Lord Roy Jenkins36:18

and the um Enigma variations.

Lord Roy Jenkins36:22

But I think I think Maria Carris would be a slightly rich diet um before breakfast, say, and so I think I'll settle for the slightly more austere notes of the Enigma variations.

Presenter36:33

And then a book. We give you already the complete works of Shakespeare and the Bible. What else would you like to have with by your side?

Lord Roy Jenkins36:40

I think I'll take that set of who was who, because it would so exactly express my position on the Desert Island, and also I find it fascinating reading for hour after hour.

Presenter36:50

And a luxury. What can we supply you with?

Lord Roy Jenkins36:53

But I think I'd better remain true to my

Lord Roy Jenkins36:56

image, even though it isn't very accurate, and say we'll have a case of wine, but it would be primarily.

Lord Roy Jenkins37:03

Not to drink.

Lord Roy Jenkins37:04

but use the bottles for sending messages.

Presenter37:09

Any particular wine?

Lord Roy Jenkins37:11

Um oh, we'd better stick to that old wine of Bordeaux.

Presenter37:16

Right. You shall have a career.

Lord Roy Jenkins37:17

I won't specify the exact the exact chateau.

Presenter37:20

Just in case we can't afford it. Thor Jenkins, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Speaker 337:33

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio form.