Was Roy Jenkins the greatest prime minister we never had?

In any list of the-best-prime-ministers-we never-had, the name of Roy Jenkins is likely to be prominent. He was intelligent, moderate, courteous, thoughtful: he was exactly the sort of man whom any civil servant would wish to see installed in No.10. That, no doubt, is why he never got there.

John Campbell makes no bones about the fact that he is a fan of Jenkins. He was, writes Campbell, ‘the first public figure I was aware of and always the one I most admired’. Campbell is far too sensible a man and good a biographer, however, to allow his book to degenerate into a paean of praise. Jenkins’s frailties are unsparingly exposed, his occasional failures recorded, his more extravagant pretensions ridiculed. The fact that, at the end of this long and thoughtful book, one ends up admiring and liking Jenkins more rather than less is a tribute to Campbell’s skills as a biographer but even more to Jenkins’s own personality and achievements.

He had his weaknesses. The most obvious was self-indulgence. He was self-indulgent when it came to food and drink, attaching great importance to consuming the right things in the right places. Many of his most important conversations took place over the luncheon or dinner table — Campbell could have saved several pages by omitting the words ‘at Brooks’s’ after the word ‘lunched’. He was self-indulgent when it came to women. He tended to have affairs with the wives of his closest friends: a trait which might sound unattractive but in fact caused little or no offence. Neither Ian Gilmour nor Mark Bonham-Carter seem to have resented the fact that their extremely attractive and intelligent wives had a fling with Jenkins, and if they did not mind why should anyone else? (Another fling was with Tony Crosland when they were undergraduates together.