Roy Jenkins

Biography

Roy Jenkins was born in 1920 in Abersychan, Monmouthshire, the only child of a miners' union official who later became a Labour MP. He studied at University College, Cardiff, and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he took a first in PPE, and in the Second World War he trained as an army officer before working as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park.

He entered the Commons at a 1948 by-election for Southwark Central and sat for Birmingham Stechford from 1950 to 1977, writing biographies alongside his political career. He sponsored the 1959 Obscene Publications Act. Harold Wilson made him minister of aviation in 1964 and home secretary in December 1965, when he merged police forces and supported liberalising measures on capital punishment, theatre censorship, homosexuality, divorce and abortion. As chancellor of the exchequer from 1967 to 1970 he raised taxes and moved the current account into surplus.

Elected Labour's deputy leader in 1970, he resigned in 1972 when the party turned against British membership of the European Communities. He returned as home secretary in 1974 and in 1977 became president of the European Commission, where he pushed for the monetary union that began in 1979 as the European Monetary System.

Dismayed by Labour's move to the left, he joined David Owen, Bill Rodgers and Shirley Williams in the Limehouse Declaration of January 1981, and they founded the Social Democratic Party that March. He won the Glasgow Hillhead by-election in 1982 and led the SDP into the 1983 election. He lost his seat in 1987, became a life peer and chancellor of Oxford University, led the Liberal Democrats in the Lords from 1988 to 1997 and in 1998 chaired the Jenkins Commission on electoral reform. He died in 2003.