Roy Jenkins and the European Commission Presidency, 1976–1980: At the Heart of Europe by N. Piers Ludlow (review)

Roy Jenkins was not just the first British president of the European Commission. Barring the improbable, he will go down in history as the only Briton who ever held the office.

With few exceptions, the United Kingdom has sent politicians of considerable caliber to Brussels. Surprisingly for a country that defends its national interests with terrier-like determination, those commissioners have mostly honored their obligation under the EU Treaties to serve the European Union (EU) and not the national interest. Roy Jenkins was no exception. Some other EU member-states have, instead, regarded their commissioner as the principal defender of their national interests. The Brussels institutional relationships (between the Council of Ministers representing the member governments, the Commission, with its unique right and duty of legislative initiative, and the European Parliament) can make a hornet's nest seem tranquil. That was the world Jenkins chose to enter after a career at the top of British politics.

Jenkins was both admirably qualified, and in some respects unsuited, for the job of president. He was a life-long European who had consistently campaigned to convince the British Labour Party to espouse the European ideal. He was valiant in defying anti-European sentiment in his party and, partly for that reason, failed to secure the leadership spot he should have received as one of the most successful chancellors of the exchequer in Britain's postwar history. He was one of the principal, and most persuasive, leaders of the campaign that secured a handsome victory in the 1975 referendum in Britain on continued membership in the European Community. He was the man the two most prominent European leaders of the day, Helmut Schmidt of Germany and Valery Giscard d'Estaing of France, most wanted for the job of Commission president. But he was also the man whom James Callaghan, who had taken over as prime minister after Harold Wilson's surprise resignation, most wanted to get rid of. They were chalk and cheese: Callaghan was clever but unintellectual, a tough and sometimes unscrupulous politician who hid the iron fist of ruthlessness in the velvet glove of bonhomie. Jenkins, though, like Callaghan, of modest background, had grown up in a political family. While Callaghan entered adulthood as a junior tax official and in the wartime Royal Navy, Jenkins did so via the intellectual (and sybaritic) pleasures of Oxford. Callaghan's defeat of Jenkins in the leadership race to succeed Wilson meant that, for Jenkins, Brussels was a challenge that, in other circumstances, he would not have sought.

Moreover, for all Jenkins's exposure to European politics and to the European cause, he had no experience of the working of the Brussels institutions and only a modest command of French at a time when French was still the lingua franca of the Commission and its staff. So, he started at a disadvantage and spent his first six months finding his administrative and organizational feet. This was one factor in the assessment that Ludlow shares with Schmidt who, toward the end of Jenkins's time in Brussels, told Margaret Thatcher (by then well into her tenure of the premiership) that Jenkins was a good president of the Commission, but not a great one. Ludlow, in a very readable, lucid, balanced, and expert telling of the story, also concludes that Jenkins's decision, a year or so before the end of his four-year term, not to seek a second stint in Brussels but to return to British politics, meant that his attention in his final months was on his British future, not on that of the European Community (EC).

Jenkins was a sociable man but not readily at ease outside his intellectual or social circle. I recall being told by an official, who worked for both Jenkins and Callaghan during their tenures as home secretary, of their respective behavior on prison visits. Jenkins could not find...