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“... buy everything. Wyatt’s cash-register mind was always busy. ‘You’re a bore about money,’ Roy Jenkins told him. The reason is not hard to find. His pleasure at the social splash made by Petronella – ‘more adult than ever, amusing and pretty’ – is immediately calibrated: she seemed ‘immensely rich with no one knowing it was a total ...”

“... ideological apparatus of the state. But the extent to which this status has been exploited varies. Roy Jenkins used it to demonstrate a completely different ideology from that of the present government. Douglas Hurd, the last effective home secretary, made little attempt to exploit the Home Office for electoral mobilisation. The rot began with Michael ...”

“... Avons and Devonshires’: ‘there was a great uproar and lots of four-letter words; Debo said to Roy Jenkins: “Can’t you stop them by saying something Labour?” ’ – ‘but this,’ she says to Waugh, ‘is something Roy has never been able to do.’ There’s an interest, of course, in all this tribal ...”

“... Communists or Communist sympathisers as Brian Walden, David Owen, Robert Mellish, John Stonehouse, Roy Hattersley and Reg Prentice; and even a bogus pamphlet on ‘revolutionary strategy’ for the installation of socialism in Britain was contrived for off-the-record briefing of American journalists, the joint ‘authors’ being Tony Benn, Stan Orme and Denis ...”

“... failing probably applies in every area, not just this one. The few exceptions – Edward Heath or Roy Jenkins – tend to be dismissed as enthusiasts, always a term of abuse in English life. If Thomas is right, the intensive ‘re-education’ that Whitehall prescribed in 1960 did not even take place in its own house. I am rather less worried about the ...”

“... and intentions. Three biographers have lately tried their hand, in strikingly different books. Roy Jenkins’s final work is really an extended essay, unfinished on his death in 2003 – the pages about 1944-45 have been written by Richard Neustadt. There is much to be gained from Jenkins’s insights but Patrick ...”

“... recruited through provincial grammar schools. When Denis Healey encountered Edward Heath and Roy Jenkins at Balliol just before the Second World War, such was their tryst with destiny. This was in Healey’s Communist phase, which lasted until the fall of France. When the Marxist-dominated Labour Club split in 1940, he opposed ...”

“... likely to get elected to pursue a programme which it couldn’t carry out if it were. Thatcher, Jenkins and Scargill all saw this, and given their interests, each drew the correct conclusion. The one who got it wrong was Benn. Meanwhile, and compounding the agony, Britain had come to have the lowest rates of investment, capital accumulation, and growth of ...”

“... languages. William Gladstone, the four-time Liberal prime minister, according to his biographer Roy Jenkins, was convinced that ‘an educated Englishman ought to be able to communicate in all the principal languages of civilised Europe. So he did.’ Gladstone’s ‘attitude to modern languages’, Jenkins goes ...”

“... I’m half delighted and I’m half disdainful – It looks so lovely and it feels so painful. Roy Jenkins will be standing at Hillhead In Glasgow. The world wonders: is this wise? Lose Warrington and it’s a watershed: Defeat there was a victory in disguise. But this time if he doesn’t win he’s dead With all his party sharing his demise. The ...”

“... European Common Market? The campaign was launched in April 1975 at a press conference chaired by Roy Jenkins (then Labour), sitting on a platform together with Cledwyn Hughes (Labour), Jo Grimond (Liberal), Willie Whitelaw and Reginald Maudling (both Conservatives) and the diplomat Con O’Neill. Harold Wilson supported Britain’s continued membership ...”

“... meagre inches of pious editorial. Writing in the Guardian three days after the story broke, Peter Jenkins talked of ‘the practical question of what should be done about the Fleet Street heavy mob bivouacking in Hertfordshire and Wiltshire, the Prime Minister pursued wherever she goes not by lobby correspondents but by crime reporters’. That, indeed, was ...”

“... of Blairites à la SDP? The latter boasted a few well-known and intelligent social democrats – Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen, Peter Jenkins and Polly Toynbee – but they were still destroyed by the electoral system and had to stave off obscurity by a political transplant, merging with the Liberals, an ...”

“... toeing the Stalinist line. As world history repeated itself in the comedy of student politics, Roy Jenkins who, with Tony Crosland and others, had left the Party because of its defence of the Soviet invasion of Finland, found himself in correspondence with Murdoch, trying to untangle the administration of the rump Oxford University Labour Club from ...”

“... 12 years during which she held the premiereship. In this, of course, he shares responsibility with Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers. But there can be very little doubt that the existence of the SDP was the major factor in sustaining Thatcherism in defiance of the fact that the Tories were unable to achieve more than a fraction of the popular ...”