Elizabethans

12

THE DAVID AND JONATHAN OF PERMISSIVE BRITAIN

Often, pre-war homosexual affairs at Oxford and Cambridge were not merely private events. They affected the course of poetry, diplomacy and politics. The gay circles that intersected with student communist politics produced the infamous ‘Cambridge spies’. The secrecy of gay men in the age of criminalization, with their secret assignations and private language, may have laid them open to blackmail, but it certainly helped them become good espionage agents. Later, David Cornwell, writing as John le Carré, persuaded modern Elizabethans that, despite the obscure heroism of his protagonist George Smiley, there was something deep, dark and rotten at the heart of the security state; and that this had been rooted in the fascism-haunted 1930s, before it spilled over into post-war crises. History books and popular films, following a similar agenda, probed the gay student friendships whose actors later did so much work for Moscow.

But there was a less well-known pre-war gay relationship – at Oxford not Cambridge this time – which would deeply affect the Elizabethan age in another way. It had nothing to do with spying, or indeed communism. This story was about mainstream domestic politics and social change. For this brief and passionate affair drew together two of the most important reformers in post-war British politics. It was a friendship and a rivalry which lasted a lifetime. Both debonair, thrusting, louche Tony Crosland and quicksilver, sardonic Roy Jenkins could, in very slightly different circumstances, have been famous British prime ministers. Neither made it. But between them they can claim to have reshaped the country more effectively than many of those who did, including their theoretical leaders Harold Wilson and James Callaghan.

As a young man, Tony Crosland had been irresistibly glamorous. Abrasive and brilliant, with the face of a corrupted choirboy, he was brought up in the strict and puritanical Exclusive Brethren sect, before fighting in the war with the Royal Welch Fusiliers. As a paratrooper in Italy, he had observed one of the most shameful moments for the British Army in its entire history. In 1945 many tens of thousands of disarmed German, Russian, Ukrainian and Cossack prisoners were passed over to the Soviet Army. They were then executed or sent to communist concentration camps. Crosland was well aware of what was happening, writing in his diary: ‘all one saw was a lot of simple uncomprehending men being shepherded off under guard to a black and hopeless future: in the case of the officers, going to certain death. However, it all went off with only a single hitch …’

This traumatic experience hardened him against the Marxism that had attracted so many of his generation and pushed him instead towards a belief in social democracy. He was a tough-minded twenty-eight-year-old when he returned to Oxford in 1946 and threw himself into democratic socialist politics. The then Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Dalton, who had an eye for attractive young left-wing men, brought Crosland into his circle. By then, Crosland himself had seduced another socialist undergraduate.

Roy Jenkins was the son of a Welsh trade unionist who had served the National Union of Mineworkers. Jenkins left Oxford during the war to work in the British Army as an intelligence officer. He, like Crosland, would become central to the social democratic project of the more leftish Elizabethans. Politically, they were two of a kind. Jenkins remembered first coming across the older man: ‘Tony was immensely good-looking and elegant. He wore a long camel-hair overcoat, and drove a powerful MG sports car known as the Red Menace. I found him rather intimidating, until he came to my rooms on some minor Labour Club business and remained talking for nearly two hours. Thereafter, I saw him nearly every day.’

The biographer John Campbell later confirmed, using love letters, that Jenkins had been seduced at least once by Crosland. From early on, Crosland realized that this lisping, apparently shy Welshman, who was already training himself to speak like a member of the upper classes, had an almost insatiable ambition, a well-disguised steely inner core and a determination to exercise power. Crosland would go on to write the book that provided the basic text for Labour thinking about society for decades to come; Jenkins would make himself the pivotal figure in a cascade of social reforms that followed it.

The two spent the rest of their lives eyeing each other, ambitious rivals whose friendship would endure to the end. Both were absolutely central to the shift in laws and values that would mark the middle years of the Queen’s reign. They were both, through most of their adult lives, uncompromisingly and enthusiastically heterosexual; but they remained close allies for decades. Intellectuals, war veterans, deep drinkers and promiscuous lovers, they were the David and Jonathan of the permissive society. Yet we have some important things to blame them for: together they may have made Britain more civilized, but they didn’t make it much more open or more equal. And that was down to the story of British schooling – Crosland’s greatest cause, and biggest failure.

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