Roy Jenkins Articles

I interviewed Denis Healey as part of the research for my biography of Aneurin Bevan in February 2011. He immediately seized on Bevan’s remark that ‘the right kind of leader for the Labour party is a kind of dessicated calculating-machine’. While Clement Attlee was...

Nigel Farage is presiding over the Europeanisation of British politics Political history is littered with ironies. Anthony Eden, who prided himself on his expertise in world affairs, was forced from office by his disastrous intervention in Suez. James Callaghan was...

Barbara Castle could have been Britain’s first female prime minister. Born Barbara Betts in 1910 in Pontefract, her mother was a Labour councillor, her father a tax inspector. She later moved to Bradford, where she attended the girls’ grammar school, before attending...

Congratulations on your appointment as foreign secretary. You join Ernest Bevin, Herbert Morrison, James Callaghan, Tony Crosland, Robin Cook, Jack Straw and David Miliband in the pantheon. As you mount the Grand Staircase, and stroll around the Locarno Suite and...