One's first emotion at laying hands upon this volume must be joy that Mr Gladstone has returned to public life. For many years, as is widely known, he has devoted himself to charitable works among the fallen women of the East End, quite careless of the toll which it has taken upon his own health. We can only mourn the loss which this selfless dedication has entailed for our party and our nation. Indeed, I venture to suggest that if the Grand Old Man had still been at the helm that ridiculous little Scotsman with the appalling taste in shirts would never have been allowed to... But let us not be distracted from the task in hand: rather let us rejoice that Mr Gladstone has at last found a subject worthy of his pen - and that he has lost none of his wicked sense of humour.
Lord Jenkins comes from Welsh mining stock. His father began life as a collier, but by dint of his hard work and natural gifts became a respected trade union leader and Socialist Member of Parliament. Despite these humble origins, the young Roy Jenkins twice won the Wynford Vaughan Thomas prize for arithmetic, spelling and clean knees, and it came as no surprise when he won a place at Oxford. Some, seizing upon Lord Jenkins accent - which, it must be admitted, is not that thought typical of the Welsh miner - have imagined him to be at pains to distance himself from this background. No assumption could be more unfair. What these critics do not realise is that Lord Jenkins speaks to this day a dialect which is confined to a small part of Monmouth- shire. In the days before the Conservatives discovered that unemployed men running on a treadmill were the cheapest way of generating electricity, it was indeed a singular experience to sit in a Miners' Welfare in that county and here the men discussing the local rugger XV's prospects in the accent and with the characteristic gestures of Lord Jenkins.
After a good war, the young Jenkins entered parliament at a by-election in 1947. The seat - Central Southwark - had largely been obliterated by the Luftwaffe, and was certain to disappear when next the Boundary Commissioners sat, but in the short time available to him, Jenkins became a firm favourite with his lovable cockney constituents. "Lor' lovaduck, your a gent, Mr Jenkins, and no mistake; apples and pears" they would cry as he descended from the Westminster tram, and ragged urchins would wrestle in the gutters of the borough as they disputed which of that day's epigrams was the wittiest.
From Southwark, Jenkins made his way to the delightful Stetchford area of Birmingham, whose Member he was to remain for many years. In the hands of a less skilled author, the minutiae of Labour's internal feuds in the 1950s might tire the reader, but one reads on here, agape to know what happens next. I, for one, shall not quickly forget the story of George Brown and the Peruvian ambassador's armadillo.
Nevertheless, it is Jenkins' achievements as a reforming Home Secretary in the 1960s upon which his lasting reputation will rest. The wearing of blue denim jeans was made legal, the hated Corned Beef Acts were repealed and the penalty of transportation was abolished for all but a handful of offences. It is fashionable, I know, to condemn the reforms of the that decade, but I am proud to have supported them with my own vote in the House of Lords. I should point out, however, that my Bill to secure the public execution of Mr Norman Wisdom was denied government time and ultimately fell.
Lord Jenkins' achievements as President of the European Commission need no rehearsal here: his renegotiation of the common Fisheries Agreement, leading as it did to a significant diminution of the haddock mountain, must rank amongst the political triumphs of the century. Yet I know from our conversations in the House that the expansion of the Eurovision Song Contest meant just as much to him. How typical of the man's democratic spirit!
Perhaps humanely, Gladstone passes lightly over the ridiculous SDP and Lord Jenkins' involvement with it. I blame little Steel for the whole mess. Jenkins and his acolytes besieged Steel's Borders home for days, begging to be allowed to join the Liberal Party, but for reasons no one has ever been able to discover, he refused their tearful beseechings. The upshot was that poor Jenkins found himself stranded in Glasgow. He was selfless enough to set aside the mantle of statesman, however, and devoted his last years in the lower House to raucous heckling of Dennis Skinner.
Yet it is ultimately the way in which Lord Jenkins has kept himself abreast of all the most topical debates throughout his long career that most commands our respect. Take the environment, for instance. The other day at a reception a young lady asked him what he thought were the three most daunting threats facing the world today. With barely a moment's hesitation he set down his wine glass and, with that famous gesture of a man picking a ripe Victoria plum replied: "Muroroa, Muroroa and Muroroa."
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South-West 1906-10