Roy Jenkins: the statesman who never became Prime Minister but excelled in being a European

Roy Jenkins, who died yesterday aged 82, was one of a handful of 20th-century politicians who achieved a lasting reputation in the front rank without being Prime Minister.

He was also, perhaps, the last notable inheritor of the Whig tradition in British politics. He wasn't, of course, an aristocrat. His father, Arthur, had been a miner and trade union official who was imprisoned during the 1926 miners' strike; he became a popular Labour MP, and sent his son to Abersychan Grammar School.

But for all his gregariousness and natural courtesy, there was a touch of grandeur about Roy, ­ just the faintest echo of the radical 18th-century Whig ancestors of modern left-of-centre politicians.

Because he mixed at the most exalted social levels, knew how to enjoy himself, loved his claret and spoke with that unmistakable drawl, it was all too easy to under-estimate his seriousness and drive as a politician.

And because his pivotal part in the creation of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 1981 provoked such bitterness among his erstwhile Labour colleagues, it was easy to depict him as a mere political boulevardier uninterested in the abiding values of the people's party.

The irony is that most of what the SDP stood for then is now Labour orthodoxy. Indeed, like the rest of the "gang of four", he sometimes found himself mildly to the left of New Labour on many of the issues of today ­ on liberty of the individual, on doubts about Tony Blair's support for George Bush, and even (though as Chancellor of Oxford University, Lord Jenkins is credited with persuading Mr Blair to favour top-up fees) on the need to persuade the electorate to accept higher taxation as a price of a more just society.

When the SDP was formed, the view was put about that he had too much ambition and not enough conviction. If anything, the truth was the opposite.

His Europeanism ­ his most recent publication was a pointed clarion call for Mr Blair to take Britain into the eurozone ­ was instinctive, born as it was for many of his generation in the idea that there should be no more European wars.

Lord Jenkins, a former president of the European Commission, was one of the inner group of Gaitskellites who were deeply dismayed when their idol made his famous "thousand years of history" attack on the application for British Common Market membership at the party conference in 1962.

Lord Jenkins stood at the end of the speech but did not clap. In 1971, he was the leader of the 69 Labour rebels who braved the wrath of their colleagues by voting in the Commons with Ted Heath's Conservatives to back a policy for the EEC.

And he in effect cost himself the chance of succeeding Harold Wilson as premier by resigning as deputy leader over Europe.

Though often characterised by mutual suspicion, his relationship with Lord Wilson was complex. Lord Jenkins knew he got more out of the relationship than their curious shared obsession with political trivia and railway timetables.

For he recognised that, in some ways, he fared better under Lord Wilson than he would have under Hugh Gaitskell, who could afford to take him for granted as an ally.

He dared to refuse the first cabinet post Lord Wilson offered, but was rewarded when he made him Home Secretary, then sent him to the Treasury when Jim Callaghan resigned over devaluation in 1967.

What didn't stand up was the accusation that he was a dilettante ­ fuelled by Lord Wilson's famous gibe that he always seemed to manage to get out for dinner when he was at the Treasury. Rather, Lord Jenkins divided his life into compartments of equal worth with skill. Be it politics, writing or relationships, he excelled in all.

Giles Radice, in his recent book Friends and Rivals, used an extract from his own diary to record a typical Lord Jenkins day at the age of 80: "Roy's energy is phenomenal. He is up early and by breakfast has already written 700 words of his Independent article... After breakfast, we go to Lincoln Cathedral before driving back for lunch at which Roy drinks liberally. He then finishes his Independent article ..." And then more of the same, writes Radice.

He was a wholly enlivening ­ and moderately indiscreet ­ lunch companion for a journalist. For example, during his time in Brussels he would revel in recounting a derogatory remark made on a car journey by Helmut Kohl about Margaret Thatcher. He would stress, in a very Jenkinsish touch, the significance lay in the fact that the German Chancellor had made his remark in front of his "dwiver".

And, interviewed by The Independent last September, he was in sparkling form. He offered a stiff whisky at 5pm to make the process more enjoyable, then went on to denounce Donald Rumsfeld for daring to compare himself to Churchill, warn Gordon Brown against being a "tail-end Charlie" successor to Tony Blair and insist on checking his own quotes ­ though not the judgements surrounding them ­ with all the punctiliousness of a textual critic.

At his 80th birthday dinner two years ago, postponed because of his heart bypass operation the previous autumn, he said he no longer minded not becoming Prime Minister.

That was no doubt true. He had his great disappointments, even if, as an old man, he could hardly have worn them more lightly.

If he, Denis Healey and his closest friend at Oxford, Tony Crosland, had been able to work more closely together, he might well have become an outstanding leader.

But he declined to strike when 100 MPs were ready to back him in 1968, judging that a coup would not succeed.

The SDP was a heady adventure that failed. His hopes that Tony Blair, to whom he had been a mentor, would reverse the split between Liberalism and the Labour Party, which he believed had made the 20th century a largely Tory one, were not realised.

But he was a fine Home Secretary who, by backing the liberalisation of abortion, homosexuality and divorce, could lay claim to the most lasting and civilising legacy of the Wilson era. He was probably the most successful Labour Chancellor until the arrival of Gordon Brown.

And he was also the leading political biographer of his era; his book on Churchill was a breathtaking achievement for a man in his eighties.

He was entitled to believe, as he himself put it, that the Labour Party would "not have been dragged back from the wilder shores of lunacy" without the creation of the SDP.

He had a long and fulfilling marriage. And he had a seemingly limitless capacity to enjoy life. As an occasional if benign brake on the Blair tendency to a right-leaning populism, he will be especially missed.

Ten years after the death of Hugh Gaitskell he wrote of his hero and fellow revisionist that "he had purpose and direction. courage and humanity. He was a man for raising the sights of politics ... He was that rare phenomenon, a great politician who was also an unusually agreeable man." Words that would not do badly as an epitaph for Lord Jenkins himself.