Two years later, when Wilson resigned as prime minister, Jenkins stood in the leadership election to succeed him, finishing third behind Michael Foot and the winner James Callaghan.

He subsequently lost his seat in Parliament at the 1987 election to Labour's George Galloway, and accepted a life peerage shortly afterwards; he sat in the House of Lords as a Liberal Democrat.

[5] Arthur Jenkins later became President of the South Wales Miners' Federation and Member of Parliament for Pontypool, Parliamentary Private Secretary to Clement Attlee, and briefly a minister in the 1945 Labour government.

Retreating from what he had demanded in Fair Shares for the Rich, Jenkins now argued that the redistribution of wealth would occur over a generation[21] and abandoned the goal of public school abolition.

[29] Three years later he claimed that "Suez was a totally unsuccessful attempt to achieve unreasonable and undesirable objectives by methods which were at once reckless and immoral; and the consequences, as was well deserved, were humiliating and disastrous".

[31] With much of the economy now nationalised, Jenkins argued, socialists should concentrate on eliminating the remaining pockets of poverty and on the removal of class barriers, as well as promoting libertarian social reforms.

[32] Jenkins was principal sponsor, in 1959, of the bill which became the liberalising Obscene Publications Act, responsible for establishing the "liable to deprave and corrupt" criterion as a basis for a prosecution of suspect material and for specifying literary merit as a possible defence.

In January 1965 Patrick Gordon Walker resigned as Foreign Secretary and in the ensuing reshuffle Wilson offered Jenkins the Department for Education and Science; however, he declined it, preferring to stay at Aviation.

[60] Addressing a London meeting of the National Committee for Commonwealth Immigrants he notably defined Integration: ... not as a flattening process of assimilation but as equal opportunity, accompanied by cultural diversity, in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance.Before going on to ask: Where in the world is there a university which could preserve its fame, or a cultural centre which could keep its eminence, or a metropolis which could hold its drawing power, if it were to turn inwards and serve only its own hinterland and its own racial group?And concluding that: To live apart, for a person, a city, a country, is to lead a life of declining intellectual stimulation.

[105] At this stage, however, Jenkins would not fully abandon his position as a political insider, and chose to stand again for deputy leader, an act his colleague David Marquand claimed he later came to regret.

Jenkins chose Gaitskell, Ernest Bevin, Stafford Cripps, Adlai Stevenson II, Robert F. Kennedy, Joseph McCarthy, Lord Halifax, Léon Blum and John Maynard Keynes.

[125] He undermined his previous liberal credentials to some extent by pushing through the controversial Prevention of Terrorism Act in the aftermath of the Birmingham pub bombings of November 1974, which, among other things, extended the length of time suspects could be held in custody and instituted exclusion orders.

[131] After two trade unionists, Ricky Tomlinson and Des Warren (known as the "Shrewsbury Two"), were imprisoned for intimidation and affray for their part in a strike, Jenkins refused to accede to demands from the labour movement that they should be released.

[132] Jenkins also unsuccessfully tried to persuade the Cabinet to adopt electoral reform in the form of proportional representation and to have the Official Secrets Act 1911 liberalised to facilitate more open government.

At the previous month's Wembley conference, Labour had adopted a programme which included non-cooperation with the EEC and "a near neutralist and unilateralist" defence policy that would, Jenkins argued, render meaningless Britain's NATO membership.

[181] Jenkins delivered a series of speeches setting out the SDP's alternative to Thatcherism and Bennism and argued that the solution to Britain's economic troubles lay in the revenue from North Sea oil, which should be invested in public services.

[184] At the SDP's first annual conference in October 1981, Jenkins called for "an end to the futile frontier war between public and private sectors" and proposed an "inflation tax" on excessive pay rises that would restrain spiralling wages and prices.

[189]Whereas earlier in his career, Jenkins had excelled in the traditional set-piece debates in which he spoke from the dispatch box, the focus of parliamentary reporting had now moved to the point-scoring of Prime Minister's Questions, which he struggled with.

Seated in the traditional place for third parties in the Commons (the second or third row below the gangway), and without a dispatch box and the gravitas it could have conferred, Jenkins was situated near (and shared the same microphone with) Labour's "awkward squad" that included Dennis Skinner and Bob Cryer, who regularly heckled abuse ("Roy, your flies are undone").

[196] According to The Glasgow Herald, Labour supporters at the election count in the Kelvin Hall booed and jeered when Jenkins' victory was announced, and he and his wife were "dismayed as police pushed back jostling crowds".

Jenkins called for more government intervention to support industry and for North Sea oil revenues to be channelled into a major programme of rebuilding Britain's infrastructure and into educating a skilled workforce.

This affords and protects the right of students and academics to "question and test received wisdom" and has been incorporated into the statutes or articles and instruments of governance of all universities and colleges in Britain.

[215] He also proclaimed his political credo: My broad position remains firmly libertarian, sceptical of official cover-ups and uncompromisingly internationalist, believing sovereignty to be an almost total illusion in the modern world, although both expecting and welcoming the continuance of strong differences in national traditions and behaviour.

[215]A Life at the Centre was generally favourably reviewed: in the Times Literary Supplement John Grigg said it was a "marvellous account of high politics by a participant writing with honesty, irony and sustained narrative verve".

[216] David Cannadine ranked it alongside Duff Cooper's Old Men Forget, R. A. Butler's The Art of the Possible and Denis Healey's The Time of My Life as one of the four best political memoirs of the post-war period.

[226] The Jenkins Commission reported in favour of a new uniquely British mixed-member proportional system called "Alternative vote top-up" or "limited AMS" in October 1998, although no action was taken on this recommendation.

[230] By the end of his life Jenkins believed that Blair had wasted his enormous parliamentary majority and would not be recorded in history as a great prime minister; he ranked him between Harold Wilson and Stanley Baldwin.

[237] After his death, Blair paid tribute to "one of the most remarkable people ever to grace British politics", who had "intellect, vision and an integrity that saw him hold firm to his beliefs of moderate social democracy, liberal reform and the cause of Europe throughout his life.

[239] However, he was strongly criticised by others including Denis Healey, who condemned the SDP split as a "disaster" for the Labour Party which prolonged their time in opposition and allowed the Tories to have an unbroken run of 18 years in government.

... Roy Jenkins was the first leading politician to appreciate that a liberalised social democracy must be based on two tenets: what Peter Mandelson called an aspirational society (individuals must be allowed to regulate their personal lives without interference from the state); and that a post-imperial country like Britain could only be influential in the world as part of a wider grouping (the EU).