JENKINS, ROY (HARRIS), BARON JENKINS OF HILLHEAD

born Nov. 11, 1920, Abersychan, Monmouthshire, Eng. British politician, a strong supporter of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Community. Formerly a Labourite, he was the first leader of the Social Democratic Party (198283) and later (from 1988) leader of the Social and Liberal Democratic Peers. Educated at Balliol College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1941, he served in the Royal Artillery in World War II and first entered Parliament in 1948. He could claim family roots in the Labour movement: his father had been a miners' union official, a member of Parliament, and parliamentary private secretary to the Labourite prime minister Clement Attlee. Jenkins at one time considered giving up politics for writing, but in the formation of the 1964 government of Harold Wilson he joined the Cabinet as air minister (196465); he then became home secretary (196567) and chancellor of the Exchequer (196770). In 1972 he resigned from the Labour Party in protest of its decision to support a referendum on whether Britain should remain in the Common Market. He reentered the shadow Cabinet in 1973 as shadow home secretary and became home secretary after Labour's victory in 1974. In 1976 he resigned from the Cabinet and Parliament to become president of the executive branch of the European Community and remained in that post until 1981. In 1981 he and other dissidents from the increasingly leftist Labour Party formed the Social Democratic Party, of which he was briefly leader. In 1987 he accepted a life peerage and moved from the House of Commons to the House of Lords, where he was a leader of the new Social and Liberal Democratic Party. Jenkins wrote several books, including Pursuit of Progress (1953), Mr. Balfour's Poodle (1954), Sir Charles Dilke: A Victorian Tragedy (1958), The Labour Case (1959), Asquith (1964), Afternoon on the Potomac? (1972), Nine Men of Power (1975), Baldwin (1987), and Gallery of Twentieth Century Portraits (1988).