Please don’t blame Roy

Roy Jenkins was my father’s oldest friend. They first met when they were both at Oxford. When, afterwards, they both decided to go into politics, my father pipped him to the post. Much later, when I was growing up in Wiltshire, where we had a house, two of our neighbours were Roy and his pearl-pretty wife Jennifer.

I don’t remember much about Roy in those days except that he was a highly competitive tennis and croquet partner. My father played tennis rather as a drunkard attempts sex. There was not much bounce to the ounce. He raised his arm to serve, rotated it several times, all the while emitting loud and fantastical noises, and hit the ball into the net.

One Saturday, Roy visited us with a young man who had a job as a researcher at the BBC. As they arrived my father was fumbling through a game of tennis with another neighbour.