Latest news with #RoyJenkins
Sky News
14-05-2025
- Politics
- Sky News
Politics latest: Ex-Reform MP Rupert Lowe will not be charged over alleged 'verbal threats'
Who Starmer was really trying to echo with 'island of strangers' speech Sir Keir Starmer is getting used to falling out with some of his MPs over policy decisions - be it on the winter fuel allowance, his approach to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza or welfare cuts. But on Tuesday the prime minister found himself embroiled in a row with MPs over something entirely different - his language over immigration. The prime minister's argument that Britain "risked becoming an island of strangers" if immigration levels are not cut has sparked a backlash from some of his MPs, and the London mayor Sadiq Khan is alarmed that his own leader is using language similar to that of Enoch Powell. The politician the prime minister was trying to channel was about as far away from Powell as you could get in the 1960s, when the debate of immigration and race relations raged. Sir Keir had wanted to echo former Labour home secretary Roy Jenkins who had always argued that immigration was good for Britain, but needed to be done at a speed the country could absorb.
The Guardian
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Gang of Three review – inside an old boys' club of Labour intrigue
D enis Healey, Roy Jenkins and Anthony Crosland were all born between 1917 and 1920, then educated at Oxford before serving in Labour governments. This homogenous gang of three, as this play's title identifies them, fail to claim the highest political prizes because they believe the inevitable winner is one of them. Written by political faction specialists Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky – whose earlier works Coalition, Kingmaker and Brexit examined aspects of the Cameron and Johnson years – the play shows the self-chosen big three of the Labour centre-right debating which of them should become deputy party leader in 1972 and 1976, prime minister in 1976 and leader of the opposition in 1980. As with events in Rome, there's a sense of Labour conclaves, with the added problem that not all of the contenders were in the room; in each case, a pope of socialism was crowned elsewhere (Ted Short, Michael Foot, James Callaghan, Foot again). Still more daringly, another party, across Westminster, chose a female leader. The Tories having picked three more women (quality aside), while all Labour's non-interim leaders have been male, is one of the play's many subtle subtexts, alongside divisions between the trio including European membership and spending cuts. Subtle subtexts … Morgan, Tierney and Cox in The Gang of Three. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/the Guardian Just as the play seems to be following conventional bio-drama chronology, there's a flashback to Oxford in 1940 in an intriguing scene dramatising a more intimate relationship between Crosland and Jenkins that, in John Campbell's biography of Jenkins, is attributed only to 'private information'. Finally, the play becomes an unofficial prequel to Steve Waters' Limehouse, in which Jenkins, as part of the 'gang of four' (with David Owen, Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers), founded the SDP, with the aim of supplanting Labour – although, like Jenkins' previous gambles, that failed, with Healey refusing to become the gang's fifth member. Eschewing a bald cap (as used by Roger Allam in Limehouse), Hywel Morgan captures Jenkins' delivery, rolling words around his mouth like the fine claret he carries in (a good in-joke about a political hero, this) a Gladstone bag. Colin Tierney as Healey nails the sudden French quotations and the habit, regardless of emotion, of speaking through gritted teeth. With the advantage or disadvantage of being the only character not impersonated by peak-time TV impressionists of the era, Alan Cox plays Crosland as a charmingly louche political chameleon – though, as the play shows, that wasn't enough. At the King's Head theatre, London, until 1 June
Times
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
The Gang of Three review — an uneven portrait of 1970s Labour
At its sharpest, this portrait of conspiratorial Labour politicians of the 1970s has a touch of Yes Minister. Cue lots of contented chortles among wonkish members of the audience on press night at the King's Head Theatre in London. For anyone who remembers the heyday of flying pickets, Weekend World and endless conference feuds, there's enough here to make an amiable evening. True, Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky's portrait of three heavyweights — Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins and Tony Crosland — does begin to run out of momentum before the end. If this were a ministerial speech, the last ten minutes would include a set of glowing statistics about the increased output of Austin Maxis on the British Leyland production line. But the actors
