Leadership Quote by Roy Jenkins

Jenkins’s line is the kind of Westminster put-down that lands because it’s politely phrased and brutally diagnostic. He doesn’t directly accuse Edward Heath of dishonesty; he questions the theater of honesty around him. The target isn’t just Heath, but the entourage that keeps insisting on his virtue like an overzealous PR team. If integrity needs constant testimonial, Jenkins implies, it has already become a campaign slogan rather than a lived reputation.

The construction does two jobs at once. “I am sure” grants Heath the benefit of the doubt in public - a politician’s version of due process - while “but I wish” shifts the burden to a social fact: why is this being repeated? It’s the rhetorical equivalent of noticing a man who keeps telling you he’s calm. Jenkins understands that in politics, repetition is rarely reassurance; it’s a countermeasure. The more an ally says “honest,” the more they betray an anxiety that the room is thinking “crooked.”

Context matters: Jenkins was a Labour modernizer with a patrician feel for language, speaking in a political culture obsessed with “soundness,” clubbability, and the unspoken codes of trust. Heath, a Conservative leader navigating a fractious party and a hostile press, often leaned on character as ballast. Jenkins punctures that strategy by hinting that character is precisely what can’t be stabilized by chorus lines. It’s less an insult than a warning about how credibility works: the moment you have to advertise it, you’re already negotiating its absence.