Leadership Quote by Roy Jenkins

For Roy Jenkins, “instinctive” does a lot of political laundering. It’s a word that tries to lift party allegiance out of the grubby realm of calculation and into something closer to temperament: not a choice, but a reflex; not a platform, but a home. Coming from a politician whose career was defined as much by friction with Labour as by service to it, the line reads less like nostalgia and more like a claim to legitimacy - a preemptive defense against the charge of disloyalty.

Jenkins was a modernizing reformer in a party that often wrestled with its own identity: movement versus machine, socialism versus social democracy, unions versus parliamentary pragmatism. His “always has been” flattens those conflicts into a single continuous narrative, the kind politics loves to tell about itself. It’s also a rhetorical attempt to disarm ideological gatekeeping. If your Labour-ness is instinct, then your deviations can be framed as conscience, not betrayal.

The context matters: Jenkins helped found the SDP after Labour’s leftward turn in the early 1980s, a break that made his relationship to Labour permanently complicated. That history turns the sentence into a quiet act of reputational management. He’s not asking permission to belong; he’s asserting that belonging predates argument. The subtext is a plea for a particular kind of Labour identity - plural, reformist, metropolitan - to be recognized as native, not imported.