Peter Jenkins

Who was Peter Jenkins?

Peter George James Jenkins was a British journalist and Associate Editor of The Independent. During his career he wrote regular columns for The Guardian, The Sunday Times as well as the The Independent.

Jenkins was educated at Culford School and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he took a BA in History. He began his career as a journalist with the Financial Times and progressed to The Guardian where he was variously their Labour Correspondent, Washington Correspondent, and Political Commentator and Policy Editor. He was political columnist for The Sunday Times and Associate Editor of The Independent from 1987 until his death.

He was committed to a vision of a European Britain, anti-communist, but more socially inclusive than the American model of society. He belonged to a group of "Königswinter journalists", who, meeting with politicians and civil servants in Königswinter near Bonn, the West German capital, attempted to build a pan-European group of opinion-formers, leaving behind the enmities of the past and looking forward to European community.

Jenkins was also theatre critic for The Spectator and his first stage play, Illuminations, was performed at the Lyric, Hammersmith, in 1980. He also wrote the comedy series Struggle, broadcast on Channel 4, a satire on the Conservative–Labour battles in local government at the time.