Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1990, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is one of the most colourful members of Britain's trade union movement. These days he is a

wealthy man who's come a long way from his Methodist working-class upbringing in South

Wales. He began his career at the age of 20 as a junior official in the Midlands and went on to become

one of the most powerful trade union leaders in the country.

The boy whose early idealism had been fueled by reading Marx and Machiavelli found power and influence very much to his taste.

At the height of his career he owned a house on the Regents Canal in London with a boat called

the Affluence Society moored at the end of the garden.

Now retired, he can look back on a career which coincided with the great rise and gentle fall of Britain's post-war trade union movement.

He is the former General Secretary of the ASTMS, Clive Jenkins.

The former General Secretary for some two years now, Mr Jenkins,

it's difficult to believe that you've taken to retirement

easily I'm not retired I'm extremely interested in what's going on I'm going

to become the executive editor of a new journal on industrial relations and legal law and

various other things as well. You make me sound so interesting I could barely wait to hear

myself talk. But you obviously enjoyed that power didn't you? I mean do you miss it now? Do you miss the

panoply of being a leading member of the TUC? What I miss is not having a dozen

researchers and a large secretariat.

That I think is the most difficult to adjust to, however,

as I'm building up all these other careers,

I will have my secretariat back.

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