Roy Jenkins was a decent and civilised man: amiable, erudite, a considerable prose stylist, a historian, a bon viveur, witty, urbane and cultivated. He did incalculable harm to his country.

He died in the odour of sanctity, secure in the knowledge that he was one of the shapers of modern Britain: from which in the opinion of many it follows that, since modernity is by definition good and we live in this, the best of all possible Britains, his life’s work was constructive. He was once described as a natural reformer, which is to say a man whose urge to change things is greater than his desire to do good. I am reminded of burglars who, when I ask them why they burgle, reply, “I’m a burglar, burgling’s what I do.” Jenkins was a reformer: reforming’s what he did.

This is not to say that none of the reforms that he oversaw during his period as Home Secretary was justified. Few people would now deny that the Bill to legalise homosexuality between consenting adults was humane. It was rather the atmosphere he created, the forces that his reforms unleashed, that did so much damage, and that so powerfully contributed to the creation of the urban hell in which so large a part of the British population now lives, whether it wants to or not. More than most, Jenkins helped to make Britain what it is today, the underclass capital of the world.

In 1969, he said, in typically aphoristic fashion: “The permissive society has been allowed to become a dirty word. A better phrase is the civilised society.” According to this idiotic and shallow idea, so redolent of the triumphalism of its age, the less people are restrained by laws, conventions, inherited rules and ethics, the more civilised they become. But the legislation of Rousseau leads straight to the world of Hobbes.

If in so much of the country we are now afraid of our own children, we have in part to thank the start Jenkins made on the complete destruction of the family and the institution of marriage. If so many of our lives are dominated by the fear of crime — and if you doubt that this is so, a couple of weeks living on a British housing estate will convince you — we have in part to thank Jenkins’s reforming leniency.

His harmful influence went much further, however: he helped to entrench the horrible hypocrisy of modern British public life, infinitely worse than the hypocrisy revealed by mere sexual scandals. It is no secret that Jenkins enjoyed the good things of life: grand clubs and dinners, the company of the rich, titled and famous. Good luck to him: who wouldn’t prefer those things to life in a South Wales mining village?

But what was so grotesque about his love of those good things in life was his simultaneous attack on the civilisation that brought them into being and made them possible. His great legacy to the leaders of the Labour Party is a completely unthinking and unacknowledged divorce between what they want for others and what they want for themselves. Tony Blair, who talks democratic and acts oligarchic, who speaks of the masses and behaves like a cross between a president and a king, who talks of devolving while relentlessly centralising, is Jenkins’s spiritual heir: except, of course, that he has not a tenth of Jenkins’s undoubted flair.

Jenkins was, whether he knew it or not, the John the Baptist of the gated society: the society in which a well-heeled elite cuts itself off emotionally and physically from all contact with the unattractive, disordered mass outside the gates. For all his personal cultivation, he was the prophet of the vulgarity for which the British are now universally known and rightfully despised throughout the world. And his political hero, again whether he knew it or not, was Louis XV, who so succinctly encapsulated his political philosophy: après moi, le déluge.

The author is a prison doctor