Government-appointed Independent Commission on the Voting System, which became known as the "Jenkins Commission", to consider alternative voting systems for the UK. The Jenkins Commission reported in favour of a new uniquely British mixed-member proportional system called "Alternative vote top-up" or "limited AMS" in October 1998, although no action was taken on this recommendation. Blair told Ashdown that Jenkins' recommendations would not pass the Cabinet. British membership of the European single currency, Jenkins believed, was the supreme test of Blair's statesmanship. However, he was disappointed with Blair's timidity in taking on the Eurosceptic tabloid press. He told Blair in October 1997: "You have to choose between leading Europe or having Murdoch on your side. You can have one but not both". Jenkins was also critical of New Labour's authoritarianism, such as the watering down of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and their intention to ban fox hunting. By the end of his life Jenkins believed that Blair had wasted his enormous parliamentary majority and would not be recorded in history as a great Prime Minister; he ranked him between Harold Wilson and Stanley Baldwin. After Gordon Brown attacked Oxford University for indulging in "old school tie" prejudices because it rejected a state-educated pupil, Laura Spence, Jenkins told the House of Lords in June 2000 that "Brown's diatribe was born of prejudice out of ignorance. Nearly every fact he adduced was false". Jenkins voted for the equalisation of the homosexual age of consent and for repealing Section 28. Jenkins wrote 19 books, including a biography of Gladstone (1995), which won the 1995 Whitbread Award for Biography, and a much-acclaimed biography of Winston Churchill (2001). His then-designated official biographer, Andrew Adonis, was to have finished the Churchill biography had Jenkins not survived the heart surgery he underwent towards the end of its writing. Historian Paul Johnson called it the best one-volume biography on its subject. Jenkins underwent heart surgery in the form of a heart valve replacement on 12 October 2000 and postponed his 80th birthday celebrations whilst recovering, by having a celebratory party on 7 March 2001. He died on 5 January 2003, after suffering a heart attack at his home at East Hendred, in Oxfordshire. His last words, to his wife, were, "Two eggs, please, lightly poached". At the time of his death Jenkins was working on a biography of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After his death, Blair