speech by quoting Jean Monnet's statement that politics was "not only the art of the possible, but...the art of making possible tomorrow what may seem impossible today". President Jenkins was the first President to attend a G8 summit on behalf of the Community. He received an Honorary Degree (Doctor of Laws) from the University of Bath in 1978. In October 1978 Tribune reported (falsely) that Jenkins and his wife had not paid their Labour Party subscription for several years. After this was repeated in the national press, Jenkins' drafted his wife's letter to The Times that refuted the allegation. Jenkins blamed the story on a "malicious Trot in the North Kensington Labour Party". Jenkins was disillusioned with the Labour Party and he was almost certain that he could not stand again as a Labour candidate; in January 1979 he told Shirley Williams that the "big mistake we had made was not to go and support Dick Taverne in 1973; everything had got worse since then". He did not vote in the 1979 election. After the Conservatives won the election Margaret Thatcher contemplated appointing Jenkins Chancellor of the Exchequer on the strength of his success at cutting public expenditure when he was Chancellor. However, his friend Woodrow Wyatt claimed that Jenkins "had other and fresh fish to fry". The Director-General of the BBC, Ian Trethowan, invited Jenkins to deliver the Richard Dimbleby Lecture for 1979, which he did on 22 November. The title Jenkins gave to his lecture, "Home Thoughts from Abroad", derived from a Robert Browning poem. He delivered it in the Royal Society of Arts and it was broadcast live on television. Jenkins analysed the decline of the two-party system since 1951 and criticised the excessive partisanship of British politics, which he claimed alienated the bulk of voters, who were more centrist. He advocated proportional representation and the acceptance of "the broad line of division between the public and private sectors", a middle way between Thatcherism and Bennism. Jenkins said that the private sector should be encouraged without too much interference to create as much wealth as possible "but use the wealth so created both to give a return for enterprise and to spread the benefits throughout society in a way that avoids the disfigurements of poverty, gives a full priority to public education and health services, and encourages co-operation and not conflict in industry and throughout society". He