Friends and Rivals: Crosland, Jenkins and Healey by Giles Radice

Lost generation of Labour's would-be leaders

Unhistoric nations cherish their "lost leaders". In Tony Crosland, Roy Jenkins and Denis Healey, British social democracy had no fewer than three, all brilliant. Crosland, a creative minister at education and environment, was Labour's greatest revisionist intellectual. Jenkins, libertarian Home Secretary, successful Chancellor and Eurocrat, also writes compelling biographies. Healey, our finest Defence Secretary, later Chancellor, has a rare cultural hinterland.

Yet their partnership was ultimately disappointing. None became prime minister. They saw Old Labour's downfall, the SDP's suicide, and Thatcher's hegemony. The tragic leitmotif of Giles Radice's enthralling analysis, enriched by personal acquaintance and parliamentary experience, is how his three "heroes" disastrously failed to unite.

These Labour revisionists were actually rather different: Jenkins the libertarian, Crosland the egalitarian, Healey the technocrat. Their origins ranged from the Welsh valleys and the West Riding to suburban Highgate. After 1945, Healey became a Transport House apparatchik, Crosland an Oxford don, while Jenkins was first into parliament.

Gaitskell becoming Labour Party leader in the mid-1950s gave all three a new boost. It was Healey who rose fastest, as Labour's expert on foreign and defence policy. Crosland's book The Future of Socialism, with its over-optimistic diagnosis of capitalism, made him the post-Marxist revisionist whom young socialists craved. By contrast, Jenkins contemplated leaving party politics. But the Wilson years brought a great transformation. Now it was Jenkins who surged ahead, distinguished in office, charismatic in debate. Becoming Chancellor in 1967, he was the obvious leadership contender. Nothing is sadder than reading how his career became derailed.

While both Crosland and Healey lost authority through dithering, Jenkins resigned as deputy leader and went off to Brussels. Crosland, now Foreign Secretary, died young, but his leadership bid in 1976 had scraped just 17 votes. Healey soldiered on as Chancellor, but union discontents and Michael Foot's leadership scuppered him too.

This account focuses on personal manoeuvres rather than policy-making. But it illuminates key turning points brilliantly: Crosland's political awakening; the personal tensions when Jenkins, not Crosland, succeeded as Chancellor.

"Rivalry" rather than "friendship" seems the predominant theme. Crosland and Jenkins were often mutually jealous, Healey a cat who walked by himself. Each was patrician more than populist. For post-Attlee Labour, they offered contrasting scenarios: Jenkins's quasi-Liberal progressivism, Crosland's enabling state with high public expenditure, Healey's managerial corporatism. Sadly, electoral victory went to none, but to a philosophically rudderless "Third Way". We never had "Socialism Now" after all.

The reviewer's books include a biography of James Callaghan (OUP)