No room at the top

In the years following the second world war, Tony Crosland, Roy Jenkins and Denis Healey either became Labour Members of Parliament or worked closely with the Labour party. Few parties in so short a time can have gathered three recruits so obviously of prime-ministerial calibre. No other party could have so contrived things that none of them attained that office.

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Rupert Darwall

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The parallels between the three are almost unnerving. Crosland’s family was socially a cut above the other two, but none of them was grand and none penurious. All were at Oxford immediately before the war, were involved in politics and were on the Left (unsurprisingly, since out of an undergraduate body of 4,500 a third were members of the Labour Club). All served in the army during the war and were commissioned, though Jenkins spent much of the war in the Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park.