Denis Healey, known to many as the possessor of Westminster’s most splendid eyebrows, introduced the notion of politicians having what he called a “hinterland”. In his autobiography, The Time of My Life, he criticises Margaret Thatcher for having a complete lack of one, chiding “in particular she has no sense of history”. Of himself, he wryly observes: “I possess the opposite shortcoming from Mrs. Thatcher — I have far too much hinterland.” Healey recognised the potential for political life to absorb all aspects of a person’s soul.
Healey was no doubt a professional politician. He became an MP at the age of 35 after studying at Oxford and serving with the Royal Engineers during the North African campaign of the Second World War. But he was also a keen amateur photographer, painter and piano player. His view was, as he noted in his cultural anthology, My Secret Planet, that it is not possible to understand modern politics without knowing something of history; that it is not possible to command foreign affairs without knowing something of the culture of other peoples; and that poets and novelists can teach us more than so-called political scientists. Perhaps only Healey could, as he did, watch a four-hour production of Hamlet in the middle of a financial crisis.
Healey was such a larger-than-life character, full of quips and acerbic put-downs — he once described the performance of Geoffrey Howe in the Commons as “like being savaged by a dead sheep” — that it’s easy to imagine that he was a one-off, and that having such an extensive cultural life and a range of experiences beyond politics was quite rare even in those days. But other prominent politicians show an equally broad array of influences — in particular, Roy Jenkins and Tony Crosland.
It was Healey who took over from Roy Jenkins as shadow chancellor in 1972 when Jenkins resigned over the issue of — what else? — Britain’s position within Europe. Jenkins, who believed that membership of the Common Market was essential to Britain’s future prosperity, was incensed that Labour Party leader Harold Wilson was whipping his opposition MPs to vote against the government, led by Edward Heath, which was driving through the European Communities Bill. Like Healey, Jenkins studied at Oxford. Like Healey, he contributed to the war effort, and he entered politics at an even younger age. He had a deep knowledge of fine wines and he was a prolific biographer, writing accounts of the lives of Roosevelt, Gladstone, Balfour and countless others.
“Healey recognised the potential for political life to absorb all aspects of a person’s soul.”
His early career in politics was nothing short of astonishing. As home secretary in the mid-Sixties, he pushed through a sweeping range of reforms which saw a huge upheaval in the structure of the police force, the ending of theatre censorship, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, the legalisation of abortion, and the end of the death penalty. Arguably no home secretary since then has transformed Britain to anything like the same extent.
Jenkins was also a man of prodigious appetites, said to have had an affair with Jacqueline Kennedy’s sister, Lee Canfield, as well as with Caroline Gilmour, the wife of a fellow MP. And many people, including his biographer John Campbell, believe that Jenkins’s close friendship with Tony Crosland had a sexual dimension while the two were at Oxford together.
And it is Crosland who forms the third leg of our political tripod. He was 32 when he became MP for South Gloucestershire. A devoted football fan, he took American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to see Grimsby Town play at home while serving as foreign secretary. He was also seen as the intellectual leading light of the Labour moderates: his book, The Future of Socialism (1956), is considered a seminal work.
The professional and personal lives of these three men intersected in fascinating and provocative ways, defining the Labour Party to this day. After Wilson’s shock resignation, all three stood for the leadership, but none made a strong showing, and James Callaghan was the eventual winner. Eventually, hard-Left Michael Foot became leader, defeating Healey in a narrow contest. But he was unable to make a dent in the side of Mrs Thatcher. After she had swept to power in 1979, it would be 18 years before another Labour leader became prime minister.
As playwrights, we were fascinated by how these three close friends, all aligned in their values, all such vibrant personalities, could have failed to prevent the party they loved from becoming so hopelessly unelectable. The result is our play The Gang of Three, currently playing to gratifyingly packed audiences at the King’s Head theatre in Islington.
While we’ve tried to follow the advice of Samuel Goldwyn to all writers — “All I want is a story, if you have a message, send it by Western Union” — we’re aware that a play like ours is going to reflect matters closer to home. When our version of Crosland berates Healey during a conversation about the IMF crisis, telling him “We can’t become the party of cuts”, an audience which has just read newspaper headlines about Keir Starmer’s Labour Party reducing benefits to disabled people chuckle ruefully or sometimes groan in despair. Life, maybe especially political life, is cyclical, and the same problems come up again and again. Can you have true friends in politics? Is politics an addictive drug? Do the ends justify the means? But perhaps the most enduring theme is that when sensible people fail to put aside their own self-interests and unite, extremists and idiots can triumph.
One question which might occur to those watching the play is: why doesn’t politics seem to make politicians like this any more? While on the one hand there is always a tendency for the human brain to imagine that the golden age of anything was about 50 years ago, usually consonant with one’s own childhood, it is hard to imagine that in 50 years’ time people will be creating theatre about Robert Jenrick, Alistair Carmichael, Bridget Phillipson or Kemi Badenoch, to name a few. Do we find in these politicians an interest in the arts, a devotion to philosophy, a library of publications, or a previous career in some other field of endeavour? In every case, hardly.
Where are the Jenkins, Healey and Crosland of our political generation? In some ways, the question is unfair: the motivations and actions of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, for instance, will surely be pored over for decades to come. And yet ours is clearly a political generation in search of a hinterland.
Perhaps this is in part because earlier generations of politicians had been shaped by wartime service. Crosland was commissioned in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, seeing combat in Italy and France, while Jenkins worked as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park. Even more impressively, Healey was a beachmaster at Anzio in 1944. This period may have given them all a sense of perspective in later life — allowing Healey to stand muster with the admirals he later found advising him at the Ministry of Defence and giving him the self-assurance to fire Lord Mountbatten as Chief of the Defence Staff.
Or perhaps it’s because the frenetic nature of politics today, with its 24-hour cycle and the endless delights of social media, just doesn’t allow time to build an intellectual and cultural hinterland that can season political minds. And with any slip of the tongue, unfortunate juxtaposition or foolish remark flashed around the world in seconds, it’s maybe no surprise that many modern politicians try to stick to the very centre of the road whenever they’re out of the house. After all, a bacon sandwich was all it took to depth charge Ed Miliband’s general election campaign.
And when one does consider politicians who use their extravagant personalities to connect with voters, one is drawn not to principled campaigners, but self-centred populists like Boris Johnson or Nigel Farage. All three of the characters in our play were motivated by passion and ambition, but the conflict between what they agreed on politically and their inherent rivalry led to all sorts of poor decisions. Not least their failure to combine forces, so that one of them could become Labour leader and form an election-winning alliance.
When he lost the Labour leadership, Jenkins decamped to Europe, becoming president of the European Commission. By the time he returned to British politics, Healey had completed his stint as chancellor and Crosland had died in office as foreign secretary. Unable to prevent the Labour Party’s lurch to the Left, Jenkins launched the SDP in 1982, while Healey remained on the Labour benches until his retirement in 1992.
How different might British politics have looked today if Crosland had lived and challenged Michael Foot for the Labour leadership? Or if Healey had joined Jenkins at the formation of the SDP? Or if Jenkins had continued his fight for moderation from within the Labour Party. These events shaped the political landscape as it is today, and we think there is much to be learned from this period in history, as well as great entertainment to be derived from it. So while we resurrect these giants of the past upon the stage, we still hold out some hope that the next generation of politicians might bring something to Westminster other than bureaucratic competence or an unseemly lust for power. After all, the pendulum always swings, so maybe we will yet see the return of the hinterland to British politics.
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The Gang of Three is playing at The King’s Head Theatre in Islington until 1 June.
