On Wednesday this week, I am looking forward to taking part in a post-performance discussion of The Gang of Three, a play at the Oxford Playhouse about three would-be Labour Party Prime Ministers in the 1970s – Tony Crosland, Roy Jenkins and Denis Healey – the first two of whom both spent time here at Trinity.

It seems hard to imagine that anyone will bother to write a play about the internal tussles of today’s Labour Party in 50 years’ time. But this trio were intellectuals, politicians and cabinet ministers of considerable distinction, and some of the policy issues with which they grappled – Britain’s relationship with Europe and the parlous state of the government’s finances – are certainly of contemporary relevance.

Tony Crosland – about whom I wrote in a previous blog – had the strongest connections to Trinity. Later Secretary of State for Education and Foreign Secretary, Crosland arrived at the College in 1937, initially to study classics and then (returning after the war) PPE. After graduating with a First, Crosland was appointed Lecturer and then Fellow in Economics. His biographer wrote of him: “His pupils remember him as a stimulating tutor. His days were spent engaged in rigorous academic work, but evenings were given over to riotous living: gambling, smoking, drinking whisky or gin, and womanising.”

Roy Jenkins was a Balliol contemporary of Crosland’s and (as the play relates in a flashback scene) briefly his lover. He was an effective Chancellor of the Exchequer and a transformative Home Secretary, promoting what he termed a “civilised society” through progressive social reforms. He championed landmark private members’ bills that decriminalised homosexuality and legalised abortion. He also abolished theatre censorship, ended corporal punishment in prisons, introduced majority verdicts for juries and significantly strengthened race relations legislation.

Jenkins’ connection with Trinity was an accidental one. During the war, the foreign policy think tank Chatham House was evacuated from London and moved into Balliol. To accommodate its staff, most of Balliol’s second-year students were dropped over the wall into Trinity. Jenkins had rooms on Staircase 6, first overlooking the library and then Front Quad.

Many years later, returning to Trinity as Chancellor of the University to open the newly built Staircase 18 in Dolphin Yard (“this constricted but important frontier space, Trinity’s equivalent of the old Polish corridor”, as he described it), Jenkins said that “the transition to Trinity was a revelation to me”. As he wrote in his autobiography:

“For Balliol men to move into Trinity was like Montagues fraternising with Capulets, but for me the arrangement worked out admirably. I found two large rooms a great improvement on the bed-sitter Balliol had given me in peacetime. There were great open fires with hods of coal borne across the quadrangles by ancient servitors. In place of all meals in Hall, there were hot luncheons in the winter and lobster luncheons in the summer, which were borne by the same old scouts, and could be eaten with guests in one's rooms.”

Jenkins also wrote: “The combination of Balliol teaching and Trinity living was the best of both worlds. For long afterwards when anyone asked whether wartime Oxford had not been a sad decline from the splendours of peacetime, I said that on the contrary it had put my standard of living up by about a half.”

Jenkins’ affection for Trinity was thankfully uncoloured by our failure to appoint him as Lecturer in Economics when Crosland was promoted to the Fellowship and Jenkins applied for the vacancy. The decision was not quite as capricious as it sounds, as the successful candidate, Fred Atkinson, went on to become head of the Government Economic Service.

After the events of the play, Jenkins left the Labour Party with three other senior colleagues to help create the relatively short-lived but influential Social Democratic Party (SDP). This is the subject of another fine political play, entitled Limehouse. Despite having been active in the SDP as a student at Cambridge, I alas met Jenkins face-to-face only once, when he was signing copies of his biography of Winston Churchill on a book tour in Washington, DC, in 2001.

Crosland died suddenly and unexpectedly in 1977 at the age of 58, probably shortly before Prime Minister Jim Callaghan would have moved him from the Foreign Office to the Treasury, as Crosland had hoped. His obituary in The Sunday Times noted: “He died, his wife at his bedside, less than 10 minutes’ walk from his old college, Trinity. What a marvellous life.”

Roy Jenkins was on a visit to Rome at the time. He wrote in his European Diaries: “I awoke at 6.30, having had a vivid dream about Tony being present and his saying in an absolutely unmistakable, clear, rather calm voice: ‘No, I am perfectly alright. I am going to die, but I am perfectly alright.’ Then at about 8 o’clock we had a telephone call from BBC saying that he had died that morning.