Last week I attended a seminar at the Treasury to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1976 IMF crisis, when the then Labour Government sought an emergency loan from the International Monetary Fund in the face of severe pressure on the pound and reluctance among investors to finance the UK’s huge budget deficit

This is widely regarded as a watershed in British economic policy. In a famous speech at the time, the Prime Minister James Callaghan said: “We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession... I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists.” The strings attached to the bailout included painful cuts in government spending and targets for money supply growth to try to lower inflation.

As the seminar recalled, within the Cabinet the most convincing opponent of resorting to the IMF was the then Foreign Secretary, Anthony Crosland, a former Trinity student and Fellow. He and his supporters argued that the public spending cuts demanded by the Fund (and also the US Government) were unnecessary and undesirable. But he gave way to preserve Labour Party unity (remember that?) and maintain market confidence when it became clear that Callaghan proposed to support his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey, in requesting a loan.

Crosland came up to Trinity in 1937 to study classics. But his studies were interrupted by the Second World War, during which he landed by parachute on the casino at Cannes during the “Operation Anvil” landings in 1944. Returning to Oxford, Crosland switched to PPE. His Oxford contemporary (and, it is now assumed, briefly also his lover), Roy Jenkins, later a reforming Home Secretary, wrote of him: “Crosland was an imposing undergraduate, apparently self-confident, irreverent, and even glamorous, with striking good looks, intellectual assurance, a long camel-hair overcoat and a rakish red sports car”.

After taking a First in 1946, Crosland replaced his tutor, Robert Hall, as Fellow in Economics when the latter became an adviser to the Attlee Government. Crosland’s biographer writes: “His pupils remember him as a stimulating tutor, always keen to relate economic theory to the world in which the government operated. 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”.

Evidence for the first of these leisure pursuits can be found in the Senior Common Room betting book. His wagers included a cigar on movements in British Transport Stock 3%; a bottle of champagne (“of reputable year and shipper”) and a bottle of whisky on the results of the 1950 general election; and a pound each on Alec Bedser’s bowling average in the 1950–51 Ashes series and whether the boxer Joe Louis had fought for the world heavyweight title within the previous five years.

Crosland is remembered as one of the Labour Party’s most consequential thinkers, thanks particularly to his 1956 book, The Future of Socialism. He was pleased to be Foreign Secretary, but would have preferred to be Chancellor or Prime Minister. Alas, he died in office in Oxford of a massive cerebral haemorrhage in 1977. Crosland, Jenkins, and Healey were hugely impressive figures, celebrated in an enjoyable play last year, The Gang of Three. Whether, in future decades, playwrights will be inspired by the current battle over the soul of the Labour Party remains to be seen.