ABSTRACT

Anthony Crosland’s career as Foreign Secretary has generally received peremptory attention, inviting comparison with one of his Labour predecessors, Herbert Morrison.2 This should not surprise us for a number of reasons. It reflects first of all Crosland’s own political agenda which, like Morrison’s, was geared more to the development of socialist ideology and Labour’s economic policy, most notably through his 1956 publication The Future of Socialism and follow-ups The Conservative Enemy and Socialism Now.3 Writing at the time of his death, his close friend Dick Leonard observed that ‘it is almost certainly as a thinker and writer that Crosland will be most remembered’,4 an opinion that over 20 years on has been upheld in a populist newspaper article that labels him ‘one of the great socialist intellectuals of his generation’.5 Second, and again like Morrison, Crosland had little time to make his mark at the Foreign Office, but whereas the former was the victim of an electoral swing to conservatism the latter was unluckier, dying from a stroke.