Current MPs in Britain seem, at times, a drab and depressing bunch. ‘The quality of parliamentarian,’ Ann Widdecombe said on a recent podcast, ‘is the lowest I can ever remember.’ It was not just the reluctance most sensible people feel about exposing themselves to such overwhelming and intrusive media focus, she explained, that was putting better candidates off. It was also down to the identity-driven shortlists all three main parties have embraced in the past few decades.

It’s all too easy for ministers to forget what a strong economy, a robust education system, or a love of free speech are actually for

‘They began to select on identity rather than merit,’ Widdecombe pointed out – adding that if you do that ‘for a quarter-century odd, then it’s going to have an impact on the quality of people in parliament.’

As a new political play, the ‘Gang of Three’, opens at the King’s Head theatre in London, about the relationship between Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins and Tony Crosland – three Labour MPs from the past who were anything but dull – the gap between now and then seems painfully wide.

The trio, taken together, make an interesting study. All had served in the war, all known each other at Oxford, and all had intense cultural interests – what Edna Healey, Denis’s wife, called ‘hinterland.’

Healey, when he wasn’t serving as a reforming Defence Secretary or beleaguered Chancellor in a time of sterling crises and rampant industrial unrest, had numerous interests to keep him going. As a teenager he loved film, paintings, music and photography, and was a voracious (and serious) reader. At the age of 19, he cycled across Europe merely to see a production of Faust at the Salzburg Festival, and at Oxford (where he took a double-first) organised exhibitions of Picasso and the Surrealists.

‘Even my family,’ Healey wrote, ‘would not have been sufficient to reconcile me to a life in politics if I had not also been able to refresh myself with music, poetry, painting.’

Later in life, surrounded by his library of 16,000 books and over a thousand films, he would produce, alongside his acclaimed autobiography, two volumes of travel photos (Healey’s Eye and Healey’s World). He would also publish My Secret Planet, an anthology of his favourite writers, of which Edward Pearce wrote that it should be circulated among ‘the entire fourteen-year-old nation, and the next generation will grasp not one man’s hinterland, but the purpose of books.’

Keir Starmer, a man reported as having no particular favourite novel or poem, and who chose as his special book on Desert Island Discs ‘a big atlas, with real details,’ should perhaps take note.

Meanwhile Roy Jenkins, son of a Welsh miner, was known for his grandiloquent skills as parliamentarian and a love of fine dining, good claret and continental travel. Yet he also wrote heavyweight biographies of Gladstone, Churchill and Roosevelt, and his numerous liberal reforms as home secretary largely created the world we live in today.

The third of the trio, Tony Crosland – ‘the most exciting friend of my life,’ Jenkins said – was perhaps best known for his drawling, donnish air, his bohemian parties of film stars and literati, for reckless womanising and his determination, as education secretary, ‘to destroy every f***ing grammar school in England.’

Yet he also wrote The Future of Socialism, probably the most influential post-war book on Labour thinking, in which he rhapsodised over ‘the cultivation of leisure, beauty, grace, gaiety, excitement, and of all the proper pursuits, whether elevated, vulgar, or eccentric, which contribute to the varied fabric of a full private and family life…We need not only higher exports and old-age pensions, but more open-air cafés, brighter and gayer streets at night, later closing-hours for public houses…better designs for furniture and pottery and women’s clothes….’

As biographer and fellow MP Giles Radice said of the trio, ‘They were big men, larger-than-life personalities who could light up a room or gathering by their presence. And their extensive “hinterlands” serve as a valuable reminder to the present generation of politicians that there is more to human affairs than politics.’

Nor was this confined to the Labour party. Tory PM Edward Heath had his championship yachting, his organ-playing and conducting. Anthony Eden was a specialist in Persian and Arabic studies and – irony of ironies – able to converse with arch-enemy Nasser, Egyptian Premier during the Suez Crisis, in the latter’s own language. A professor of Greek at 25, fellow MP Enoch Powell would campaign in his constituency in English, French, Italian, German, modern Greek and Urdu, all of which he spoke. ‘No other politician,’ said Lord Annan of Powell, ‘had the ability to translate the law book of a medieval Welsh king, edit Greek texts with a dryness that made Housman look gushing, master the intricacies of the medieval House of Lords, and reinterpret the New Testament.’

Are these things important? These politicians’ private interests gave them a separate world to retreat to – the cultural equivalent, you might argue, of f***-you money when the going got rough. As Harold Macmillan, famous for ‘going to bed with a Trollope’, put it: ‘You should read Jane Austen… then when they come in with some awful crisis, having read about Pride and Prejudice and so on, you’ll feel better.’

Without an appreciation of such things, it’s arguably all too easy for ministers to forget what a strong economy, a robust education system, or a love of free speech are actually for. You may disagree with Jim Callaghan’s 1971 reluctance to join the EEC, but still have admiration for his reasoning. Fearing French would be the dominant language, Callaghan remarked: ‘Millions of people in Britain must have been very surprised to hear that the language of Chaucer, of Shakespeare and of Milton must in future be regarded as an undesirable American import from which we have to protect ourselves if we are to build a new Europe…I will say it in French in order to prevent any misunderstanding: Non, merci beaucoup.’

It is not an argument one can imagine a politician like Rishi Sunak, with his fabled emphasis on STEM subjects and hostility to degrees that do not ‘grow our economy,’ ever making.

As for the Starmer administration, with their apparent dearth of private passions, it can take heart from perhaps one thing: the Gang of Three’s erudition did not often translate into effective government. The Wilson and Callaghan cabinets in which they served were fractious, knotty things, slipping and sliding through crisis after crisis, riven not least by the clashing egos of these three men.

‘With hindsight,’ Healey later reflected of Jenkins, ‘I regret that, though we often worked closely together, an element of mutual jealousy prevented us from co-operating more effectively.’ Nor, when Michael Foot took over the party, did things improve. Foot may have been brimming over with interests – penning excellent biographies of Byron, Bevan and H.G. Wells – but made a woeful opposition leader, taking Labour down to one of its worst election results in history. Yet without these men, the political landscape of the past fifty years would be a much poorer place.

For politics is not just in the here and now, but in the legacy of inspiring ideas, breadth of vision, and juicy personalities it leaves behind it. The sense that the ‘boiled rabbits’ of the Starmer government, like Tory governments immediately before it, seem to lack anything resembling a hinterland should depress us all. As journalist Finn McRedmond put it in the New Statesman last year, ‘Politics needs complex ideas and ambition to work beyond the short term; without it, we risk managing our own decline through the fear of intellectual imagination.’ As the summer recess in parliament approaches, there is ample chance for Labour MPs to do some holiday reading. A trip to the local branch of Waterstones (or even to the King’s Head Theatre) would seem to be in order for them all.