Looking back, it is clear that without more root-and-branch reform of unions, the City of London and company structures, the policy was doomed. But now that the Thatcherite alternative has failed just as completely with a broken, amoral banking system, those 1960s and 70s struggles seem less futile. Healey also had to fight his way through a fiscal and exchange rate crisis, calling in the International Monetary Fund – but he protected rather than eviscerated Britain's social contract, defences and wider public infrastructure.

He must be scored above Osborne. So must Geoffrey Howe, if only for sheer political bravery – and for being lucky. Howe, anticipating Osborne, insisted in 1981 on cutting the budget deficit at the peak of a recession, thus courting the wrath of 364 economists – including Mervyn King, later to become governor of the Bank of England. But it was not a multi-year austerity programme like Osborne's, and although stupid Howe, unlike Osborne, was lucky. Unbeknown to him or the Treasury, a credit boom triggered by financial deregulation would offset his ludicrous, pro-cyclical, recession-inducing budget.

In 2010 Osborne faced almost no intellectual opposition. The brave act would have been to resist the clamour for self-defeating, over-aggressive austerity in the wake of a financial crisis – but Osborne has neither Healey's nor Howe's bravery. You can neither imagine him taking on his own party, like Healey, to do the right thing nor making a resignation speech with the dignity and bite of Howe. Chancellors also need luck: Osborne is luckless.