style="overflow: hidden; color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; border: medium none;">Samuel Brittan is well-known to FT readers as an enormously influential writer on the British economy and macroeconomic policy. Few, however, will know that early in his career he had a brief interlude drafted in as an “irregular” civil servant in the short-lived Department of Economic Affairs during the Labour government of the mid-1960s.