Portraits and Miniatures(101)

Yet Crossman, although unlike Crosland he was never even in his own eyes a serious competitor for the party leadership, was a more dominant figure in Cabinet, more central for thirty years to the life of the Labour Party, and a more striking speaker both in Parliament and on a political platform. As a Cabinet member it was more the tone than the outcome of discussions that he influenced for he did not have a high reputation for wisdom and often changed his mind in the middle of the argument. He specialized in rumbustious iconoclasm. He asked questions that nobody else would. Although he dropped off to sleep in the Cabinet more frequently than anyone I ever saw, whenever he himself was awake he was very good at keeping others so too. I sat next to him in 1967-70 and greatly missed him in the dull Cabinet of 1974-6.

His party activity I mostly disapproved of. We belonged to different tribes. He was always a Bevanite, although a surprising one because he was neither particularly left-wing nor a natural hero-worshipper, either in general or of Aneurin Bevan in particular. I fear it stemmed from the facts that he could not get over having rather despised Gaitskell both at Winchester and at New College, and that Attlee (a family neighbour in Essex suburbia) so deeply disapproved of his behaviour as a young man towards both his dry Chancery judge of a father and his more outgoing mother that he would not contemplate giving him a government job. Palestine and the ‘Keep Left’ revolt he might have forgiven him, but not his bullying around the tennis court in the Buckhurst Hill garden.

As a speaker Crossman imported his Oxford teaching methods into politics. Yet his style was the antithesis of the austerely academic. His central desire was to grip the attention of his audience, almost to seize them intellectually by the throat, and to this end he would always prefer a slightly shocking generalization, whether or not well founded in the facts, to platitudinous verities. He was also a master of the art of keeping his audience on tenterhooks. I remember once comparing his speaking method with that of a trick motor cyclist who rode as hard as he could at the end of a cliff. Everyone in sight was held fascinated, waiting to see how on earth he was going to turn round before going over the edge. I was sufficiently impressed as a young MP that he was the only parliamentarian I ever consciously tried to emulate. I am not sure I had much success in this.

Why, with all his verve and talents, did Crossman as a politician never get into the league of Wilson or Callaghan? There were two major reasons. First, he really was the classic example of being his own worst enemy. Ernest Bevin never applied his famous ‘not while I’m alive, he ain’t’ to Crossman, bitterly though he accused him of the ‘stab in the back’, perhaps because he recognized that Crossman’s self-destructiveness needed no assistance. Crossman had an extraordinary penchant for gaffes. The major ones were well spaced: 1952, 1957, 1969. But they were buttressed by a host of minor ones which bespattered almost every year. ‘I have measured out my life in howling gaffes,’ he could have written towards the end, paraphrasing Eliot.

Second, penetratingly though he wrote about it both in his Diaries and in his 1963 preface to Bagehot, Crossman was remarkably bad at operating the Whitehall machine. He believed civil servants were instinctively disloyal, which they are not, and as a result, despite his sparkle and exceptional intelligence, succeeded in making them almost uniquely so towards himself. I will never forget a pensions meeting which as Chancellor I had with Cross-man as Social Security Minister accompanied by a galaxy of his officials in 1969. It was a pushover. He was jumping about from one intellectual position to another, and his officials wanted to see him lose. I never saw a departmental minister so badly supported. It almost made me rally to the side of his expenditure claims.

Yet, in spite of the weaknesses, Crossman was by no means wholly a bad minister. He was vigorous and innovating. It was merely that he was not as good as he ought to have been in relation to his talents. He was always a commentator first and an executant second. He was frequently more interested in the argument than in the result. But his sotto voce remarks made him an irreplaceable companion.

Part of his desire to shock, out of which he never grew, may have stemmed from a persistence of his adolescent bullying. But there was also a much more amiable side to it. He was as natural a teacher as he was a commentator. An aggressively conducted seminar, with himself in the chair, was his idea of paradise. And his early and continuing conviction was that the best way to open closed minds and to keep open minds engaged was to shock them. Of the time when I first met Crossman (fifty-six years ago) I wrote in my autobiography: ‘The visitor [to my parent’s house in South Wales] who most dazzled me was without doubt Richard Crossman. His brand of verve and paradox I found very exciting at sixteen.’ In later life I did not exactly admire him, but I enjoyed his company to an extent matched by that of only three or four other politicians.