Home truths
A. N. Wilson
Tony Crosland Susan Crosland (Cape £10.95)
This is one of the most gripping political biographies of recent years. Anthony Crosland was married to Susan Barnes, a practised journalist who specialised in 'pro- files' and biography. When he died, having been Foreign Secretary for less than ten months, it was inevitable that she should write the story of his life. She has taken the obvious risk of writing a completely per- sonal account and has produced a book which many will consider indiscreet and tasteless. That is what makes it so readable. The bizarre collection of people who com- posed Harold Wilson's various cabinets have already been paraded before us in the diaries of Dick Crossman and Barbara Castle. Here they are again, making us consider once more why, in democracies, the scum should so inevitably rise to the top. But this narrative also gives us intimate glimpses of a Cabinet Minister's amorous and domestic life, set against the background of his quarrels and alliances with the clowns who were set in authority over us during the 1960s and 1970s. Crosland was the son of a high-ranking civil-servant. He had a prosperous upbring- ing in North London, He was educated at a private school in Highgate (described here as 'a public school') and, during the war, he served in the Royal Welch Fusiliers before taking up a place at Trinity College, Ox- ford. The only notably unusual feature of this otherwise conventional middle-class background was the religion of his parents, who adhered to the sect known as the Ex- clusive Brethren. Once, when he found his future wife reading Father and Son (Gosse shared a similarly eccentric religious paren- tage) Crosland exploded with rage: 'Why don't you mind your own bloody business?' He was loath to recall the Brethren. The secularism of his mind and his free alcoholic and sexual indulgence were alike reactions against the puritanical rigours of the Meeting House at Highgate.
Crosland did well at Trinity, became a don, taught politics and economics and gathered the store of notions which were to be fed into his various books — of which. The Future of Socialism is the best-known. From his arrival in the House of Commons in 1950, he was a close friend and disciple of Hugh Gaitskell. The chief political fascina- tion of this biography is the light it casts upon the so-called Gaitskellites in the Labour Party during the last 15 years. It shows, for instance, that Roy Jenkins and his henchmen — particularly William Rodgers and David Owen — were all set to form a breakaway party as early as March 1976, when Jenkins was defeated in the leadership contest which followed Wilson's sudden resignation. By then, the 'Gait- skellites' had formed into two quite distinct groups: the Jenkinsites who (by the stan- dards of the rest of the party) had ceased to be socialists at all; and those, like Crosland, Hattersley and Healey, who wanted to hang on to their jobs and felt capable of concoc- ting an ideological socialism which was distinct from the loony Left Wing.
Both these groups (by then hardly on speaking terms — even the wives cut one another) invoked Gaitskell's name to hallow their position. His early death somehow served to disguise the more foolish or dangerous aspects of his political creed. Is the same thing likely to happen to Anthony Crosland? In the terms of 1066 And All That was Crosland a Good or a Bad Thing?
On a personal level, this biography makes a strong case for his being a Good Thing. It is written by someone who loved him, who divorced her husband in order to marry him, who was in awe of his cleverness and charmed by characteristics which she knew were irritating to the rest of the world: the arrogant irascibility, the drunken bossiness, the inverted snobbery which made him refuse to wear 'correct' dress on 'official' occasions. She knows that not everyone will be charmed by her glimpses of Crosland at home — making love, shaving, watching Match of the Day, smoking cheroots and bellowing down the telephone. But everyone will see that it is written from the
heart, and praise the honesty and courage of her portrait.
On the public level, one is bound to say that he will leave little trace. Obviously, in terms of what he stood for, he was A Bad Thing. He held five offices of state. After brief service in George Brown's ill-starred Department of Economic Affairs, Crosland became Secretary of State for Education in January 1965. 'If it's the last thing I do, I'm going to destroy every fucking grammar school in England', he remarked at the time. As it turned out, the last things he did were in the Foreign Office — bungling the Cod War and trusting in Henry Kissinger to get us out of the Rhodesian crisis. Crosland, like the Americans, was com- pletely hoodwinked by Ian Smith. He said that when he died, FISH and RHODESIA would be written on his heart.
Anyone can make mistakes. If Crosland had not wrecked the British educational system and made an ass of his government in Africa, some other man would have done precisely the same. He was never (to judge from his widow's account) a very conscien- tious, nor enthusiastic, minister of the Crown, and that is greatly to his credit. One feels at frequent intervals throughout this book that he was too nice to be mixed up with the crowd he was in with.
In general political terms, however, Crosland's brand of socialism is already ex- tinct. In the leadership contest in 1976 (in which Callaghan ultimately beat Foot and Jenkins), Crosland decided (he did not need much prompting) to 'throw his hat into the ring'. He calculated how many votes he would 'find not too bad': '10-15 would be a disaster; 15-20 very bad' ... 'Anything over 35, sensational'. In the event, 17 MPs voted for him. He had only stood because he wanted to be Chancellor of the Exche- quer. Instead, Callaghan made him Foreign Secretary, a post for which he had no preparation or qualifications.
By then, the Labour Party was hopelessly split. On the one hand, there were the true socialists, prepared, for the time being, to shove in Worzel Gummidge as a figure- head for their aspirations. On the other hand, there were the disillusioned Jenkin- sites, already preparing for the Great Divorce. A decade earlier, Crosland had contemplated the divisions in the party and given utterance to the most ludicrous hyper- bole in this book: 'Harold knows best. Harold is a bastard, but he's a genius. He's like Odysseus. Odysseus was a bastard, but he managed to steer the ship between Scylla and Charybdis'. Whether one now con- siders the party to have crashed on a rock or to have floundered in a whirlpool, there is manifestly no political future for Crosland's brand of socialism.
His mistake, perhaps, consisted in believ- ing that political power was vested largely in the parliamentary party at Westminster. The Conservatives do not suffer from this delusion. Nor does the former Viscount Stansgate, who was a pupil of Crosland's at Oxford and known to him as 'Jimmy'. He emerges from this book as an amusing friend and neighbour of the Croslands', given to ringing up at odd hours, putting on funny voices and pretending to be a Post Office Engineer. After Labour's electoral defeat in 1970, 'Tony Benn' was not in the least cast down. He saw himself as 'a left- wing answer to Enoch Powell. "Enoch has had more effect on the country than either party", said Benn, adding that he himself intended making a major speech every three months'.
Susan Crosland asked her husband if he thought 'Tony Benn' would succeed in his Messianic ideals. Perhaps Crosland never spoke more truly than when he replied, 'Over my dead body'.
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