Books

Here comes everybody

Alan Watkins

The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister; Volume Three: Secretary of State for Social Services 1968-70 Richard Crossman (Flemish Hamilton and Jonathan Cape £12.50) Though it would be absurd to pretend that Richard Crossman was a shy or sensitive spirit, he was not a self-assured as he seemed. The most encouraging personal discovery of his life, he once told me, was not that he was clever or could pass examinations. Nor was it that he could speak in public. It was that he could write English. He made this discovery in the mid-1930s as (this may surprise you) Oxford correspondent of the Spectator. Earlier he had been told, at both Winchester and Oxford, that his 'style was bad', that he 'couldn't write'. Actually he always lacked a certain discernment. For instance, when he was editor of the New Statesman he tried to change some such uninspiring sentence of mine as 'Harold Wilson made an attack on Sir Alec' into 'Harold Wilson made a bitter attack on Sir Alec'.

'Livens it up a bit,' he explained.

`But Dick,' I protested, 'by shoving in "bitter" you're adding a cliché to an already flat sentence.'

Crossman looked uncomprehending. Like all politicians, he tended to think at any rate to write in precast blocks of Words. But, to be fair, he was a much more skilled writer than most politicians. He was also more skilled than most journalists. His The Charm of Politics, a collection of book reviews from the NS, still bears re-reading today. At all events his writing ability was the most important thing in Crossman's life, apart from his third wife Anne and their two children.

As his family play a large part in this volume, as they did in the previous two, it may be worth saying something of why they were important to him. It was not just that Anne brought him stability and 'the farm' (in fact a solid and imposing seventeenthcentury manor house). Nor was it simply that he had fathered children late in life. He had earlier concluded that he was unable to have any. He explained as much to Anne, Who married him on that understanding. His first wife Orly German tart', as he used jocularly to refer to her) had a child by another man. His second wife, who had Previously been married to an Oxford science don whose precise speciality Crossman ,always affected, Waugh-like, not to remember, also had children of her first marriage. 'I naturally thought', Crossman would say in his customary expansive manner, 'that I was impotent' (by which of course he meant sterile). Thus the children were an uncovenanted bonus.

Indeed life was a bonus. In the early 1960s he erroneously thought he had lung cancer. He also underwent a major stomach operation. He nearly died. The doctors gave him the choice of minor repairs, which would have confined him to a lifetime's diet of milk and rusks, or what amounted to a new stomach. With characteristic boldness, Crossman chose the new stomach. It enabled him, he claimed, to drink as much as he liked without suffering hangovers. From the evidence of Volume Three this claim was not entirely true. Still, Crossman always ate and drank a good deal, with evident enjoyment and no observable illeffects. Likewise he treated his corporeal infirmities not so much with courage as with indifference. He wore a truss of whose unbeautiful qualities he was happily unaware. He would march up and down his room at the party conference hotel attired only in his truss, declaiming loudly on the iniquities of Harold Wilson or whoever it might be. He suffered too from swollen ankles and (an exception to his general unconcern) had an aluminium device manufactured which enabled him to rest his leg. When he was editor of the NS his hands were so arthritic that he could hardly hold a pen; he never learnt to type. Instead he dictated his articles. (`They read like that too,' someone once unkindly remarked.) The Diaries were written partly to provide his family with extra cash, partly because he believed they should be published anyway. It is incorrect to assert, as Sir Harold has understandably asserted, that they would have taken a different form had Crossman not died. True, they began life as raw material not for Crossmaa's memoirs but for his projected book on the working of the British Constitution, his new Bagehot. However, he soon decided they ought to be published separately. The present volume differs from its predecessors only in that his assistant, Janet Morgan, has done the editing herself. It is far the best of the three, a fitting climax to a great work on British politics.

Two of the projects in which Crossman was engaged during this period, Lords reform and national superannuation, came to nothing. Some may think this detracts from the interest of the book. Not a bit of it. Crossman is interesting even when describing failure. He did not really mind about failure, I have already indicated the reasons. He was basically a writer; always a half-outsider. And though he was prodigiously industrious, every day was a holiday: it was enough simply to be alive. Moreover, he has a cast of thousands, at any rate of hundreds. At the heart of the book, providing it with a natural coherence, nature propping up art, are five politicians, their rivalries and alliances as the trailer to the film might put it jealousies and kindnesses, though precious little of the last: Sir Harold, James Callghan, Roy Jenkins, Barbara Castle and Crossman himself.

But he is if anything even better on those who have only walk-on parts. It was often still is said, for instance, that Crossman 'lacked judgment'. This is usually a way of saying that somebody is more interesting, clever, talented or amusing that the critic. But take this assessment in January 1969 of John Stonehouse: 'He is a strange fellow. . . a tall, dark, rather sleek young man. . He has this rather insolent, handsome face, and when he is nervous an incipient stutter. I have always had the profoundest suspicion of his moral reliability . . . I have watched him in every job for some reason he always gets advancement and 1 think he is a kind of dangerous crook, overwhelmingly ambitious but above all untrustworthy.' On another occasion, 'I was giving dinner to Brian Walden. He's a tight-faced, ambitious, clever little man. . . His manners are a little odd, he insisted on ordering the expensive 14s 6d dinner' this was in May 1968 'but then eating none of it and on entertaining me to an expensive bottle of wine. I rather like someone who so insists on being on equal terms and on showing that he's got plenty of money.' Again, 'David Owen is an arrogant young fellow, a close friend of David Marquand and John Mackintosh, who are. . . far abler and more deserving of promotion if you want someone from that section of the party.' So one could go on, quoting thousands of beautifully quotable words.

It was therefore with some trepidation on my own behalf that I opened this volume. After all, Crossman says at one point that 'Walter Padley got drunker and drunker'; at another that Sir Harold was confined to his bed because he had been up until four, boozing with the industrial correspondents. There was no knowing what Crossman might have disclosed. But there was no need to worry. I have no cohiplaints whatever. Quite the reverse. I doubt whether Crossman's old colleagues feel so generous. Mrs Castle? Well, perhaps. A publicityseeker she may be, a purveyor of half-baked proposals, a fixer with Sir Harold behind the Cabinet's back, even a bit of an hysteric; but in the end Barbara is always a grand girl, a good sort, a real chum, a pal. Indeed Crossman's relationship with Mrs Castle, surviving as it did all kinds of political ups. and downs, is a genuine and affecting tribute to something or other.

And she had some cause for complaint against Crossman, after all. It would be tedious to rehearse the detailed history of her proposals for trade union legislation: but she and Sir Harold originally wanted a long Bill, to be preceded by virtually a year's consultation with the TUC and other interests. Crossman said this would be politically perilous. It would be better, he urged, to have a short measure, quickly brought in. This measure was so introduced in Jenkins's 1969 Budget. Crossman, who, to do him justice, had always had doubts about the whole enterprise, then deserted her. Jenkins did not so much desert as stand aside: he was certainly not in the forefront of any battle. Crossman's view of Jenkins goes up and down, chiefly down. At one minute he is a possible successor to Sir Harold, more frequently an indolent fellow, secretive, 'a literary man', self-centred, concerned only with his own reputation and the impression he makes. Nevertheless it was the alliance or understanding between him and Crossman which, according to the diary, decisively killed Mrs Castle's proposals. The understanding was that both she and Sir Harold were dispensable. And Sir Harold would be replaced (thought the diary is not wholly consistent on this) not by Jenkins but by Callaghan.

It has been said that Callaghan dominates the book. Certainly — this again is a measure of Crossman's good judgment — he emerges as a formidable politician, a mixture of slyness, main chance-eyeing, consistency (at least over Mrs Castle's proposals) and sheer political unsinkability. But it may be we are more interested in him because he happens to be Prime Minister, whereas the other main characters are dead, in Brussels or on the back benches. In any case the dispute hardly matters. It is enough to say that Dick does Jim proud. On one occasion a slightly dotty official put in a neo-Buch man ite paper suggesting people needed a change of heart. 'We must stop all this bloody religious nonsense,' says Jim. Crossman does the rest of them proud as well, from Sir Harold and his brandyswigging to Jenkins and his urge to turn even the most innocent activity, like swimming, into a personal competition: 'in this sense he is a caricature of a public school boy, and he loses his attraction unless he is fully clothed.'

I wrote above that the diary as a whole was a great book. 'Great' is a big word. It needs justification. I am biased not only because I liked and admired Dick (though I found him as an editor difficult to work for) but also because much of the information I had about this period came contemporaneously from him. There are therefore co-existing elements of confirmation and of its absence. He may not have told me or even known the whole truth; but there is no significant difference between what he told me at the time and what now appears in the diary. It is often alleged that he lacked regard for truth. What he had was something different: the ability to keep in his head simultaneously several propositions which were in apparent and sometimes real contradiction. In fact he had a great regard for truth. He also hated mysterymongering. He was a Victorian rationalist. He did not believe that men were rational — how could he, having lived in Germany before the war? — but he believed they ought to be treated as if they were.

His urge to see through things, not to be taken in, sometimes led him into an affected 'realism' which came close to callousness.

('Julian Snow . has a slight limp but his stroke doesn't seem to have affected his mind which wasn't very good anyway.') But he was convinced that people were deluded and tricked into believing untruths. His diary is, as he wished it to be, a deeply subversive work. Certainly it strikes a mighty blow for the sceptical or dis respectful school of political journalism. Peregrine Worsthorne may wish to believe — or wish the populace to believe — that politics is more than a comedy of errors. But what if it is indeed that? 'Everything is what it is,' wrote Bishop Butler, 'and not another thing.' Why then should we seek to deceive ourselves? Crossman did not deceive himself. He did not believe that other people ought to be deceived either. This is the measure of an achievement that is unprecedented and may turn out to be unequalled.