Richard Crossman
It was in the variety of his ideas, and the passion with which he regarded and promoted them, rather in their originality or precision, that Richard Crossman made his major contribution to British politics. There was no intellectual arena into which he was unwilling to enter, and none in which he was unwilling to take sides. Yet, though the passion and energy of his personality led to often justified accusations that he was a bully, he was, in his quieter moments, ever prepared to take the objective view, and even to exalt excitement in politics above implementation of the socialist doctrines to which he gave his allegiance. Thus, in the bitterest disappointment of his life, when Mr Wilson's calling of the general election of 1970 destroyed his plans to put on the statute book the most gigantic state-directed pension scheme ever conceived,he was still able delightedly to assert that he had at least prodded the Conservatives into producing a scheme of their own which was as doctrinaire on the right as his own had been on the left.
This electricity of the mind caused many doubts about his stability, just as the speed of his intellectual analysis, and his determination to voice his thoughts immediately they occurred, encouraged men who could not assert themselves against him to mutter angrily about the highwayman tactics pf his conversational technique. It was, perhaps, his lack of a settled rhetorical commitment to socialism, topped off by the unusual fact that he was an extremely slow and agonised writer, that caused him to be undervalued by both staff and management during his period as editor of our distinguished contemporary the New Statesman. For the reader Crossman was an almost ideal editor: during his time at Great Turn stile there was a new revelation, a savage challenge, almost every week. Alas, it was found impossible to tolerate his exceptional ego.
Yet he could be a man of exceptional grace and kindness. With his young children he was the epitome of ebullient fatherhood, reviving his old interest in defence matters by compelling visiting distinguished professors of military history to engage in the construction of fortifications for the edification of his children and the improvement of their education. On other occasions he showed incredible patience with those who differed from him instinctively, but were less well versed in detail or in the technicalities of debate than he was himself. In his last and prolonged illness he showed an amazing courage, continuing with his work until he could no longer walk, in particular by developing his new career as a television commentator both in the Crosstalk interviews and as a reporter for Granada during the election campaign. Frustrated from an early stage by Attlee's determination never to give him a job, and given, initially, a job he did not want by Harold Wilson in 1964, he was never able to make the substantial contribution to British politics and government that he thirsted for. But he will be as well remembered as many who made such contributions because of his extraordinary personality, and the richness of his mind.
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