Fine reviewer, fair journalist, poor editor

Alan Watkins

DICK CROSSMAN: A PORTRAIT by Tam Dalyell

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, .C14.95, pp. 253

There is a case for saying that biog- raphers are usually more interesting than their subjects: Boswell more so than John- son, Randolph Churchill than Winston, Cosgrave than Thatcher and Dalyell than Crossman. Not that Mr Dalyell has written a biography exactly: for that we must await Mr Anthony Howard's major production. He has, as he explains, given us a personal and political memoir, based on a friendship with Crossman that lasted from the start of his political life to Crossman's death in 1974.

As such, it succeeds triumphantly. There are a few repetitions, which are perhaps inevitable owing to the structure that Mr Dalyell has, correctly in my view, imposed on the book: he takes various aspects of Crossman's life and character (`Journalist', `Bevanite' and so forth) instead of striding down the path of chronology more appropriate to political biography. There are occasional contradictions: at one point Mr Dalyell asserts that Hugh Gaitskell would not have given Crossman a post in his government, at another that he would have done. So he would, though Crossman did not know it at the time of his greatest antipathy to Gaitskell.

There are some mistakes. Thus Cross- man did not leave New College because the Warden, Herbert Fisher, advised him to go as a young man out into the great world of politics: that world which Fisher had briefly experienced and to which he looked back with a misty sadness. Un- doubtedly Fisher had this romantic notion of the great game and advised Crossman to join in it while he was still young. But the reason Crossman had to leave Oxford was that he had an affair with the wife of a don: not just any old don, mind you, but a Fellow of the same college.

It was typical of Crossman, though Mr Dalyell does not tell us this, that in later years he could never remember (or, in a style more typical of Anthony Crosland, affected not to be able to remember) what the wronged don's main subject had been. `Biology, or it may have been zoology, something of that kind,' he would say. Despite his friendship with Mr Dalyell, his period as shadow Minister for Education and Science, and his acquaintance with several of the leading scientists of his time, Crossman considered science a question- able activity (`stinks' as he called it, only half-facetiously) and Classics as, the only proper subject. It was his highest compli- ment to say of someone that he was a classical scholar, which he would some- times deduce erroneously from the per- son's way of writing English.

Crossman learnt to write English on The Spectator, as Berlin correspondent, then on the New Statesman. He was quite precise with me about the age at which he had first realised he could write. It was 32. This would have been some time in 1939- 40, when he had first started with the Statesman. It was, he went on — he may have been flattering a fellow-journalist the most exciting discovery of his life, more important than his scholarship to Winches- ter, his First in Greats or his Fellowship of New College. He had previously been told by schoolmasters, dons and others that, though he was 'clever', his 'style was bad'. Life suddenly became different: like find- ing that you are attractive to women, though he did not draw this particular analogy.

Mr Dalyell does not tell us this. On the contrary: he goes out of his way, time and again, to depreciate the Statesman and to exalt the Mirror, both Daily and Sunday, to which Crossman became attached after the war. Mr Dalyell even goes so far as to say that the late Sydney Jacobson 'taught him his craft'. Jacobson was a fine journal- ist and a nice' man; I doubt whether he would have claimed so much had he still been with us. When, in the course of preparing a 'profile' of Crossman over 20 years ago, I asked Lord Cudlipp whether he had taught Crossman popular journal- ism, he replied that he did not need teaching.

Crossman later told me that Lord Cud- lipp had laid down that a perfect column should consist of three items in the ratio 3:2:1. This sounds likely to me — the kind of rule that old journalists are forever laying down with the utmost confidence. Irrespective of who, if anyone, taught Crossman popular journalism, I think Mr Dalyell overestimates both the importance of his column and the power of the Mirror. The last error is common to most Labour politicians, and was recently demonstrated by Mr Neil Kinnock's furtive entry to Mr Robert Maxwell's party during the Bright- on conference. The overestimate of his column derives from Dick's high opinion of his own journalistic abilities. He called himself the Mirror's 'fig-leaf, which annoyed Lord Cudlipp through its appear- ance of patronage.

He was a superb reviewer of political books: his selection, The Charm of Poli- tics, can stand comparison with any similar production by Lord Dacre or Mr A. J. P. Taylor. He was a good writer of political articles, specially if they had a foreign slant. He was a fair-to-middling popular journalist. The great columns of the post- war period have probably been by, in no particular order, 'Cassandra' (William Connor), 'Cross-bencher' (various hands), John Gordon, Sir John Junor and Mr Keith Waterhouse. In this race, Crossman is, I am afraid, panting at the rear.

Mr Dalyell may reply that Crossman was trying to write about complicated subjects for a mass audience. What does he imagine `Cassandra' was doing, or Mr Waterhouse does today? He seems to think, as Cross- man did before him, that serious popular journalism consists in writing baby-talk for a backward WEA class. It does not. It requires wit, humour, fantasy and inven- tion: all qualities which, despite his learn- ing, his acuity and his fluency, were conspi- cuously lacking in Crossman, who — this may surprise you — had in certain respects a curiously wooden mind. Mr Dalyell tells us that he could not tell a funny story. But he could not recognise when a story was funny either. He disliked my own efforts at pastiche in the style of 1710. He found Lord Dacre's more accomplished efforts, then appearing in The Spectator in the style of a slightly earlier period, even less to his taste.

This brings me to Crossman as editor, which he was not very good at. Though Mr Dalyell devotes perhaps surprisingly little space to this episode in Crossman's life, he is broadly right about it. He was mistaken to do the job, not only because he was coming to it too late in life but, more important, because he was taking it on for a base reason: to dance on the grave of Kingsley Martin, who, he considered, had unjustly barred his path to the editorship all those years before.

He was not only moody, bossy and bullying, as Mr Dalyell says: he was the living confutation of his old school's motto. Following his discharge from hospital after a major operation, we staff members (as everyone regarded me, though I was tech- nically a freelance by this time, having resigned in a pique in 1970) clubbed together to buy a bottle of Krug cham- pagne, which we bore to Cropredy, near Banbury, taking the train from Paddington for the purpose. Crossman muttered per- functory thanks and spent the rest of the afternoon complaining about the quality of the paper in his absence.

Before this, he had tried to split the editorial conference: the principal one to include such luminaries as Mrs Barbara Castle, Mr Tony Benn, Lord Lever and Mr Des Wilson, the subsidiary one to include the people who actually wrote the paper. Mr Howard and I were, however, to be asked to both. To his credit, Mr Howard, who was closer to Dick than I, said that this was an impossible arrangement: of course, everyone who worked for the paper must be invited to all conferences. Dick agreed.

All this may give the impression that I disliked Crossman. Not so: I liked him very much, though more as a political informant than as an editor. Mr Dalyell liked him even more, and has written a splendid book about him.