Teenage hero mutant Wykehamist
Ben Pimlott
CROSSMAN: THE PURSUIT OF POWER by Anthony Howard
Cape, £16.99, pp.400
Most politicians of prominence are humdrum people who achieve fame through a combination of luck, diligence and obsession.
The case for a well-researched biography of Richard Crossman rests on his having been an extraordinary man who was able, from time to time, to raise the level of political exchange above its usual mediocrity. He was not conspicuously suc- cessful, inspirational or nice. The nick- name 'double Crossman', acquired at school and never lost, was more than a play on words: it reflected what many people at different stages of his life felt about his consistency, and even his integrity. If he is remembered today — as Anthony Howard points out at the beginning of this im- mensely enjoyable book — it is less for what he did than for his record of what others were doing around him. He set out with the bold scheme of supplanting Wal- ter Bagehot. Instead, he became a 20th- century Samuel Pepys, the most eyebrow- raising diarist of our time. Yet Howard argues convincingly for something more: a dash of quirky genius which enhanced the lives even of those who found him most infuriating.
Crossman's own life was spent on the margins of a series of Establishments academic, journalistic, civil service and political. He was always noisy and visible, but seldom central. A generous way of putting it would be to call him a renaiss- ance man in an age of specialists. Less generously, he seemed a maverick and a dilettante who wasted much of his bril- liance by failing to discipline it. Crossman was a genetic Wykehamist (his family claimed to be founder's kin), and he remained throughout his life an instantly recognisable member of the breed, despite some mutant traits. By his mid-teens he had a settled place within the intellectual oligarchy of his generation: Winchester contemporaries included the poet William Empson, as well as the future Labour politicians Hugh Gaitskell and Douglas Jay, who were to become his arch-enemies. Like Cyril Connolly at Eton, Crossman experienced his schooldays as a triumphant struggle which made everything that came later seem dull by comparison. `For six years I fought for survival and then for success,' he wrote later, 'according to rules which barred very few holds.'
New College was the inevitable next step, leading to a double first in Greats and the privileged freedoms of life as a don. Politics had little importance for him and he did not join the University Labour Club. Emotionally and intellectually, he was confused. 'Broad of Church and broad of mind,' John Betjeman wrote of the post-adolescent classical scholar, 'Broad before and broad behind/A keen ecclesiologist/A rather dirty Wykehamist.' Sex rather than politics was his preoccupa- tion, and in a way sex led to politics. It is interesting to discover that as an under- graduate Crossman was predominantly homosexual. Howard makes light of this aspect, suggesting that it was almost de rigueur among cultured Oxonians at that time, especially in the circle which included
W.H. Auden. Yet a bisexual temperament (shared with other public school socialists who went into Parliament) may have con- tributed to his social irreverance, as well as to the incestuous clubbability and high emotions which characterised Crossman's enjoyment of the almost all-male West- minster world. It may also have been a factor in his curiously Lawrentian admira- tion for Nazi youth culture even after Hitler came to power. Meanwhile, the instability of his heterosexual relationships — producing a short-lived marriage, and then an affair with a colleague's wife — helped to eject him, scandalously, from the Oxford cocoon.
It was the war which turned him from a bohemian scribbler into a man of subst- ance. Recruited into what became the Special Operations Executive, Crossman quickly acquired a leading role in what was grandiosely called 'psychological warfare' — or telling lies to the Germans. It suited his temperament. Those who worked with him were agreed on three things: his enthusiasm, his exceptional intellect and his ferocious self-interest. 'I view this able and energetic man with some detachment,' wrote Hugh Dalton, the Labour old Eton- ian who was his ministerial boss. 'He is loyal to his own career but only incidental- ly to anything or anyone else.'
When Crossman entered Parliament in 1945 he expected a job: he did not get one. Perhaps, if Attlee had preferred him to other Wykehamists like Gaitskell and Jay, office would have mellowed him: he might have been a Labour Party gamekeeper rather than a poacher. As it was, Crossman became one of the instigators of the post-war left-wing movement, bitterly dis- trusted by the leadership. When Gaitskell died in 1963, Crossman helped to master- mind Harold Wilson's successful leader- ship bid. Within 18 months he changed from rank outsider with little chance of ever becoming a minister into the close courtier of a newly elected premier. Wilson valued his advice and gave him a series of Cabinet posts, though never the most senior ones: Crossman does not appear to have had many other supporters. He was regarded with suspicion by fellow minis- ters, with hostility by trade unionists and exasperation by his own officials.
His ministerial legacy during the troub- led 1964-70 government was not much above the average. Though it is an odd decision by his biographer to devote only one chapter to the whole of his subject's governmental career, Howard is right not to place the main stress here. For Cross- man's heyday was on the backbenches: the Thirties intellectual turned Fifties Bevanite rebel, the host of convivial left-wing parties in Vincent Square, the co-conspirator of Thomas Balogh, Harold Wilson, Barbara Castle in the years when lack of office allowed their spirits to roam free.
The portrait here is of a splendid anachronism, the last of his kind: an intellectual adventurer in politics. He was never a leader or much of a creator. He was dazzling, naive, impatient, careless, big-hearted, courageous, insufferably arro- gant, bullying. On some issues, he had (as Attlee once put it) 'no judgment at all'. His achievement was to ruffle feathers, rock boats, prick pomposities and induce apo- plexy, especially on his own side. He was extraordinary, and in the sanitised 1990s Labour Party he has no heir.
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