Crossman and Social Democracy

Peter Clarke

  • The Backbench Diaries of Richard Crossman edited by Janet Morgan
    Hamish Hamilton/Cape, 1136 pp, £15.00, March 1981, ISBN 0 241 10440 8

The intellectual in politics has often been tortured by the dilemma of his role. Either he has attempted to turn himself into a real politician, adopting the posture of his new travelling companions as men of action and decision, and jettisoning his bookish lumber as ‘not wanted on voyage’. Alternatively, he has minced around like a political eunuch, uneasily conscious that something is missing, but anxious that people should not suspect that it is his integrity. The career of Richard Crossman refuted these stereotypes rather in the manner that Samuel Johnson, by stubbing his foot against a rock, claimed to refute Berkeley: what was lost as a formal exercise was pure gain as an object lesson. For Crossman remained incorrigibly attached to the habits and training of an academic milieu without ever forgetting that it was as an intellectual in politics that he had a peculiar usefulness.

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