num_pages: 1136
description: Richard Crossman's three volumes of Ministerial diaries provided a unique and historical view of Cabinet government at work in a twentieth-century democracy. They also became the subject of a legal cause célèbre, which was to have significant effect on future interpretation of the British Constitution.But, by the time he began recording his million-and-a-half words as a Cabinet Minister following the return of a Labour Government in 1964, Crossman had established already the diarist's habit with no fewer than twelve years' practice recording weekly the parliamentary scene as he saw it from the Opposition backbenches. In lighter mood, then, these diaries record the conduct of the Labour Party after its fall from office in October 1951 at the end of six years as the most zealously reforming government the country had ever known.Crossman describes with humour and insight the constant battles of those twelve years – between the leaders and the rank-and-file, left and right, trade unionists and 'intellectuals'. The Party argued endlessly about personalities (Bevan, Foot, Gaitskell, Wilson, Brown and indeed Crossman himself) as well as over policy. The issues that provoked the fiercest rows were not always those of national importance, such as defence, German rearmament, Suez and the H-bomb; as much ferocity could be, and was, aroused by Labour's internal search for the right road to socialism – particularly over nationalization and revising the Party constitution.Argumentative and shrewd, the diarist himself moves agilely over the battleground, as conspirator, mediator and critic. The picture that emerges includes the larger political context of Britain enjoying the end of her heyday. Crossman went everywhere and saw everyone. The departure of Churchill, Eden's deployment of gunboat diplomacy at Suez, Macmillan's 'wind of change' in Africa and his embarrassment over the Profumo affair, the Common Market issue, the first Tory leadership contest and Home's succession – all these are assessed by no ordinary backbencher but by one of the most versatile and popular journalists of the time.Above all, the Backbench Diaries show us how the Conservatives maintained such a prolonged grip on power and how, after a decade in the wilderness, Labour caught the changing mood of the country and finally outed them.
language: English
title: The Backbench Diaries of Richard Crossman
titlecomplete: The Backbench Diaries of Richard Crossman
characters: Jennie Lee, Baroness Lee of Asheridge, Hugh Gaitskell, James Callaghan, Barbara Castle, Baroness Castle of Blackburn, George Brown, Baron George-Brown, Hugh Cudlipp, Michael Foot, John Strachey, Tony Benn, Morgan Phillips, Herbert Morrison, George Wigg, Harold Macmillan, Richard Crossman, Harold Wilson, Tony Greenwood, Baron Greenwood of Rossendale, Anthony Eden, Ian Mikardo, Winston Churchill, Rab Butler, Aneurin Bevan, Sydney Jacobson, Baron Jacobson, Clement Attlee, Tom Driberg
genres: Politics
ratings_count: 12
series: The Diaries of Richard Crossman
publisher: Holmes & Meier Pub