Word: crossman
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Every weekend during the six years that he held various jobs in the 1960s Labor Cabinet of Prime Minister Harold Wilson, Richard Crossman would retire to his 17th century country house near Oxford and dictate the week's experiences into a tape recorder. Nothing remarkable about that. Memoir writing -and now taping-is a well-developed art, and Wilson himself had published his bland prime ministerial recollections...
...Crossman, a former Oxford don and journalist (he edited The New Statesman from 1970 to 1972) who died last spring, was devilishly unflattering in many of his reminiscences of Wilson, Britain's all-powerful civil service and even Queen Elizabeth. Financial Times Political Editor David Watt called the volume "the most important book about British politics to have been written in years," but civil servants in the office that serves the Cabinet found Cross-man's wealth of detail on how British government works to be profoundly disturbing. With Wilson's approval, they moved in effect...
This time the expected did not happen, because Sunday Times Editor Harold Evans saw in the Crossman diaries an opportunity to publish an important document and frustrate censorship at the same time. The diaries are indeed uncharitable: they depict Wilson making major policy decisions without informing the Cabinet, the Queen showing more interest in discussing her Corgi dogs than affairs of state, civil servants hiding important documents from Grossman. But they spill few state or industrial secrets; so prosecution under the Official Secrets Acts or on other grounds would be difficult. Besides, during last year's election campaign Wilson...
Kenneth A. Crossman, enforcement director of the Natural Resources Department, said yesterday that his department is testing the fur to determine whether it was coyote or wolf...
...judge from the outcry that followed the New Statesman's article, Britons will continue to insist on picking up the tab for their monarchy. Crossman himself said: "I am strongly pro-monarchy. The Queen is good at her job-she is better value for the money than the Church of England-and should get the rate for it." Better that, he went on, than "a Copenhagen monarchy cycling around the streets...