Word: crossman
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...support--both inside and outside the party--to keep Labour in power. And what the recent Blackpool conference proved is that the one thing every major Labour party figure, including the big union leaders, can agree on is that Labour must be kept in power at all costs. Crossman himself would have appreciated the strengths as well as weakness of being a Labour politician. When he first ran for office, in 1945, he earnestly campaigned in his constituency with loud-speaker and earnest desire to discuss the issues...
Wilson's attempt to keep the Crossman diaries out of public view raised some of the same constitutional issues that Crossman himself discussed in his Godkin lectures and in his introduction to a re-issue of Walter Bagehot's English Constitution published in 1963, the year before he entered the Cabinet for the first time. Bagehot had named cabinet secrecy as one of the three sine qua nons of cabinet government, along with party loyalty and collective responsibility. Secrecy allows each member of the Cabinet to express his or her views freely and without fear of being contradicted when called...
...meetings, so that only the Prime Minister's summation--and not the arguments that went before it--are recorded. Bagehot's dictum that "no minister who respected the fundamental usages of political practice" would make public the inner workings of Cabinet debate remains valid to this day. So far, Crossman is the only major figure who has challenged...
...since Bagehot's time the Cabinet's role has changed enormously. In Bagehot's analysis, the Cabinet was the most powerful and effective organ of government, or, as he put it, government's "efficient secret." When Crossman joined the government in 1964, he discovered that, like the House of Lords before it--the Cabinet had moved from the efficient part of the constitution to what Bagehot called the "dignified" part, where its chief role was ceremonial. The Cabinet was at the beck and call of the Prime Minister and, like Parliament, was unable to make or break him. That struggle...
...Crossman traced his change in the power of the Cabinet to the necessities of war. The great bureaucracies created to prosecute the Great War of 1914-18 and only partially dismantled in the twenties and thirties were run from the Prime Minister's office. After 1945, Clement Attlee transformed Churchill's "rather haphazard personal autocracy" into a steamlined power structure. Increasingly the real decisions were made by the Prime Minister alone or in consultation with one or two other key figures, and the Cabinet relegated to the role of a rubber stamp. Attlee, along with a small group...