Word: crossman
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...Part I of "Bagehot Updated" explained how Harold Wilson attempted to block publication of the diaries kept by Richard Crossman, but lost his case in the courts. In the process, important issues about Cabinet secrecy and freedom of the press were raised, as well as Crossman's theory that "Cabinet government" has been replaced in England by "Prime Ministerial" government. Last week's piece ended with a short account of Wilson's difficulties in holding the Labour Party together and how the Crossman diaries fit into this situation...
Wilson's success in the forging of his new "social contract" between Labour and the nation--Britain's last credible chance to stave off economic anarchy, as even the Tories concede--will depend on factors more fundamental than the revelations of the Crossman diaries. But clearly the embarassments they contain could not have come at a worse time for Wilson, when he needs all the support of Labour's Old Left (Foot and others of the New Statesman set) to control the New. But Wilson gravely miscalculated his legal position when he tried to suppress the diaries by direct government...
...been consulted in the matter and had not acquiesced in the decision. This outraged the professional civil servants who play a much more important role in Whitehall than in Washington. The Cabinet Secretary circulated a memo around government offices in which MacDonald's assertion was cut to ribbons. In Crossman's analysis, "MacDonald was forced to make a partial withdrawal which led to the fall of the Government...
...reminscences of his first government, entitled A Personal Record. At the time no one had raised any objections about the propriety of releasing inside versions of "secret" cabinet meetings. Wilson claims in these memoirs to have been against the resumption of arms sales to South Africa, an assertion that Crossman's diaries show to be false. Wilson and Crossman conflict on many other points, mostly ones that seem fairly trivial to outsiders but that have remained issses of passionate conceern to the Labour party's left wing...
This left wing has been giving Wilson more and more trouble lately. In his Godkin lectures, Crossman described the job of any Labour Prime Minister as "driving the two-horse chariot"--maintaining control over both the Parliamentary Labour Party, which tends to be middle-of-the-road, and the National Executive, which represents the party outside Parliament. In the complicated Labour Party Constitution, written in the early years of this century by Beatrice and Sidney Webb and Arthur Henderson, the big unions were supposed to supply the moderate ballast to keep the national party roughly in line with the P.L.P...