Word: crossman
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...secret in reality....No description of it, at once graphic and authentic, has ever been given. It is said to be something like a rather disorderly board of directors, where many speak and few listen--though no one knows." A century later, the situation had not changed. Richard Crossman--Oxford don, psychological warfare chief, Labour M.P. and editor of The New Statesman--complained of "how little is normally revealed of what goes on in the modern Cabinet, and how much information is available about these secret proceedings, if only someone who knows the truth can be stimulated to divulge...
...following year Crossman was thus "stimulated" when he joined the Cabinet himself. For the next six years, until Harold Wilson's Labour government was unexpectedly turned out of office in 1970, Crossman learned about Cabinet government from the inside. His conclusion--after serving successively as Minister of Housing, Lord President of the Council, Majority Leader in the House of Commons and Secretary of State for Social Services--was that the Cabinet had little effective power and that Britain had drifted into a "Prime Ministerial" form of government. Crossman presented these views in his 1970 Godkin lectures at Harvard, which...
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...