The Cripps Version: The Life of Sir Stafford Cripps
Peter Clarke Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 574pp, £25
ISBN 0713993901
Sir Stafford Cripps, more than any other cabinet giant in the 1945-50 Labour government, symbolises "the age of austerity". As chancellor of the exchequer from 1947-50, he was the chief architect of the postwar settlement based on Keynesian principles of economic management. Yet until recently, Cripps suffered unfairly from relative neglect at the hands of historians. His prominent colleagues - Ernest Bevin, Herbert Morrison, Clement Attlee - all received substantial treatment in sympathetic biographies many years ago, but not Cripps. However, since 1997, three biographies on him have been published.
The latest is the best, not least because it is the first to be based on Cripps's own private papers, which were dutifully guarded by his wife, Isobel, for almost four decades after his death in April 1952. It is an entertaining, scholarly and readable volume that does ample justice to an often eccentric but always formidable figure from Labour's golden years.
However, it is a pity that Professor Clarke, who in the past has written impressively about economic policy-making in mid-20th-century Britain, devotes insufficient space to a detailed assessment of Cripps's time as the "people's chancellor". More pages deal with his fascinating but not decisive role in the independence of India than with his struggles to reconstruct the shattered postwar economy. This is surprising, given that Clarke claims Cripps "arguably exerted more power at the Treasury than anyone since Lloyd George and arguably exerted more influence over Treasury policy than anyone since Gladstone". It may be explained, in part, by Clarke's limited use of the departmental archives and overuse of private diaries.
It is hard not to write an absorbing biography of one of the strangest men ever to reach the heights of British politics. An ascetic wealthy aristocratic barrister, Cripps did not join the Labour Party until he was 39. He was expelled from Labour's ranks on the eve of the Second World War for left-wing deviation, and remained an independent until just before the 1945 general election. A Tory imperialist in his younger days, Cripps became a Marxist in the 1930s, arguing first for a popular front with the communists, then for a united one with any political grouping opposed to fascism.
Cripps may have had success as Britain's ambassador in Moscow in the first months after Hitler's assault on the Soviet Union, as well as briefly formidable public opinion ratings, but he never posed a threat to Churchill's position as prime minister, even when he became an unlikely hero of the Daily Mail and ally of Lord Beaverbrook. Clarke writes with acumen on Churchill's complex relations with the often worldly-unwise Cripps, whose odd moment of apparent political ascendancy soon faded after his failed mission to India.
Despite his many gyrations in a brief career, Cripps was seldom accused of hypocrisy or do-goodery. He certainly laid himself open to such accusations. In the 1930s, his aptly named country house, Goodfellows, was a retreat for opulent weekends during which Labour's left wing planned the Marxist revolution. But Cripps put some of his wealth to good use in secretly subsidising the relatively poor Attlee as party leader. Cripps's teetotal and vegetarian lifestyle reflected his persistent poor health rather than a desire to be seen to practise self-denial. He was a chain-smoker, no sexual prude and a peripatetic traveller.
His appeal stretched far across the political divide. Leading Conservatives such as Anthony Eden, Rab Butler and Lord Halifax were among his many influential admirers, even at a time when he was often seen as an apologist for Stalin. He aroused much more animosity inside the Labour Party. Hugh Dalton and Ernest Bevin were among his most formidable critics.
In truth, it is hard to explain a man who could excuse Stalin's invasion of Finland and understand the Soviet Union's rapprochement with Hitler in August 1939 and go on to become one of Arthur Harris's champions in the strategic mass bombing of German cities. Perhaps Cripps's greatest appeal as "a man without a party" was to the high earners and professional classes. The patrician who believed in equality may have been a "vulnerable paradox", but he was very much a figure of the times.
Clarke completed his biography before the Public Record Office released Cripps's personal file compiled by our intelligence services. This file reveals that he came under a good deal of scrutiny in the 1930s, a target of surveillance and phone-tapping. No doubt his friendly relations at that time with leading communists such as Harry Pollitt were of particular interest to the secret state. There is no suggestion that Cripps was ever a Soviet agent, but there was official disapproval of some of the company he was keeping.
Robert Taylor is writing a one-volume biography of Ernest Bevin
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