The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, Volume 1: Minister of Housing, 1964-66

When Richard Crossman began to keep a political diary in 1952 he was a Bevanite activist, a member of the National Executive committee and an Opposition backbencher of the House of Commons without hope of office. Controversy was then tearing the Labour Party apart and he felt that, if no one kept a chronicle of it, future historians would be unable to piece together any coherent picture of what went on inside the Bevan group at that time. In 1960 Bevan died, and three years later so did the Party leader, Hugh Gaitskell. Crossman helped Harold Wilson to gain the leadership and, within a year, the Party found itself once again in office, with Crossman a Cabinet member at the Ministry of Housing. At this point the diary was to become all the more exhilarating and valuable. 'About this job I knew practically nothing,' Crossman writes. 'Indeed, the only preparations I had made which were of any use were those that concerned my diary. Jennie Hall, my secretary, agreed to become my archivist and to look after the tapes on which it would be dictated each weekend at my home in North Oxfordshire. Transcription of the tapes for obvious security reasons would not be attempted till later in the life of the Government. I was aware when I made these arrangements that if I could achieve a continuous record of my whole Ministerial life, dictated while the memory was still hot and uncorrupted by "improvements", this part of the diary would become of quite special historical value . . . I realized the interest of a diary which gave a daily picture of how a Minister of the Wilson Government spent his time.' From the vantage point of the Housing ministry, then as Lord President of the Council and finally as Secretary of State for Health and Social Security, Crossman recorded, with the keen observer's eye of a former Oxford don, more than a million and a half words over a period of six years. Acutely aware of the trap of self-deception about his own motives and of the need to avoid distortion through compression, Crossman is always alive to the illuminating insight to be gained from a faithful record of the shifting relationship s between colleagues and adversaries in public life. His diaries, of which this is the first volume of three Cabinet diaries that are planned, provide in all a fascinating view of the working of high state office as well as an entertaining and at times controversial record of the Wilson administration of 1964-70. Here, indeed, is a unique contribution to the history of government in Britain in this or any other century.