Richard (Howard Stafford) Crossman - Quotation, Works

British statesman, born in Cropredy, Oxfordshire, SC England, UK. He studied at Oxford, where he became a philosophy tutor, and was leader of the Labour group on Oxford City Council (1934–40). In 1938 he joined the staff of the New Statesman. In 1945 he became a Labour MP, and under Wilson was minister of housing and local government (1964–6), then secretary of state for social services and head of the Department of Health (1968–70). He was editor of the New Statesman (1970–2). His best-known work is his series of political diaries, begun in 1952, keeping a detailed record of the day-to-day workings of government. They were published in four volumes (1975–81), despite attempts to suppress them.

Richard Howard Stafford Crossman, known as Dick Crossman, (15 December 1907 – 5 April 1974) was a British politician and writer. He was a prominent member of the Labour Party, a socialist intellectual and a Zionist. He was a councillor on Oxford City Council, becoming head of the Labour group in 1935.

At the outbreak of World War II he joined the Civil Service, serving in the Psychological Warfare Department under Robert Bruce Lockhart.

He entered Parliament in 1945, as MP for Coventry East, a seat he would hold until his death in 1974. He was a member of the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party from 1952 until 1967, and Chairman of the Labour Party in 1960-61. On the left wing of the Parliamentary Labour Party, in 1947 he was a co-author of the Keep Left pamphlet, and later a prominent Bevanite. He was Labour's spokesman on Education before the 1964 General Election, but upon forming the new Government Harold Wilson appointed Crossman Minister of Housing and Local Government.

He resigned from the Labour front bench in 1970 to become editor of the New Statesman magazine, where he had been assistant editor from 1938 to 1955.

Crossman was a prolific writer and editor. He is most famous for his three-volume Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, covering his time in government from 1964 to 1970, published despite a legal battle by the government to prevent their publication.

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Plato Today New York: Oxford University Press (1939).