Battles of Labour's Roundhead

If politicians can be divided into Cavaliers and Roundheads, Stafford Cripps was probably the Roundhead's Roundhead. Brendan Bracken dubbed him "the carrot-crunching Cripps" and, in as much as he is remembered today - 50 years after his death - it is as the rather forbidding personification of Austerity Britain in the immediate post-war years: vegetarian and teetotal in his habits, ascetic in his appearance, and driven by an almost inhuman work ethic that took him to his relatively early grave.

Cripps's abiding streak of self-righteousness inevitably made him respected rather than loved. In the immortal words of Churchill: "There, but for the grace of God, goes God." Peter Clarke's achievement in this accomplished, appropriately heavy-duty study - based on unprecedented access to Cripps's papers - is to show in a convincingly nuanced way not only the full range of his career, but also how seamlessly the public and the private lives meshed.

On the face of it, Cripps's background was classic for a high-minded, paternalist Labour politician: the mother a sister of Beatrice Webb, the father a successful lawyer, and the public school Winchester. In fact, young Stafford (born four days after Hitler in 1889) was a staunch and patriotic Tory, until the First World War began his process of radicalisation. This was completed in 1931 by the financial crisis that brought down Ramsay MacDonald's Labour government and convinced Cripps that the battle between capital and labour would have to be fought to the death. By then an extremely rich barrister in his own right and owner of a large country estate in Gloucestershire, he had entered public life and was on the Labour front bench.

During the rest of the 1930s, there was - as with so many in that febrile decade - a wild, even hare-brained quality to his politics. "His Marxist slogans were undigested," Michael Foot (who knew him well) would aptly recall. "He declared the class war without ever having studied the contours of the battlefield." Cripps himself posed the question, "Can Socialism Come by Constitutional Methods?", to which his chilling answer was that a future socialist government would have no alternative but to seek "the prolongation of the life of Parliament for a further term without an election." Not surprisingly, many in the Labour Party found him an uncomfortable colleague and, in May 1939, he was expelled.

The war made him. Having long extolled the virtues of an Anglo-Russian alliance, and having been stoically undeterred by the Nazi-Soviet Pact in August 1939, he was picked by Churchill in June 1940 to be British ambassador in Moscow. There he made little impact on the Soviet leadership, despite having a pet dog called Joe, but received much credit at home for Russia entering the war on the side of the Allies after the German invasion in June 1941.

When he returned to Britain in January 1942, at a time when Churchill was under widespread attack for his apparently ineffectual handling of the war, Cripps suddenly found himself all the rage and even viewed (by more than a third of the electorate) as a likely successor.

In the event, there was no putsch - nor even an attempted one. Churchill played the situation with typical aplomb, bringing Cripps into the War Cabinet and waiting for his military fortunes to turn up, while Cripps, for all his keen personal ambition, never seriously saw himself as a war leader. Anyway, by now he had put the nation's struggle above the class struggle. "Cripps has been got at," a disappointed George Orwell noted in June 1942 after meeting him, "not with money, nor even by flattery and the sense of power, but simply by responsibility, which automatically makes a man timid." Later that year he became Minister of Aircraft Production, emerging as a whole-hearted supporter of "Bomber! Harris and even giving an address to Bomber Command with the memorable title, "God is my co-pilot".

After the war, no longer a firebrand socialist, and back in the Labour fold, Cripps was one of the Attlee government's undisputed "Big Five". He played an often frustrated part in the negotiations that led to Indian independence and, in 1947, became Chancellor. For a year-and-a-half he was remarkably successful - and even popular - before, in 1949, the sensible but inevitably humiliating devaluation of sterling sharply undermined his reputation. Soon afterwards, a terminally sick man, he stepped down. Surprisingly charming, albeit seriously deficient in humour, a minister capable of inspiring great loyalty but obsessively concerned with his media image, Cripps survives semi-intact from Clarke's biography as a major figure who ultimately failed to make the weather.

"He is ignorant about political, social and economic institutions," Aunt Beatrice shrewdly observed in 1942. "And he does not know he is ignorant." It is a timeless lesson for preacher-politicians who distance themselves from the prosaic concerns of more journeyman operators.