Advent 9

There can be very few studies of our parliamentary system that were so rapidly overtaken by events as Walter Bagehot's The English Constitution … As an account of contemporary fact , the book was out of date almost before it could be reviewed … Yet for anyone who wants to understand the workings of British politics … The English Constitution still remains the best introduction available.

Thus Richard Crossman on my old favourite Walter Bagehot. It is not Bagehot we are concerned with today but Crossman - intellectual, journalist, socialist politician and most importantly for my purpose, diarist. My introduction to both Bagehot and Crossman came in the reading list for the Constitutional Law module of my degree. Bagehot was recommended for those very reasons Crossman cited in his Introduction to the Fontana edition of The English Constitution. Crossman was recommended because his diaries made the matter of legislating and its attendant chicanery come to life.

As a diarist Crossman is mischievous, rarely boring, sometimes even impish. Take this brilliant sketch on Gaitskell in 1955,

He is a man not at all sure of himself outside his special subject, a man who felt himself a hero and a St Sebastian when he stood up to Nye and, most serious of all, someone who takes a moralising and reactionary attitude, which is in my opinion almost instinctively wrong on every subject outside economics