THE CRIPPS VERSION: THE LIFE OF SIR STAFFORD CRIPPS By Peter Clarke, Allen Lane, £ 20 'There, but for the grace of God, goes God.' This was Churchill's barb about his famous contemporary and potential rival, Stafford Cripps. The figures of Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee so loom over the history of Britain in the Forties that one tends to forget the importance of Cripps in that period. And Indian history in the same period was dominated by Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah and Mountbatten. The role of Cripps in the transfer of power negotiations often gets eclipsed especially in a historiography with radical orientations. Lord Listowel, the last secretary of state for India, wrote in 1979 that when a proper biography of Cripps is written, India will be seen as the focus of his political career. Peter Clarke's biography does not quite fulfill Listowel's prophecy. Clarke shows, in this detailed and extraordinarily well-researched biography, that there was more to Cripps's life than what he did in India (or, as Clarke would have it, for India). India does occupy a large and special portion of Clarke's narrative but this is not at the expense of Cripps's part in British politics (he was in the Forties, during World War II, Lord Privy Seal and leader of the house under the coalition government, and after the war, he was the Lord Chancellor) and in international relations (he was Britain's ambassador to Moscow in the early Forties and played no mean role in forging an Anglo-Soviet alliance). R.J. Moore, who till the publication of Clarke's book was by far the best commentator on Cripps's unique role in Indian affairs, commented in his Escape from Empire that Cripps left no memoirs to record his own views about his own role. This is Clarke's point of departure. The book rests, in large measure, on diaries. Cripps's own, covering his first visit to India in 1939 and his Moscow stint, which had been used by Moore. But there are other diaries - notably the Indian diary for 1946, which is mined by Clarke for the first time. Clarke also uses the diaries of contemporaries - Leo Amery, Hugh Dalton, Harold Nicolson, Hugh Gaitskell, Robin Barrington-Ward (editor of The Times), Reginald Coupland (the Beit professor of Imperial history in Oxford, who came out to India with Cripps in 1942) and so on. These and other archival sources are played off against each other to form the Cripps version. Cripps's father was an affluent lawyer and his son, following the family tradition, went to Winchester. Like most outstanding Wykehamists, Cripps developed in school the ability to pursue subtle intellectual arguments and the commitment to high-minded causes. Cripps responded to the call of silk and became England's youngest KC. He gave up a very lucrative practice to join politics because he believed that it was his duty to serve the nation. His rise in politics was so swift and dramatic that many considered him as Churchill's rival. Cripps had many disagreements with his prime minister but, as Clarke shows, he never tried to dislodge Churchill. The failure of the Cripps Mission of 1942 has often been attributed by Cripps's advocates to sabotage by Churchill. Clarke does not buy into this view but is at great pains to show that Cripps accepted that his mission was doomed once he realized that the demands of the Congress could never be reconciled with his more important commitment to win the war. He temporarily lost the friendship of Nehru but gained the warmth of Churchill, again only temporarily. He came out to India in 1946 as the head of the Cabinet Delegation, with greater authority and the guarantee that independence could no longer be deferred. He pursued, what Clarke calls, 'negotiation by attrition'. The achievement of this delegation was fragile but it did serve 'to demonstrate that Britain intended to quit India and that the transfer of power was no longer a question of whether but of when and how and to whom'. These issues were crucial in the endgame of empire which Cripps participated in with some finesse in Whitehall. The biography could easily have been subtitled the importance of being earnest without any of the Wildian overtones. Cripps was an earnest man who always backed up his earnestness with an enormous amount of hard work. His devout belief in Christianity probably had something to do with this. He had affinities with Gandhi, his rival in negotiations, especially in his relentless pursuit of austerity. Churchill, the bon vivant, probably had the last word on him when he said that, 'He [Cripps] has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.'