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When Singapore fell, when the Imperial troops were thrown back in Libya, when German battleships slipped through the Channel, the British for the first time began to question Churchill's vision. When Sir Stafford Cripps returned from Moscow with a smile on his face, they thought they had found someone more atuned to the revolutionary present and the possible future.
The Coup. Sir Stafford arrived from Moscow at a time when the British were disgruntled with their leaders, and passionately grateful to the Russians. They did not choose to remember that Sir Stafford had never been very popular with the Russians, that it had been Lord Beaverbrook (next to Hitler) who was mainly responsible for the improvement in Anglo-Soviet relations. In good British taste, Sir Stafford took what was coming to him.
At first Churchill tried to handle Sir Stafford by absorbing him. He offered him Lord Beaverbrook's job as Minister of Supply, but without War Cabinet rank. Sir Stafford's refusal made him more popular than ever. When he broadcast three days later about the "lack of urgency" in the British war effort, his audience was almost as big as Churchill's. Letters piled in by the thousands, all demanding: "For God's sake do something!" On his first day in the House of Commons he astonished fellow M.P.s by quietly sitting on the farthest back bench, with ordinary members, instead of on the front Opposition bench.
A week later, Churchill bowed to public pressure, appointed Sir Stafford Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House. Thus was scored one of the outstanding political coups of modern times, by a man about whom the world knew only a little less than the British.
The Man. Sir Stafford Cripps bears a marked resemblance to Woodrow Wilson. He has the same tight, twisted, sickly mouth, the same cold-chisel intellect, the same egotistical integrity. Wilson's ideals were embodied in liberalism at home and in the League of Nations, while Sir Stafford's gravitated to Socialism in Britain and his current crusade to get 352,000,000 Indians to make peace among themselves and accept his offer of freedom.
Stafford Cripps was the youngest son of the late Lord Parmoor, who enjoyed the distinction of being made a knight by a Liberal Government (1908), a Lord by a Coalition Government (1914) and Lord President of the Council by a Labor Government (1924). Stafford's mother, who died when he was only four, was a sister of the eminent Fabian Socialist, Beatrice Webb.
In his youth Stafford leaned more toward science than toward politics. He built underground houses on his father's estate and, when he was 17, invented a glider which, called "Stafford's Folly," crashed the first time he tried to fly it from a hilltop. As a schoolboy at Winchester he wrote an exam which won him a scientific scholarship to Oxford. The paper was so good that it was shown to University College's great Sir William Ramsay, who straightway invited Stafford to study under him.