ABSTRACT
Richard Crossman was an irreverent and intellectual Cabinet Minister. An Oxford don and former editor of the New Statesman magazine, throughout his career, beginning as Secretary of State for Housing and Local Government, Crossman kept detailed diaries to cast light on how the institutions of government worked, as experienced from the inside. In them he conveyed the full extent of the power of the civil service, and the power of senior civil servants, including Dame Evelyn Sharp, his own permanent secretary. When Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government abolished the British government's Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS) in June 1983 there were no objectors. It was apparently accepted that the CPRS Think Tank, established in 1970 by Edward Richard George Heath's Conservative government, was superfluous and unnecessary. Lloyd George established the War Cabinet Secretariat led by Colonel Maurice Hankey, so that the process of strategic decision-making at the centre could be structured and recorded.
