THE BRITISH CRISIS
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in New York at the time was interpreted here as an effort to tread on as
many Indian toes as possible and thus make a get-together between Cripps
and Nehru more difficult. Similar efforts are being made from the opposite
end at this moment. The upshot is that Cripps's reputation is damaged in
India but not in this country-or, if damaged, then by his entry into the
government rather than by the failure in Delhi.
I can't yet give you a worthwhile opinion as to whether Cripps is the
man the big public think him, or are half-inclined to think him. He is an
enigmatic man who has been politically unstable, and those who know him
only agree upon the fact that he is personally honest. His position rests
purely upon the popular belief in him, for he has the Labour party
machine more or less against him, and the Tories are only temporarily
supporting him because they want to use him against Churchill and Beaver–
brook and imagine that they can make him into another tame cat like
Atlee. Some of the factory workers are inclined to he suspicious of him
(one comment reported to me was "Too like Mosley"-meaning too much
the man of family who "goes to the people") and the Communists hate
him because he is suspected of being anti-Stalin. Beaverbrook already
appears to be instituting an attack on Cripps and his newspapers are
making use of anti-Stalinist remarks dropped by Cripps in the past. I
note that the Germans, to judge from their wireless, would be willing to
see Cripps in power if at that price they could get rid of ChurchilL They
probably calculate that since Cripps has no party machine to rely on he
would soon he levered out by the rightwing Tories and make way for Sir
John Anderson, Lord Londonderry or someone of that kind. I can't yet
say with certainty that Cripps is not merely a secondrate figure to whom
the
public have tied their hopes, a sort of bubble blown by popular dis–
content. But at any rate, the way people talked about him when he came
back from Moscow was symptomatically important.
WAR STRATEGY
There is endless talk about a second front, those who are for and those
who are against being divided roughly along political lines. Much that is
said is extremely ignorant, hut even people with little military knowledge
are able to see that in the last few months we have lost by useless defensive
actions a force which, if grouped in one place and used offensively, might
have achieved something. Public opinion often seems to be ahead of the
so-called experts in matters of grand strategy, sometimes even tactics and
weapons. I don't myself know whether the opening of a second front is
feasible, because I don't know the real facts about the shipping situation;
the only clue I have to the latter is that the food situation hasn't altered
during the past year. Official policy seems to be to discountenance the idea
of a second front, but just possibly that is only military deception. The
rightwing papers make much play with our bombing raids on Germany
and suggest that we can tie down a million troops along the coast of
Europe by continuous commando raids. The latter is nonsense, as the
commandos can't do much when the nights get short, and after our own
experiences few people here believe that bombing can settle anything. In
