Crossman, Richard Howard Stafford (1907-1974) An erstwhile Oxford don who became an MP in 1945 and served as a Cabinet Minister from 1964-70, Crossman spent a year in Germany in 1930 where he had firsthand experience of the rise of Hitler about which he would write in Plato Today (1937). He worked as a journalist and then for the government during the war, in propaganda and psychological warfare, before being elected as Labour MP in 1945. He ended his career as a journalist and by writing up his controversial political diaries.