"Crossman was witty, sarcastic and offensive. He judged politicians below the belt rather than as embodiments of principle, and left little reason to suppose that his friends behaved differently from his enemies or the Conservative Party differently from the Labour Party. He was without doubt a Socialist (of a libertarian kind), and assumed that it was desirable to subvert middle-class respectability by a Socialist use of state power. But his principles, when not merely the cocksure excesses of an undergraduate mind, were the loquacious excesses of a theoretical mind and made him an object of mistrust in the Labour Party and among some of the trades union bores of his generation."