Stafford Cripps was the only person who ever came close to ousting Winston Churchill during the Second World War, yet there has not been a biography of him since 1957. His life was full of contradictions. Schooled at Winchester he was for at least eight years the most radical of all Britain's senior politicians. Extremely Conservative in personal taste, he was revolutionary in his politics. A Communist sympathiser in his forties he was, in his fifties, Labour's most fiscally responsible Chancellor of the Exchequer. He attacked the institution of the monarchy, yet was a close friend of some of the most Establishment Conservatives.

As political careers go his was a roller coaster which started late. Having turned down a place at New College, Oxford to train as a chemist, at the age of 40, in the dying months of the Labour government he was made Solicitor-General by Ramsey MacDonald and joined the Cabinet even before he had secured a parliamentary seat. By the time of the General Election of 1945, he was appointed President of the Board of Trade in Attlee's first government. In 1947, having mounted an unsuccessful attempt to oust Attlee, he was given the new post of Minister of Economic Affairs and, only a few weeks later, was made Chancellor of the Exchequer and Minister for Economic Affairs, thereby combining for the first time the whole of the economic brief in one post.