A wealthy lawyer by background, Cripps first entered Parliament at a by-election in January 1931, and was one of a handful of Labour frontbenchers to retain his seat at the October general election that year.

During World War II (1939-1945), Cripps served from May 1940 to January 1942 as Ambassador to the USSR, with major responsibility for building rapport with Hitler's greatest foe.

Nonetheless, he kept the trust and friendship of V. K. Krishna Menon, allowing him to retain a role in Indian affairs, including as a member of the 1946 Cabinet Mission to India and, ultimately, in having a voice in the selection of the final Viceroy in 1947.

[2] Cripps rejoined the Labour Party in February 1945, and after the war he served in the 1945-1951 Attlee ministry, first as President of the Board of Trade and between 1947 and 1950 as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Labour Party member and historian Kenneth O. Morgan claimed of his role in the latter position that he was "the real architect of the rapidly improving economic picture and growing affluence from 1952 onwards".

Cripps kept the wartime rationing-system in place to hold down consumption during an "age of austerity", promoted exports and maintained full employment with static wages.

He served in the First World War as a Red Cross ambulance driver in France, and then managed a chemical factory producing armaments.

[6][9] In 1936, Labour's National Executive Committee dissociated itself from a speech in which Cripps said he did not "believe it would be a bad thing for the British working class if Germany defeated us".

During one of the political meetings he spoke at, the audience included the future pioneer of black civil rights in Britain, Billy Strachan, who had been taken by his father to hear Cripps speak.

He was appointed a member of the War Cabinet, with the jobs of Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Commons, and was considered for a short period after his return from Moscow as a rival to Churchill in his hold on the country.

Cripps designed the specific proposals himself, but they were too radical for Churchill and the Viceroy, and too conservative for Mahatma Gandhi and the Indians, who demanded immediate independence.

[16] In November 1942, Cripps stepped down from being Leader of the House of Commons and was appointed Minister of Aircraft Production, a position outside the War Cabinet in which he served with substantial success until May 1945, when the wartime coalition ended.

When Cripps discovered details of the German radio work of Sefton Delmer (through the intervention of Richard Crossman) he wrote to Anthony Eden, then Foreign Secretary: "If this is the sort of thing that is needed to win the war, why, I'd rather lose it."

[19] When Labour won the 1945 general election, Clement Attlee appointed Cripps President of the Board of Trade, the second most important economic post in the government.

However, he gave his assent to the proposal, and Soviet scientists and designers travelled to the United Kingdom to meet Cripps and request the engines.

[21] Ironically, a US fighter Aircraft that fought the M15 was the Grumman F9F Panther which was equiped with the US Version of the Nene-Pratt & Whitney J42 Also in 1946, Cripps returned to India as part of the Cabinet Mission, which proposed formulae for independence to the Indian leaders.

Six weeks later Hugh Dalton resigned as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Cripps succeeded him, with the position of Minister for Economic Affairs now merged into the Chancellorship.

Personal incomes and free time continued to rise, as characterised by cricket and football enjoying unprecedented booms, together with the holiday camps, the dance hall, and the cinema.

He resigned from Parliament the same month, and at the resulting by-election on 30 November he was succeeded as the MP for Bristol South East by Anthony Wedgwood Benn.