THE apparent link between digestive troubles and radicalism is often noted, though rarely pursued with any kind of scientific rigour.

Are people with bothersome guts disproportionately drawn to the revolutionary cause? Or do leftwingers develop such symptoms from worrying about the state of the world? Or is the whole thing a statistical illusion — the result, if you’ll pardon the expression, of relying on too small a sample size?

Whatever the case, “Sir Stifford Crapps” was an inevitable nickname for a man as famous for his asceticism and his stomach problems as for his political actions.

Today, Sir Stafford Cripps (1889-1952) is mostly remembered as the architect of post-war austerity, and as embodying an unattractive puritanical streak which, supposedly, taints the British left.

That’s an unfair legacy for someone who admittedly may have ended up on the wrong side of the barricades, but who at one point in his life was arguably one of the most effective rebels in our history.

In 1939 Cripps was expelled from the Labour Party for supporting a popular front against fascism, in which Labour would co-operate with the Liberals to its right and the communists to its left.

A few months later, of course, the popular front was universal common sense — everyone together against the Nazis. But at the time it was heresy and Cripps was cast into the darkness for daring to suggest it.

However, when Churchill became prime minster in 1940 he appointed Cripps — still banned from the Labour Party, still officially a rebel — as ambassador to the Soviet Union.

This made tactical sense; as a leftist with no anti-communist baggage, Cripps would be someone the Soviets wouldn’t distrust on sight, at a moment when relations between the two countries were almost non-existent. At a more personal level, Churchill was glad to exile a man he despised, to live as “a lunatic in a country of lunatics.”

And so it was that this radical outcast found himself in what became one of the most important positions in world affairs; many historians credit him with having done more than any other person to ensure the alliance between Britain and the USSR, which played such a crucial part in the defeat of Hitler.

Cripps was born into a wealthy and political family. Beatrice Webb, a leading intellectual figure of the Fabian Society, was his aunt, while his father was a Conservative MP who subsequently became a Labour Cabinet minister.

As a young man, though, Stafford was more concerned with religious matters, having been raised in an evangelical household which held knowledge of the New Testament to be the key to leading a good life.

Though he never had any financial need to work, Stafford wasn’t one for idleness. After serving as a Red Cross ambulance driver during WWI, and then as the manager of a giant armaments factory, he became a very successful barrister.

Witnessing the poverty and inefficiency created by capitalism in the 1920s moved him, quite gradually, away from the unexamined conservatism of his youth. By the time he was elected as Labour MP for Bristol East in 1931, he was firmly identified with the Marxist left of the party.

So shocked was he by the heavy-drinking culture of Labour parliamentarians that he became teetotal in protest. This — along with the fact that he followed a rather severe and humble form of Christianity, and did so without embarrassment in an increasingly secular age — perhaps laid the foundations of the seemingly imperishable myth that he was a prig and a killjoy.

In fact, contemporaries found him good company, sociable and amusing. His dining habits, it’s true, were somewhat bleak, but that was mainly because of the colitis which blighted his whole adulthood, having begun during a period of extreme overwork in WWI.

Finding little aid in conventional medicine, and though sceptical of crank cures, he was willing to give anything a go. He became vegetarian, and followed a raw food regime whenever possible. At one point, it’s said, he adopted the briefly fashionable “oranges-only” diet (which, ironically, proved fruitless.)

Eventually he even gave up smoking, on doctor’s orders, and so the image was complete: Cripps was a highly religious public servant, working every hour that God sent, who didn’t drink, didn’t eat meat, didn’t smoke, and who practised what he preached when it came to belt-tightening and sacrificing life’s pleasures for the greater good. Incorruptible, certainly, admirable, surely, but a bit of a cold fish.

His vegetarianism created many anecdotes, as he travelled the world on political business — to India, China and the Soviet Union in particular. He developed the strategy of eating as much as possible of whatever non-flesh food was on offer, no matter what it was.

On one occasion a colleague noted that Cripps’s meal had consisted of two entire chocolate cakes, because there was nothing else suitable on the table.

A Sunday Pictorial profile of Cripps during WWII reported admiringly that “he usually has one meal a day, consisting of vegetables, sour milk, wholemeal bread and butter, and an occasional baked potato.”

Seen by the public as “the man who brought Russia into the war,” Cripps enjoyed considerable popularity after 1941. He was even thought of as a possible rival to Churchill, for a while; the prime minister’s standing was falling as Cripps’s rose. Churchill himself so feared this threat to his position that he took Cripps into the war Cabinet in an attempt to neutralise him.

For the rest of his life, Cripps was a major political force. But his medical situation never did improve, and on October 20 1950 he resigned from the government and from Parliament.

He died in 1952 at a convalescent home in Zurich run, inevitably enough, by health freaks who believed in the philosophy of Vitalism.

It’s undeniable that, as chancellor of the Exchequer in Clement Attlee’s post-war government, Cripps took the familiar path from far-left rebel to moderate minister, content merely to administer capitalism less dreadfully than the Tories (although, from today’s perspective, we can only look back with envy on the massive programmes of public spending, reconstruction, investment and rising living standards which he oversaw.)

But I still think there’s more to him than his funny food and his stern face; that his early achievements should not be lost to posterity. In other words, he should be known to history as Sir Stafford Cripps, not Sir Stifford Crapps.

You can sign up for Mat Coward’s Rebel Britannia Substack at www.rebelbrit.substack.com for more strange strikes, peculiar protests, bizarre boycotts, unusual uprisings and different demos.