by Hugh Purcell
The electoral shift was a reaction to a decade of rationing and constant exhortation to personal sacrifice for the public good. It was an example of Galbraith’s Law that centre-left parties do themselves out of a job by making more and more people comfortable, secure and therefore conservative.1
There was also a redrawing of boundaries, particularly in the London area, that favoured the Tories. All of this accounted for the loss of votes for Freeman in Watford, but nevertheless he won again, assisted by a visit to the constituency from Prime Minister Attlee. Freeman did not attend the count.
Labour’s campaign had been lacklustre. The Big Five were exhausted. Foreign Secretary Ernie Bevin was seriously ill, often away or falling asleep in meetings. Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Stafford Cripps was failing fast, with a gastric illness that deprived him of food and sleep. Prime Minister Attlee suffered from gastric problems too, so he was in and out of hospital. That left Hugh Dalton, whose power – though not influence – was much reduced after he had resigned from the chancellorship in 1947, after inadvertently leaking Budget changes to a journalist. He was back in the Cabinet, but with a relatively minor post as Minister of Town and Country Planning.
That left Aneurin (Nye) Bevan, but he too was a spent force as Minister for Health – a post he had held since 1945. He was ambitious for one of the top two posts, but Attlee preferred Hugh Gaitskell as Chancellor when Cripps resigned in October 1950, and he preferred Herbert Morrison as Foreign Secretary when Ernie Bevin had to retire six months later in March 1951. Bevan was humiliated and intent on revenge. That January, he had agreed to move sideways to become Minister of Labour; his successor as Minister of Health, Hilary Marquand, did not have a seat in the Cabinet.
The stage was now set for the split in the Labour Party that contributed to the loss of the next general election, banished it to the political wilderness for the next thirteen years, and caused an interparty civil war of a ferocity Labour was not to experience again until the early 1980s. It was, said Gaitskell to Dalton, ‘a fight for the soul of the Labour Party’. It was a fight that cost Freeman his promising political career – one that some people thought might have taken him to party leadership and even beyond.
A year into the second Labour government, shortly after Freeman had steered through the iron and steel debate, Dalton spoke to Attlee again about him:
I then returned to John Freeman, recalling his very remarkable speech last week; how he had been completely wasted at [the Ministry of ] Supply; how Strauss had given him no show at all. Attlee seemed shocked to hear this. Then Attlee said he would like to put Freeman [as a minister] at the War Office. ‘That,’ he said, ‘would be a bold stroke, wouldn’t it?’2
Dalton reported this to Freeman, who agreed he would accept the job if it were offered. Promotion was in the air. Michael Foot concurred with this: ‘Thanks to his extreme competence at the despatch box and elsewhere, he was clearly destined for early promotion.’3 As it turned out, this was the apex of Freeman’s political career. Only two months later, on 23 April 1951, he resigned from the government. He did so with Nye Bevan and Harold Wilson, and this precipitated the split of the Labour Party.
The row had been simmering for several weeks. The presenting issue was whether or not Bevan, spoiling for a fight, would resign over the government’s decision to impose charges on his precious health service. If so, would his resignation, as Freeman believed, bring down the Labour government within weeks? Throughout this period – ‘this odious war of nerves, which is becoming totally intolerable’ is how Dalton described it in his diary on 20 April – Dalton was both mediator and counsellor to Freeman, taking his task very personally. He begged Freeman to stay in the government like a forlorn lover:
I say as we part: ‘I shall be très déchiré [heartbroken] if you break.’
He [Freeman] says: ‘Don’t let’s discuss it again out here.’
I say: ‘No one will know what déchiré means. But your going would serve no useful purpose whatsoever.’4
In the event, this was true. What is more, the Labour establishment from Attlee downwards tried harder to keep Freeman than it did either Bevan or Wilson. He was offered a choice of jobs. So why did Freeman resign? Didn’t he really want the seat in the Cabinet that was his for the taking?
Ten years ago, when I began writing this biography, I asked Norman MacKenzie to pose these questions to Freeman. Freeman replied that he resigned because he had given his word that if Bevan went, ‘so would I, and I didn’t want to renege on my promise as others had done’. Personal principles were more important to Freeman than political ones – and once he made up his mind he never changed it.
One external event had brought about the split. This was the Korean War that Britain had engaged in since July 1950, fearing that a victory for Stalin and North Korea might well heat up the Cold War in Europe. The fear led to a massive re-armament programme in the United States and Britain. In January 1951, the new Chancellor, Hugh Gaitskell, proposed in Cabinet a colossal increase in the defence budget of 30 per cent, to total £4.7 billion spending over the following three years. He acknowledged that this would divert over half a million workers into defence production, and adversely affect house building, investments and consumer spending. What is more, he volunteered that there was no certainty Britain would be able to obtain the additional raw materials or machine tools necessary to achieve this target: ‘There is a danger that the increased defence programme might, in practice, yield less and not more production within the next two years.’5 Nevertheless, the Cabinet agreed to the programme. It remained to be seen how the government intended to pay for it, and that was a matter for Gaitskell’s Budget two months later. For Freeman, as an under-secretary at the Ministry of Supply, and therefore closely involved in the process, it was the re-armament proposals that became his resignation issue.
Gaitskell knew that the only way he could meet the costs of re-armament would be to curb expenditure on social services, particularly health, which had been protected under Bevan like a sacred cow. On 9 April, he informed the Cabinet of his Budget proposals. These included capping the National Health Service expenditure at £400 million and imposing charges for glasses and false teeth, which would produce £13 million. Bevan retorted that these savings were a serious betrayal of socialist principles and threatened that he would be obliged to resign if they were announced in the Budget the following day.
In the circumstances, the savings were very modest, but a personality clash inflamed the row. Bevan was the son of a Welsh miner. He had left school at thirteen and was propelled to greatness by a passionate belief in socialism. Gaitskell was the son of a civil servant. He had been educated at Winchester and Oxford University and lived in Hampstead. Bevan called him a ‘dessicated calculating machine’. What is more, this new-school Labourite had got the job Bevan had coveted after a lifetime of service. The social divide ran through the party, though there were some like Freeman – a ‘Nye-ite’ and member of the ‘Keep Left’ group – who had crossed it. This is not to say there was no policy issue. For the Bevanites, it was a matter of socialist principle: for the Gaitskellites, it was good economic housekeeping.
Gaitskell refused to back down, threatened to resign himself, and was only given the go ahead by Attlee to announce the Budget on the morning of the announcement itself. ‘I’m afraid they will have to go,’ said the Prime Minister, referring to Bevan and his supporters.6
Shortly before, Gaitskell and his wife Dora had been staying with the royal family at Windsor. The King had waggled his foot at his Chancellor and said: ‘I really don’t see why people should have false teeth free any more than they should have a pair of shoes free.’7
Dalton provides in his diary an intimate account of the splitting apart of his party. He writes how his friend John Freeman twisted and turned in reaction to events – but, at the end of the drama, stayed loyal to Bevan:
Friday 6 April. Freeman thinks that on the narrow issue – teeth and spect
acles – Nye would have very little support. But on the wider issue of finance and re-armament he would have a lot, and Freeman himself would have to consider his position very carefully. He was sure our re-armament was excessive, could not be carried out and would cause great dislocation. If Nye went, he said, the government could not last more than eight or ten weeks.
That Sunday, 8 April, Wilson and Freeman spent a long evening at Bevan’s home in Cliveden Place, persuading him to broaden his opposition from simply health cutbacks, hence Freeman’s later remark: ‘When Nye had finally determined his course of action, Harold and I made up Bevanism to give him a justification for it.’8 Freeman’s claim is an exaggeration because Nye had resisted the colossal re-armament policy from the beginning, but it was the health issue that stirred him emotionally. Dalton’s diary continues:
Monday 9 April. I saw Freeman later this evening. He said all Nye’s friends were trying to persuade him not to resign before the party meeting on Wednesday, but if he goes he must go with him. He hopes that, if we are on opposite sides of the gulf, it won’t end our friendship.
Tuesday 10 April. Freeman came to see me in my room. He has been working hard on Nye. He still thinks that if Nye goes he must go too. But he won’t decide yet. I am trying to make him think less idolatrously of his idol!
In fact, on that day, 10 April, Freeman wrote what Michael Foot MP (Bevan’s biographer) called ‘a very powerful letter’ to Bevan. His point was that Attlee intended to call a general election in the near future to increase the size of the Labour majority. If Bevan resigned in April, it would cause a split in the party that would lead to an election debacle ‘of 1931 proportions’, whereas if Bevan campaigned during the election on the reasons for his threatened resignation, ‘three-quarters of the Labour movement would rally to you’:
If you could find some way of not making your resignation public at the moment on this issue, you would not lack the opportunity in the coming weeks to go out on an issue to which millions of Labour supporters would rally enthusiastically – [your opposition to] the drive towards war, the absence of any coherent foreign policy, the inflationary and anti-working-class character of our re-armament economies. We would still probably lose the election but you would hold the initiative and have a good chance of capturing the machine.
He ended, however, with the promise to stand by Nye whatever his choice: ‘The assurances I gave you this afternoon are in no way modified or withdrawn; but they do give me the right to address this last appeal to you.’9
To Freeman, then, personal loyalty was everything. True to his nature, however, he showed no apparent warmth or intimacy towards Bevan. Michael Foot, who was a witness to these events, makes that same point in his biography. Bevan, he writes, described Freeman as the most inscrutable of his Bevanite colleagues, calling him ‘the man from Saturn’ (i.e. a man of mystery).
Bevan did agree, however, to postpone his resignation until the third reading of the Health Charges Bill on 23 April, should that come to pass. Back to Dalton’s diary:
Tuesday 17 April. Freeman says he would give anything to leave his present post. He thinks he must tell Clem, if he offers him the War Office, that he would have gone with Nye if Nye had resigned. I ask how far Freeman will follow Nye like a dog? Won’t he in future recover his own judgement? He says yes, certainly, and if Nye were just to resign on the Charges Bill, he thinks he wouldn’t go with him.
Friday 20 April. What, asked Hugh [Gaitskell], did I think of Freeman? I said I thought he was by far the most talented of the under-secretaries. Hugh said he liked him very much and Dora liked his wife [Mima]. Hugh would quite like him as financial secretary to the Treasury. He said he had been much moved by a letter from Freeman. He hoped there was no fear of his resigning.
Freeman’s letter to Gaitskell said that breaking up the government on such a narrow issue as ‘teeth and spectacles’ was the height of folly and he was working to prevent it happening. He hoped their good relations would continue and he was ‘delighted to see how clearly the mark of greatness sits upon you’.10 The strength of Freeman’s position as a junior minister was that he was valued highly by both sides – the Bevanites and the Gaitskellites – and his charm and conciliatory manner therefore might have brought them together. Presumably Attlee thought so, which is why Freeman’s future looked so bright. Dalton’s diary continues:
Sunday 22 April. I go walking with John Freeman on Hampstead Heath. I say I feel as if I am taking him to a high place and tempting him, as they tempted Christ, by showing him all the kingdoms of the earth. I tell him his stock is quite high and there are various ministerial changes that might interest him apart from the War Office. He agrees to see Hugh and tells me he is not now committed to follow Nye.
The following day, events everyone had dreaded unfolded. During the debate on the third reading of the Health Charges Bill, Bevan resigned from the government. Dalton’s diary drips with despair:
Monday 23 April. Nye flopped today in resignation speech. It was most vicious. I saw John Freeman standing at the Bar listening. I tried to find him. I was very much agitated. Later I went to see Willy Whiteley [the Chief Whip]. Willy had asked John if he could tell the PM that John would accept promotion. He had asked for an hour to think it over. [Then Freeman had written Whiteley a note informing him of his intention to resign.] Willy told me John was out of the government.
Then I saw John in the passage and brought him to my room and was very sad. Then the phone rang from No. 10 and the secretary asked John to go see the PM in hospital [where he was receiving treatment for ulcers]. I gave him my car. I said, ‘Think again. Be prepared to change your mind.’ But later that night he wrote me another note. ‘No change. So sorry!’
Oh, hell!
Dalton concludes his account of Freeman’s resignation in his memoirs:
The next day I talked to Freeman on Hampstead Heath. He told me that Attlee had been ‘most kind and friendly’ but that his own mind remained unchanged. I told him, with Attlee’s authority, that if he stayed Attlee had the possibility of promoting him to be either Secretary of State for War or president of the Board of Trade [both Cabinet posts]. I asked him to reconsider his opinion, but he made it clear he had finally decided to resign. I deeply regretted this. As a junior minister, he had not been fully used, not given a chance, and he had become browned off. If he had been my junior minister, things might have been different. I liked him and thought highly of his political intelligence.11
Freeman was not susceptible to flattery and, in his mind, Dalton had gone too far. He said in the 1970s that this ‘clumsy talk of promotion’ had made him more determined not to change his mind, for he had interpreted it as simply a bribe to keep him without any commitment attached.
Unlike Nye Bevan and Harold Wilson, John Freeman did not make a resignation speech. Instead, he wrote to Attlee. He did not give as a reason for resigning the ‘teeth and spectacles’ charges (although he did oppose the ‘real reduction in our social services’), but instead cited his opposition to the re-armament programme – it was neither practical nor necessary and it would ‘rob us of our vitality as a nation’. He said he had hoped these difficulties would be resolved by internal discussion, given time, but that the government had forced the issue with the Budget. He felt honour-bound to resign from a post that, although minor, carried the responsibility for administering a policy of which he did not approve. The Prime Minister replied that he did not agree with Freeman’s reasons and was sorry to lose him, but he accepted the resignation.12
All three men majored on re-armament as the main reason for resignation, but this was only the presenting reason. It was a common assumption that Bevan resigned out of pique, Wilson out of opportunism, and only Freeman out of principle.
Bevan certainly resigned out of pique, as his resignation speech made very clear. He did put across his central argument, but he did so with a Welsh hwyl (emotional fervour) that many found excessive. The American re-armament programme was
a greater threat to the West, he blustered, than the Russians were, for if Britain followed it, the programme would imperil ‘the foundations of political liberty and parliamentary democracy’. Much of the rest of the speech was an attack on Gaitskell for his incompetence as Chancellor. Freeman dropped a regretful note to Dalton: ‘Nothing could have done more to influence me the other way than Nye’s outburst this afternoon.’13
Meanwhile, Dalton was sure Wilson’s motives had been opportunistic throughout. He referred to him dismissively as ‘Nye’s Dog’ and wrote: ‘I made no effort to persuade Harold Wilson from resigning. In contrast with the other two, he did not have much strength of character.’ Wilson made little secret of his tactical resignation, telling Woodrow Wyatt at the time:
He feared he would be blamed as president of the Board of Trade for the adverse balance of trade arising from the Korean War, to the detriment of his career. He thought a resignation at this stage would do his long-term career good. It would win him backing from the Labour Party activists, among whom he would be able to work, and with whom he had had no contact.14
Wyatt felt so ‘shocked and disappointed’ to hear this that he did not talk to Wilson for the next eight years. Freeman’s own view was that ‘at first [Wilson’s resignation] seemed public-spirited, but later I thought that it was his best chance of getting to the top: if Wilson backed Bevan, and Bevan won, then the succession was his’.
