by Roy Jenkins
From there the road led on to the Foreign Office, which might have excited him in 1955 but which merely wearied him in 1963, to the refusal of an earldom from Home in October 1964 and the acceptance of a life barony from Wilson in January 1965 (a very Rab touch this, half disdainful throwaway and half unfortunate cock-up), thirteen years of hesitant spring and glorious autumn as Master of Trinity, followed by three and a half years of declining health, death on Budget day 1982, and a memorial service in Westminster Abbey with the Government reeling at the beginning of the Falklands crisis. Even at the end Rab could not be far from the epicentre of politics. Maybe he was the best Prime Minister we never had. Certainly he was the most ambivalently fascinating of the nearly men.
Aneurin Bevan
When Bevan died in the summer of 1960, aged only sixty-two and after six months of cruel illness, he had already become something of a national hero. Conservatives who throughout his active career had portrayed him as a symbol of destructive evil, a compounded mixture of Tony Benn and Arthur Scargill at the height of their powers, members of the Labour right who had spent most of the previous decade in implacable battle with him, and even his own old allies and friends who had been dismayed and affronted by his 1957 endorsement of the British H-bomb, were united in their affection and respect.
This final wave of feeling has had the paradoxical affect of leaving an opaque film over his memory. Neither Ernest Bevin nor Stafford Cripps who had died a decade before him, the latter at almost exactly the same age, was mourned as Bevan was, but both have left a more sharply defined imprint upon the recollection of the informed public, Bevin for brutal but constructive working-class statesmanship, Cripps for an ascetic, almost Robespierrian moral authority.
Yet much more than either is Bevan enshrined in the small pantheon of Labour heroes. Although the Labour Party has been less ruthless in disposing of its failing leaders than has the Conservative Party, it has also been more reluctant to award them posthumous honours. From Disraeli to Mrs Thatcher there is a clutch of former Conservatives whose names, appropriately dropped, should evince a cheer. Before a general Labour audience it would now be wise only to try Keir Hardie, Attlee and Bevan in this context. And of these only Attlee was leader and Prime Minister. Of the other three Labour Prime Ministers, Ramsay MacDonald, Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, the last might do the best, but even his ripple of applause might be embarrassingly faint.
Bevan, however, is a safe name to play with. ‘As Nye said’ is the Labour equivalent of Mrs Thatcher’s over-familiar references to the ‘Winston’ she did not know and whose consensual style, in both his governments, she did not understand. But Bevan’s posthumous clouds of glory have by no means swirled exclusively around the Labour Party. His cross-party reputation at the end of his life and in subsequent years was as high as it had at one time been abysmal. Both Churchill’s ‘squalid nuisance’ of the war years and the Minister of Health who in 1948 had rather overdone his sanitary responsibility in referring to the Tories as ‘lower than vermin’ were forgotten. For a short time he was presented as almost all things to all men. He became at once the patriot who rose above petty politics and the keeper of the Labour Party’s socialist conscience; the expression both of the provinces’ revolt against London and of the welcoming tolerance of the metropolis, which made him as much at home in the Café Royal and the Savoy Grill as in the Tredegar Workmen’s Institute (latterly perhaps more so); and the symbol of the generosity as well as the conflict of British politics. Such generalized reverence is a helpful qualification for national sainthood. But it inevitably leaves a certain fuzziness of impression.
Is it now possible to remove the fuzz from Bevan? There have been two main biographies since his death. Michael Foot’s two volumes of inspired hagiography came out in 1962 and 1973. They were hagiography not only because every account of Bevan’s many disputes disparage his opponents with all the fervour of a contemporary polemic, but also because such a normally witty writer as Mr Foot never permits himself to make a joke at Bevan’s expense. He is portrayed as unlaughable at as well as omniscient and impeccable.
The second biography was written by John Campbell and published in 1987. Campbell had previously written about Lloyd George (after his fall from power), F. E. Smith, and me, and is currently engaged on Edward Heath. So he can be regarded as an eclectic political biographer. His portrait of Smith, later Birkenhead, was not only his best book but achieved to a unique degree a combination of the enhancement of the reputation of the author and the destruction of that of the subject. In Bevan’s case he set out to provide a corrective to Foot, and showed convincingly that Bevan’s basic political idea, which was that socialism was essential for efficient production and was therefore in accordance with the tide of history, was about as false as it could have been, and that his only piece of sustained political writing, In Place of Fear (a better title than a text), was fairly flatulent.
Yet, in spite of this ‘pricking of the bloated bladder of falsehood with the poniard of truth’ (to use the opening of one of Bevan’s most successful House of Commons speeches), I think Campbell, too young to have known him, fell under Bevan’s spell while sceptically reading and writing about him. His concluding words were: ‘As well as a rare humanity and gaiety, intelligence, anger and wit, Bevan brought to the life of politics a passionate seriousness which no one who has come after him has begun to match. If to be irreplaceable is to be great, Bevan was a great man after all.’ The tribute is perhaps the more impressive for the apparent reluctance with which it is paid.
I, unlike Campbell, observed Bevan and knew him, although never intimately, over many years. In my adolescent, Oxford and army years he sat in Parliament for the adjacent constituency to my father’s. I was subsequently in the House of Commons with him for the last twelve years of his life. For the first three of them I admired him to the verge of extravagance. For the last nine I was separated almost completely from him by the bitter depth of the Gaitskellite/Bevanite divide in the Labour Party. Although the ideological gap between the two sections was narrower than that which convulsed the party in its lurch to the left in the early 1980s, the tribes were then more hermetically sealed.
There were a few MPs who managed to transcend this narrowness, but I was emphatically not one of them. Bevan could sometimes be generous across the floor of the House of Commons but amongst young Labour MPs he liked acolytes and not critics, and as a core Gaitskellite I was regarded as outside his pale. For five years or more I exchanged hardly a word with him. He would stalk past in a corridor with a scowling leonine disdain, unnodding and unspeaking. But he was an immanent presence in my early political life, and reactions to his echoing if often petulant and disruptive words and actions dominated a great part of my thoughts, conversations and tactical discussions.
Yet I do not think that this period of living in an opposing armed camp biases me against Bevan today. If anything, it does the reverse, for I am not proud of my narrowness of those years and regret having cut myself off from someone who, whether or not he was a great man, was certainly the second most striking personality of my early years in the House of Commons. During my immersion in Bevan books for the purpose of this essay I find that, like Campbell, I have half fallen under his spell, and wonder why I was so immune to it forty years ago. His phrases ring remarkably fresh down the decades, his arrogance (which was vast) appears fierce rather than ridiculous, and he makes nearly every present Cabinet minister, or his shadow, look tailor-made to be an under-secretary.
This does not, however, answer the question of whether he was a great man. Margot Asquith (whose judgements were far from infallible but who may have been right on this occasion) dismissed Kitchener as a great poster masquerading as a great man. Bevan was not that. Hand in hand with Barbara Castle, who was similarly linked on the other side to Hugh Gaitskell, he did get on to Labour billboards at the 1959 election, but in general he was regarded as too abrasive to be advertising material. A more typical visual
image was a 1955 cartoon showing a reassuring Attlee mask covering the reality of a menacing Bevan which lay behind. But if he was not a great poster masquerading as a great man he may have been a great word-spinner, both in oratory and in conversation, whose judgement, self-discipline and achievement failed to live up to his verbal talent.
He was born in 1897 with few advantages beyond that of starting in the centre of the Labour heartland. He was a non-Welsh-speaking Welshman from Tredegar, a Monmouthshire mining community a couple of miles over a bare hillside from the steel town of Ebbw Vale and eight miles east of Merthyr Tydfil, the cradle of the South Wales industrial revolution where Keir Hardie became the first independent Labour MP three years after Bevan’s birth. The renowned but raw South Wales industrial community, which had erupted into the steep sylvan fortresses of Glamorgan and West Monmouthshire from about 1840 onwards, manifested the mixture of roughness and gentleness which was later to be a special characteristic of Bevan’s oratory. Its class conflict was jagged, its strikes were visceral, but it respected education and learning. Its men, like Bevan’s father, were often quiet and bookish, and its households, again like Bevan’s, were often matriarchal. Essex man would not have been esteemed in Tredegar.
Bevan was none the less not a typical product of the South Wales political class. He did everything too quickly, some would have said too superficially, and once he had an avenue of escape he seized it as completely as did Lloyd George from the very different background of rural North Wales, or Gracie Fields from Rochdale, or Richard Burton from the same South Wales. From his early thirties onwards Tredegar and Ebbw Vale were for Bevan a base and an audience, but not a home or even a place of rest and recreation.
He was a miner for only nine years, although he started at thirteen, as was normal at the time. He was chairman of his lodge (or union branch) at nineteen. He went for two years to the Central Labour College in London soon after the 1918 armistice, but he was a lazy student. He never properly returned to the pits, although he remained in South Wales for eight subsequent years. He was a local councillor for six of them, and then an impatient county councillor for one. In the meantime he had played a central part in running the Tredegar Workmen’s Institute, half a home university library and half a medical insurance scheme. At the time of the General Strike (still aged only twenty-eight) he had filled a vacuum and seized almost as much of a commissar’s local role as on a national scale did his later enemy, Ernest Bevin. (‘His own worst enemy? Not while I’m alive he ain’t,’ as Bevin was to say of Bevan.) In 1929 he superseded the little more than fifty-year-old local MP, an almost unprecedented event in the job-preserving Labour culture. The victim must, however, have been very lackadaisical, for there were plenty of non-Bevan supporters who were anxious to get rid of him. As a result Bevan entered the House of Commons at the age of thirty-one, which was equally unprecedented in the semi-gerontocracy of South Wales miners’ parliamentary representation.
In that 1929 world-slump-buffeted Parliament, with its minority Labour government and misty MacDonald leadership, Bevan’s early speeches were constituency-orientated and surprisingly loyalist. They nevertheless presaged something of the vivid spontaneity of his later philippics. His maiden speech, neither a failure nor memorable, appears to have been made on the spur of the moment. This habit of making even his most important speeches without detailed preparation, which he shared with Gladstone although most conspicuously not with Churchill, makes an enormous difference to the pattern of a politician’s life. In Gladstone’s case it enabled him to carry on his voluminous correspondence with bishops and deans, statesmen and professors, station-masters and booksellers in the morning while electrifying the House of Commons for several hours in the evenings.
In Bevan’s case it enabled him, at least at this stage in his life, to be both lazy and noticed, often not getting up before noon, but making more impact than more diligent colleagues. It also introduced additional hazard into his speech-making. Although he was a gourmand of unusual words he did not have the defences of Gladstone’s convoluted qualifications. Many of Bevan’s most notorious phrases were probably uttered without premeditation.
His early loyalist phase did not last long, and justifiably so, for the Government was supine before unemployment, and its leading members were determinedly unadventurous. Bevan was drawn to those - on both sides of the House - who were more so. It was those with off-beat glamour as well as a capacity for intellectual innovation who most attracted him. His closest House of Commons associates became Oswald Mosley, John Strachey, Frank Owen (a Beaverbrook protégé and subsequent editor who was Liberal member for Hereford), Bob Boothby and Edward Marjoribanks, Quintin Hogg’s half-brother who subsequently committed suicide.
His one close ‘proletarian’ parliamentary friend was Jennie Lee, then looking less forbiddingly partisan than in her middle period, a Fifeshire miner’s daughter but a graduate of Edinburgh University, who had become a Scottish MP at the same time as Bevan had become a Welsh one. There was little romantic attachment between them in that Parliament for her attentions were engaged with Frank Wise, also a Labour MP and a faintly sinister figure of the period, who was twenty years their senior but who died young, aged fifty-eight, in 1933. Miss Lee then married Bevan in 1934. Already by the election of 1931, however, Bevan was sufficiently involved to spend almost the whole time in her constituency of North Lanark, the bleakest part of the Clydeside industrial area, in a vain attempt to save her seat. Amazingly, in that Labour holocaust of an election, he was unopposed in Ebbw Vale.
Bevan’s career in the 1930s did not advance as much as it ought to have done. A Labour parliamentary party of little more than fifty until 1935, and only 150, no more than two or three of whom were aged under forty, after the general election of that year, created one of the great vacuums of political history. In 1931-5 the only surviving trio of ex-ministers, Attlee, Lansbury and Cripps, expanded beyond any previous appreciation of their size to fill it. Then in 1935-40 subsequently reviled governments lived through a series of parliamentary dramas, mostly provoked by stations on the road to Britain’s nadir after a quinquennium of retreat before the Axis.
Bevan remained no more than a fringe politician during this period. He was elected neither to the Shadow Cabinet (by the parliamentary party) nor to the National Executive of the Labour Party (first by the whole conference and then by the constituency parties alone after 1937), but he could always be recruited for a Trafalgar Square or Marble Arch demonstration which the official Labour Party regarded as on the edge of respectability. He was much better known at them than in the House of Commons. He supported Cripps’s call for a United Front with the Communists, and then for a Popular Front across a broader spectrum of politics ‘from Churchill to Pollitt’. For the latter he got himself briefly expelled from the Labour Party but, unlike Cripps, came back a little humiliatingly as soon as he could. His most seminal activity was to be involved in the foundation of Tribune in 1937. In the great post-Norway debate of 7/8 May 1940 he did not speak (probably he tried and was not called), but he did not even pass Disraeli’s test that the important thing was that it should be asked why one was not speaking. At the age of forty-two and after eleven years in the House of Commons his absence was not noticed in the greatest set-piece debate of the century. Everyone spoke their lines like characters in a Shakespeare depiction of a Plantagenet council. But not Bevan.
Yet the consequences that flowed from that debate, and his reaction to them, determined the path of the second half of Bevan’s career more than any participation of his in it could possibly have done. The debate destroyed the Chamberlain Government and the normal pattern of politics, which had made Bevan no more than a noisy irritant, a fly thrashing at a window pane in a vain attempt to get through it. Subsequent high-level party manoeuvres put in its place an all-party coalition, with a rumbustious but revered leader, underpinned by a desperate national situation and a political consensus that comprised almost the whole of the House of Co
mmons except for one right-wing Conservative who was imprisoned and one Communist who was against the war until Hitler attacked Russia a year later. The Labour Party put its first eleven into the Government while its second eleven occupied the Opposition front bench with a determined loyalty, at least until 1943 when the tide had turned and post-war politics began to loom, which gratified Churchill and Attlee but made the House of Commons little more than a simulacrum of the parliamentary democracy which was supposed to be one of the causes for which the war was being fought.
Bevan saw the gap and devoted the next five years to trying to fill it. Primarily this meant attacking Churchill, which he did with a mixture of courage, verve and irresponsibility. His skill was that, although he talked a lot of presumptuous nonsense shot through with shafts of good sense, he never appeared defeatist. Some of his criticisms were ideological; Churchill was too much the prisoner of his class, whose ‘ear is too sensitively attuned to the bugle notes of Blenheim for him to hear the whisperings in the streets’; but others were strategic and appealed more to disgruntled Tories than to loyal Labour members. Probably he never wanted to bring Churchill down. He had no serious candidate to put in his place, for he discounted Attlee and clashed with Bevin and Morrison as violently as he did with Churchill himself. He may have played with the idea of Cripps or Beaverbrook, but then went off each of them in turn. It was more that he genuinely believed that Churchill would be a better war leader if he had more criticism and less adulation (a recipe Bevan singularly failed to apply to himself when he established his own court in the 1950s); and that he had the daring to build up his own reputation by going for the biggest target on the field as Disraeli had done with Peel a hundred years before, as Lloyd George had done with Joseph Chamberlain fifty years later, and as Iain Macleod was to do with Bevan himself ten years into the future.
