by Roy Jenkins
Bevan’s high point was a censure debate in July 1942, just before the global strategic balance was changed by the German defeat in front of Stalingrad and Britain’s morale was transformed by Montgomery’s victory over Rommel at Alamein. On the first day of the censure motion Wardlaw-Milne, the dissident Tory mover, produced bathos by his suggestion that the Duke of Gloucester be appointed Commander-in-Chief. Bevan, opening on the second day, had to retrieve the position. He did so with deadliness. ‘The Prime Minister’, he said, ‘wins debate after debate and loses battle after battle.’ It was probably the most damaging remark, six months after Singapore and four months before Alamein, made against Churchill during the whole course of the war. The Prime Minister defeated the censure motion by 475 to 25, but as Rab Butler with typical ambiguous felineness subsequently remarked, ‘Churchill had had his day … but Aneurin Bevan had made his mark.’
Bevan’s imagery was sometimes unforgettable. Churchill had described Italy as ‘the soft under-belly of the Axis’. As the Allies endeavoured painfully to fight their way up the peninsula over the switchback of the Apennines in 1943-4, Bevan dismissed the strategy as nonsense. ‘Is this the soft under-belly of the Axis? We are climbing up his backbone.’ On another occasion he compared Churchill’s slow approach to a Second Front in France with the approach of an old husband to a young bride: ‘fascinated, apprehensive, sluggish’.
Yet it would be a mistake to allow his lapidary phrases to obscure the foolish recklessness of many of his ideas. He was totally starry-eyed about Russia in 1941-4 and looked to Moscow not merely for a stubborn national defence but for the libertarian leadership of the world. This led him to advocate a Second Front for 1941; even 1942 or 1943, he held, would be dilatory. Had his advice been taken, he would have been a butcher on a scale that dwarfed Field Marshal Haig. He never bought the idea of the Duke of Gloucester as Commander-in-Chief but in 1941 he wanted the British Army put temporarily under the command of émigré Czech, Polish or French generals, and in 1942 he wanted the Soviet Marshal Timoshenko to command British troops in an immediate assault on Fortress Europe. In 1944-5 he began to be disenchanted with Stalin, and being always suspicious and reserved in his attitude to America he played with an ‘organic confederation’ in Western Europe comprising all the obvious countries, plus ‘a sane Germany and Austria’ with ‘an enlightened Britain’ graciously accepting leadership. But as soon as such a European union began to become a practical proposition in the 1950s Bevan shied violently away from it.
Whatever his extravagances and inconsistencies, however, he emerged from the war as a colourful and famous figure, even if on the whole an unpopular one. Any elected office in the Labour Party continued to elude him, and in 1944 he had been very close to his second expulsion from it. He was obviously anathema to ‘patriotic’ opinion, and although he burnished his steel on Churchill this did not arouse any feelings of chivalrous courtesy in the latter. ‘As great a curse to his country in time of peace as he was a squalid nuisance in time of war,’ which were Churchill’s phrases in December 1945, well after victories had ceased to be elusive, was not the way in which one saluted a knightly opponent.
Why, then, did Attlee make Bevan the youngest and most controversial of his Cabinet appointments after the Labour landslide? Of those who were in a position to influence Attlee, his claims could hardly have been urged by Bevin or Morrison, who were even more antipathetic to Bevan than they were to each other, or by Dalton, who had recently written of him as being ‘more than usually hysterical and abrasive’. Nor was there any obvious affinity between Attlee himself, ‘reek[ing] of the suburban middle-class values which Bevan detested’ as Michael Foot put it, and Bevan’s flamboyant bohemianism. (Bevan’s style was not suburban, whatever else it was. In 1944 he and Jennie Lee had removed themselves from the Berkshire countryside near Newbury to a fine house (cheap at the time) in Cliveden Place, between Eaton and Sloane Squares, as fashionable a London address as it is possible to imagine.)
Attlee liked balancing between the different factions of the Labour Party and was careful never to commit himself to tribal loyalties. But he also liked the quick despatch of Cabinet business and neat administration. He must have regarded Bevan’s intoxication with words as the enemy of speed and at best a risky bet for neatness. And he increased the hazard by giving him a department with one of the heaviest administrative burdens in Whitehall. The Ministry of Health to which Bevan was appointed in 1945 was essentially the same partly misnamed ministry that Neville Chamberlain had preferred to the Exchequer in 1924. It embraced housing, local government and the Poor Law, as well as such limited responsibility as the state took before 1948 for hospitals and doctors.
It was therefore a crucial department for the Labour Government’s impact upon the condition of the people. But it was also a ‘safe’ one in the sense which first Charles de Gaulle in the late 1940s and then François Mitterrand in the 1980s turned into a term of art when they were the only two French heads of state to accept Communists in their governments. Communist ministers were necessary but they must not be allowed to get their hands on foreign affairs, defence, finance, or the interior (police). No one (other than perhaps Senator McCarthy) ever thought Bevan was a Communist, but Attlee never let Bevan get near any of these four departments, even when in 1950-1 two of them became vacant in quick succession. The paradoxes of Attlee’s attitude to Bevan were compounded by the fact that while Attlee destabilized his government by never giving him one of these great offices of state, there is quite a lot of evidence that, if Bevan could ever have brought himself to behave calmly for even a couple of years, Attlee would have preferred him, certainly to Morrison and maybe to Gaitskell, as his successor.
That was all in the future. The reality was that in 1945 Bevan was given an opportunity far beyond his or anyone else’s expectations and advanced upon it with the eagerness of an enthusiastic schoolboy. Attlee bestowed it upon him with more of the bracing admonition of an old-style schoolmaster than of the comradely confidence of a fellow socialist campaigner. ‘You are starting with me with a clean sheet … Now it is up to you. The more you can learn the better.’
Surprisingly, Bevan did not seem to resent this patronizing pat on the head (the size of the tip that accompanied it was no doubt a factor) and got down to the five and three-quarter years (five and a half of them at the Ministry of Health) that were his sole experience of office and his sole claim to constructive achievement as opposed to the magical deployment of words. During this period he built a moderate quantity of high-quality council houses and launched the National Health Service in a hybrid, pragmatic and original form which has broadly since persisted. He then flounced out of the government in April 1951, taking with him as a hardly noticed adjutant a future Prime Minister in the shape of Harold Wilson. It was the most seminal resignation since Joseph Chamberlain left the Balfour Government in 1903. In the late 1950s the Thorneycroft resignations were merely ‘a little local difficulty’. In the 1960s George Brown’s was just a banging of a door in the wind. In the 1980s Heseltine, Lawson and Howe achieved a cumulative effect, but Bevan’s stood on its own and reverberated down the next decade.
The main question is how great was his 1945-50 achievement. Did it justify the Labour Party myth into which, quite a long time later, it became elevated? In the 1950s it was famously excoriated by Macleod, subjected to a rather loose bombardment by Churchill and Macmillan, and privately undermined (although under great provocation) by Dalton, Morrison and Gaitskell. ‘Nye left a lot of loose ends. But what could you expect with someone with such an untidy mind who was in any event nearly always in the smoking room of the House of Commons from 5.30 p.m. onwards.’ This was the sort of comment that became widespread. Did Bevan’s administrative record deserve it?
His housing performance, for some time at least, bore an uncomfortable resemblance to his 1942 strictures of Churchill. He won debate after debate but was bereft of victories on the building sites. During this period he embe
llished his replies to House of Commons debates, and largely got away with, a series of remarkable animadversions on the aesthetics of housing policy. He denounced ‘the fretful fronts stretching along the great roads out of London’ of 1930s building and proclaimed that he was not going to have the landscape desecrated by ‘ugly houses poking their stupid noses into the air because they are too high for their width’. Up to the end of 1946 there was not much danger of many new houses poking their noses anywhere, for only 60,000 had been completed in the eighteen months since the end of the war. In the third full year, as is the habit with production programmes, there was a movement into relative spate, and well over 200,000 were completed in 1948. By then he was in trouble with successive Chancellors for commanding too large a timber share of scarce dollar imports and had his programme cut back for several years to come. In the infinitely complicated game of bandying housing statistics he ended up with a defensible record in numbers and a good one for the quality of houses built. Harold Macmillan subsequently upstaged him on numbers although he achieved this partly by reducing the size and quality of the units.
The creation of the National Health Service was a less ephemeral battleground than was provided by the exchange of housing statistics. Bevan of course did not create it out of nothing. Two successive Tory ministers had been working on the issue since 1943, and the late 1940s would have seen the creation of some form of National Health Service whoever had been Minister of Health and even had Labour not won in 1945. Nevertheless, Bevan deserves the credit that belongs to those who are in the right place at the right time and who do not fumble the opportunity with which they are presented. Furthermore, he deployed his forces with great strategic skill, advancing from one to another battle that he could win, and never engaging in those that he could not, except occasionally to fight a drawn diversionary action the noise from which helped his more central purposes. His adversaries were not so much the Conservatives, who were throughout more embarrassed than aggressive, although obligingly voting against both the second and third readings of the bill. They were the doctors, a traditionally noisy profession, who had the advantage of being mostly popular with their patients, but the disadvantage of being fissiparous; and the local authorities, strongly represented in the Cabinet by Morrison, the 1930s leader of the London County Council, the most powerful and efficient of them, which wanted to keep control of their own hospitals.
The doctors, and particularly the grand ones associated with the voluntary teaching hospitals, wished at all costs to be free of the local authorities. However, their great hospitals, while trailing clouds of glory, had little prospect of financing themselves satisfactorily in the post-war world. Bevan, helped by his best officials whom he captivated almost as much as Napoleon did his marshals, saw the gap and drove through it with adventurous skill. He proposed to unify the hospital service (two-thirds local authority with whiffs of the Poor Law about it, and one-third voluntary with whiffs of Lady Bountiful) and run it nominally as a nationalized service, but with a great deal of consultant control.
To do this he had to defeat Morrison in Cabinet, which he did in October 1945, but once he had done so he had the Royal Colleges on his side, particularly as he further sweetened the consultants by allowing them pay beds and the continuation of private practice alongside their public responsibilities. This left the British Medical Association, essentially representing the general practitioners, as an army whose commanders had defected. In compensation Charles Hill, their deputy secretary, widely known as the Radio Doctor and later to be a Conservative MP and minister, put on a great performance as a ranker general, and they also had the advantage, as general practitioners, of being close to the ground. Bevan was accused (by R. A. Butler, for example, who contrasted Bevan’s behaviour with his own mollifying treatment of the teachers in 1944) of handling them truculently. It probably suited him to do so. First, the Lloyd George experience at the beginning of National Insurance in 1912-13 suggested that doctors always capitulated at the end. Second, Bevan needed some ‘noises off’ in order to distract attention from how far away his NHS was from the models which the Socialist Medical Association had previously promulgated. Doctors remained unsalaried, there were no local health centres, preventive medicine was discounted, and the split between the general practitioners and the hospitals became greater than ever before. But he got his bill on the statute book by the end of 1946, and, perhaps more difficult, the NHS in operation by 5 July 1948.
Bevan must therefore be accounted a considerable success as a departmental minister. He had the essential qualities of being able to command and enthuse his civil servants, of fixing his strategic objectives, and of getting his way in Cabinet. However, as is often the way with upwardly mobile ministers, three years was enough for him in one ministry, and in 1948/9 he was ripe for a move. Attlee did not give him one. Why not is a much greater mystery than why he put Bevan at Health in the first place. It was almost his only major failure in deft Cabinet management. The new job did not have to be close to the core. Even the Colonies, then an absorbing department, would have done. Instead he left Bevan to vegetate, powerfully but vainly defending his housing programme against the facts of Britain’s overstrained resources, being accused of letting his health estimates run out of control, but probably doing so no more than anyone else introducing a new and thirsty service would have done.
Somewhere around 1951, however, Bevan began to acquire a messianic complex, exacerbated by the view, which by no means necessarily goes with being a messiah, that his rivals were pygmies. He had long been an irreverent critic, an impudent boy with a catapult aiming his stones, without much discrimination between his party opponents and his nominal friends, at the top hats of the great and the good. To do that required a self-confident courage, but was quite different from believing that he was surrounded by colleagues who were not only adversaries, but adversaries with whom it was an insult to have to soil his hands.
The transition from the boy David to Gulliver in Lilliput was an abrupt one, which it is difficult to feel did not stem substantially from his double passing over for both the Exchequer and the Foreign Office, although it was no doubt exacerbated by policy resentment that first his housing programme and then his health service were under attack from within the government. It showed itself not only in his bad-tempered resignation of April 1951, but also in a series of contemptuous denunciations. Of Gaitskell he had exploded to John Strachey in 1950: ‘But he’s nothing, nothing, nothing.’ Five years later he was thought to have called him ‘a desiccated calculating machine’, but in fact it was Attlee whom Bevan then had in his sights.
For Gaitskell, however, he never had any real respect or liking, even when they were thrown into alliance by Bevan’s 1957 denunciation of unilateralism and the need for both of them to win the 1959 election if either was ever again to hold office. At best Bevan regarded him as an honest but unimaginative bureaucrat who had too pedestrian a mind - and life - ever to be a real leader. The nearest he could get to friendliness was to be patronizing.
About Attlee his feelings were more mixed. He put him several notches above Morrison, whom he regarded as a squalid party boss, and with some reason. Attlee, after all, apart from the qualities that have given him such a vast posthumous reputation, had been the indispensable agent for Bevan’s success at the Ministry of Health, both by appointing him and by decisive support in Cabinet. But indebtedness is not always the basis for respect, and Attlee’s bourgeois primness grated on Bevan’s flamboyance. It was by two acts of gross public discourtesy to Attlee in 1954 that he had his last brush with expulsion from the Labour Party.
When reproved for this behaviour by the Shadow Cabinet Bevan said that his nerves could not stand the strain of such ‘impudent’ attacks, and it was in much the same mood that he told Crossman a few months later that he was by no means sure that he wanted to be leader if he had to behave circumspectly in order to become it. ‘I’m not a proletarian or an intellectual,’ he inconsequenti
ally added. ‘I am an aristocrat with a real distaste for that kind of politics.’
There is a danger of seeing the Bevan of the 1950s too much through the prism of Crossman’s voluminous Diaries. Crossman did not really either like or admire Bevan, although he followed him for nearly five years, but mainly because he could never win Attlee’s approval and found it difficult to reconcile himself to Gaitskell whom he thought of as a much inferior Wykehamist to himself. Nevertheless, it is impossible not to cite Crossman once more because of the ironic memorability of his (mostly) benign description of Bevan’s behaviour on their infamous trip to the Italian Socialist Party Conference in Venice in February 1957. ‘Bland, ebullient, impeccably dressed in his beautiful new suit, fresh white linen with his handkerchief falling out of his breast pocket, pretentiously discussing the qualities of Italian wine, pretending to knowledge of Venetian architecture, laying down the law about Italian politics with vitality and charm, and occasionally with the wildest irresponsibility.’
