Portraits and Miniatures

by Roy Jenkins

  The trip was infamous because, consequent upon it, Bevan put on one of the two really discreditable performances of his life. The first was in 1955 when he tried as a desperate last-minute manoeuvre to offer Morrison, whom he despised, an uncontested election to the leadership of the Labour Party in order to block Gaitskell, who was the strong majority choice.

  The second was in the action against the Spectator following the Venice visit, when Bevan, Crossman and Morgan Phillips (the general secretary of the Labour Party) sued on an almost unbelievably mild libel (‘they puzzled the Italians by their capacity to fill themselves like tanks with whisky and coffee … Although the Italians were never sure if the British delegation was sober, they always attributed to them an immense political acumen’) and sailed to victory on the unfortunate combination of Lord Chief Justice Goddard’s prejudice against the anti-hanging and generally libertarian Spectator of those days and the perjury of the plaintiffs, subsequently exposed in Crossman’s endlessly revealing diaries.

  The fact of the matter was that Phillips was a near-alcoholic, that Bevan was a heavy drinker with a good head, often ‘tanked-up’ (‘tanks’ was indeed a mot juste), habitually in my observation drinking three times as much as he claimed in the witness box he had done in Venice, but never appearing drunk as opposed to flushed and didactic, and that even Crossman, the most abstemious of the three, had an intake that would have terrified most Italian livers. None of this would have mattered had they not falsely claimed the reverse.

  All of the last quinquennium of Bevan’s life was not therefore glorious. But much of it was. Maybe he lost the Labour Party the 1955 election, although my guess is that they would have lost it in any case. In 1959 he probably helped rather than hindered. By then he was becoming something of a paradox. He was a hero who was also an anachronism. He and Churchill were the last great politicians never to adapt to television. Both were in their different ways orators who needed audiences. Macmillan, and after him Wilson, would have made them both look flailing and florid on the box. Indeed the effects of great audiences, physically present, vibrant and adulatory, were a drug that did Bevan far more harm than alcohol or his inherent faults of temper. And the fault was compounded by the utter safeness of Ebbw Vale insulating him from the realities of marginal constituency life.

  In addition, long before the manifest exposure of his central belief that ultimate victory must belong to socialist planning because of its productive efficiency, his subsidiary doctrine of a triumphant Labour Party based on proletarian solidarity (which was always violently contradicted both by his own lifestyle and by the fact that his acolytes were almost uniformly middle-class and even fashionable) began to fray badly at the edges. His last election - Macmillan’s ‘you’ve never had it so good’ consumer durables triumph of 1959 - was the first to be strongly influenced by middle-class aspirations amongst the traditional working class.

  Less than a year after that election Bevan was dead, having been incapacitated for six months. Two and a half years after that Gaitskell, nearly ten years his junior, was dead too. But I somehow doubt if Bevan, had he survived, would have been elected on Gaitskell’s death. I think Wilson would have slipped in ahead of him. So Bevan would have been alive and almost sixty-seven when the first Wilson Government came in. What would have been done with him? He could hardly have been given a nostalgic appointment like Jim Griffiths becoming Secretary of State for Wales. But he would have been a difficult morsel to swallow. Indeed Wilson found it difficult enough to handle his widow, Jennie Lee, to whom he gave nominally only junior status but a privileged position in charge of the arts. I think a surviving Nye Bevan might have paralysed the whole government, a considerable but not a constructive feat.

  Perhaps, in spite of his first three years at the Ministry of Health, that gives the key to his whole life: a considerable but not a constructive statesman. What he indisputably was, however, was a star. Amongst those born around the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century there were four or five incontestable stars, Gladstone, Newman, Tennyson, Dickens, Darwin, maybe Carlyle. They were not always sensible, but anything they touched was infused with excitement. Amongst those born around a hundred years later it is difficult to find a comparable list. Who are the possible candidates: Waugh, and Green, Henry Moore, Dylan Thomas, maybe Graham Sutherland? Bevan certainly deserves the politician’s place on that polymathic list and the knowledge that this was so would, I suspect, have more than compensated him for the thought that, also of his generation, Macmillan, Eden and Home were Prime Minister and he was not.

  Iain Macleod

  Iain Macleod was a very professional politician in both the good and the bad senses of the word. Although he had a darting crossword-puzzle mind, fortified by a phenomenal memory, he was not an intellectual. But as he had a touch of magic about him, he was able to inspire a considerable range of people who were intellectually more gifted and more interested in ideas than he was himself.

  I am not convinced that he was a particularly nice man, but he had insight and insolence, which latter quality put him in the tradition of Disraeli, Joseph Chamberlain and F. E. Smith, and sharply contrasted him with Austen Chamberlain, R. A. Butler and James Callaghan, three politicians who in their differing ways were notably deficient in daring unorthodox thrusts. But the political figure in British history to whom, across a gap of 150 years, Macleod bore an almost uncanny resemblance was George Canning. They both lived for within a few months of fifty-seven years. They were both financially insecure, socially a little indeterminate and had rakish aspects to their lives. They were both compact men with a riveting eye, who stood for a popular (not populist) but sometimes unpredictable Toryism. They were both good at banking their treasure in the hearts of their friends and followers, so that their resonance has been somewhat greater than their achievements. Canning attained higher office than did Macleod (after two periods as Foreign Secretary he had been Prime Minister for six months when he died) and he also accomplished the feat, unique I think for a politician as opposed to a poet, although Gladstone, Disraeli and Churchill might come close, of putting four phrases into the English language.

  So Macleod ought to be pleased with the comparison. He contributed no comparable hand of phrases (indeed the most remembered one associated with him was Salisbury’s discreditable claim that he was ‘too clever by half’) but he was a very considerable orator, inspirational at a party conference, often with a mordant deadliness of phrase in the House of Commons, to whom many would give third place in the pantheon of British speakers of the past fifty years, after only Churchill and Bevan. I am torn in deciding whether he ought to be there. On the one hand I can think of no challenger to topple his oratory off its bronze medal plinth. On the other, I engaged in many parliamentary jousts with him and did not feel intimidated as I certainly would have done with either of the other two.

  I did not find him an amiable ‘shadow’. Quintin Hailsham, Reggie Maudling, Peter Thorneycroft and James Prior, who at one time or another also occupied this position in relation to me, were all much easier to get on with. Macleod had been friendly enough to me before I went to the Treasury, which he had already been shadowing for a couple of years, at the end of 1967. Then for the next two and a half years he became increasingly sour, partisan and withdrawn. He made a tremendous fuss about small change parliamentary procedure issues in relation to the Finance Bill, rather embarrassing his backbenchers by forcing them to walk out of the Committee at one stage. When I followed his advice in 1968 and introduced a National Lottery, subject to a free vote of the House of Commons, he turned round like a squirrel in a cage and successfully voted against it, claiming that the times had become too grave for such frivolity. When I eventually got him to lunch alone at 11 Downing Street (probably a mistaken venue) he sulked throughout the meal, declining both conversational gambits (which was occasionally his habit) and alcoholic refreshment (which was not). No doubt he was in pain from the crippled back and neck which began wi
th a war injury. Perhaps he also had a premonition that time was running out for him. He desperately wanted to be Chancellor, and it was a tragedy for himself, the Heath Government and the country that he occupied the post for only one month. Although he resented me as Chancellor in a way that inevitably diminished the warmth of my feelings for him at the time, this did not kill my longer-term admiration for many of his political qualities. Nor, I hope, does it now make it impossible for me to see and appraise him in perspective.

  Macleod came of Hebridean stock on both sides, but I doubt if, apart from going to school in the ruggedly conformist atmosphere of Fettes in Edinburgh and enjoying holidays of fishing and rough shooting on the Isle of Lewis, Scotland meant a great deal to him. He was born at Skipton in the Yorkshire Dales, where his father was a family doctor, and brought up in a quiet middle middle-class way. He went to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he was an undistinguished undergraduate, save for his high skill at bridge and his liking for betting at Newmarket. Apart from an unsuccessful year’s apprenticeship in the De la Rue banknote and playing-card company he did no job between coming down from Cambridge in 1935 and the outbreak of the war. He earned a substantial but insecure living from playing bridge, but used it to support a life which was more purposeless than gilded.

  He enlisted early and was an officer in time to spend a few weeks in France before the collapse. He was quite badly wounded in a leg and thigh and sent home via St Nazaire before the retreat to Dunkirk. He then had a rather mixed army career. He ended a major on a divisional staff but as the division was in the forefront of the 1944 invasion this brought him no red-tabbed safety. He was back in France on D-day. His degree of promotion was about average for someone of his background and age (he was thirty-two when the war ended). He was not like one of those civilian (that is, non-regular army) brigadiers who were to be his companions on the Conservative benches in the House of Commons - Selwyn Lloyd, Enoch Powell, John Foster, Toby Low (Lord Aldington) - who had risen inexorably. Indeed, accounts of this phase of his life give the impression that he was a feckless, doubtfully disciplined officer. But his four months at the Staff College at the end of 1943 engaged him intellectually in a way that Cambridge never had. He discovered that he was remarkably good at solving the finite problems with copybook answers, and this gave him a new self-confidence which expressed itself in political ambition.

  In 1945, because he happened to be on leave at his father’s holiday house there, he more or less adopted himself as a sort of makeshift Conservative candidate for the Western Isles, and ran third to both the sitting Labour member and the Liberal challenger. Within two months of finally getting out of the army at the beginning of 1946 he had - together with Enoch Powell and Reggie Maudling - been taken on by the Conservative Research Department as part of the parliamentary secretariat. The director thought Macleod was intellectually the least good of the three, but ten years later he decided that Macleod balanced this by being the most formidable politician amongst them. By either criterion it was a distinguished trio amongst whom to compete.

  After another couple of months he was adopted as candidate for Enfield. With a Labour majority of 12,000 it was not an obvious plum of a seat, but a redistribution before the next election (which could be foreseen at least as easily as the run of the cards in a bridge game) gave Macleod only the much more favourable western half of the borough to fight, a comfortable majority in 1950, and no real constituency worries throughout the six subsequent elections that he fought there.

  For his first thirteen years in Enfield he lived there. In 1941 he had married a war widow of striking good looks who had been born Evelyn Blois, a descendant of Essex baronets on her father’s side and of a Disraeli-created peer on her mother’s, and who is now Lady Macleod of Borve, longer-lived but no less dependent upon courage to overcome pain than was her husband. By the end of the war they had two children and had settled in a moderate-sized 1920s house on a sylvan suburban ridgeway. Perhaps surprisingly the Macleods seemed to like suburban living, for although they moved to an SW1 flat when he was Colonial Secretary and then Leader of the House of Commons they were back in Potter’s Bar, just over the Hertfordshire county boundary from Enfield, for much of the 1960s.

  Macleod, more than any other politician I can think of, made both his career and his reputation with a single highly effective House of Commons intervention. F. E. Smith in 1906 sprang at least as much into the public eye with a coruscating maiden speech. But it did not directly make his career, for he was in opposition for the next nine years and on the back benches for the first six of them. Aneurin Bevan achieved his first fame from the impact of his iconoclastic wartime attacks upon Churchill, but it was a cumulative effect rather than a single speech that produced the result. And, amongst Macleod’s own contemporaries, Enoch Powell’s 1959 speech on the Hola Camp massacre in Kenya remains in the minds of those who heard it at least as strongly as does Macleod’s 1952 oration. But, as with Smith, it had no direct career impact, partly because it was a further attack on a government from which Powell had recently resigned and partly because its primary appeal was to a swath of cross-party opinion which he was subsequently bitterly to affront.

  Macleod’s speech, on the other hand, was manna to the ears of his party leaders and admirably attuned (although not necessarily calculatingly so) to bring its reward. Following on his Research Department experience he thought of himself as a health specialist. He had made his maiden speech on the subject with unspectacular success. Two years later his speciality gave him the opportunity to engage in and win a joust with Bevan. Bevan’s debating reputation was at its height and he regarded the National Health Service as almost a personal political fief, although, brooding increasingly on wider issues, he had in fact become somewhat rusty on the subject. The Speaker had intended Macleod to precede Bevan, but he changed his mind and put in a maiden speaker so that Macleod immediately followed the great gladiator. Because he had the verve to exploit his opportunity it was a greater piece of luck than he had ever experienced at a gaming table. He began with an unusually phrased and riskily provocative sentence of invective: ‘I want to deal closely and with relish with the vulgar, crude and intemperate speech to which the House of Commons has just listened.’ Churchill had come in to listen to Bevan and rose to depart as Macleod said these words. Hearing them he sat down again and stayed. Macleod, benefiting from his phenomenal factual memory, his quickness of reaction and the deadly beam of his delivery, fully justified his opening statement of intention. Early on Churchill turned to his Chief Whip and asked who Macleod was. Then he turned again and said ‘Ministerial material?’ Six weeks later he made Macleod Minister of Health. The post was not then in the Cabinet, but it none the less meant that Macleod at thirty-eight had moved ahead of his contemporaries and leap-frogged over the frustrations of junior office into a department of his own.

  The circumstances of his appointment to that department were, however, more dramatic than his tenure of it. He stayed there three and a half years, identified well with the Health Service ethos and always looked at home in photographs with nurses or doctors. But he innovated little and achieved little extra money for a demanding service. Ironically, having used anti-Bevanism as a launching pad, he became a defender of the structure that Bevan had bequeathed as well as a mild friend and modified admirer of Bevan himself. This illustrated two points about Macleod’s attitudes. The first was that, although he was always an overt campaigner for the centre ground, he preferred those on the other side who did not compete with him for it. He did not like Gaitskell any more than he liked me, and much preferred Bevan and maybe Foot and Crossman too. The second was that he regarded invective as a politician’s stock-in-trade rather than as an expression of genuine indignation. He cared deeply about some mostly worthy causes, but his strictures on the moral turpitudes of his opponents had a certain calculated coldness about them. He frequently said that opposition was sterile and unimportant. It was office that counted, and
there was almost an indifferent frivolity about his attacks on those who stood in his way of getting it. This was paradoxical, for it is at least arguable that he was better as a destructive critic than he ever was in any ministerial office.

  After Health came promotion to the Cabinet in a major reshuffle at the end of 1955 and nearly four years, one under Eden (who had at last succeeded Churchill in April 1955) and three under Macmillan, as Minister of Labour. To that department of conciliation Macleod brought a more abrasive style than his predecessor, the famously emollient Walter Monckton. Was this a difference only of style or of substance as well? Mostly of style, I think. His main confrontation was with the London busmen under the new and truculent leadership of Frank Cousins. But it took place only after he had secured his flank by a compromise settlement of a more important and more dangerous dispute with the railwaymen, and only too after the Cabinet had forced him into a more intransigent (and arguably duplicitous) handling of Cousins than he might himself have chosen.

  Macleod compensated, as was often his way, with a viciously successful House of Commons speech. Also typically, he muted his criticism of Alf Robens, who had moved a motion of censure upon him, and turned the blast of his invective against Gaitskell, the bigger target and never Macleod’s favourite: ‘I cannot conceal my scorn and contempt for the part that the Leader of the Opposition has played in this … We are having the debate because the Leader of the Opposition, in a parliamentary scene on Monday, could not control himself. Because of his refusal on Friday to say a single word that would uphold the authority of an arbitration award; because of his mischievous speech over the weekend; because of his lack of authority on Monday. If we are to vote then let the censure of the House be on the right honourable gentleman tonight and from the country tomorrow.’