Portraits and Miniatures(10)

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.

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.