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?