Portraits and Miniatures(14)

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.