Attlee arrived in Number 10 Downing Street eight years after Baldwin had left for the last time. Unlike either Asquith or Baldwin, he inherited a vast government machine which the war had created, and which was used to dealing with a great part of the nation’s affairs and spending a high proportion of its income. He was also the heir to a post-Baldwin Prime Ministerial habit of trying to run a large part of British foreign policy from 10 Downing Street, and believing that Britain counted for a great deal in the world. (The latter belief was pre- as well as post-Baldwin.) Attlee’s first duty in his new office was to meet the Russians and the Americans at Potsdam. Neither Asquith nor Baldwin had ever attended an international conference as Prime Minister. Attlee, a very firmly established member of the English upper-middle-class, was not rich like Baldwin, or fashionable like Asquith, but he was similar to both of them in having a natural respect for conventional values and institutions. He liked almost all institutions with which he had been connected: cricket, Haileybury, where he had been at school, Oxford (and University College in particular), the Inner Temple, Toynbee Hall, and even the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party. It did not make him pompous, for his taciturnity gave him a natural talent for balloon-pricking, and it did not prevent his being the head of an effective radical government just as it had not prevented Asquith or, for that matter, Gladstone before him being in the same category.
Compared with Asquith and Baldwin, Attlee was the worst speaker, the least engaging personality, and by far the best Cabinet chairman. He developed this last quality even before he had the authority of Prime Ministership behind him. Many recorded tributes testify to the way in which he presided over the War Cabinet during Churchill’s frequent absences: rhetoric disappeared, and decisions were taken with speed and precision. Yet Attlee was not the dominating figure of his government, either publicly or privately. Bevin, Cripps, Dalton, Morrison, Bevan, and latterly Gaitskell, constituted a formidable array of ministers. I do not think that they can quite be classed with Asquith’s, partly because of the subsequent fame of Lloyd George and Churchill, but also because there was nobody in the Attlee Government to match the non-political distinction of Morley, Birrell and Haldane. That Liberal Government apart, however, they are unmatched this century and for most of the last, too. Attlee balanced them, steered them, kept them and himself afloat, but he did not exactly lead them. He was a cox and not a stroke. For his first three or four years he distributed their weight brilliantly, although latterly he failed to place Aneurin Bevan properly, which led to considerable trouble.
One of his strongest attributes was said to have been his capacity for laconic ministerial butchery. This may be slightly exaggerated. He despatched parliamentary under-secretaries with ease, but this was rather like shooting chickens. Of big game he was more cautious. He was probably relieved when an exhausted Dalton shot himself but he pulled no trigger on him. Arthur Greenwood he did dispose of but only when that figure had become unwilling to conduct even his morning’s business from anywhere except the ‘snuggery’ (I think it was called) of the Charing Cross Hotel. Then towards the end he dismissed Ernest Bevin from the Foreign Office. That was an extraordinary feat. Bevin was the most important Foreign Secretary of this century, by which I mean that he was the one who left the biggest imprint on British foreign policy for a generation ahead. He was a massive but by no means a wholly amiable personality. He had been the sheet-anchor of Attlee’s support throughout the life of the government. He had given his support to ‘little Clem’ against Morrison, Cripps, and Dalton. Yet when his health made him no longer capable of doing the job, out he went, miserable and complaining, and died six weeks later. This was an act of cold courage more difficult even than President Truman’s sacking of General MacArthur.
With what aspects of government policy did Attlee most concern himself? Like both Asquith and Baldwin, even though both of them had been Chancellors of the Exchequer, I do not think that he understood or was much interested in economics. But the ‘dismal science’ had become far more central to government by his day. He gave his Chancellors, and especially Cripps, a very dominant position. His Foreign Secretary had such a position by virtue of his own personality. Between Potsdam and Attlee’s visit to Washington in December 1950, when Truman had falsely suggested that he might be about to drop an atomic bomb on the Chinese in North Korea and when Bevin was too fragile to cross the Atlantic in less than five days, Attlee intervened in foreign policy no more than Asquith had done.