Portraits and Miniatures(7)

Aneurin Bevan





When Bevan died in the summer of 1960, aged only sixty-two and after six months of cruel illness, he had already become something of a national hero. Conservatives who throughout his active career had portrayed him as a symbol of destructive evil, a compounded mixture of Tony Benn and Arthur Scargill at the height of their powers, members of the Labour right who had spent most of the previous decade in implacable battle with him, and even his own old allies and friends who had been dismayed and affronted by his 1957 endorsement of the British H-bomb, were united in their affection and respect.

This final wave of feeling has had the paradoxical affect of leaving an opaque film over his memory. Neither Ernest Bevin nor Stafford Cripps who had died a decade before him, the latter at almost exactly the same age, was mourned as Bevan was, but both have left a more sharply defined imprint upon the recollection of the informed public, Bevin for brutal but constructive working-class statesmanship, Cripps for an ascetic, almost Robespierrian moral authority.

Yet much more than either is Bevan enshrined in the small pantheon of Labour heroes. Although the Labour Party has been less ruthless in disposing of its failing leaders than has the Conservative Party, it has also been more reluctant to award them posthumous honours. From Disraeli to Mrs Thatcher there is a clutch of former Conservatives whose names, appropriately dropped, should evince a cheer. Before a general Labour audience it would now be wise only to try Keir Hardie, Attlee and Bevan in this context. And of these only Attlee was leader and Prime Minister. Of the other three Labour Prime Ministers, Ramsay MacDonald, Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, the last might do the best, but even his ripple of applause might be embarrassingly faint.

Bevan, however, is a safe name to play with. ‘As Nye said’ is the Labour equivalent of Mrs Thatcher’s over-familiar references to the ‘Winston’ she did not know and whose consensual style, in both his governments, she did not understand. But Bevan’s posthumous clouds of glory have by no means swirled exclusively around the Labour Party. His cross-party reputation at the end of his life and in subsequent years was as high as it had at one time been abysmal. Both Churchill’s ‘squalid nuisance’ of the war years and the Minister of Health who in 1948 had rather overdone his sanitary responsibility in referring to the Tories as ‘lower than vermin’ were forgotten. For a short time he was presented as almost all things to all men. He became at once the patriot who rose above petty politics and the keeper of the Labour Party’s socialist conscience; the expression both of the provinces’ revolt against London and of the welcoming tolerance of the metropolis, which made him as much at home in the Café Royal and the Savoy Grill as in the Tredegar Workmen’s Institute (latterly perhaps more so); and the symbol of the generosity as well as the conflict of British politics. Such generalized reverence is a helpful qualification for national sainthood. But it inevitably leaves a certain fuzziness of impression.

Is it now possible to remove the fuzz from Bevan? There have been two main biographies since his death. Michael Foot’s two volumes of inspired hagiography came out in 1962 and 1973. They were hagiography not only because every account of Bevan’s many disputes disparage his opponents with all the fervour of a contemporary polemic, but also because such a normally witty writer as Mr Foot never permits himself to make a joke at Bevan’s expense. He is portrayed as unlaughable at as well as omniscient and impeccable.

The second biography was written by John Campbell and published in 1987. Campbell had previously written about Lloyd George (after his fall from power), F. E. Smith, and me, and is currently engaged on Edward Heath. So he can be regarded as an eclectic political biographer. His portrait of Smith, later Birkenhead, was not only his best book but achieved to a unique degree a combination of the enhancement of the reputation of the author and the destruction of that of the subject. In Bevan’s case he set out to provide a corrective to Foot, and showed convincingly that Bevan’s basic political idea, which was that socialism was essential for efficient production and was therefore in accordance with the tide of history, was about as false as it could have been, and that his only piece of sustained political writing, In Place of Fear (a better title than a text), was fairly flatulent.

Yet, in spite of this ‘pricking of the bloated bladder of falsehood with the poniard of truth’ (to use the opening of one of Bevan’s most successful House of Commons speeches), I think Campbell, too young to have known him, fell under Bevan’s spell while sceptically reading and writing about him. His concluding words were: ‘As well as a rare humanity and gaiety, intelligence, anger and wit, Bevan brought to the life of politics a passionate seriousness which no one who has come after him has begun to match. If to be irreplaceable is to be great, Bevan was a great man after all.’ The tribute is perhaps the more impressive for the apparent reluctance with which it is paid.