Portraits and Miniatures(9)

In that 1929 world-slump-buffeted Parliament, with its minority Labour government and misty MacDonald leadership, Bevan’s early speeches were constituency-orientated and surprisingly loyalist. They nevertheless presaged something of the vivid spontaneity of his later philippics. His maiden speech, neither a failure nor memorable, appears to have been made on the spur of the moment. This habit of making even his most important speeches without detailed preparation, which he shared with Gladstone although most conspicuously not with Churchill, makes an enormous difference to the pattern of a politician’s life. In Gladstone’s case it enabled him to carry on his voluminous correspondence with bishops and deans, statesmen and professors, station-masters and booksellers in the morning while electrifying the House of Commons for several hours in the evenings.

In Bevan’s case it enabled him, at least at this stage in his life, to be both lazy and noticed, often not getting up before noon, but making more impact than more diligent colleagues. It also introduced additional hazard into his speech-making. Although he was a gourmand of unusual words he did not have the defences of Gladstone’s convoluted qualifications. Many of Bevan’s most notorious phrases were probably uttered without premeditation.

His early loyalist phase did not last long, and justifiably so, for the Government was supine before unemployment, and its leading members were determinedly unadventurous. Bevan was drawn to those - on both sides of the House - who were more so. It was those with off-beat glamour as well as a capacity for intellectual innovation who most attracted him. His closest House of Commons associates became Oswald Mosley, John Strachey, Frank Owen (a Beaverbrook protégé and subsequent editor who was Liberal member for Hereford), Bob Boothby and Edward Marjoribanks, Quintin Hogg’s half-brother who subsequently committed suicide.

His one close ‘proletarian’ parliamentary friend was Jennie Lee, then looking less forbiddingly partisan than in her middle period, a Fifeshire miner’s daughter but a graduate of Edinburgh University, who had become a Scottish MP at the same time as Bevan had become a Welsh one. There was little romantic attachment between them in that Parliament for her attentions were engaged with Frank Wise, also a Labour MP and a faintly sinister figure of the period, who was twenty years their senior but who died young, aged fifty-eight, in 1933. Miss Lee then married Bevan in 1934. Already by the election of 1931, however, Bevan was sufficiently involved to spend almost the whole time in her constituency of North Lanark, the bleakest part of the Clydeside industrial area, in a vain attempt to save her seat. Amazingly, in that Labour holocaust of an election, he was unopposed in Ebbw Vale.

Bevan’s career in the 1930s did not advance as much as it ought to have done. A Labour parliamentary party of little more than fifty until 1935, and only 150, no more than two or three of whom were aged under forty, after the general election of that year, created one of the great vacuums of political history. In 1931-5 the only surviving trio of ex-ministers, Attlee, Lansbury and Cripps, expanded beyond any previous appreciation of their size to fill it. Then in 1935-40 subsequently reviled governments lived through a series of parliamentary dramas, mostly provoked by stations on the road to Britain’s nadir after a quinquennium of retreat before the Axis.

Bevan remained no more than a fringe politician during this period. He was elected neither to the Shadow Cabinet (by the parliamentary party) nor to the National Executive of the Labour Party (first by the whole conference and then by the constituency parties alone after 1937), but he could always be recruited for a Trafalgar Square or Marble Arch demonstration which the official Labour Party regarded as on the edge of respectability. He was much better known at them than in the House of Commons. He supported Cripps’s call for a United Front with the Communists, and then for a Popular Front across a broader spectrum of politics ‘from Churchill to Pollitt’. For the latter he got himself briefly expelled from the Labour Party but, unlike Cripps, came back a little humiliatingly as soon as he could. His most seminal activity was to be involved in the foundation of Tribune in 1937. In the great post-Norway debate of 7/8 May 1940 he did not speak (probably he tried and was not called), but he did not even pass Disraeli’s test that the important thing was that it should be asked why one was not speaking. At the age of forty-two and after eleven years in the House of Commons his absence was not noticed in the greatest set-piece debate of the century. Everyone spoke their lines like characters in a Shakespeare depiction of a Plantagenet council. But not Bevan.

Yet the consequences that flowed from that debate, and his reaction to them, determined the path of the second half of Bevan’s career more than any participation of his in it could possibly have done. The debate destroyed the Chamberlain Government and the normal pattern of politics, which had made Bevan no more than a noisy irritant, a fly thrashing at a window pane in a vain attempt to get through it. Subsequent high-level party manoeuvres put in its place an all-party coalition, with a rumbustious but revered leader, underpinned by a desperate national situation and a political consensus that comprised almost the whole of the House of Commons except for one right-wing Conservative who was imprisoned and one Communist who was against the war until Hitler attacked Russia a year later. The Labour Party put its first eleven into the Government while its second eleven occupied the Opposition front bench with a determined loyalty, at least until 1943 when the tide had turned and post-war politics began to loom, which gratified Churchill and Attlee but made the House of Commons little more than a simulacrum of the parliamentary democracy which was supposed to be one of the causes for which the war was being fought.