‘Few thought he was even a starter; there are those who thought themselves smarter; but he ended PM, CH and OM; an earl and a knight of the garter.’
Clement Attlee’s boastful rhyme, contained in a private letter to his brother, Tom, in 1956, is in every way revealing. A man who rose quietly to enjoy one of the greatest political careers of the twentieth century, a radical comfortable with traditional institutions, and someone whose quiet modesty disguised self-assurance and even self-satisfaction.
Such contradictions deserve a discerning biographer, and in John Bew, Attlee has the man he deserves. He has written with verve and confidence a first-rate life of a man who he correctly argues has been under-appreciated.
The appeal of the Labour Party, during its periods of electoral success, has been its ability to do three things at the same time. To provide practical help to working people and the poor, to offer intellectuals and visionaries a glimpse of a better tomorrow, and to ensure that the broad mass regard it as patriotic and able to be trusted with the nation’s security.
Clement Attlee (1883–1967) became Labour’s leader almost by accident, he was never secure in the job (even in 1945) or much admired by his party colleagues, he made poor speeches, struck many contemporaries as unimpressive, sometimes grasped hold of quite silly ideas, and often did little more than hold the ring as the chairman of a meeting. Yet more than any figure in the party’s history he brought together all the ingredients of Labour success.
As a result, a man who was still called an ‘arch-mediocrity’ by critics (Michael Foot, in this case, quoting Aneurin Bevan) late in his life, nevertheless lived a triumphant one: compassionate as a social worker, brave as a soldier, loyal and loved as a family man, a rock for his nation in wartime, an architect of extraordinary electoral victory, a builder of a modern welfare society supported by a broad political consensus that he did much to create. What a life and what a man.
By the time Attlee became leader of the Labour Party in 1935, he had worked in the East End of London as a Labour pioneer, but also left the battlefield injured in the First World War. He therefore combined socialist ideals with a deep practical experience of how most people lived and thought. He had a surprising romantic streak, but it was expressed in his liking for poetry and love of country rather than in abstract theories.
He was therefore always interested in practical advances for people such as his constituents in Limehouse, where he was MP from 1922 to 1950, and, while at home discussing socialist ideals, hadn’t much time for those intellectuals who he thought had created systems in their heads that missed out human beings.
It is true, as Bew shows, that not having much understanding of economics and occasionally falling prey to naive notions, at times Attlee did advance some fairly alarming and impractical ideas. He was attracted in the 1930s to having politics and the economy put on an emergency footing and run by commissars. He held on for far too long to the idea that a world government would solve the problems of fascism. And he sometimes over-optimistically believed that combatants in a civil war (such as in Palestine or India) might suddenly come to their senses when they experienced the reality of fighting.
Yet, for all of this, he retained a keen sense of what was possible and reasonable, and his career as a man of power shows him capable of distinguishing between foolish ideas and sensible reform, even when the foolish ideas had once been his.
The claim that Attlee was a great figure, as great in some ways as Winston Churchill, rests on two things that Bew, a historian at King’s College London, brings out particularly well.
The first is the choice he makes as Labour leader in the last half of the 1930s. Under pressure from figures such as Stafford Cripps and Bevan to create a popular front with communists, he decides that they have drawn the line in the wrong place. The right division is not between capitalism and socialism, it is between democracy and dictatorship.
This decision had huge consequences for Britain. It helped to win the war by uniting Labour behind Churchill. (A fascinating side point here is that Attlee fought and was wounded in Churchill’s controversial Dardanelles campaign. Yet he believed in the concept of that campaign, arguing that the failing was in the execution. He thus trusted Churchill and reinforced him against the generals.) And after the war Attlee’s decisions led Britain to be strongly Atlanticist, to be cold warriors, and to form Nato. His instincts here could not be more different from those of Jeremy Corbyn.
The second claim to greatness is the record of Attlee’s government. Bew’s book is particularly strong on his subject’s ideas, reading and thinking. The author explains Attlee’s strong belief in the idea of citizenship, the notion that we must recognise our rights and our duties. This spurs him on to some of his great achievements – national insurance, the NHS and, the one he was proudest of himself, Indian independence – but it also proved a weakness.
In the immediate aftermath of war, using moral exhortation, planning and appeals to patriotism, rather than competition and incentive, to improve productivity and to avert strikes had some chance of working. Within as little as three years, however, the public had begun to tire of this message. It is right to assert an idea of common citizenship and to be hopeful that the public might find it uplifting. To believe that it would long outlast the war was an example, more serious this time, of Attlee’s occasional naivety.
Nevertheless, few prime ministers can look back on a period in office that did so much to fulfil their youthful notions. Bevan’s attacks, during the war and in government, on Attlee’s gradualism were petulant and sometimes close to bonkers.
It is quite hard to get a grip on Attlee as a man. I could, for example, maybe have done with a bit more on his family life. I have always found it intriguing that while his wife, Violet, used to drive the two of them on the campaign trail for mile upon mile in their little family car, she is said by many to have voted Conservative, even in 1945.
However, by using his correspondence with Tom Attlee, Bew does succeed in getting inside the pipe-smoking, slipper-wearing, moustached major from Stanmore. It shows him strong and self-confident, for all his apparent reticence. Never the showman, Clement Attlee still put on quite a show.