Portraits and Miniatures by Roy Jenkins Read Free Book Online

governments. Communist ministers were necessary but they must not be allowed to get their hands on foreign affairs, defence, finance, or the interior (police). No one (other than perhaps Senator McCarthy) ever thought Bevan was a Communist, but Attlee never let Bevan get near any of these four departments, even when in 1950-1 two of them becamevacant in quick succession. The paradoxes of Attlee’s attitude to Bevan were compounded by the fact that while Attlee destabilized his government by never giving him one of these great offices of state, there is quite a lot of evidence that, if Bevan could ever have brought himself to behave calmly for even a couple of years, Attlee would have preferred him, certainly to Morrison and maybe to Gaitskell, as his successor.
    That was all in the future. The reality was that in 1945 Bevan was given an opportunity far beyond his or anyone else’s expectations and advanced upon it with the eagerness of an enthusiastic schoolboy. Attlee bestowed it upon him with more of the bracing admonition of an old-style schoolmaster than of the comradely confidence of a fellow socialist campaigner. ‘You are starting with me with a clean sheet … Now it is up to you. The more you can learn the better.’
    Surprisingly, Bevan did not seem to resent this patronizing pat on the head (the size of the tip that accompanied it was no doubt a factor) and got down to the five and three-quarter years (five and a half of them at the Ministry of Health) that were his sole experience of office and his sole claim to constructive achievement as opposed to the magical deployment of words. During this period he built a moderate quantity of high-quality council houses and launched the National Health Service in a hybrid, pragmatic and original form which has broadly since persisted. He then flounced out of the government in April 1951, taking with him as a hardly noticed adjutant a future Prime Minister in the shape of Harold Wilson. It was the most seminal resignation since Joseph Chamberlain left the Balfour Government in 1903. In the late 1950s the Thorneycroft resignations were merely ‘a little local difficulty’. In the 1960s George Brown’s was just a banging of a door in the wind. In the 1980s Heseltine, Lawson and Howe achieved a cumulative effect, but Bevan’s stood on its own and reverberated down the next decade.
    The main question is how great was his 1945-50 achievement. Did it justify the Labour Party myth into which, quite a long time later, it became elevated? In the 1950s it was famously excoriated by Macleod, subjected to a rather loose bombardment byChurchill and Macmillan, and privately undermined (although under great provocation) by Dalton, Morrison and Gaitskell. ‘Nye left a lot of loose ends. But what could you expect with someone with such an untidy mind who was in any event nearly always in the smoking room of the House of Commons from 5.30 p.m. onwards.’ This was the sort of comment that became widespread. Did Bevan’s administrative record deserve it?
    His housing performance, for some time at least, bore an uncomfortable resemblance to his 1942 strictures of Churchill. He won debate after debate but was bereft of victories on the building sites. During this period he embellished his replies to House of Commons debates, and largely got away with, a series of remarkable animadversions on the aesthetics of housing policy. He denounced ‘the fretful fronts stretching along the great roads out of London’ of 1930s building and proclaimed that he was not going to have the landscape desecrated by ‘ugly houses poking their stupid noses into the air because they are too high for their width’. Up to the end of 1946 there was not much danger of many new houses poking their noses anywhere, for only 60,000 had been completed in the eighteen months since the end of the war. In the third full year, as is the habit with production programmes,