Portraits and Miniatures by Roy Jenkins Read Free Book Online Page B

unsalaried, there were no local health centres, preventive medicine was discounted, and the split between the general practitioners and the hospitals became greater than ever before. But he got his bill on the statute book by the end of 1946, and, perhaps more difficult, the NHS in operation by 5 July 1948.
    Bevan must therefore be accounted a considerable success as a departmental minister. He had the essential qualities of being able to command and enthuse his civil servants, of fixing his strategic objectives, and of getting his way in Cabinet. However, as is often the way with upwardly mobile ministers, three years was enough for him in one ministry, and in 1948/9 he was ripe for a move. Attlee did not give him one. Why not is a much greater mystery than why he put Bevan at Health in the first place. It was almost his only major failure in deft Cabinet management. The new job did not have to be close to the core. Even the Colonies, then an absorbing department, would have done. Instead he left Bevan to vegetate, powerfully but vainly defending his housing programme against the facts of Britain’s overstrained resources, being accused of letting his health estimates run out of control, but probably doing so no more than anyone else introducing a new and thirsty service would have done.
    Somewhere around 1951, however, Bevan began to acquire a messianic complex, exacerbated by the view, which by no means necessarily goes with being a messiah, that his rivals were pygmies. He had long been an irreverent critic, an impudent boy with a catapult aiming his stones, without much discrimination between his party opponents and his nominal friends, at the tophats of the great and the good. To do that required a self-confident courage, but was quite different from believing that he was surrounded by colleagues who were not only adversaries, but adversaries with whom it was an insult to have to soil his hands.
    The transition from the boy David to Gulliver in Lilliput was an abrupt one, which it is difficult to feel did not stem substantially from his double passing over for both the Exchequer and the Foreign Office, although it was no doubt exacerbated by policy resentment that first his housing programme and then his health service were under attack from within the government. It showed itself not only in his bad-tempered resignation of April 1951, but also in a series of contemptuous denunciations. Of Gaitskell he had exploded to John Strachey in 1950: ‘But he’s nothing, nothing, nothing.’ Five years later he was thought to have called him ‘a desiccated calculating machine’, but in fact it was Attlee whom Bevan then had in his sights.
    For Gaitskell, however, he never had any real respect or liking, even when they were thrown into alliance by Bevan’s 1957 denunciation of unilateralism and the need for both of them to win the 1959 election if either was ever again to hold office. At best Bevan regarded him as an honest but unimaginative bureaucrat who had too pedestrian a mind - and life - ever to be a real leader. The nearest he could get to friendliness was to be patronizing.
    About Attlee his feelings were more mixed. He put him several notches above Morrison, whom he regarded as a squalid party boss, and with some reason. Attlee, after all, apart from the qualities that have given him such a vast posthumous reputation, had been the indispensable agent for Bevan’s success at the Ministry of Health, both by appointing him and by decisive support in Cabinet. But indebtedness is not always the basis for respect, and Attlee’s bourgeois primness grated on Bevan’s flamboyance. It was by two acts of gross public discourtesy to Attlee in 1954 that he had his last brush with expulsion from the Labour Party.
    When reproved for this behaviour by the Shadow Cabinet Bevan said that his nerves could not stand the strain of such‘impudent’ attacks, and it was in much the same mood that he