The Tortoise and the Hares
Giles Radice
Politico’s Publishing
288pp
£25.00

In The Tortoise and the Hares, a readable and sympathetic portrait of the 1945-51 Labour government through its five leading figures (Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin, Stafford Cripps, Hugh Dalton and Herbert Morrison), Giles Radice effuses colour into a sepia age. Radice’s great strength as a political writer is his ability to weave the insights he draws from his own not insignificant parliamentary career into his narrative, and to draw out the importance of the interplay of personalities in politics.

Radice’s central premise is that the success of Attlee’s government was down not so much to it being a government of political giants, but a coalition of talented but egotistical titans held together by the very lack of stature of their leader. Attlee was, Radice points out, an ‘improbable premier’, who, in the immortal words of Peter Hennessy, had ‘all the presence of a gerbil’. It was only because the electoral catastrophe that had befallen Labour at the 1931 general election had defenestrated almost the entirety of Labour’s parliamentary leadership that Attlee became leader at all. More senior figures like Morrison had lost their seats. By the time Morrison and others got back into parliament in 1935, Attlee had superglued himself to the leadership chair, where he remained for 20 years.

For Radice, Attlee ‘provided the framework within which his more brilliant cabinet ministers could thrive,’ and it was this achievement, he implies, that made Attlee a greater prime minister than his more egotistical rivals – the ‘hares’ to Attlee’s ‘tortoise’ – could have been.

A more modern parallel might be drawn here between Attlee and a successful John Major. Morrison in this analogy would be cast as Michael Heseltine. Morrison, like Heseltine, had enemies in his party, but it was Morrison’s vision and drive (coupled with Bevan’s at the Ministry of Health and Housing) that shaped the Labour government’s domestic policy agenda – Bevin had a full plate at the Foreign Office while successive chancellors Dalton and Cripps were busy wrestling with the economy.

Radice argues that ‘though Attlee was a first-rate chairman of cabinet and manager of his government, he was largely dependent on the ideas, inspiration and drive of his more dynamic cabinet ministers. When the energy and health of Bevin, Cripps and, later, of Morrison and Dalton too gave out, Attlee’s government faltered’. For Radice, the 1945-51 government was thus ‘a golden moment’ whose ‘shadow was not as long as it could have been’.

In recounting how ‘the Labour party lost momentum, went down to defeat in
1951 and instead of regrouping in opposition, wasted much of the 1950s in factional strife’, Radice concedes that Attlee must shoulder at least part of the blame: ‘on balance… the Tortoise (Attlee) should have retired soon after the 1951 election defeat.’ Morrison would undoubtedly have become leader. Yet Radice’s recognition of Morrison’s talents is tempered by his admiration for Bevin, who disliked Morrison and whom Morrison succeeded as foreign secretary in 1950. For Radice, Morrison failed ‘to fill Bevin’s shoes’ at the Foreign Office. But as Kenneth Morgan observed in his own study of the era, it is difficult to see why Morrison should shoulder the blame for ‘the basic futility and failure of Bevin’s policy in the Middle East’. Can Morrison really have been so much worse a foreign secretary than Bevin, as Radice contends, when it was Bevin’s Middle East policy that blew up in Morrison’s hands?

In Radice’s reticence to give Morrison’s abilities greater recognition relative to those of his peers there is an echo of the late Roy Jenkins, whom Radice generously credits in his acknowledgements as having inspired the book. Jenkins characterised Morrison, ‘of whom we had never thought a great deal’, as merely ‘a party machine boss, skilled at his trade but operating a little below the level of events’. Radice does not seem wholly to reject this characterisation, dismissing Morrison’s agenda to rejuvenate the Labour party post-1950 with one line: ‘Morrison knew that something more was needed but never got beyond “consolidation”.’ This is unfair. As the New Statesman observed in May 1950: ‘Herbert Morrison is almost the only cabinet minister whose speeches give the impression that he is not too busy to think … he has taken to heart the plain evidence of recent months that the Labour programme of public ownership and control in industry needs thinking out afresh.’

Indeed, ‘consolidation’ was important in itself, for it meant recognising that the purpose of Labour governments was not simply to pass legislation but to ensure that the new structures, institutions and legislative frameworks actually delivered what they were supposed to do. In that sense it foreshadowed the ‘New Labour’ catechism of ‘delivery, delivery, delivery’. Morrison’s was the ‘bread and butter’ socialism of trains that ran on time and better civic amenities, housing, parks and libraries. It was a socialism that, despite party disunity, secured a better result at the 1955 election, when Morrison was deputy to an Attlee who was very clearly past his sell-by date, than did the post-Morrison vision that Labour offered the electorate in 1959.