Atlee’s Great Contemporaries
Frank Field (ed)
Continuum
240pp
£16.99

Frank Field has had the brilliant idea of compiling, with the addition of an excellent introduction, 30 of the essays, articles and reviews which the Labour prime minister, Clement Attlee, wrote, mostly following his retirement from the party leadership in 1955. Concerned about providing for his beloved younger wife, Vi, after his death (though, in the event, he outlived her), he decided to supplement his prime ministerial pension of £2,000 a year and his House of Lords attendance allowance of three guineas a day by a series of biographical studies, mainly for the Observer. Field also includes four essays for the National and English Review, as well as articles for the Times.

Those who have only read Attlee’s flat and uninformative autobiography, As it Happened, are in for a pleasant surprise. For one thing, these pieces of occasional journalism are remarkably well written. In a few terse pages, he brings his subjects to life, illuminating their characters with a telling phrase or sharp judgement. And, in contrast to Winston Churchill’s somewhat egotistical volume of pen portraits, Great Contemporaries, which are, to a considerable extent, a description of the war leader’s relations with other statesmen, Attlee brings to his portfolio of miniatures not only the insights of a fairminded politician but also the measured detachment of the historian which he was trained to be at Oxford.

His range is wide. Not surprisingly, he writes with authority about Labour figures such as George Lansbury, Keir Hardie, Beatrice Webb, John Strachey, Nye Bevan and, above all, Ernest Bevin. However he is equally at ease with generals and strategists. In Attlee’s opinion, Bernard Montgomery ‘was a great soldier’, who had no use ‘for the old school tie or the old boy network, told his men to wear what they liked … and discouraged [them] from respecting red tape, power and the trappings of authority’. His main weakness was his failure to get on with the Americans; this was a factor in their rejection after the Battle of Normandy of the Montgomery plan for a concentrated thrust from the eastern front which, in Attlee’s view, could have shortened the war.

Attlee is especially revealing, as well as generous, about the two great men with whom he worked so closely – Churchill and Bevin. He says about the former: ‘Churchill, I consider, was the greatest leader in war this country has ever known. Not the greatest warrior … But a war leader must be much more than a warrior … above all he must stand like a beacon for his country’s will to win. And give it constant voice, and translate it into action.’ Attlee concluded about Churchill: ‘History set him the job that he was the ideal man to do … Winston was superbly lucky. And perhaps the most warming thing about him was that he never ceased to say so.’

Churchill is said to have described Attlee as ‘a modest man who has much to be modest about’. But, though they were never really close, Churchill trusted and respected Attlee. Attlee’s relationship with Bevin was of a different order. As he says: ‘My relationship with Ernest Bevin was the deepest of my political life. I was very fond of him, and I understand that he was very fond of me.’

He considers Bevin’s greatest contribution to the Labour movement as being ‘to emphasise the importance of power’. He notes that: ‘Lord Acton’s famous dictum on power probably never occurred to him. And if he agreed that power corrupts, he would have said it corrupted only the men who were not big enough to use it.’ He describes Bevin in his prime: ‘Ernest, walking slowly through a congested hall to board the platform, rolling slightly from side to side like a battleship, seemed the embodiment of self-confidence. He would square up to anybody, physically or morally, with relish – Churchill, for instance, at the height of his prestige in the second world war. Ernest treated him as an equal.’ Attlee says about Bevin that he was the embodiment of common sense: ‘Yet I have never met a man with as much imagination as he had, with the exception of Winston.’

The interesting question is why did Churchill and Bevin, both clearly more able than Attlee, trust him so much – Churchill almost always leaving him in charge of the cabinet when he was on one of his frequent absences abroad, and Bevin continuing to support him as party leader throughout the crises which beset the Labour government. The answer is that Attlee had moral integrity, what Field shrewdly calls ‘the politics of character’. It was this priceless gift, combined with lack of vanity, which enabled him to hold together the great wartime coalition and provide the framework within which the brilliant and charismatic ministers of the postwar Labour government could thrive. From 1940 to 1951, they could not do without Attlee.