Portraits and Miniatures (6 page)

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 told Crossman a few months later that he was by no means sure that he wanted to be leader if he had to behave circumspectly in order to become it. ‘I'm not a proletarian or an intellectual,' he inconsequentially added. ‘I am an aristocrat with a real distaste for that kind of politics.'

There is a danger of seeing the Bevan of the 1950s too much through the prism of Crossman's voluminous
Diaries.
Crossman did not really either like or admire Bevan, although he followed him for nearly five years, but mainly because he could never win Attlee's approval and found it difficult to reconcile himself to Gaitskell whom he thought of as a much inferior Wykehamist to himself. Nevertheless, it is impossible not to cite Crossman once more because of the ironic memorability of his (mostly) benign description of Bevan's behaviour on their infamous trip to the Italian Socialist Party Conference in Venice in February 1957. ‘Bland, ebullient, impeccably dressed in his beautiful new suit, fresh white linen with his handkerchief falling out of his breast pocket, pretentiously discussing the qualities of Italian wine, pretending to knowledge of Venetian architecture, laying down the law about Italian politics with vitality and charm, and occasionally with the wildest irresponsibility.'

The trip was infamous because, consequent upon it, Bevan put on one of the two really discreditable performances of his life. The first was in 1955 when he tried as a desperate last-minute manoeuvre to offer Morrison, whom he despised, an uncontested election to the leadership of the Labour Party in order to block Gaitskell, who was the strong majority choice.

The second was in the action against the
Spectator
following the Venice visit, when Bevan, Crossman and Morgan Phillips (the general secretary of the Labour Party) sued on an almost unbelievably mild libel (‘they puzzled the Italians by their capacity to fill themselves like tanks with whisky and coffee … Although the Italians were never sure if the British delegation was sober, they always attributed to them an immense political acumen') and sailed to victory on the unfortunate combination of Lord Chief Justice Goddard's prejudice against the anti-hanging and generally
libertarian
Spectator
of those days and the perjury of the plaintiffs, subsequently exposed in Crossman's endlessly revealing diaries.

The fact of the matter was that Phillips was a near-alcoholic, that Bevan was a heavy drinker with a good head, often ‘tanked-up' (‘tanks' was indeed a
mot juste),
habitually in my observation drinking three times as much as he claimed in the witness box he had done in Venice, but never appearing drunk as opposed to flushed and didactic, and that even Crossman, the most abstemious of the three, had an intake that would have terrified most Italian livers. None of this would have mattered had they not falsely claimed the reverse.

All of the last quinquennium of Bevan's life was not therefore glorious. But much of it was. Maybe he lost the Labour Party the 1955 election, although my guess is that they would have lost it in any case. In 1959 he probably helped rather than hindered. By then he was becoming something of a paradox. He was a hero who was also an anachronism. He and Churchill were the last great politicians never to adapt to television. Both were in their different ways orators who needed audiences. Macmillan, and after him Wilson, would have made them both look flailing and florid on the box. Indeed the effects of great audiences, physically present, vibrant and adulatory, were a drug that did Bevan far more harm than alcohol or his inherent faults of temper. And the fault was compounded by the utter safeness of Ebbw Vale insulating him from the realities of marginal constituency life.

In addition, long before the manifest exposure of his central belief that ultimate victory must belong to socialist planning because of its productive efficiency, his subsidiary doctrine of a triumphant Labour Party based on proletarian solidarity (which was always violently contradicted both by his own lifestyle and by the fact that his acolytes were almost uniformly middle-class and even fashionable) began to fray badly at the edges. His last election - Macmillan's ‘you've never had it so good' consumer durables triumph of 1959 - was the first to be strongly influenced by middle-class aspirations amongst the traditional working class.

Less than a year after that election Bevan was dead, having been incapacitated for six months. Two and a half years after that
Gaitskell, nearly ten years his junior, was dead too. But I somehow doubt if Bevan, had he survived, would have been elected on Gaitskell's death. I think Wilson would have slipped in ahead of him. So Bevan would have been alive and almost sixty-seven when the first Wilson Government came in. What would have been done with him? He could hardly have been given a nostalgic appointment like Jim Griffiths becoming Secretary of State for Wales. But he would have been a difficult morsel to swallow. Indeed Wilson found it difficult enough to handle his widow, Jennie Lee, to whom he gave nominally only junior status but a privileged position in charge of the arts. I think a surviving Nye Bevan might have paralysed the whole government, a considerable but not a constructive feat.

Perhaps, in spite of his first three years at the Ministry of Health, that gives the key to his whole life: a considerable but not a constructive statesman. What he indisputably was, however, was a star. Amongst those born around the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century there were four or five incontestable stars, Gladstone, Newman, Tennyson, Dickens, Darwin, maybe Carlyle. They were not always sensible, but anything they touched was infused with excitement. Amongst those born around a hundred years later it is difficult to find a comparable list. Who are the possible candidates: Waugh, and Green, Henry Moore, Dylan Thomas, maybe Graham Sutherland? Bevan certainly deserves the politician's place on that polymathic list and the knowledge that this was so would, I suspect, have more than compensated him for the thought that, also of his generation, Macmillan, Eden and Home were Prime Minister and he was not.

Iain Macleod was a very professional politician in both the good and the bad senses of the word. Although he had a darting crossword-puzzle mind, fortified by a phenomenal memory, he was not an intellectual. But as he had a touch of magic about him, he was able to inspire a considerable range of people who were intellectually more gifted and more interested in ideas than he was himself.

I am not convinced that he was a particularly nice man, but he had insight and insolence, which latter quality put him in the tradition of Disraeli, Joseph Chamberlain and F. E. Smith, and sharply contrasted him with Austen Chamberlain, R. A. Butler and James Callaghan, three politicians who in their differing ways were notably deficient in daring unorthodox thrusts. But the political figure in British history to whom, across a gap of 150 years, Macleod bore an almost uncanny resemblance was George Canning. They both lived for within a few months of fifty-seven years. They were both financially insecure, socially a little indeterminate and had rakish aspects to their lives. They were both compact men with a riveting eye, who stood for a popular (not populist) but sometimes unpredictable Toryism. They were both good at banking their treasure in the hearts of their friends and followers, so that their resonance has been somewhat greater than their achievements. Canning attained higher office than did Macleod (after two periods as Foreign Secretary he had been Prime Minister for six months when he died) and he also accomplished the feat, unique I think for a politician as opposed to a poet, although Gladstone, Disraeli and Churchill might come close, of putting four phrases into the English language.

So Macleod ought to be pleased with the comparison. He contributed no comparable hand of phrases (indeed the most remembered one associated with him was Salisbury's discreditable claim that he was ‘too clever by half') but he was a very considerable
orator, inspirational at a party conference, often with a mordant deadliness of phrase in the House of Commons, to whom many would give third place in the pantheon of British speakers of the past fifty years, after only Churchill and Bevan. I am torn in deciding whether he ought to be there. On the one hand I can think of no challenger to topple his oratory off its bronze medal plinth. On the other, I engaged in many parliamentary jousts with him and did not feel intimidated as I certainly would have done with either of the other two.

I did not find him an amiable ‘shadow'. Quintin Hailsham, Reggie Maudling, Peter Thorneycroft and James Prior, who at one time or another also occupied this position in relation to me, were all much easier to get on with. Macleod had been friendly enough to me before I went to the Treasury, which he had already been shadowing for a couple of years, at the end of 1967. Then for the next two and a half years he became increasingly sour, partisan and withdrawn. He made a tremendous fuss about small change parliamentary procedure issues in relation to the Finance Bill, rather embarrassing his backbenchers by forcing them to walk out of the Committee at one stage. When I followed his advice in 1968 and introduced a National Lottery, subject to a free vote of the House of Commons, he turned round like a squirrel in a cage and successfully voted against it, claiming that the times had become too grave for such frivolity. When I eventually got him to lunch alone at 11 Downing Street (probably a mistaken venue) he sulked throughout the meal, declining both conversational gambits (which was occasionally his habit) and alcoholic refreshment (which was not). No doubt he was in pain from the crippled back and neck which began with a war injury. Perhaps he also had a premonition that time was running out for him. He desperately wanted to be Chancellor, and it was a tragedy for himself, the Heath Government and the country that he occupied the post for only one month. Although he resented me as Chancellor in a way that inevitably diminished the warmth of my feelings for him at the time, this did not kill my longer-term admiration for many of his political qualities. Nor, I hope, does it now make it impossible for me to see and appraise him in perspective.

Macleod came of Hebridean stock on both sides, but I doubt if, apart from going to school in the ruggedly conformist atmosphere of Fettes in Edinburgh and enjoying holidays of fishing and rough shooting on the Isle of Lewis, Scotland meant a great deal to him. He was born at Skipton in the Yorkshire Dales, where his father was a family doctor, and brought up in a quiet middle middle-class way. He went to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he was an undistinguished undergraduate, save for his high skill at bridge and his liking for betting at Newmarket. Apart from an unsuccessful year's apprenticeship in the De la Rue banknote and playing-card company he did no job between coming down from Cambridge in 1935 and the outbreak of the war. He earned a substantial but insecure living from playing bridge, but used it to support a life which was more purposeless than gilded.

He enlisted early and was an officer in time to spend a few weeks in France before the collapse. He was quite badly wounded in a leg and thigh and sent home via St Nazaire before the retreat to Dunkirk. He then had a rather mixed army career. He ended a major on a divisional staff but as the division was in the forefront of the 1944 invasion this brought him no red-tabbed safety. He was back in France on D-day. His degree of promotion was about average for someone of his background and age (he was thirty-two when the war ended). He was not like one of those civilian (that is, non-regular army) brigadiers who were to be his companions on the Conservative benches in the House of Commons - Selwyn Lloyd, Enoch Powell, John Foster, Toby Low (Lord Aldington) - who had risen inexorably. Indeed, accounts of this phase of his life give the impression that he was a feckless, doubtfully disciplined officer. But his four months at the Staff College at the end of 1943 engaged him intellectually in a way that Cambridge never had. He discovered that he was remarkably good at solving the finite problems with copybook answers, and this gave him a new self-confidence which expressed itself in political ambition.