Many Americans are astonished by the fact that in July 1945, having won the Second World War in Europe, Winston Churchill was defeated in the general election and had to leave the premiership despite having been so personally popular and militarily successful in that job. Yet that extraordinary phenomenon becomes far more explicable when one learns about the attributes of the man who defeated Churchill in that election—and indeed, in the subsequent one, too: Clement Attlee, the best of many biographies of whom has just been written by Professor John Bew of King’s College London.
Clement Attlee was the most consistently underestimated politician of modern times. Bald, mustachioed, unassuming, quiet, as averse to grandiloquence and grandstanding as Churchill was addicted to them, Attlee seemed hardly to rate beside Churchill. Indeed, Churchill’s two best-known jokes about Attlee, that he was “a sheep in sheep’s clothing” and “a modest man with a lot to be modest about”—the first apocryphal, the second genuine—echoed the other remark made about him, that “an empty taxi drew up in Westminster, and Mr. Attlee got out.”
Yet this was the man who defeated Winston Churchill at the height of his powers, who was the leader of the Labour party for 20 years at a time when its upper echelons contained far more flamboyant and seemingly substantial figures than he—including Ernest Bevin, Stafford Cripps, Aneurin Bevan, Herbert Morrison, and Hugh Dalton—and who ended the British Empire in India.
Bew is excellent at showing how Attlee was primarily motivated by a sense of social responsibility, which he gained from working with the poor of London’s East End before World War I. Although agnostic in religion, the socialist creed to which Attlee belonged owed far more to Methodism than to Marxism—indeed, he fought hard and successfully against all Communist attempts to take over the Labour party he loved. (How he must be turning in his grave today.)
In both of Attlee’s longest-lasting legacies, the creation of the modern British welfare state and NATO, Bew shows how Attlee’s profound anti-communism was central to his beliefs. The former was largely created in order to fight communism domestically and draw off revolutionary danger through generous social provisions; the latter was intended to prosecute the Cold War actively against Soviet and Chinese communism. Attlee was prime minister during much of the Korean War, in which he supported the U.S.-led United Nations operations at the cost of over a thousand British lives.
Attlee himself had fought bravely in the disastrous Gallipoli campaign, and somewhat surprisingly, it left him with a profound appreciation of Churchill’s strategic sense, which stood both of them in good stead when he became deputy prime minister during the Second World War.
Churchill left Attlee to run much of the home front during the war, which he did expertly, as well as presiding over the cabinet on the many occasions when Churchill was abroad. Meanwhile, Attlee let Churchill get on with everything concerning grand strategy and the service departments. Once the 1945 election was won, therefore, Attlee slipped into the premiership effortlessly, and many civil servants, even those devoted to Churchill personally, commented on how much more efficiently he expedited government business than had Churchill.
In many ways, Attlee was extremely fortunate in his career, not least in having survived Gallipoli, where he was the last man off one of the major beaches during the final evacuation. He was fortunate politically, too, especially in surviving the National Government’s landslide victory in 1931 when Labour had only 52 MPs elected, removing many of his rivals for the leadership from the House of Commons. Once the pacifist Labour leader George Lansbury made it clear, by 1935, that he would oppose rearmament whatever Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were doing, Attlee managed to dislodge him and take the leadership himself, despite his perceived lack of charisma.
Attlee’s lack of pacifism was underlined by his support for compulsory universal conscription in 1939, by his support for Harry Truman’s use of the atomic bombs against Japan, and by his pursuit of a nuclear capacity for Britain in the face of Congress’s McMahon Act, keeping the decision to go nuclear a secret from most of his cabinet.
The withdrawal from and partition of India in 1947-48 were badly mismanaged by Lord Mountbatten, the viceroy whom Attlee appointed; but as Bew argues convincingly, the decisions of Mountbatten were those of the man on the spot, who could not be hyper-managed thousands of miles away by ministers in London. The overall policy to quit India was the only one that really lay open to the Attlee government.
Bew rightly makes much of Attlee’s hitherto-underexplored (indeed, almost unknown) inner life, especially his reading of the great English poets such as John Milton, William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Rudyard Kipling, as well as Attlee’s own youthful poetry, which reveals a man with depths that he deliberately kept hidden through an extreme taciturnity, not usually a foremost attribute amongst politicians. It seems that beneath the dull speaker, with his flat and often clichéd rhetorical style, lay a pulsating heart of poetry and romance.
Who knew? I doubt that even his wife, Violet, knew—a lifelong Tory who was generally a mouse, except behind the wheel of a car, when she suddenly became a mortal danger to pedestrians and motorists alike.
Bew presents a scholarly and highly readable picture of Attlee as a profound English patriot, a man who was only persuaded of the importance of installing a ticker-tape news machine in 10 Downing Street when it was pointed out to him that it would let him have the latest cricket scores. One of the underlying themes of this book is that Attlee and much of the Labour left around him were staunch Atlanticists, and Bew produces several reasons for this.
First, they were more interested in modern American socialist writers like Edward Bellamy because the Americans had a better grasp of modernity and industrial power than the traditional English socialists. Second, and particularly for those who had supported and fought in the Great War, Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points really gave them something to fight for that was idealistic but not imperialist. Third, they were much disheartened by American withdrawal from the world in the interwar years, and always preferred the United States to be forthright and engaged. Fourth, there was a huge amount of fellow-feeling and affection for Franklin Roosevelt and the New Dealers long before the war broke out. The Atlantic Charter bore testimony to the fact that on some issues, FDR was politically much closer to the Labour members of the coalition than to Churchill.
Bew is at pains to point out how Attlee always took Churchill’s side against the British service chiefs when they were griping about American commanders at various points in the war. Like Churchill, he understood how much the political optics mattered, and that it was his duty to be supportive both to Churchill and the Grand Alliance. Such pro-American sentiment helped turn what Churchill dubbed the “Special Relationship” into something that long outlasted the Churchill ministry and the war.
Indeed, Bew argues cogently how, in many ways, Attlee and his foreign secretary Ernest Bevin were more forthright cold warriors even than their American counterparts. Attlee soon grasped the fact that the United Nations sadly wasn’t up to the job of keeping Soviet (and later Chinese) communism at bay, and that the Western alliance would necessarily remain the key instrument of security. Bew even goes so far as to argue that the decision fully to support the Americans in Korea was the factor that finally brought Attlee’s government down because of the budgetary belt-tightening that it necessitated.
Professor Bew, who works in the prestigious department of war studies at King’s College London, fully covers Attlee’s several visits to the United States, including his emergency trip to try to prevent the nuclear bomb being deployed by Douglas MacArthur in Korea. My favorite anecdote, however, is the homely one of the time, in San Francisco in late April 1945, when Attlee and his private secretary, Captain John Dugdale, went for dinner with Attlee’s old friends Robert Collier and his wife at the Colliers’ cottage in San Bruno. As deputy premier, Attlee was in California for the opening of the United Nations, but no politics were discussed and when, at the end of dinner, Mrs. Collier suggested that the men should retire to the drawing room while she washed up, “Attlee just swung his legs out from the table and started washing the dishes, with Dugdale drying them.”
It was typical Attlee.
Small wonder that only weeks later, in the general election, Churchill found it impossible to convince the British people that the mild-mannered, utterly decent Major Clement Attlee would come to rely upon what Churchill called “some form of Gestapo” to impose socialism in Britain. To any American wanting to understand why Winston Churchill was cashiered in 1945, this book will explain everything.
Andrew Roberts is the author, most recently, of Napoleon: A Life.
