Clem the gem
Clement Attlee became Prime Minister 75 years ago because, under a quiet exterior, he was ruthlessly brilliant, says Francis Beckett
Everyone knows the Churchill quip about Clement Attlee – ‘A modest little man with plenty to be modest about.’ Almost no one knows Attlee’s typically terse and pronounless description of Churchill’s political style: ‘Trouble with Winston. Nails his trousers to the mast. Can’t get down.’
Which illustrates a strange paradox. Attlee – the Labour Prime Minister from 1945 to 1951 whose government created the welfare state – was considered an insignificant little man. ‘An empty taxi drew outside Downing Street and Clem Attlee got out.’ Yet most historians now agree that Attlee and Margaret Thatcher were the two most effective Prime Ministers of the 20th century.
People underestimate him because he talked so little. ‘Is there anything else you’d like to say to the BBC, Mr Attlee?’ asked a television interviewer during the 1950 election campaign. ‘Don’t think so. No,’ said the Prime Minister.
‘A conversation with Attlee is like throwing biscuits for a dog,’ said one colleague. ‘All you can get out of him is yup, yup, yup.’
Just after he retired, a pretentious BBC interviewer opened a discussion with a long, elaborate, tortured analogy between Marx and Machiavelli. ‘So don’t you think, Lord Attlee, that socialism is really just like Machiavellianism?’ Attlee replied, ‘No.’
But his taciturnity hid absolute self-belief and utter ruthlessness. A minister, summoned to see him, was horrified to be told that the Prime Minister wanted his resignation, and asked why. ‘Not up to it,’ said Attlee, and that was that.
Who was this minister? Denis Healey told me it was John Parker, fired from the Dominions Office in 1946. An equally good source names
Richard Stokes, removed as Minister of Works in 1951. Lobby journalist James Margach wrote it of an unnamed Scottish Secretary.
It’s perfectly likely that it happened to all three, for Attlee was ruthless with his ministers. Whoever called him ‘a sheep in sheep’s clothing’ was about as wrong as you could be.
‘Perfect ass,’ he said of his voluble first Chancellor Hugh Dalton. ‘Always had to have a secret to tell someone, to please them.’ When, in 1947, the main items of Dalton’s budget were in an evening newspaper before Dalton gave them to the House of Commons, Attlee said, apparently with genuine puzzlement, ‘He spoke to a journalist? Why would he want to do that?’ He forced Dalton to resign, though no harm had been done and there was no question of corruption.
He had terse and often unkind things to say about many of his colleagues. Nye Bevan’s marriage to the rather more left-wing Jennie Lee provoked him to say, ‘Nye needed a sedative. He got an irritant.’ Of patrician, pre-war Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, he said, ‘Queer bird, Halifax. All hunting and holy communion.’
And yet he had a genius for getting people who loathed each other to work together. ‘Herbert Morrison [the Deputy PM] is his own worst enemy,’ one Cabinet Minister confided to Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, and Bevin growled, ‘Not while I’m alive, ’e ain’t.’ Tight-lipped though he was, just occasionally Attlee suddenly became very talkative, though never about politics. At one of his press conferences, which was running into the ground after ten minutes because of the Prime Minister’s monosyllabic answers, a journalist who knew him well said, ‘Prime Minister, we’re all stumped. What’s 12 across, two words, seven and six letters?’ And Attlee talked for ten minutes about how he had solved the clue from that morning’s Times crossword.
He enjoyed talking about school cricket matches with anyone who went to his old public school, Haileybury. In fact, he would talk to anyone about cricket, which was a great passion with him. When his press officer, Francis Williams, wanted to install a telex machine in Downing Street, to see what was running on the news wires, he knew how to overcome Attlee’s objections – he pointed out that the machine would keep the Prime Minister up to date with the latest score from Lord’s.
After it was installed, Attlee looked into his press officer’s room. ‘Francis, my cricket machine – it’s giving out the decisions made in Cabinet this morning. How can it do that?’ Williams explained that he routinely briefed the lobby. ‘All right. Leave the show to you. Good work.’
How did this terse, understated little man beat the charismatic war hero Winston Churchill, 75 years ago, on 5th July 1945, and win a stunning overall majority of 145 seats? The main reason was widespread determination not to go back to the sufferings of the unemployed in the thirties.
But it helped that Attlee was a known quantity – he had been Churchill’s deputy during the war. He was fond of telling the story about an old lady in his East End constituency who wanted to vote for Mr Churchill, but Mr Churchill’s name was not on the ballot paper. Fortunately, Mr Attlee’s name was there, and he had been Mr Churchill’s deputy, so she happily voted for him.