Ernest Bevin: Labour’s Churchill, by Andrew Adonis

Ernest Bevin: Labour’s Churchill

By Andrew Adonis Biteback £20

Ernest Bevin, if not a forgotten figure of midcentury politics, remains under-appreciated.

His was an unusual political career. Bevin was a brilliant trade-union leader, an accomplished Minister of Labour in Churchill’s wartime coalition government, and then an unlikely Foreign Secretary during the opening stages of the Cold War after 1945.

Yet he was never a distinguished Parliamentarian (he became an MP only after joining the Cabinet), nor a denizen of Westminster or the Establishment.

His genius, as Andrew Adonis regularly reminds us in this excellent, concise and vivid biography, was to be a trade unionist in every job he had.

Adonis argues that Bevin’s flair for organisation, judgement (of people and politics), negotiating skills and capacity for calculated brutality were behind all his successes: the creation of Britain’s first most powerful amalgamated trade union (the T&G), the mobilisation of the Home Front as Churchill’s unlikely right-hand man and the defence of Western Europe after 1945 from the expansionist designs of the West’s new enemy, Josef Stalin.

This narrative thread of Bevin as ‘the union man’ connecting his varied achievements makes Adonis’s portrait distinctive compared with Alan Bullock’s exhaustive multi-volume biography.

Adonis is surely right to claim that these combined successes alone justify Bevin’s claim to be considered a key figure in the victory over Hitler, containment of the USSR, and the emergence of the post-war consensus in British politics that lasted until Thatcher’s arrival in 1979.

Adonis seeks both to correct the historical record on Bevin and to use his achievements to remind the modern Labour Party what it needs to do now to rediscover its strengths and historical mission. The book offers a subtle yet colourful picture of Bevin’s essential convictions and characteristics.

He was a socialist who knew that the improvement in the lives of working people would come not from the patrician generosity of the political class, but from organising and negotiating. He was a builder, an organiser and a man of constant action. He was always a democrat: always muscular, but never a militant. He did not suffer his fellow men gladly. Bevin hated intellectuals, Communism (unlike many in the pre-war Labour movement) and many if not most senior Labour politicians of his era.

Bevin’s extraordinary origins and path to politics are captured beautifully in Adonis’s account. He was an orphan from a poor, rural background, constantly moving between homes and manual jobs, until the Baptist Church and Socialist Society in Bristol helped him discover his vocation in the Dock Workers Union, which he joined in 1911.

Bevin’s rise owed much to an astonishing work ethic, one that gave him numerous breakdowns and premature ill-health, and an oratorical prowess that both used and belied his lack of education. Michael Foot remarked that ‘his speeches had all the fascination of a public execution’.

Yet he also was an astute builder of tactical alliances – notably with Keynes, who put expert flesh on Bevin’s instincts about state intervention; and with Attlee, whose cross-class partnership with Bevin was mutually beneficial and crucial to Labour’s success in 1945.

Adonis’s praise is greatest for two major episodes in Bevin’s career. First, as Churchill’s Minister of Labour, he brought the collective organising genius of a trade-union supremo to a Tory-led

wartime Cabinet, enabling Britain at home to rival the mobilising capacities of Germany and the USSR’S totalitarian states.

Secondly, Adonis’s account of Bevin’s time as Foreign Secretary (1945-51) is overwhelmingly focused on his attempt to confront and contain Stalin. Attlee used him as a diplomatic attack-dog, and Adonis rightly credits Bevin with an early, clear-eyed understanding of the imperial intentions of Stalin at a time when war-weariness in London and muddled thinking in Washington urged compromise with Soviet expansionism.

Bevin helped create both the modern Federal Republic of Germany, and the notion of ‘the West’ as an alliance of free and prosperous nations.

Some areas Adonis skips over more lightly, though never less than honestly. Bevin’s personal weaknesses – his vanity, his heavy drinking (he was said to ‘use alcohol like a car uses petrol’), his health, his anti-semitism and his grudges – occupy less space than his strengths.

His judgement as Foreign Secretary, aside from his locking horns with Stalin, was often very poor: on Indian independence, the formation of Israel and especially on the early stages of the formation of the European Union (which Adonis regrets).

And while we are spared most details of Bevin’s smoke-filled-room machinations as leader of the T&GWU for 23 years, I found myself wanting to know more about his wife and daughter, who are largely absent throughout.

But this is a book primarily about politics: the politics of Bevin’s time, and the politics of now. Adonis has written a compelling biography that captures the distinctive zest of Bevin’s beliefs, his larger-than-life presence on the political stage and his extraordinary contributions to mid-century politics. He is right that Labour and Britain have not had a Bevin since Bevin, and are the poorer for it.

Lord Wood was an adviser to Gordon Brown, 2007-10