I should declare an interest. My father was a member of the Attlee governments of 1945-51, first as the secretary for overseas trade and eventually as Aneurin Bevan’s successor as minister of health. At some point in the early 1950s, I can’t now remember precisely when, Attlee and his wife came to dinner with my parents. Attlee asked me what form I was in at my not particularly distinguished grammar school. I told him that I was in the sixth form. “Ah, he said wistfully, “I never got as far as the sixth form.” Not surprisingly, he won my heart. Even now, getting on for 70 years later, I still treasure the memory of his self-deprecating, unselfconscious charm and the authenticity that underpinned it.
The Attlee who captivated my gawky, adolescent self is the one celebrated in John Bew’s huge and disappointingly bland new biography. The attractions of blandness are easy to understand. Attlee left office 65 years ago. Thirteen years passed before Labour returned to government, with Harold Wilson as prime minister. The Wilson governments of 1964-70 were miserable affairs, marked by a paranoid obsession with plots against him, both on his part and on the part of his squalid kitchen cabinet. Much more damaging was the mortally wounding insouciance summed up in his most memorable phrase: “a week is a long time in politics”. Faced with the choice between devaluation and deflation, the government prevaricated, and ended with both.
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