A Biography of Attlee by John Bew - Citizen Clem
Review by Stephen Kearney
“An empty taxi pulled up outside ten Downing Street” ran the joke of the time “and Clement Attlee got out”. Orwell called him “a dead fish”. A chapter of this very biography is entitled “Few thought he was even a starter.” So embarrassed was the man at encountering his supporters on returning to Number 10 one evening, that he ran inside “like a man escaping his creditors”. Once, travelling by train in 3rd class, he was asked “have you ever been told you look like that Mr Attlee?” Came the monosyllabic reply “frequently”.
So who was this insignificant little twerp, this third class traveller? Have you ever even heard of him? Who hasn’t heard of Winston Churchill and who has heard of Clement Attlee? John Bew, in this excellent biography fills in most of what you need to know about the man in 670 pages of fully annotated, indexed and referenced text with 16 pages of photographs thrown in for good measure. Don’t want to know? You should! It was thanks to Clement Attlee, Labour Prime Minister from 1945 to 1951, ousting Churchill in 1945 in a shock overturning of all expectations, that we got the NHS, the welfare state and a raft of social reforms that has made Britain a much better place for ordinary people. So powerful, beneficial and popular were his reforms, that even Margaret Thatcher had to publicly proclaim “the NHS is safe in our hands”, whatever her private views. In terms of the practical welfare of ordinary people, Clement Atlee was probably the best prime minister this country has ever had – yet few under the age of 60 have heard of him.
Clement Atlee was no ideologue; indeed he came from the most unlikely of backgrounds considering his start in life. Born in 1883 into a prosperous upper-middle class family, son of a wealthy solicitor, he grew up in leafy Putney, probably as affluent then as it is now. After the almost obligatory route of public school followed by Oxford, he practised as a barrister. The route ahead was straight, direct, simple and prosperous, his father’s life repeated with 20th century upgrades; I’m tempted to borrow from Albert Hammond’s 1973 The Free Electric Band “my future in the system was talked about and planned …… but I gave it up for music and the free electric band.” What happened? How did the man go off the rails? Where did his “free electric band” come from?
As a young man he started doing voluntary social work in an east London boys’ club, yeah, on the cheaper side of town. After a while of working with the disadvantaged he did something that so few politicians do: he realised that something was fundamentally wrong. But then he wasn’t a politician – just a comfortable, passive conservative cruiser. He was shocked at what he found. It wasn’t the poor that were the problem: it was the system that created them and perpetuated the injustices that condemned so many to a life of poverty and squalor. He realised that the system that had benefited him so greatly was fundamentally unfair. Political change, he reasoned, was the only way. And that’s why he went into politics. He went in to right a wrong, not to establish a career. The contrast with most politicians could hardly be greater.
And there was something else that stands in utter contrast to so many politicians today; he was not a self promoter endlessly looking for PR opportunities, and would surely have recoiled aghast at Tony Blair’s email instruction to one of his staff for “the creation of eye-catching initiatives with which I can be personally associated.” A photograph taken in 1955 at Marylebone tube station, shows a man of utterly insignificant appearance, a man of no consequence, an Ealing comedy, downtrodden, homburg hatted bank clerk, the hat preserving the last vestiges of visual dignity. And when not travelling by tube or third class, his wife would drive him to various rallies and events around the country. Would anyone even look at such a besuited nonentity today? Yet this PR disaster of a man, this bald-headed, insignificant little twerp, somehow brought more real benefits to Britons than any other politician.
The man’s lack of ‘presence’ was noted right from the start. When he became leader of the Labour party in 1935, it was simply assumed he was in position only until a proper leader could be chosen. Yet there he stayed for twenty years. How did he do it? He mightn’t have had the ‘X’ factor but he had something ten times better: the ‘C’ factor – character. This, dare I say it, character, as deputy prime minister under Churchill, helped carry Britain through WW2, through to VE (Victory Europe) day. Labour’s inspired election poster, fighting Churchill in the May 1945 general election, to the backdrop of a massive ‘V’ carries the exhortation “and now win the peace”. The empty taxi won by a landslide of 145 seats.
As prime minister, through his vision, character and determination to get the job done, he created institutions and practices that we enjoy to this day, even if now under increasing threat. Of course he didn’t do it alone; he had a special ability to get the best out of his cabinet, comprising some very able, if fiercely independent people who didn’t always get on, to put it mildly. Two of the big hitters, Ernest Bevin, foreign secretary, and Herbert Morrison, deputy prime minister, hated each other’s guts. A remark made to Bevin that Morrison was his own worst enemy drew the instant retort “not while I’m alive, he ain’t.” Yet this government of Attlee’s saw the end of WW2 (VJ day), the creation of the NHS, the creation of the ‘cradle to grave’ welfare state, great improvements in employment conditions and oversaw Britain’s initial withdrawal from empire, plus many, many more, shaping the following decades. And all against a backdrop of a country shattered and bankrupted by six years of war. No mean achievement.
Bew’s biography does the subject proud. Obviously the product of an immense amount of work, as evidenced by the great level of detail, the book in total conveys very much the flavour of the time, all presented in a straightforward easy to read style. While clearly very much taken with his ‘Citizen Clem’, Bew has written no eulogy. We get warts and all and Clem has his fair share of them. Did you ever wonder why a total health service, covering cradle to grave, misses out on teeth? Originally, free dentistry was included within the scope of the NHS, but then fees came in in 1950 – to pay for the war in Korea. I’d call that a case of wrong priorities. By the time the war was over, the Tories, still under Winston Churchill, were back in power and they, opponents of the NHS anyway, were hardly going to bring back free teeth. By the time of the next Labour government in 1964, I suspect the post war vision was already beginning to fade and the new breed of politicians was unwilling to be bold, to do the right thing. Though by then, the new breed probably had a different view of what that constituted: it was (New) Labour, after all, who introduced university tuition fees.
Atlee would appear as an oddity in today’s political climate, some might even call him a freak. He had no interest in self-promotion, was not one for PR spin and usually felt uncomfortable when praised – the very anti-thesis of our celebrity driven culture today. Yet he knew what was right and what was wrong, and there was a lot wrong in the Britain of his youth which, despite his own very comfortable start in life, he saw, recognised and acted upon – a latter day veni, vidi, vici, perhaps, but without the grandiosity. Clement Attlee, a real Citizen Clem, was a man of guts, compassion, persistence, vision and modesty and Bew tells his story wonderfully.
What Britain was crying out for in 1997 was another Clement Attlee but it got a Tony Blair instead.
Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee by John Bew Review by Stephen Kearney © June 2021.r1