Attlee turned in a stellar performance as Churchill’s wartime deputy. To begin with, he got along with Churchill, no mean feat. Many in the Labour Party felt that he was too deferential to the prime minister and missed key opportunities to promote the socialist agenda. Attlee’s priority was winning the war, however, and he rightly saw his role as providing a steady manager’s hand to enable both the government and the country to run as smoothly as possible under the most trying of circumstances. Still, as Bew acknowledges, “outside the world of Whitehall, Attlee’s presence in the government did not inspire.” In other words, Attlee was the government’s “Mr. Inside,” a superb chief operating officer, who enabled his chief executive to focus on larger strategic matters.

While the Labour Left may have been excessively and somewhat unfairly critical of Attlee, it did have a point. It was the widely acclaimed 1943 Beveridge Report—named for its principal author, a Liberal civil servant—that actually provided the framework for what became the postwar Labour government’s reformist social policy. As Bew concedes in a model of understatement, “The enthusiastic reception of the Beveridge Report does suggest that something had been lacking in Attlee’s approach.” As the fortunes of war began to turn in the Allies’ favor, Attlee once again found his leadership challenged, primarily but not solely from his left-wing backbenchers. He was fortunate that Morrison, ever his rival, and Bevin, his closest ally, worked jointly to prevent a split in the party that would only have benefitted the Conservatives.

Bew points out that Attlee did not hesitate to criticize Churchill, albeit only in private. For his part, Bew is not at all reluctant to take sideswipes at the old man. He calls Churchill’s account of his years in the “wilderness” purely “self-serving.” He describes Churchill as “always more statesmanlike and benevolent when he was basking in glory.” He notes that in 1944 Churchill was drinking heavily and “took it out on the chiefs of staff.” He even blames Churchill for sounding “the first note of discord” during a 1944 by-election, though Labour, like the Tories, had begun its political maneuvers in anticipation of the inevitable postwar general election.

It was Bevin and Morrison on Labour’s right, and Stafford Cripps on Labour’s left, who took up the cudgels and rallied the party in the run-up to the 1945 election, while Attlee remained “the invisible man,” as the left-wing Tribune newspaper dubbed him. Churchill undermined his own prospects by seeming oblivious to the urgent popular desire to avoid at all costs the shortage of jobs and housing that had confronted returning veterans of the previous Great War. Meanwhile, virtually up to the election itself, Morrison continued his scheming to replace Attlee as leader. Bew can only rely on what he admits is anecdotal evidence when he asserts, “There is reason to believe that Attlee’s persona acted as a reassuring counterbalance to those who might otherwise have been put off by the Labour Party’s penchant for factionalism and intrigue.” It is equally arguable, however, that Labour won that election in spite of Attlee, not because of him.

ONCE IN office, Attlee acted as primus inter pares within the cabinet. While successfully cultivating a close personal relationship with his plain-spoken, often laconic American counterpart, Harry Truman, Attlee left many of Labour’s other policy initiatives to his cabinet colleagues. Thus it was Bevan who fathered Britain’s National Health Service; Cripps and Morrison who managed the economy and nationalized key industries; Hugh Dalton who managed financial policy; Bevin who played an outsize role in foreign affairs. Indeed, Bevin took the lead in responding to the Marshall Plan and in pushing for the creation of what became NATO. As Bew notes,

Attlee was happy to follow Bevin, who was the driving force in turning the Treaty of Brussels [the defense agreement among the UK, France, West Germany and Benelux] into a larger security arrangement with the Americans and Canadians.

Attlee did reserve for himself, with Bevin’s strong support, the historic decision for Britain to proceed with development of its own strategic nuclear capability, which ensured that even as its empire became a relic of the past, the United Kingdom would remain a powerful force to be reckoned with for decades to come. Attlee also personally oversaw the transition to Indian independence; he had retained a strong interest in Indian affairs ever since his service on the Simon Commission. Indian independence, as well as that of Pakistan, enabled Attlee to transform the British Empire into the British Commonwealth of Nations, an institution that continues to endure, and may well grow in importance once Britain leaves the European Union. For all three of these major developments Attlee has received far too little credit than he deserves.

Attlee was considerably less successful in managing Britain’s exit from Palestine. The Palestine issue, Bew writes, “ultimately defeated both Bevin and Attlee.” But his account is one-sided, focusing on Jewish violence against British forces and Truman’s constant pressure for expanded immigration. Meanwhile, Bew is completely silent regarding the total rejection by Palestine’s Arabs of any arrangement that would have led to the creation of a Jewish state, however small it might have been. Nor does he mention Britain’s detention of Holocaust survivors in camps on Cyprus in order to restrict their entry into Palestine.

Much of Britain’s Palestine policy was generated by Bevin, who was no friend of the Jews. Bevin attributed Truman’s sympathy for the plight of European Jewry as purely a response to the “Zionist lobby”; he nastily remarked that a Zionist “is defined as a Jew who collects money from another Jew to send another Jew to Palestine.” But as Bew does allow, “Even after the issue [of Palestine] was sent to the UN . . . Attlee remained personally active in trying to slow down illegal immigration from Europe to Palestine.” It was not the prime minister’s finest hour.

Virtually from the start, the Attlee government’s initiatives were undermined by Britain’s parlous economic state and the constant need to impose austerity measures on a long-suffering populace. With the passage of time, the public’s impatience grew stronger, as one economic crisis followed another, resulting in further cuts in welfare spending as well as the need to devalue the pound sterling, which in turn raised the cost of desperately needed foreign goods. It did not help that economics was never Attlee’s strong suit. Neither did the fact that several of his key ministers, notably Cripps, had taken the lead in managing the economy. Attlee observed, “It was easier standing at street corners than it was dealing with the complexities of life in office.” Years later, Barack Obama could have said the same, as has Donald Trump begun to realize.

Labour barely won the 1950 election. Bew calls it a strong mandate, but the actual figures betray his assessment. In 1945, Labour had gained a 146-seat margin, winning 393 seats. Five years later, Labour lost seventy-eight seats, retaining a mere five-seat margin. It was hardly a vote of confidence for the prime minister. Within a year he was out of office, having lost to Churchill. He would carry on as leader of Labour for another four years, finally resigning in 1955 and bringing to a close two decades as party leader. His later years were not dissimilar to those of other “formers,” whether in London, Washington or elsewhere in the West: speeches, travel, honors and the patching up of old rivalries—in his case, most notably, with Churchill. Bew documents this latter period of Attlee’s life with the same careful detail that marks the rest of this lengthy biography.

For an accomplished historian, Bew surprisingly commits several howlers that cannot be ascribed to poor editing. He described Bevan as a “moderate,” when he surely meant Bevin. Neville Chamberlain did not walk “down the steps from the British Airways flight announcing ‘peace with honour’” upon his return from meeting with Hitler in Munich. Nor did Attlee’s “British Airways Stratocruiser” land at National Airport in 1950. British Airways did not come into existence until the 1970s. Henry Morgenthau was not Roosevelt’s secretary of state. He was secretary of the treasury. Similarly, John Foster Dulles was not a senator in 1948, as Bew records. New York governor Thomas Dewey appointed the future secretary of state to fill a Senate vacancy in July 1949; he served only until November of that year.

More than a half century ago, Robert Blake wrote a biography of Andrew Bonar Law called The Unknown Prime Minister. In the course of but three decades, the former Conservative prime minister had become a forgotten man, and Blake sought to resuscitate him. Clement Attlee was never completely forgotten, nor has he been underestimated, especially by historians. As Bew observes, he recently has enjoyed something of a minor revival in Labour circles. Nevertheless, he still deserves better, even if he was not among the first rank of British prime ministers.

It is unfortunate that sixty-five years after he left office, Attlee’s accomplishments, both during the war and as prime minister for three times as long as Bonar Law, did not prevent him from fading from public memory. That will no longer be the case. In his compendious and well-written history, Bew rightly has rescued Attlee from undeserved obscurity, at least insofar as the general public is concerned. And for that he should be commended.