John Bew, Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee (London: Riverrun, 2016), 668 pp., $30.00.

CLEMENT ATTLEE was blessed by good fortune. Wounded at Gallipoli, he survived the military disaster while many of his comrades never left the battlefield. When an ailing George Lansbury relinquished the leadership of the Labour Party in 1935, Attlee—virtually alone among Labour’s senior front-benchers to survive the electoral wipeout that the party had suffered four years earlier—was easily elected to replace him. When the British public, haunted by visions of the unemployment and homelessness that characterized the aftermath of the Great War, turned away from Winston Churchill and abandoned the Conservatives in the 1945 election, Attlee, still Labour’s leader despite numerous attempts to unseat him, assumed the prime ministership in the great man’s place. And as a prime minister surrounded by an exceedingly talented group of cabinet colleagues, ranging from the hardline Socialists Stafford Cripps and the rabble-rousing Nye Bevan to Herbert Morrison and Ernest Bevin on Labour’s right, he was able to overhaul Britain’s social system while replacing its empire with a loose collection of its former colonies and dominions, which was termed the British Commonwealth (now called simply “the Commonwealth”). In Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee, John Bew, an acclaimed historian and professor at King’s College London, has produced a biography that would have readers believe that Attlee’s career was more a product of his talent than of good luck. He argues that patriotism and pragmatism, rather than ideology, motivated Attlee throughout his professional life, and led to his success. Neither patriotism nor pragmatism necessarily mark one out for greatness, however, and they certainly did not in Attlee’s case.

Bew’s biography represents his attempt to demonstrate that Attlee was Britain’s “first-ranked citizen.” He does not go so far as to assert that Attlee outranks Churchill in the annals of Britain’s prime ministers. Indeed, Bew acknowledges that such a claim would have “caused Attlee himself to guffaw.” Roy Jenkins, a leading Labour politician and political historian of the first rank, who had previously written biographies of Gladstone and Baldwin, as well as of Attlee, whom he knew as a family friend (Jenkins’s father, Arthur, was Attlee’s wartime parliamentary private secretary) concluded his biography of Churchill with the observation:

When I started writing this book, I thought that Gladstone was, by a narrow margin, the greater man. . . . In the course of writing it, I have changed my mind. . . . I now put Churchill . . . as the greatest human being ever to occupy 10 Downing Street.

Bew wisely recognized that to compare Attlee to Churchill would have been nothing short of risible.

What Bew might actually mean by “first-ranked citizen” is not entirely clear, however. Perhaps he considers Attlee to have been a greater man than, say, his talented contemporary, David Lloyd George; or perhaps he is comparing Attlee to other residents of 10 Downing Street, such as Sir Robert Walpole, Pitt the Younger or Disraeli. Still, to rank Attlee in their company, much less Gladstone’s, would call for nothing less than a leap of faith.

Bew argues that Attlee has not so much been underestimated as “underappreciated.” To buttress his case, Bew focuses not only on Attlee’s public career, but also on his private intellectual interests, most notably the books he read and the poetry he wrote, though at times that poetry was little more than doggerel. In any event, Bew’s characterization of Attlee as underappreciated is close to the mark: few of his contemporaries lavished him with praise until late in life, most after he had relinquished his leadership of the Labour Party. All the same, like so many biographers who have fallen in love with those whose lives they chronicle, Bew appears to have overestimated the greatness of his subject. His characterization of Attlee ultimately falls short, because his subject was, at bottom, an unremarkable man, both by his own account and by most of those with whom he served or otherwise interacted.

ATTLEE WAS one of eight children, born to an upper-middle-class family that, according to family lore, traced its ancestry almost to the Norman conquest. He pursued an upper-middle-class education: first at Haileybury, an elite public school a notch or two below Eton and Harrow, and then at Oxford, which all three of his brothers had also attended. And like others of his social class, he received a “generous stipend” from his father. He “embraced the university lifestyle—rowing, reading and socialising.” Needless to say, he did not graduate with first-class honors. His passions were history and cricket; the latter tended to be a gentleman’s sport, as opposed to football (what Americans call soccer), both then and now the favored game of those on Britain’s lower economic rungs.

Attlee’s maternal family traditionally voted Conservative, as might have been expected given its social class, while his father was a Liberal who venerated Gladstone. Attlee never had a real taste for either party. After a brief stint as a barrister, his father’s profession, which he entered for lack of interest in very much of anything, he hit upon his lifelong calling: politics, particularly of the socialist variety. He became active in the Haileybury club, a noblesse-oblige institution that facilitated meetings among poor teenagers from the East End of London under the guidance of Old Haileyburians. Captivated by what he saw, Attlee became increasingly involved in the club’s activities and, among other things, acted as a kind of drill sergeant for the boys. He soon moved his lodgings to the club, though he always could return to the safety net of his family’s residence in the wealthier London suburb of Putney, and benefited from his father’s financial support to supplement his meager income as club manager.

Attlee’s socialism did not result from a particular epiphany, which is how his brother Tom described his own conversion. Instead, Clement almost fell into the movement in 1906 as a result of his activities in the East End. By 1907 Attlee had followed Tom into the International Labour Party (ILP), which the Scotsman Keir Hardie had founded some two decades earlier. Hardie, who was elected the first Labour member of Parliament, established Scotland as a Labour stronghold, which it remained for a century, until it was eclipsed by the Scottish Nationalists.

It is arguable, however, that Attlee, while sincere in his concern for the working class, was also motivated by that same sense of noblesse oblige that he never shed. Years later, as Attlee contemplated the production of a film that would make the case for an international coalition to stop Hitler, he described the effort as “valuable propaganda if done sufficiently crudely for the popular taste.” Neither the trade unionist Ernest Bevin nor the Welsh firebrand Nye Bevan would ever have uttered such words. It is noteworthy that Bew quotes Attlee without comment, because any comment would have diminished the man’s stature.

Just two years after joining the ILP, Attlee stood (the British do not run) for a place on the borough council of Stepney, in London’s East End. He garnered a grand total of sixty-nine votes. But he had launched his political career, and he flourished as a somewhat-radical stump speaker for the ILP.

Attlee was deeply affected by his experience in the Great War, having been wounded not only at Gallipoli but also in the ill-fated British attempt to relieve the besieged garrison at Kut (in today’s Iraq). He returned home both a war hero and a convinced patriot. As Bew rightly argues, patriotism was one of the primary forces that motivated Attlee throughout his career, and he never considered it to be in conflict with his socialist principles.

Attlee also returned home mildly disdainful of the Anglo-socialist intelligentsia, exemplified by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, both of whom issued panegyrics to Stalin’s Soviet Union. He later felt similarly about the likes of Harold Laski, a professor at the London School of Economics (among whose founders were the Webbs), a leading member of Labour’s National Executive Council and also someone who suffered from delusions about the Soviet experiment, as the Left referred to it during the 1930s. These were the type of people whom George Orwell had in mind when he sent up British socialism in his novel 1984.

More realist than purist, Atlee was not anti-intellectual or antireform. As Bew repeatedly demonstrates, that was far from the case. It was simply that he had little time for the intolerance that the intellectuals displayed for views other than their own, for the arrogance that permeated their arguments and for their conviction that the only perspective that mattered was theirs. Today their behavior would be styled as “political correctness.”

Attlee also could not ascribe to the views of the Leftist firebrand Aneurin Bevan, and those of his equally outspoken wife Jennie Lee, about whom Bew has little to say. The couple represented a strain in the Labour Party that has since been embodied by Michael Foot, a gifted historian who led Labour to a disastrous electoral defeat in 1983, and until recently by Jeremy Corbyn, who reversed that narrative in the June 2017 general election. Attlee’s socialism was simply too much of the moderate variety, though perhaps not as emollient as Tony Blair’s New Labour some seven decades later.

THE RETURNING soldier was deeply affected by the inability of the Lloyd George government to provide veterans with jobs and housing, despite the reformist agenda that had been the hallmark of Liberal governments since the election of 1906, which had placed H. H. Asquith into residence at Number 10. Back in the East End, he developed into a compelling instigator, and in 1919 stood for a seat on the London County Council. He lost, but not by much. He became a serious player in East End Labour circles, which dominated the politics of that polyglot area of London. It was only a matter of time before he would assume public office. His first post was an appointive one: despite his electoral defeat, the Labour majority on the Stepney Borough Council voted him in as the borough’s mayor. He served only a year, but was an effective, low-key administrator, a management style that would characterize his entire political career. He also built up a strong personal following, and in 1920 he was selected as the parliamentary candidate in the Limehouse constituency, a division of Stepney. Two years later he won his election as Labour-dominated Scotland and London added seats in the north of England and became the second-largest party in Parliament. Attlee would continue to serve in Parliament for the next three decades.

While mayor, Attlee had come to know, and work alongside, several aspiring young Labour politicians, notably Herbert Morrison, who was five years his junior. Morrison was an outsized talent with an equally outsized ego. He was also a political schemer. Having reneged on a promise to Attlee that he would obtain for him a minor political post, he earned Attlee’s undying political distrust. It would not be the last time that Morrison would attempt to double-cross his colleague; Attlee, for his part, would later undercut Morrison when both were in government.

Upon entering Parliament, Attlee was chosen by Ramsay MacDonald, Labour’s leader and the official leader of the opposition, to be his parliamentary private secretary, one of the lowest rungs on the political ladder, but an important post all the same, for it gave him insights into the workings of the parliamentary party and its leadership, as well as into the arcana of parliamentary procedure. When, after the 1923 election, MacDonald formed the first-ever Labour government in 1924, Attlee was appointed under secretary of state for war, a junior ministerial or subcabinet position. Like so many other politicians with whom Attlee came into contact, then and thereafter, MacDonald did not regard Attlee as particularly talented, but saw him, in Bew’s words, as “steady and reliable.”

While at the War Office, Attlee managed to balance the seemingly conflicting demands of his ministerial portfolio and Labour’s antimilitary instincts. His ability to reconcile different and often mutually hostile interests stood him in excellent stead over time once he emerged as Labour’s leader. It was perhaps his greatest talent.

Attlee’s term of office did not last very long. The Labour government collapsed after only ten months when, shortly after Britain formally recognized the Soviet Union, the so-called Zinoviev letter calling for a British revolution was leaked to the press. The letter was what would now be called “fake news,” but it led to an overwhelming Conservative majority. Back in opposition, Attlee was an active critic of the government. But Manny Shinwell, who had served alongside Attlee in the MacDonald government, summed him up as “just an ordinary person, nothing spectacular, hardly going far.” Shinwell reflected the views of virtually all of Attlee’s fellow parliamentarians. But he was dead wrong about Attlee’s prospects; Shinwell himself would later serve in his unspectacular colleague’s government as minister of fuel and, indeed, would nearly be dismissed from that post by that “ordinary person.”

While in opposition, Attlee was appointed to the Simon Commission, named for its leader, Sir John Simon, which attempted to set a course for India’s political future. Bew observes that MacDonald named Attlee to the commission to keep him off the opposition front benches. It was therefore not very surprising that when MacDonald formed a new government after the 1929 elections, Attlee remained a backbencher. Still, MacDonald brought him into the government as chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in May 1930, to replace the aristocratic, incorrigible and nascent fascist Oswald Mosley.

Attlee soured on MacDonald when, in August 1931, the Labour leader brought down his own government and, together with some of Labour’s most notable leaders, opted to join the Conservatives to form a “National Government.” Bew notes that the November 1931 election, which MacDonald called to consolidate the National Government’s position, “almost killed the Labour Party.” Labour’s better-known leaders had defected to MacDonald, while most of its remaining senior stalwarts, including nearly all the cabinet ministers who had not gone over to him, lost their parliamentary seats in the Labour wipeout. So too had many of the party’s younger stars, notably Herbert Morrison and the Labour leader Ernest Bevin. Attlee had retained his seat, however, though by a mere 531 votes; he was among the few relatively senior Labour leaders left standing.

When the aging George Lansbury took over the party leadership in 1932, Attlee became his deputy almost by default. Though Bew does not explicitly say so, the outcome of the 1931 election was perhaps the most important turning point in Attlee’s career. It enabled a capable but uninspiring politician of the second rank to jump the queue for his party’s leadership. By the time his potential rivals were returned to Parliament, Attlee was in an unassailable position as Lansbury’s successor. He had established himself alongside Lansbury as the key individual responsible for maintaining Labour’s parliamentary coherence, and had prevented its subordination to the party’s overweening and more radical National Executive Committee. When Lansbury resigned in 1935, Attlee was duly elected Labour’s leader.

ATTLEE’S RECORD during the latter half of the 1930s is hardly stellar. Despite his anti-Communist stance at home, he did not hesitate to identify with the British volunteers who served in the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War, although many had been recruited by the British Communist Party. A company in that brigade was named in his honor. Bew writes approvingly of Attlee’s visits to Spain in support of the Republicans, while stressing Hitler’s support for Franco’s fascists. He says virtually nothing about the activities of the British Communists as recruiters, however. Nor for that matter, does he explicitly point to Stalin’s aid to the Nationalists, which included supplying, among other weapons systems, one thousand aircraft, nine hundred tanks, 1,500 artillery pieces, fifteen thousand machine guns and thirty thousand mortars.

Though he was not an appeaser—he bitterly attacked the Hoare-Laval Pact that partitioned Abyssinia and, in practice, handed it over to Italy—Attlee did nothing to encourage a military buildup to deter both Mussolini and Hitler. Instead, he supported the quixotic notion that it was best to rely upon the League of Nations to curb the appetites of the fascist dictators. “Not for the first time,” Bew writes, “Attlee let others lead the fight for a tougher line on defence.” In 1936 Attlee characterized Hugh Dalton’s proposal that Labour support the Baldwin government’s rearmament proposals, modest as they were, as “stupid.” And as late as 1939, Attlee was still opposed to conscription. His attitude did not reflect the initiative one might have expected from a party leader committed to democracy. It was instead typical of those who sat on their hands “while England slept.” Then again, Attlee rarely took the initiative, letting his colleagues lead on a host of issues, which of course subjected them to blame if things went wrong.

In one of his many swipes at Churchill, Bew claims that “in the first half of 1938, as Churchill softened his criticisms of the [Chamberlain] government, an emboldened Attlee ratcheted up the rhetoric.” It is true that, as Jenkins notes, Churchill was inclined to give Chamberlain “the benefit of the doubt,” but that did not mean he lowered his antiappeasement profile. On the contrary, Jenkins observes, “during the late spring and early summer of 1938, Churchill did some sustained antiappeasement campaigning.” Moreover, it was Churchill, not Attlee, who gave the most riveting and critical speech in Parliament after Chamberlain returned from Munich proclaiming “peace in our time.” Finally, when Churchill circulated a letter to protest the treatment of the Czechs, Attlee refused to sign. While Churchill had long been outspoken in his criticism of Hitler for the treatment of Germany’s Jews, Attlee, who had long represented a heavily Jewish constituency in London’s East End, was notably silent. Bew can only recount that Attlee was moved by Churchill’s “tears when he talked of the sufferings of the Jews in Germany.” For his part, Bew has no comment to offer about Attlee’s reluctance to criticize Nazi persecution of German, Austrian and Czech Jewry.

Bew asserts, “It was Attlee, working through the Labour Party, who was to be the kingmaker, that is, who stage managed Churchill into Number 10.” Jenkins, biographer of both Churchill and Attlee, would have none of it. After demonstrating that it was Viscount Halifax’s reticence that opened the door for Churchill, Jenkins argues, “The view that the Labour Party made Churchill Prime Minister is therefore a myth,” though he acknowledges that Labour was a “crucial piece on the chessboard.” Attlee would have been equally comfortable with Halifax as prime minister. Bew observes that Attlee, like Morrison, Dalton and Cripps, “seemed to be more inclined towards Lord Halifax.” Attlee steadfastly supported Churchill, however, when the Conservative maverick was asked to form a government, and agreed to serve as his deputy, despite opposition from Labour’s left. Bew reports that Attlee’s patriotism never burned brighter: “Of all the moments of Attlee’s public life . . . taking Labour into government under Churchill at Britain’s darkest hour was his proudest act.”

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.

Dov S. Zakheim was an under secretary of defense (2001–4) and a deputy under secretary of defense (1985–87). He is vice chairman of the Center for the National Interest.

This essay was published in the July/August 2017 print magazine under the headline “Belaboured.”

Image: Wikimedia Commons.