AND ANOTHER THING
The benevolent ghost of Aneurin Bevan at Tony Blair's love-feast
PAUL JOHNSON
Socialist old fogeys are using the approaching centenary of Aneurin Bevan's birth to present him as the archetype of Old Labour and a patriarchal reproach to its New version. The line peddled in Old Labour newspapers like the Guardian is that the Welsh firebrand would have repu- diated Tony Blair and all his works. I am not sure that speculation about what Bevan, who died nearly 40 years ago, would have thought of Blair serves any purpose. The only Labour icon whose view I can be sure of is Attlee, Old Labour personified. He would have approved of Blair, for Attlee loathed ideology and believed in winning elections in order to do what he called 'useful things'. The only Blair policy I am certain Bevan would have hated is Welsh devolution. He detested Welsh sepa- ratism and had a peculiar loathing of pro- fessional Welshmen: the news that the creeps who will sit in the Welsh Assembly will be paid £70,000 a year would have filled him with fury.
However, to present Bevan as the moral custodian of Old Labour is unhistorical. He put up with the Labour party because he had nowhere else to go, but he did not like the way it was run. Meetings of the parlia- mentary Labour party were, he said to me, 'occasions of exquisite torture'. The trades unions were 'thundering herds of buffaloes' who 'have no idea what is the object or des- tination of their stampede'. Hampstead, Where lived middle-class Labour intellectu- als like Douglas Jay, Hugh Gaitskell and Michael Foot, was a 'pit of cobras'. He did not like the so-called Bevanites much either. Dick Crossman's house in Smith Square where they met was a 'mansion of discombobulated malice'. I don't know which he disliked more, institutionalised majorities or conspiratorial coteries. He treated his sycophantic followers with bare- ly concealed contempt. Out of the good- ness of his heart, he wrote an introduction to my first book though I doubt if he liked me ('over-educated red-haired papist). But he tolerated the way I argued with him, and my last memory of the man was a blazing row we had about the Middle East, just before he went into that fatal hospital. Bevan not only disliked the apparatus of parties but the people who ran them and indeed all full-time politicians, even part- time party workers. They adored him but their love was not reciprocated. His irrita- tion with their sentimental, unthinking devotion to sacred cows came out suddenly during his famous 'naked into the confer- ence chamber' speech when he accused them of 'an emotional spasm', spitting out the words in his contempt. What Bevan wanted was to reach out over the heads of the 'political nation' to the 'real nation', which he could sway with his extraordinary oratory, as Lloyd George had once done. Bevan learned the lesson of LG's long, sad twilight, that a leader needed a strong party, but he never regarded a party as an end in itself. I suspect he would have approved of the way Blair has used Labour for his own national purposes.
Bevan was not a team player and made a bad Cabinet colleague. He tended to wreck any show he was not running. But he would have made a magnificent prime minister and national leader, for he had the gift, like Churchill, of identifying patriotic purpose with his own interests and, once he got his way, he behaved with charismatic magna- nimity. I rank him alongside Churchill and Thatcher as possessing political genius, eas- ier to illustrate than to define; Blair is beginning to fit into the same category.
There is no good book about Bevan and probably never will be, for he left virtually no papers. And as Pitt the Younger said of Charles James Fox, his extraordinary power could be understood only by those 'who sat under the wand of the magician'. His orato- ry was mesmeric not just because of the words he used, though they were arresting. Bevan told me his stammer, as a boy, was so bad that he had to ransack dictionaries to discover synonyms he could pronounce, and this meant he used words in the most unexpected manner, so that they came out new-minted. But the power of his speech lay in his lithe and sinuous arguments, which sprang direct from his fertile brain and creative imagination He had a gift for saying something entirely new about a sub- Very discreet, that's Mr and Mr Chris Smith.' ject everyone else had talked to death, and producing it unexpectedly so that his listen- ers suddenly found themselves stunned into thoughtful silence.
Bevan sometimes struck me as being a frustrated artist who might have been a great architect. I intend to put him into my new book, Creators, as an example of a cre- ative politician, someone who bequeathed to posterity a lasting institutional achieve- ment, rather as William I gave us the Domesday Book or Stephen Langton Magna Carta or Gladstone the Budget or Lloyd George the Welfare State. Bevan's National Health Service was not just a political act, it was a work of art with an emotional life of its own which has long survived the death of its creator. Today it is like a great cathedral, serving multitudes but standing for a vision altogether beyond the practical purposes for which it was built. But, like other great cathedrals, it was built on obsolescent structures, demolished by ruthless innovators to serve as founda- tions for the new masterwork. Bevan was a ruthless creator himself in scrapping such cherished institutions as the old doctors'- panel system to erect his NHS. All true cre- ators are also destroyers.
Today the politician Bevan would most approve of, I think, is Frank Field, who has been charged with rethinking and re- creating the welfare system. This is exactly the kind of task Bevan himself would have relished, involving imagination, creativity and an intuitive rapport with the mass of the people, together with a willingness to scrap what is outmoded, however dear to sentimental minds. Bevan would have dis- missed the opposition to Field's reforms as 'an emotional spasm' and seen the creation of an affordable, efficient and non- corrupting system of welfare as a primary target for the first Labour government in two decades. He would also have hoped, as I do, that Field, having reformed welfare, would go on to recreate the NHS, which is badly in need of it, as Bevan would have been the first to point out. To this extent at least, it is clear to me that Tony Blair, the party leader and Prime Minister who is directing the recreative process, would have had Bevan's warm approval. New Labour or Old Labour, Bevan always saw the party as what he called 'a living body', subject to its own organic rules as it reflected the changing aspirations of real people, not ideological constructs.
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