Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee by John Bew (riverrun, £30)
On 3rd August 1945 at 10.45am, newly victorious Labour MPs assembled in Westminster to take their oath of allegiance. Clement Attlee, the new prime minister whose party had just won by a landslide, gave his fellow MPs three pieces of advice: do not talk in the lobby of the House of Commons; do not loiter or dine in West End restaurants; and never converse with William “Max” Aitken (Lord Beaverbrook). As to himself: “I am a very diffident man,” he explained. “I find it very hard to carry on conversation. But if any of you come to see me, I will welcome you. I will receive you and I will discuss your problems with you.”
This is the Attlee we know: straightforward, decent, conservative, even a little dull in the face of epochal events. John Bew’s new account serves up an altogether more compelling story of Attlee—the wartime deputy prime minister inspired by John Milton; the political lion who bested Winston Churchill in the Chamber; the Atlanticist who shaped US President Harry S Truman’s geopolitics; and, all the while, a Labour leader who remained true to his radical, socialist creed.
As such Citizen Clem comprises a great work of personal biography, social history, political philosophy, international relations and ferrets-in-a-sack Labour Party infighting. As the do-or-die 2016 Labour Party Conference opens and Britain stands at its most internationally exposed since the Suez crisis, this 500-page doorstopper could not have landed at a more timely moment. Attlee himself, in a manner which would have instantly labelled him a “red Tory” by today’s Momentum activists, was always delighted to talk up his conservative pedigree. In his stunningly dull autobiography As It Happened, published in 1954, he writes lovingly of weekends spent at his grandfather’s house, The Gables, on Wandsworth Common. “Aunt Jane’s room was very jolly—it had a hob grate with Dutch tiles, deep window seats and a shining mahogany wardrobe,” he recalled. “There were little closets giving off it, used for washing and pervaded by a general smell of Pears soap.”
The future Labour prime minister’s upbringing was a classic chronicle of late Victorian upper-middle-class life: prep school, public school, Oxford and preparation for a career at the Bar. What changes Attlee from City lawyer to the great social reformer was, as Bew explains, a mixture of the personal and intellectual. The seminal act was, in October 1905, aged 22, taking the train from Putney to Stepney Green to volunteer for the Haileybury Club—a cadets club for working-class teenagers run by old boys. If it began as a charitable display of Edwardian “good works,” life in the East End proved a transformative experience for Attlee as he immersed himself in its grinding poverty and revelatory camaraderie. “Thrift, so dear to the middle classes, was not esteemed so highly as generosity,” he wrote admiringly. “The Christian virtue of charity was practised, not preached.”
His “maturing into socialism” continued during the First World War. While his beloved brother Tom chose the path of conscientious objection, Clem threw himself into service. Major Attlee saw action in the Gallipoli campaign, holding the line at Lala Baba against a Turkish assault, and at Givenchy in France, before being wounded and evacuated (back to Wandsworth). From his time with the troops, he was left with a profound appreciation of the power of patriotism: “It was not until the Great War that I fully understood the strength of the ties that bind men to the land of their birth.”
This notion of progressive patriotism, of a social democratic sense of citizenship, is fundamental to Bew’s account. What is more, it didn’t “just happen” to him. Bew explores in great detail Attlee’s pilgrim’s progress toward socialism with a thorough critique of his literary, cultural and political reading—from Mary Shelley to William Blake, Rudyard Kipling to John Buchan, William Morris to Beatrice Webb (but why no RH Tawney?). Interestingly, he suggests that it was Edward Bellamy’s utopian socialist tract, Looking Backward (1888), which had the greatest impact on Attlee with its futuristic, if somewhat functional, account of a centrally planned egalitarian society. Indeed, William Morris thought Bellamy’s vision so bleak that he penned his more romantic radical alternative, News from Nowhere (1890), in response.
These were the pathways by which Attlee—in a conversation with the Welsh dockworker and Independent Labour Party activist Tommy Williams—announced himself a socialist. But like William Morris, Attlee was never interested in the rigidities of orthodox Marxism. His socialism was born of a frustration with the social inequalities of Edwardian England and a patriotic commitment to a deeper, almost civic republican sense of a commonweal. “Instead of the exploitation of the mass of the people in the interests of a small rich class,” he was declaring by 1922, “I demand the organisation of the country in the interests of all as a co-operative commonwealth in which land and capital will be owned by the nation and used for the benefit of the country.”
Despite his extensive readings, Attlee’s socialism was always based on praxis. After he realised the limitations of the noblesse oblige “settlement movement” to reform British society, he looked in on the Fabians (too intellectually introspective), before landing with the Independent Labour Party. At the same time, he worked as a propagandist for Beatrice Webb’s Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission. “What I think you need to make you a first-rate organiser,” Webb decided, “is rather more of the quality of ‘Push’ and the habit of a rapid transaction of business.” Which were exactly the attributes for which Attlee would later be so admired.
After his return from the First World War, Attlee put himself forward for elected office in his adopted East End, rising swiftly to become Mayor of Stepney and then Labour candidate for Limehouse—with his new wife Violet acting as teller in every poll. On the stump, he put forward a compellingly simple political programme: those who had fought in the War had been materially and morally betrayed. The Labour Party was the only political vehicle committed to building an equitable Britain, because it was unafraid to utilise the power of government.
There had been full employment during the war. What was required now was the taking hold of the purchasing power of the country, “by directing the energies of the nation into the production of necessities for life, and not merely into the production of luxuries or necessities for profit. As the nation was organised for war and death, so it can be organised for peace and life.”
Bew ably charts Attlee’s steady rise through the ranks of the parliamentary party during the 1920s and, after Labour’s 1931 electoral annihilation, into a central role on the Opposition front bench. All the while, Attlee was the subject of relentless under-estimation. Hugh Dalton called him “poor little rabbit.” For Neville Chamberlain he was a “cowardly cur” and for Malcolm Muggeridge a “sheep in sheep’s clothing.” “Just an ordinary person, nothing spectacular, hardly going far,” concluded fellow MP, Emanuel Shinwell.
Yet when George Lansbury, the pacifist Labour leader, stumbled in the aftermath of Benito Mussolini’s 1935 invasion of Abyssinia, it was Attlee who assumed the post of acting chairman. And he would not cede it for another 20 years, displaying saintly patience in dealing with the monstrous vanities, ideological posturing and sheer unruliness of the Labour Party. The anecdotes are worth repeating. When, in the immediate aftermath of the 1945 victory, Herbert Morrison wrote to him demanding a leadership contest (“That I am animated solely by considerations of the interests of the party, and regard for their democratic rights, and not by any personal unfriendliness towards yourself, I need hardly assure you”), Attlee replied with his most famous one-liner: “Thank you for your letter, the contents of which have been noted.” But I like the story of the self-aggrandising Richard Crossman giving Attlee a lengthy monologue on post-war German reconstruction policy. To which Attlee responded, “I saw your mother last week. She is looking very well.”
More challengingly, he had to manage Churchill. For when the moment came in 1940, with Hitler rampaging across Europe, Attlee’s leadership convinced the Party to go into Coalition government (despite the terrible memory of Ramsay MacDonald’s earlier attempt) with a clear proviso that Chamberlain could not be prime minister. As a historian, Bew is at his most insightful charting Attlee’s statecraft during the Second World War, born of a shared conviction with Churchill that government had to function efficiently if generals were to succeed in the field. In different ways, both men bore the wounds of Gallipoli and were determined not to repeat those mistakes. At his lowest ebb, Attlee stood by Churchill and, as a loose-tongued Tory MP learned, Churchill never forgot. “Mr Attlee is a great patriot,” he thundered at John Rodgers. “Don’t you dare call him ‘silly old Attlee’ at Chartwell or you won’t be invited again.”
And Attlee, with a bit of Webb’s “push,” was just the man to implement this new social contract, determined to reject both 1930s laissez-faire conservatism and the wrongs of David Lloyd George’s 1918 betrayal through the coalition with the Conservatives. The 1945 government was mandated to utilise all the tools of wartime state planning to build a more equitable Britain. “Fundamental things—central banking, transport, fuel and power—must be taken over by the nation as a basis on which the rest of the re-organisation of the country would depend,” Attlee explained.
Alongside the technocratic centralism, came a broader commitment to a new ethos of citizenship based on the dignity of universal provision. The National Insurance Act and National Health Service—as well as the Coalition’s 1944 Butler Education Act and 1945 Family Allowances Act—signalled the move from a welfare system based on means-testing to one premised on universal provision and, with it, a more progressive relationship between state and citizen. This was Britain’s New Deal. Attlee had, in the words of one US journalist, put Britain “through the political sausage grinder with a vigour and determination seldom seen in this cautious island since the Normans took a good hold on the Saxons.”
A similarly transformative and ethical approach was evident in Attlee’s management of Indian independence. One of the most enjoyable elements of Bew’s work is his reading of Attlee’s shifting understanding of Empire—from a flag-waving jingoism at the Diamond Jubilee, to a post-Boer War sense that the British Empire was losing its civilising function, and, finally, as an avid reader of Edward Gibbon, a clear-headed sense of the need to move from empire to commonwealth. So as a young MP, working on the 1928 Simon Commission on Indian Independence, he hesitated about granting self-government to the sub-continent; but his experience of war, and the urgent need to nurture democracy, led him as prime minister to support Indian freedom with almost “spiritual integrity.” What still remains a mystery is why he fell for the vainglorious Louis Mountbatten as last viceroy. But then the Haileybury old boy peeks out again, as he confides in Rab Butler that, “I feel sure that the first Empress of India [Queen Victoria] would be glad to see a descendant complete the last part of a century’s work.”
Of course, the “scuttle” from Palestine was a less successful example of Attlee’s statecraft. For as the pressures of Britain’s post-war finances came up against imperial overreach, Soviet aggression, atomic reality and American double-guessing, Attlee and Ernest Bevin, his Foreign Secretary, struggled to retain any sense of strategy. And up until the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950—with its fiscally and politically punitive demands for re-armament—the strength of their relationship just about delivered it. Their rugged, collective leadership saw the Labour Party back a British nuclear deterrent, support the establishment of Nato, take on expansionist communism (“bred on the continent of Europe in the atmosphere of authoritarianism and brought to flower in the soil of Tsarism”) and make the realist case for multilateralism.
So one cannot help reading this magisterial biography and reflect just how far we, in the Labour Party, have fallen. Because for all the Ken Loach genuflection in his film The Spirit of ’45, Jeremy Corbyn’s metropolitan liberalism, unthinking anti-Americanism, distaste for nationhood, contempt for parliamentary democracy and rigid socialist orthodoxy represents a complete betrayal of Attlee’s purpose. In 1983, at the height of the Bennite insurgency, James Callaghan was already reflecting that, “If Attlee were alive today his virtues would not be fashionable in some quarters.” In the spirit of Attlee, he went on to argue that “radical change needs to be made persuasive if it is to be acceptable and become permanent; and that party members… have no right to insist on the last drop of their particular sectarianism to the exclusion of all else.”
Attlee’s politics were ones of deep ethical conviction, but also reflection—a political suppleness in the face of a rapidly shifting century and a guiding belief that the Labour Party was the best vehicle for managing and marshalling that change. There was a humility in his leadership—which so many misinterpreted as weakness—but a rich, clear sense of what Britain could and should be in the world. As the Labour Party retreats towards ideological self-immolation, as Britain stumbles on the world stage, and as European social democracy stands in peril, we need another Attlee more than ever. In the absence of which, we have Bew’s brilliant book.
On 3rd August 1945 at 10.45am, newly victorious Labour MPs assembled in Westminster to take their oath of allegiance. Clement Attlee, the new prime minister whose party had just won by a landslide, gave his fellow MPs three pieces of advice: do not talk in the lobby of the House of Commons; do not loiter or dine in West End restaurants; and never converse with William “Max” Aitken (Lord Beaverbrook). As to himself: “I am a very diffident man,” he explained. “I find it very hard to carry on conversation. But if any of you come to see me, I will welcome you. I will receive you and I will discuss your problems with you.”
This is the Attlee we know: straightforward, decent, conservative, even a little dull in the face of epochal events. John Bew’s new account serves up an altogether more compelling story of Attlee—the wartime deputy prime minister inspired by John Milton; the political lion who bested Winston Churchill in the Chamber; the Atlanticist who shaped US President Harry S Truman’s geopolitics; and, all the while, a Labour leader who remained true to his radical, socialist creed.
As such Citizen Clem comprises a great work of personal biography, social history, political philosophy, international relations and ferrets-in-a-sack Labour Party infighting. As the do-or-die 2016 Labour Party Conference opens and Britain stands at its most internationally exposed since the Suez crisis, this 500-page doorstopper could not have landed at a more timely moment. Attlee himself, in a manner which would have instantly labelled him a “red Tory” by today’s Momentum activists, was always delighted to talk up his conservative pedigree. In his stunningly dull autobiography As It Happened, published in 1954, he writes lovingly of weekends spent at his grandfather’s house, The Gables, on Wandsworth Common. “Aunt Jane’s room was very jolly—it had a hob grate with Dutch tiles, deep window seats and a shining mahogany wardrobe,” he recalled. “There were little closets giving off it, used for washing and pervaded by a general smell of Pears soap.”
The future Labour prime minister’s upbringing was a classic chronicle of late Victorian upper-middle-class life: prep school, public school, Oxford and preparation for a career at the Bar. What changes Attlee from City lawyer to the great social reformer was, as Bew explains, a mixture of the personal and intellectual. The seminal act was, in October 1905, aged 22, taking the train from Putney to Stepney Green to volunteer for the Haileybury Club—a cadets club for working-class teenagers run by old boys. If it began as a charitable display of Edwardian “good works,” life in the East End proved a transformative experience for Attlee as he immersed himself in its grinding poverty and revelatory camaraderie. “Thrift, so dear to the middle classes, was not esteemed so highly as generosity,” he wrote admiringly. “The Christian virtue of charity was practised, not preached.”
His “maturing into socialism” continued during the First World War. While his beloved brother Tom chose the path of conscientious objection, Clem threw himself into service. Major Attlee saw action in the Gallipoli campaign, holding the line at Lala Baba against a Turkish assault, and at Givenchy in France, before being wounded and evacuated (back to Wandsworth). From his time with the troops, he was left with a profound appreciation of the power of patriotism: “It was not until the Great War that I fully understood the strength of the ties that bind men to the land of their birth.”
This notion of progressive patriotism, of a social democratic sense of citizenship, is fundamental to Bew’s account. What is more, it didn’t “just happen” to him. Bew explores in great detail Attlee’s pilgrim’s progress toward socialism with a thorough critique of his literary, cultural and political reading—from Mary Shelley to William Blake, Rudyard Kipling to John Buchan, William Morris to Beatrice Webb (but why no RH Tawney?). Interestingly, he suggests that it was Edward Bellamy’s utopian socialist tract, Looking Backward (1888), which had the greatest impact on Attlee with its futuristic, if somewhat functional, account of a centrally planned egalitarian society. Indeed, William Morris thought Bellamy’s vision so bleak that he penned his more romantic radical alternative, News from Nowhere (1890), in response.
These were the pathways by which Attlee—in a conversation with the Welsh dockworker and Independent Labour Party activist Tommy Williams—announced himself a socialist. But like William Morris, Attlee was never interested in the rigidities of orthodox Marxism. His socialism was born of a frustration with the social inequalities of Edwardian England and a patriotic commitment to a deeper, almost civic republican sense of a commonweal. “Instead of the exploitation of the mass of the people in the interests of a small rich class,” he was declaring by 1922, “I demand the organisation of the country in the interests of all as a co-operative commonwealth in which land and capital will be owned by the nation and used for the benefit of the country.”
Despite his extensive readings, Attlee’s socialism was always based on praxis. After he realised the limitations of the noblesse oblige “settlement movement” to reform British society, he looked in on the Fabians (too intellectually introspective), before landing with the Independent Labour Party. At the same time, he worked as a propagandist for Beatrice Webb’s Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission. “What I think you need to make you a first-rate organiser,” Webb decided, “is rather more of the quality of ‘Push’ and the habit of a rapid transaction of business.” Which were exactly the attributes for which Attlee would later be so admired.
After his return from the First World War, Attlee put himself forward for elected office in his adopted East End, rising swiftly to become Mayor of Stepney and then Labour candidate for Limehouse—with his new wife Violet acting as teller in every poll. On the stump, he put forward a compellingly simple political programme: those who had fought in the War had been materially and morally betrayed. The Labour Party was the only political vehicle committed to building an equitable Britain, because it was unafraid to utilise the power of government.
There had been full employment during the war. What was required now was the taking hold of the purchasing power of the country, “by directing the energies of the nation into the production of necessities for life, and not merely into the production of luxuries or necessities for profit. As the nation was organised for war and death, so it can be organised for peace and life.”
Bew ably charts Attlee’s steady rise through the ranks of the parliamentary party during the 1920s and, after Labour’s 1931 electoral annihilation, into a central role on the Opposition front bench. All the while, Attlee was the subject of relentless under-estimation. Hugh Dalton called him “poor little rabbit.” For Neville Chamberlain he was a “cowardly cur” and for Malcolm Muggeridge a “sheep in sheep’s clothing.” “Just an ordinary person, nothing spectacular, hardly going far,” concluded fellow MP, Emanuel Shinwell.
Yet when George Lansbury, the pacifist Labour leader, stumbled in the aftermath of Benito Mussolini’s 1935 invasion of Abyssinia, it was Attlee who assumed the post of acting chairman. And he would not cede it for another 20 years, displaying saintly patience in dealing with the monstrous vanities, ideological posturing and sheer unruliness of the Labour Party. The anecdotes are worth repeating. When, in the immediate aftermath of the 1945 victory, Herbert Morrison wrote to him demanding a leadership contest (“That I am animated solely by considerations of the interests of the party, and regard for their democratic rights, and not by any personal unfriendliness towards yourself, I need hardly assure you”), Attlee replied with his most famous one-liner: “Thank you for your letter, the contents of which have been noted.” But I like the story of the self-aggrandising Richard Crossman giving Attlee a lengthy monologue on post-war German reconstruction policy. To which Attlee responded, “I saw your mother last week. She is looking very well.”
More challengingly, he had to manage Churchill. For when the moment came in 1940, with Hitler rampaging across Europe, Attlee’s leadership convinced the Party to go into Coalition government (despite the terrible memory of Ramsay MacDonald’s earlier attempt) with a clear proviso that Chamberlain could not be prime minister. As a historian, Bew is at his most insightful charting Attlee’s statecraft during the Second World War, born of a shared conviction with Churchill that government had to function efficiently if generals were to succeed in the field. In different ways, both men bore the wounds of Gallipoli and were determined not to repeat those mistakes. At his lowest ebb, Attlee stood by Churchill and, as a loose-tongued Tory MP learned, Churchill never forgot. “Mr Attlee is a great patriot,” he thundered at John Rodgers. “Don’t you dare call him ‘silly old Attlee’ at Chartwell or you won’t be invited again.”
"Churchill never forgot Attlee's loyalty. 'Mr Attlee is a great patriot,' he thundered at John Rodgers. 'Don't you dare call him silly old Attlee'"Crucially, however, Attlee never fell for the Churchill myth of his national indispensability and, when the moment came to pull Labour out of the coalition, he didn’t flinch. His partisan distrust of Toryism never dimmed. The New Jerusalem agenda of social patriotism which Attlee presented to the British public in 1945 was the product of 30 years of political philosophy and personal activism. The economics of John Maynard Keynes, the social policy of William Beveridge, the prose of George Orwell and the merits of nationalisation merged to create Labour’s centralist “post-war consensus.”
And Attlee, with a bit of Webb’s “push,” was just the man to implement this new social contract, determined to reject both 1930s laissez-faire conservatism and the wrongs of David Lloyd George’s 1918 betrayal through the coalition with the Conservatives. The 1945 government was mandated to utilise all the tools of wartime state planning to build a more equitable Britain. “Fundamental things—central banking, transport, fuel and power—must be taken over by the nation as a basis on which the rest of the re-organisation of the country would depend,” Attlee explained.
Alongside the technocratic centralism, came a broader commitment to a new ethos of citizenship based on the dignity of universal provision. The National Insurance Act and National Health Service—as well as the Coalition’s 1944 Butler Education Act and 1945 Family Allowances Act—signalled the move from a welfare system based on means-testing to one premised on universal provision and, with it, a more progressive relationship between state and citizen. This was Britain’s New Deal. Attlee had, in the words of one US journalist, put Britain “through the political sausage grinder with a vigour and determination seldom seen in this cautious island since the Normans took a good hold on the Saxons.”
A similarly transformative and ethical approach was evident in Attlee’s management of Indian independence. One of the most enjoyable elements of Bew’s work is his reading of Attlee’s shifting understanding of Empire—from a flag-waving jingoism at the Diamond Jubilee, to a post-Boer War sense that the British Empire was losing its civilising function, and, finally, as an avid reader of Edward Gibbon, a clear-headed sense of the need to move from empire to commonwealth. So as a young MP, working on the 1928 Simon Commission on Indian Independence, he hesitated about granting self-government to the sub-continent; but his experience of war, and the urgent need to nurture democracy, led him as prime minister to support Indian freedom with almost “spiritual integrity.” What still remains a mystery is why he fell for the vainglorious Louis Mountbatten as last viceroy. But then the Haileybury old boy peeks out again, as he confides in Rab Butler that, “I feel sure that the first Empress of India [Queen Victoria] would be glad to see a descendant complete the last part of a century’s work.”
Of course, the “scuttle” from Palestine was a less successful example of Attlee’s statecraft. For as the pressures of Britain’s post-war finances came up against imperial overreach, Soviet aggression, atomic reality and American double-guessing, Attlee and Ernest Bevin, his Foreign Secretary, struggled to retain any sense of strategy. And up until the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950—with its fiscally and politically punitive demands for re-armament—the strength of their relationship just about delivered it. Their rugged, collective leadership saw the Labour Party back a British nuclear deterrent, support the establishment of Nato, take on expansionist communism (“bred on the continent of Europe in the atmosphere of authoritarianism and brought to flower in the soil of Tsarism”) and make the realist case for multilateralism.
So one cannot help reading this magisterial biography and reflect just how far we, in the Labour Party, have fallen. Because for all the Ken Loach genuflection in his film The Spirit of ’45, Jeremy Corbyn’s metropolitan liberalism, unthinking anti-Americanism, distaste for nationhood, contempt for parliamentary democracy and rigid socialist orthodoxy represents a complete betrayal of Attlee’s purpose. In 1983, at the height of the Bennite insurgency, James Callaghan was already reflecting that, “If Attlee were alive today his virtues would not be fashionable in some quarters.” In the spirit of Attlee, he went on to argue that “radical change needs to be made persuasive if it is to be acceptable and become permanent; and that party members… have no right to insist on the last drop of their particular sectarianism to the exclusion of all else.”
Attlee’s politics were ones of deep ethical conviction, but also reflection—a political suppleness in the face of a rapidly shifting century and a guiding belief that the Labour Party was the best vehicle for managing and marshalling that change. There was a humility in his leadership—which so many misinterpreted as weakness—but a rich, clear sense of what Britain could and should be in the world. As the Labour Party retreats towards ideological self-immolation, as Britain stumbles on the world stage, and as European social democracy stands in peril, we need another Attlee more than ever. In the absence of which, we have Bew’s brilliant book.
