The mouse that thundered: what we get wrong about Clement Attlee

As the Labour leadership contest hots up—Nandy vs Starmer—the question inevitably turns to Labour leaders from the past. Attlee’s name is frequently invoked. Yet while he is a legendary figure on the left he is all too often misunderstood.

When he was elected as leader of the Labour Party in 1935, the Labour MP (and future chancellor of the exchequer) Hugh Dalton mocked Attlee as “a little mouse” who, at best, would serve as an interim figurehead. Ten years later, it was Attlee who led Labour to a landslide victory in the July 1945 election, one of the biggest political upsets of the 20th century, with the party taking 393 seats against 197 for the Conservatives.

Vision is a much-abused term today, so perhaps it is better to talk of the imagination displayed by Attlee and those who surrounded him. For a long time, the tendency was to belittle Attlee as a competent administrator but never a figure with much in the way of imagination. Even now, although he is revered as the architect of the post-war consensus, the slightly-built, bald, pipe-smoking prime minister still tends to be viewed more drily than charismatic firebrands such as Nye Bevan or Herbert Morrison.

The historian Vernon Bogdanor called Attlee “the enigma” of the 20^th century yet, as his most recent biographer, John Bew, points out, Citizen Clem was in his own way as much a Romantic as Churchill.

Attlee once said that “my mind is stored with poetry,” with Blake, Shelley, Milton and even Kipling providing what Bew has called the “script for his political life.” Attlee made the mystic hymn “Jerusalem” the anthem of Labour, famously invoking it during his 1951 election manifesto speech at Scarborough when he thundered: “Remember that we are a great crusading body, armed with a fervent spirit for the reign of righteousness on earth. Let us go forward in this fight in the spirit of William Blake.” His 1920 book, The Social Worker, an account of the skills and abilities required in those who wish to participate in social work of any kind, begins not with the role of government and private or religious charities, but the exhortation to mental fight from Blake, the “visionary and prophet,” and the poetry of John Keats, who as a dreamer strove not only to create beauty but also turned “his back on the parallel creation of ugliness, moral and material.”

Cults rose around Bevan or Morrison but more than anyone else in the party it was Attlee who had the simplicity to see the reconstruction of Britain as the act of rebuilding Jerusalem, a combination of socialism and patriotism that was instrumental in shaping the country in the second half of the 20th century.

It was this vision that enabled him to lead such a radical Labour Party. For all Churchill’s undisputed popularity as a wartime leader it was Labour which could see what Britain would need to do for the future, rather than dwelling on the horrifying experiences of the immediate past. In the 1945 manifesto, Let Us Face the Future, Attlee’s party promised to establish a prosperous peace for the majority rather than return to the literal status quo ante bellum. Labour drew upon the 1942 Beveridge Report to propose a redistribution of wealth as part of a cradle-to-grave welfare state that would remove the “five giants” of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. Nor was Labour coy about attacking the Conservatives, for all that Britain had maintained a government of national unity during the war: the author of Let Us Face the Future, Michael Young, depicted Churchill as the natural representative of the “hard-faced men” who had done well out of the First World War and thus laid the seeds for the Second.

The 1946 National Insurance Act was undoubtedly a piece of exceptional technical legislation, one that completely transformed the relations of government and the governed. But it was also an act of imagination. Previous lawmakers had concentrated on the “deserving” poor, but at a stroke Labour brought all citizens together, regardless of status. Historian Chris Renwick observes that the country had to commit to the creation of new and costly institutions, but that Attlee’s administration had the political will to completely modernise the country rather than tinker at the edges of social and economic policy.

The rebuilding of post-war Britain required committees, social workers and administrators, but it also required dreamers and poets, what Shelley had called the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Among those who recognised that Attlee was much more than the little mouse derided by Dalton was the Life journalist Patricia Beck. She brought a copy of Blake’s poetry to Downing Street because she recognised that the Romantic’s works were relevant to the prime minister’s attitudes, an act which immediately endeared her to Attlee.

Nandy seems keen to invoke the party of 1945 as a way of highlighting Labour glories while circumventing the bloodletting between Blairites and Corbynistas. Starmer too wishes to present himself as the inheritor of Attlee’s party. Yet if either candidate wants to assume Attlee’s mantle, they should not forget those elements of his personality that helped Labour win in 1945: passion and imagination.