Ernest Bevin: Labour's Churchill by Andrew Adonis – review

Shortly after the formation of the wartime coalition in May 1940, the Evening Standard published one of David Low’s most celebrated cartoons. Above the caption “All behind you, Winston”, the members of the new cross-party government march together. Sharing the front rank with Churchill is the equally imposing figure of Ernest Bevin, who had just been recruited from the union movement to mastermind the war effort on the home front.

“Ernie”, as he was almost universally known, was one of the greatest public figures of the mid-20th century in every sense, both for the huge impression his remarkable personality made on the public and for the colossal imprint he left on the course of history. It is the persuasive contention of this terrific biography that he was second in importance only to Churchill himself. Before the second world war, Bevin founded the Transport & General Workers’ Union, becoming the “leader of leaders” in the movement by turning the T&G into the largest and most effective union in the free world. This equipped him with the stature and the skills to mobilise labour and industry to win the struggle against the Nazis. Then, as foreign secretary in Attlee’s postwar government, he played a critical role in containing Stalin and Soviet tyranny by building the institutions that ensured the security and prosperity of western Europe.

Bevin’s reward for this awesome legacy is to be barely remembered today. Tories struggle to comprehend the “proletarian patriot” who blended a tremendous love of country with a passionate drive to improve the lives of working people. The Labour party, dominated recently by posturing middle-class leftists who regard the ability to wield a placard as a great feat, has almost entirely forgotten one of its authentic working-class heroes. The left prefers to sentimentalise his near-namesake, Nye Bevan, the founder of the NHS, though Bevin’s record was more substantial in its sweep. Andrew Adonis sets out to put this right – and does so superbly in a biography brimming with colour and insight that brings both the character of the man and his many achievements vividly to life.

In later years, Bevin would describe himself as “a turn up in a million”. Where Churchill was a scion of the aristocracy, Bevin came from literally nothing. His was a desperately poor background that only the kind of leftwing intellectual that he despised would romanticise. Born in 1881 into a Somerset family of illiterate labourers, he was orphaned at eight and turned up in Bristol at 13 with little more than the clothes on his back and the addresses of older brothers. A barrow boy and then a drayman, he began to develop his talents for advocacy and negotiation as a union organiser. The ability to captivate an audience was honed as a Baptist lay preacher. His socialism always owed much more to Methodism than to Marxism. As Adonis puts it: “Bevin was revolutionary about ends, democratic about means.”

One of the assets that he brought to every position he held was a genius for organisation, often underrated as a political quality, as Britain has learned to its cost during the coronavirus crisis. He had no time for the concept, so often and calamitously favoured on the left, of “the glorious defeat”. His keen nous for knowing when to pick a battle scored notable victories to improve workers’ pay and conditions.

The reputation he built meant that no one was more important to getting the working classes behind the war in the dark hours of 1940. He became minister of labour because both Churchill and Attlee saw him as indispensable – and so he proved. Thanks to his dynamism, creativity and charisma, he became a force of nature “ever present in the wartime media and the popular consciousness as the man, alongside Churchill, driving the war effort”. By 1945, Britain had mobilised more of its population and with much greater public consent than totalitarian Germany.

On most of the large questions of his career, Bevin made the right calls when many rivals with much better paper qualifications were making the wrong ones. During the 1930s, when both the pacifist left and the appeasing right responded to Hitler by wringing their hands, he was as clear-eyed as Churchill about the menace posed by the Nazis. His record opposing appeasement arguably surpassed that of the other man, because Churchill had a weak spot for Mussolini.

His moral compass was equally true when confronted with totalitarianism of the Soviet variety. He resisted communist attempts to take over Britain’s prewar union movement and faced up to the Kremlin after the conflict. Unlike many on the left, he never fell for the delusion that communism was on the same spectrum as socialism, but rightly viewed it as a distinct and hostile ideology that would tyrannise working people just as surely as fascism did. He saw earlier than most, including the Americans, that Stalin was not cuddly “Uncle Joe” but a brutal threat to the liberty of Europe. Adonis makes an excellent case that Bevin was the effective founding father of West Germany. He had no love for Germans – “I tries ’ard, but I ’ates them” – but he saw that a stable German democracy was an essential cornerstone to keeping the Soviets out of western Europe. His role was also pivotal when it came to the Marshall plan and Nato, the guarantors of prosperity and peace on the free side of the iron curtain.

The size of his ebullient personality gave him a protean appeal. He inspired working-class audiences and so impressed the expensively educated mandarins of the foreign office that they thought their aitch-dropping boss was the most brilliant leader they had ever had. He had “a supreme talent” for giving and commanding loyalty that helped him to forge strong and productive relationships with other big figures. Churchill called him “the most distinguished man that the Labour party has thrown up in my time”.

While hugely admiring of his subject, Adonis is not blind to his flaws. A Churchillian scale of achievement was accompanied by some Churchill-like attitudes. Bevin was another unreconstructed imperialist, wrongly thinking that Britain could sustain its place in the postwar world by trying to maintain an empire that was bound to become defunct. He failed to engage with the nascent integration of Europe. He made a terrible mess of the Israel/Palestine question. This was not least, Adonis shows, because he had a pronounced streak of antisemitism.

He played up to his image as “the working-class John Bull” to the end of his career, but had ascended a long way from his poverty-stricken origins. He wore well-cut suits, smoked cigars and consumed prodigious amounts of booze (“he used alcohol like a car used petrol”.) He was a working-class giant who became a titan of the realm. But crucially, and unlike Ramsay MacDonald, he was not seduced by the establishment. Plenty of temptation came his way, but power never corrupted him. He turned down all honours, though almost everything was offered. On his death in 1951, he left little besides a flat and his union pension to his wife Flo.

As the Observer put it, he was: “The first British statesman to have been born a working man and remained one.” He placed the welfare of workers, industrial partnership and collectivist ideas at the heart of the British state, while democracy had no stauncher champion against its totalitarian enemies.

“He was the first of a kind,” says Adonis. Alas, he was also the last of a kind.

• Andrew Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer

• Ernest Bevin: Labour’s Churchill by Andrew Adonis is published by Biteback (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15