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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An outstanding political biography, 6 May 2004
Arguably, Aneurin Bevan, the miner-turned-politician who became in roughly equal measure the darling of the British labour movement and the bête noire of the right-wing establishment, is better remembered than any other member of the historic 1945-51 Labour government - better than his colleagues Ernie Bevin (part-architect of NATO), Stafford 'Austerity' Cripps and even the Prime Minister himself, Clem Attlee. This is because Bevan's name will be forever linked in the public consciousness with the NHS, which, as Minister of Health, he brought into being in 1948.
Unlike every other political issue of that era (it pre-dates serious squabbles over Europe by more than a decade and outlasted the Cold War), the health service continues to excite debate and controversy today. In this splendid biography, John Campbell examines the pertinent issues: the extent to which the NHS was Bevan's own creation; his dealings with interested parties such as the BMA; the administrative and financial structures put in place to support this audacious social experiment; and the post-1948 political fallout.
Tellingly, however, Campbell devotes a mere 30 or so pages directly to the NHS - though indirectly it casts a lengthy shadow across the latter half of the book and the final decade of his life - because there was, in fact, so much more to this remarkable figure, a combustible mix of self-taught intellectual, instinctive rebel, eager, ambitious minister and charismatic leader. Campbell provides us with a fully rounded portrait of the man as well as analysing his impact on the Labour Party. He tackles with impeccable balance the highs and lows of Bevan's life: the (relatively few) periods of triumph as well as the more frequent times of struggle, failure and schism - not to mention odd moments of bathos, most notably the publication of an eagerly anticipated book In Place Of Fear in 1952.
Bevan was a passionate man, a man of unimpeachable integrity and honesty, a great orator (indeed, one of the towering parliamentary speakers of the century) and an able minister and administrator - a true political heavyweight. Yet, we sense also an imperious temperament, a restless and ambitious spirit, prone to bouts of petulance and arrogance, and demanding unquestioning loyalty from his devoted followers. Moreover, it becomes apparent that his judgements about politics, about future developments, about the nature of mankind no less, were often seriously flawed - a consequence of a deterministic Marxism that he learnt in his youth and carried almost to the grave.
The controversies surrounding Bevan did not end with his untimely death in 1960. The party wounds of the 1950s, patched up for the 1959 hustings, were reopened well before the election of Wilson's unhappy government in 1964. Thus, the first volume of Michael Foot's biography, published in 1962, brilliantly written to be sure, is hagiographic and tendentious and reads best, as Campbell himself says, as "an episode in the long-running civil war" within the party.
Foot, himself a born rebel and Bevan's Acolyte-in-Chief, refused to serve in Wilson's first government and then renewed the fight with a second volume in 1973. In an excellent Introduction, Campbell deals with Bevan's political legacy, particularly the claim made for Bevan's imprimatur by a host of Labour politicians (the latest, to update Campbell, being John Reid, Blair's Health Secretary since 2003) as they re-brand and re-invent policies - or (increasingly) consign them to the dustbin - and seek to sell a new manifesto to a deeply sceptical and conservative movement.
John Campbell is a fine, experienced biographer, scrupulously fair in the judgements that he reaches. The book is authoritatively written and meticulously researched, marred only by a handful of proofing errors. I confess to finding one 'Wildean' slip (a reference to Alan Bullock's book Earnest (sic) Bevin in the bibliography) highly amusing but, as a reader with no knowledge of the publishing world, I am puzzled as to why such errors should remain to blight later editions of published works. This book was originally published under the title 'Nye Bevan and the Mirage of British Socialism' in 1987 and re-issued with an abridged title ten years later, presumably to mark the coincidence of the centenary of Bevan's birth and Blair's first landslide.
Reading Campbell opens a window on the politics of a bygone era, allowing us to draw comparisons with modern times. Take age, for example. With Tony Blair having been Prime Minister for seven years by the time he reached 50, it is fascinating to learn that Bevan himself was the most junior member of the 1945 Cabinet aged 47. Or, take the press. Setting the headlines Bevan received c1951 alongside the obituary notices of a decade later, reminds one of the kicking meted out to Tony Benn, Bevan's successor as Labour's bogey man in the 1970s and 1980s, now rather fondly admired as a harmless, slightly eccentric, elder statesman.
The writer uses a 1997 Introduction to update us on important political developments in the decade since the first edition; the main text, however, seems to be untouched and, as Campbell went to some trouble to relate the political controversies in Bevan's life to the issues of the 1980s (particularly Neil Kinnock's battles to modernise party policy vis-à-vis nationalisation and unilateralism), the reader is left with an unmistakeable sense of the ephemerality and sheer unpredictability of modern politics. For example, writing in 1987, Campbell was obviously taking seriously predictions of the Labour Party's terminal electoral decline (p253 - "Some would say [the 1951 election defeat] was the beginning of the end of the Labour Party"); a mere 14 years later in 2001 it was the Conservatives about whom such prognostications were being uttered.
I thoroughly recommended this marvellous book to political animals and the intelligent general reader alike.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
In Place of Foot, 20 Sep 2008
At the inception of this study the acclaimed political historian/biographer John Campbell justifies its writing by arguing that Nye Bevan was "the equal in potential, though not in achievement" to former British Prime Minister's David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. Yet, until Campbell's book, first published in 1986, there had been little extensive assessment of his career. Those analyses which had been written had come from a decidedly partial perspective: his friend, and fellow democratic socialist, Michael Foot's two volume account and the memoir by his wife Jennie Lee, My Life with Nye. Campbell then has performed a useful function in providing the first impartial, independent interpretation of the man whose iconic status and socialist credentials have seen him being adopted as "a sort of a mascot" by successive Labour Party leaders regardless of their own ideological standpoints.
Campbell clearly chronicles how Bevan acquired this totemic status. He finds his explanation, firstly, in his determined attitude to politics (he lauds him, at one point, for his "passionate seriousness") and, secondly, in the unique fashion in which he projected his character and beliefs. His praise for Bevan's speech-making abilities illustrates that well. Approvingly he describes the wide range of moods and styles that Bevan used in his oratory; Campbell feels that when Bevan spoke his words were always characterised by a "startling fertility and freshness of phrase". That evaluation leads him to contentiously suggest that if any individual could persuade the Labour Party and the electorate of the case for socialism "it was surely Bevan".
This is a well-researched account.Campbell has drawn upon a wide range of written sources including Hansard, Tribune, the newspapers of the time, the cabinet papers from 1945-1951 and the diaries of his Labour Party contemporaries Hugh Gaitskell, Hugh Dalton and Richard Crossman. Consequently, Campbell can depict in vivid detail all aspects of his career including neglected aspects, like, his time as a union negotiator and local councillor in Tredegar. It is also means that it is belatedly free of the hearsay and speculation which bedevils many modern political biographies. Bluntly, this is a book for the political anorak rather than the political gossip.
Though Campbell is clearly impressed by his subject, he is also alive to his faults and failings. He is willing to take fire and metaphorically shoot Bevan down when he feels it is necessary. For instance, he dismisses his political treatise In Place of Fear, which Michael Foot praises as "fact packed with striking aphorisms and original reflections", as "utterly unstructured", littered with "questionable assertions" and "pervaded by a dismaying sense of muddle and irrelevance".
One of the most striking and interesting aspects of Campbell's reading of Bevan's life is the implied bleakness of its ending. He argues that Bevan believed that the British people had concurred with mid 20th-century Conservative Prime Minster Harold Macmillan's remark that "most of our people have never had it so good" , rejected socialism, and that that this had left him "sickened". This leads him to gloomily suggest that Bevan died aware that the ideals for which he had lived had failed utterly "to win the adherence of the class... [they were] supposed to benefit".
Obviously, given the paucity of portrayals of Bevan's career Campbell is trying to mark his claim for his own text as the authoritative biography on Bevan. Occasionally, however, in doing this he pursues his case against Michael Foot's account too fervently (on one occasion he argues that Foot's representations of complex political arguments in which had Bevan had been embroiled as "slanted" and "distorted"). He believes that Foot overstates the idea of Bevan as a romantic rebel; he points to Bevan's realism, his desire to gain and use political power and his practical success as a Minister in the post-1945 Labour government. He is right in this argument. Nye Bevan: A Biography is also the more persuasive account of the man. Perhaps, this is because of the distance from the political events, arguments and emotions that he is describing. Certainly, it has allowed him to produce an informed and interesting assessment of a man who was a key figure in the history of the Labour Party in the 20th century.
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by Aneurin Bevan
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