November 10, 2015

Finest Hour 169, Summer 2015

Page 44

Review by John Campbell

Giles Radice, Odd Couples: The Great Political Pairings of Modern Britain, I.B.Tauris, 292 pages, £25.
ISBN 978-1780762807


Odd CouplesSince stepping down as a Labour MP in 2001, Giles Radice has made something of a corner in group biographies of British politicians, with perceptive studies first of the rivalry of Roy Jenkins, Denis Healey, and Tony Crosland; then of the five leading figures of the 1945–51 Labour government (Attlee, Bevin, Morrison, Dalton, and Cripps) and of the three architects of New Labour (Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and Peter Mandelson). His latest covers some of the same ground by looking at seven pairs of rivals who set their differences aside to work constructively together in government. It is an attractive way of repackaging some familiar history, but the difficulty lies in finding an overarching theme to bind the case studies together.

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Radice’s answer is that successful government usually depends on a partnership between an “initiator” and a “facilitator.” This works well enough with some of his pairings—with Harold Macmillan and R. A. Butler in the 1950s, or Margaret Thatcher and Willie Whitelaw in the 1980s—where the Prime Minister’s defeated rival genuinely accepted the role of loyal deputy. The experience of Blair and Brown can also be said to make this case, in that the Blair government was pretty successful so long as Brown accepted his subordinate role but began to fall apart as he became increasingly impatient to take over.

But Radice stretches the format a bit with his chapter on Ernest Bevin and Herbert Morrison, who could not stand each other and worked effectively together only because Attlee kept their areas of responsibility apart—Bevin as Foreign Secretary,  Morrison minding the home front—under his own shrewdly unobtrusive chairmanship. And he busts it completely by pairing Harold Wilson and Ted Heath—political opponents and successive Prime Ministers of opposed parties, who never worked together at all. His rationale for linking them is that between them they were responsible for Britain’s membership in the European Community: Heath by leading the country into the Common Market in 1973 and Wilson by holding and winning a referendum to confirm that decision two years later. It may have taken both of them to achieve the result, but they certainly did not do it in partnership.

Neither does his first pairing, Churchill and Attlee, really fit the template. Britain’s war-winning coalition government was unquestionably an extraordinarily successful though unlikely combination, with the modest and self-effacing socialist serving as deputy to the rambunctious Tory warrior. But it worked largely for the same reason that Bevin and Morrison did: because they were operating almost entirely in separate spheres. Churchill conducted the military strategy and made the rousing speeches, while Attlee looked after the home front, kept the government machine running and defused conflicts. Neither interfered much in the other’s sphere. Of course Churchill bagged most of the glory. Nevertheless Attlee’s role was crucial, not least in making Churchill Prime Minister in the first place by insisting in May 1940 that Labour would not join a government led by either Chamberlain or Halifax, and then by backing Churchill’s determination to fight on after the fall of France when Halifax as Foreign Secretary wanted to open compromise negotiations.

But Attlee made it clear from the beginning that Labour’s war aims were very different from Churchill’s: “The world that must emerge from this war must be a world attuned to our ideals. I am quite sure that our war effort needs the application of the socialist principles of service before private property.” Thereafter, while Churchill concentrated all his attention on winning the war, Attlee quietly focussed on planning the postwar world, preparing the ground for Labour’s landslide in the 1945 election which led to the foundation of the welfare state, the creation of the National Health Service and the nationalisation of key industries. Attlee certainly “facilitated” Churchill’s victory, but he also “initiated” a domestic victory of his own. Quibbles aside, Giles Radice has written another engaging and readable commentary on postwar British politics.


In addition to major biographies of Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher, and Roy Jenkins, John Campbell has written Pistols at Dawn: Two Hundred Years of Political Rivalry, from Pitt and Fox to Blair and Brown, published in 2009 by Jonathan Cape.

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