To no one except to Mr. Bevin's wife and daughter
must greater sympathy be extended than to the Prime Minister. He suffers a deep personal loss, for it is a matter of common know- ledge that no one in the Cabinet stood closer to him than the Foreign Secretary, utterly different though the origins of the two men were. In addition the whole balance of the Cabinet is upset. The Morrison faction and the Bevan faction—it is useless to pretend that they do not exist—have to be held together, and that task will be more than doubly hard for Mr. Attlee without the massive support which Bevin always gave him. In addition to that again is the loss of the sagacity and experience the Foreign Secretary always brought to any discussion of Labour problems and of the continuity in foreign policy which his presence in the Cabinet as a Minister without Portfolio would have assured. These gaps are hard to fill. In spite of his trade union history, Mr. Aneurin Bevan belongs rather to the political than the indus- trial side of the Labour Movement. (He was elected to the Labour Party Executive as a constituency, not a trade union, representative) Mr. James Griffiths is more of a Labour leader, but close on six years of political office have to some extent severed him, too, from his past. Bereft first of his Chancellor of the Exchequer and then of his Foreign Secretary, still imprisoned himself in hospital, the Prime Minister will need all the physical and mental toughness of which he has so often given surprising evidence.
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