Loved and now brought to life
Alan Watkins
HUGH GAITSKELL by Brian Brivati Richard Cohen Books, £25, pp. 492 0 f politicians since the war, five have been loved: Aneurin Bevan, Anthony Crosland, Michael Foot, Hugh Gaitskell and Iain Macleod. I have been lucky enough to know two, Crosland and Macleod, very well, and another, Foot, quite well. They were all three exceptional- ly attractive people. Mr Foot still is. It was easy to see why they aroused the emotion they did. Bevan I met briefly only once. It was equally easy to see why he too was loved as he was. He possessed a natural simplicity, an unforced affability and a goodness of nature which were overwhelm- ing.
Gaitskell I met only a few more times. I could see why he was admired politically, but I could never understand why he was so loved personally. The primness, the intoler- ance and the arrogance (qualities which the intellectually more gifted Crosland did not display) were unattractive. But loved by others he was. There was no doubt about it. It could not be disputed; was a matter of fact. 'I'd go through fire for that man,' Brian Walden once claimed to me. There is no reason to question Mr Walden's sinceri- tY- Philip Williams, Gaitskell's first biogra- pher, felt similarly — was indeed, with Mr Walden, a member of the Oxford group of pioneer Gaitskellites. But there was little in his book about Gaitskell personally. When I reviewed it in these pages 17 years ago, I wrote that it would prove of great value to those who took a perhaps unwholesome interest in the history of the Labour Party but hold few attractions for anyone else. Dr Brivati has succeeded where Williams failed. He has managed to bring Gaitskell to life, though there is less about his affair with Ann Fleming than some of the earlier reviews had led me to expect, and little more than is available from already pub- lished sources.
It would be wrong to say that this has not been accomplished before. Shortly after Gaitskell's death Lord Rodgers edited a collection of essays which was a model of its kind and can still be read with profit. But Dr Brivati is the only biographer to give us Gaitskell in the round. Whether he appears any more attractive as a conse- quence is a question of taste. No matter. For a writer who was born in 1966, three years after Gaitskell's death, it is an aston- ishing achievement, a triumph. Indeed, his youth is often a positive advantage. It enables him to place in perspective those disputes which embittered so many other- wise rational and amenable Labour persons 40-odd years ago and continue to affect the political attitude of their survivors and suc- cessors.
Dr Brivati is clear that Gaitskell was a socialist, standing somewhere slightly to the left of Mr Roy Hattersley today. What he objected to in the Clause IV dispute was not public ownership as such. It was the apparently all-embracing nature of the commitment. This, he considered, was both dishonest intellectually and unprofitable politically. The Conservatives made much of Labour's supposed threat to nationalise absolutely everything, as they continued to do. Indeed, Margaret Thatcher went on tediously but — who knows? — effectively about it all the time. Dr Brivati is correct to point out that the attempt to abolish Clause IV which Gaitskell inaugurated at the 1959 conference did not originate in the famous Sunday meeting at his house in Frognal Gardens, Hampstead, immediately after the loss of the election. The project was supported only by Patrick Gordon Walker.
It is perhaps a pity that Dr Brivati does not conclusively scotch the myth that the meeting was held as part of some larger commemoration of Hugh Dalton's retire- ment from the Commons. This was the story that was given out to the press after the Guardian had got wind of the gather- ing. Williams then put it in his book quite erroneously. Susan Crosland, in her scintil- lating life of her late husband, added an embellishment. The Gaitskellites, she wrote, had gathered at Frognal Gardens on the Saturday evening for a dinner in Dal- ton's honour but had then returned next day for a council of war. In fact no such dinner took place. One would have expect- ed Dalton at least to refer to the occasion in his diary if it had: he did not. Indeed, Lord Jenkins remembers that he, his wife Jennifer and Dalton all dined modestly together on the Saturday in question.
Dr Brivati has listed correctly the politi- cians who were present at the Sunday meeting together with Lord Harris, even then Gaitskell's man of business. One per- son he has omitted: Frank Hayman, Mem- ber for Falmouth and Gaitskell's recently appointed PPS. In Douglas Jay's memoirs (on which, together with Dalton's diary, Dr Brivati properly relies for this episode) there is a reference to a mysterious 'trade unionist' who was also present. This was clearly meant to imply that this was no mere gathering of workers by brain but included at least one worker by hand. In fact Hayman was a teacher, later an educa- tional administrator. Though he was con- nected with the local government officers' union, he was not in normal speech a trade unionist.
Still less was J. Chuter Ede, as Dr Brivati says he was, though he may well have been a loyal member of the NUT or some other teaching union. Chuter Ede was C. R. Attlee's Home Secretary. He embodied some of the virtues and most of the vices of English Nonconformity. He had been com- pelled to leave Cambridge for lack of funds. He then became a teacher. I men- tion this not in any carping spirit but to show that youth, for all its advantages, also exacts a price. One can get the politician who flourished — inasmuch as Chuter Ede ever enjoyed this condition — 20 or so years before one's birth slightly wrong. Thus Chuter Ede is as remote a figure to Dr Brivati as one of his predecessors, Sir William Joynson-Hicks, is to me (though I Hugh Gaitskell by Judy Cassab, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery think I am right in saying that Joynson- Hicks was neither a teacher nor a trade unionist but a solicitor).
Likewise Dr Brivati refers to William Hall and W. G. Hall rather than to W. Glenvil Hall, which is what he liked to call himself, and to Arthur Greenwood when he means Anthony. I know Arthur's son was actually christened Arthur too, but he called and signed himself Anthony. Again, the interview in 1955 where Attlee indicat- ed a preference for Gaitskell as his succes- sor over both Bevan and Herbert Morrison was given not, as Dr Brivati states, to Hugh but to Percy Cudlipp. At any rate he does not mix up Hugh Cudlipp with Hugh Gaitskell. And Morrison did not succeed Ernest Sevin as Foreign Secretary on Bevin's death in April 1951 but before that. This is important because Attlee (always something of a humbug in his often expressed preference, before the Cudlipp interview anyway, for Bevan as his succes- sor) could still have appointed him as Bevin's successor if he had wanted to.
The chronology is as follows. On 17 Jan- uary Bevan succeeded George Isaacs in the then important but nonetheless second- order post of Minister of Labour, I have no doubt he continued to argue with Gaitskell, the Chancellor, about charges for teeth and specs, as Dr Brivati says he did. But having left Health (where he was succeeded by Hilary Marquand, who was kept out of the Cabinet), Bevan had no further locus in the matter. Gaitskell could legitimately have told him to mind his own business, which admittedly Bevan was always reluctant to do. On 9 March Morrison became Foreign Secretary. On 24 April, following Gaitskell's Budget, Bevan resigned and was succeeded by Alfred Robens. His resigna- tion would almost certainly have been averted if Attlee had been prepared to risk him rather than Morrison at the Foreign Office.
It was partly Morrison's performance in the post (he was described by the young Macleod as its worst occupant since Ethelred the Unready) which led to Gaitskell's succession in December 1955. The other factor was Gaitskell's annihila- tion of R. A. Butler over his Budget in autumn 1955. Dr Brivati recognises the latter but gives insufficient weight to the former. He also gives too little emphasis to — indeed, does not mention at all — the influence of the press, particularly the Daily Mirror, both in persuading Attlee to resign and in securing Gaitskell the succession. In defeat a surly Bevan blamed the Mirror. Dr Brivati perpetuates the hoary old tale that it was the brutish trade unionists, Will Lawther, Tom Williamson and, above all, Arthur Deakin who 'made' Gaitskell lead- er. But the trade unions had no votes in the contest. They had to wait another 26 years before they acquired them. Gaitskell won fair and square in the parliamentary party, which admittedly contained more trade unionists in those days.
He certainly did the unions' bidding in the attempted expulsion of Bevan earlier in 1955. Dr Brivati is rightly censorious of his conduct, more so than Williams. I find myself occupying a position somewhere in between. Gaitskell certainly behaved appallingly. But he did so not because of self-interest, to secure the unions' support in any future contest for the leadership (at that stage he was still backing Morrison), but because as Treasurer he wanted to pre- serve the party's finances. The best accounts of this sordid episode are in Foot's Bevan and in Eric Shaw's invaluable Discipline and Discord in the Labour Party. Williams remains essential too, for this and other incidents. But for the common read- er Brivati has supplanted Williams. I still cannot love Gaitskell myself. And I suspect too that old Gaiters would have contrived some means of losing the 1964 election.
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