The quiet patriot

History teaches no lessons but we insist on trying to learn from it. There is no political party more sentimental than the Labour party. The stone monument of Labour history is Clement Attlee’s 1945–51 administration, so any biography of the great man is, inevitably, an intervention into the present state of the party, even if it comes supported with all the best scholarly apparatus.

The last major biography of Attlee was Kenneth Harris’s official work, more than 30 years ago, in 1982. There is a neat symmetry to the fact that Harris was writing during the last occasion that the Labour party decided to join hands and walk off a cliff. If the leading lights of today’s party are at all interested in stopping before the edge, John Bew’s excellent new life yields two indispensable lessons.

The first is that Attlee was a social patriot, a conservative man who loved his public school, Haileybury, and lived in suburban splendour in Stanmore.