Politics can give rise to some unlikely alliances. None more so than that between Churchill and his wartime deputy, Attlee. In most respects polar opposites, they were thrown together by a common cause – in this case, the need to win the war.
Churchill was a larger-than-life, verbose, vain but wonderfully charismatic politician whose talents were ideally suited to the needs of the hour. Attlee, by contrast, was a modest man of few words and utterly lacking in charisma, so much so that his colleagues often despaired of him. But for the war, he would almost certainly have been overthrown. Likewise, but for the war, Churchill’s political career would have come to an ignominious end. War was the making of both of them.
One of their cabinet colleagues described the contrast thus: “When Attlee takes the chair, cabinet meetings are businesslike and efficient, we keep to the agenda, make decisions and get away in reasonable time. When Churchill presides, nothing is decided; we listen enthralled and go home many hours later, feeling that we have been present at an historic occasion.”
As a partnership, it worked perfectly, especially in the later stages of the war, when Churchill was frequently preoccupied with high-level summitry, leaving Attlee to preside over a domestic political agenda that increasingly focused on postwar reconstruction. Although, in theory, both parties were signed up to the implementation of the Beveridge report, which laid the foundations for the welfare state, in practice the Tories were getting cold feet as the election, and a return to politics as usual, drew closer. The fact that Attlee and his colleagues Ernest Bevin and Herbert Morrison were more or less in charge of the home front throughout the last years of the war meant that, come the Labour victory in 1945, the groundwork had already been laid.
The successful partnership between Churchill and Attlee is one of a series of unlikely couplings between rival politicians, sometimes from different parties, that form the basis of Giles Radice’s entertaining canter through postwar British political history. Others include Bevin and Morrison, Macmillan and Butler, Blair and Brown, Cameron and Clegg. While some of this is ground much travelled elsewhere (notably in John Campbell’s Pistols at Dawn), Radice offers some interesting insights.
Successful politicians, he argues, tend to divide into initiators and facilitators. Churchill was an initiator, Attlee a facilitator who got things done behind the scenes. Harold Macmillan was an initiator, his deputy, Rab Butler, a facilitator. Likewise Thatcher, who, especially in the early years of her reign, was heavily dependent on the advice and support she received from her loyal deputy, William Whitelaw.
The Whitelaw-Thatcher alliance is especially intriguing. Whitelaw was a gent of the old school, one of that now almost extinct species, the one-nation Tory. He was not a natural Thatcherite, on one occasion allegedly referring to her in private as “that awful woman”. In public, however, he was totally loyal and helped her through several scrapes to the point where she came to regard him as indispensable. “Every prime minister needs a Willie,” she famously remarked, oblivious to the double entendre. Whitelaw retired in 1988 following a heart attack and it is doubtful whether (had he remained) even his considerable political and diplomatic skills could have saved Thatcher from herself in the final years. Whether the rest of us should be grateful for the service he performed on her behalf is a matter for debate. Loyalty is an admirable quality, but it can be stretched too far.
Radice argues that just about all successful postwar governments have been the result of partnerships, often between bitter rivals. Ultimately, of course, success required one party to accept the role of second fiddle. Butler, who was outwitted at every turn by the genial but more ruthless Macmillan, loyally served in successive Macmillan governments with the result that, according to Radice, they proved “one of the most creative combinations in Tory party history.”
Similarly, the Blair-Brown partnership, although fraught, was “one of the most powerful and creative partnerships in Labour party history”.
As for the Cameron-Clegg alliance, more of a shotgun wedding forced upon unwilling partners by a surly electorate, the jury is still out. To be sure, it has provided a period of stable government at a time when the electoral arithmetic might have dictated otherwise. Liberal Democrats would argue that they have at least mitigated the worst excesses of the Tory right, and David Cameron might even agree (although he couldn’t possibly say so out loud).
One thing is for sure: neither party is keen to repeat the experience, although the way things are going, they may not have a choice.
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