Attlee’s Great Contemporaries: The Politics of Character, edited by Frank Field
This book consists of a 50-page introduction in which Frank Field, shrewdly though large- ly in eulogistic vein, analyses the character and political principles of Clement Attlee, followed by 28 essays, many of them book reviews or articles first published in the Observer, in which Attlee considers various of his contemporaries, from Lansbury and Keir Hardie to Aneurin Bevan and Montgomery. Field argues that these articles are uniquely revealing of the values which shaped Attlee’s own career and his understanding of ‘the collective nature of leadership in a free, and in particular, a social democratic society’. This claim is, on the whole, well-justified. He also maintains that the essays are ‘a joy to read … a set of literary crown-jewels … I am struck in these miniature portraits by the beauty of Attlee’s language.’ Here one is left wondering whether one has been reading the same material.
Attlee, Field writes, with an eye to contemporary events, ‘held it as a great truth that the revolution he espoused would never change the character of the British nation unless politicians led by living that kind of life themselves’. Attlee himself, as few others, exemplified ‘that kind of life’. He was austere in his habits, dedicated in his responsibilities, totally incorruptible, indifferent to fashion or popular prejudice. It was not unlike the life led by one of his heroes, King George VI. To be a monarch in a modern democratic state, wrote Attlee, does not call for the possession of exceptional ability: indeed ‘to have it might be rather a disadvantage. What is needed is someone of good intelligence, character and judgment, and a high sense of duty.’
He would have said much the same of a prime minister.
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