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window pane in a vain attempt to get through it. Subsequent high-level party manoeuvres put in its place an all-party coalition, with a rumbustious but revered leader, underpinned by a desperate national situation and a political consensus that comprised almost the whole of the House of Commons except for one right-wing Conservative who was imprisoned and one Communist who was against the war until Hitler attacked Russia a year later. The Labour Party put its first eleven into the Government while its second eleven occupied the Opposition front bench with a determined loyalty, at least until 1943 when the tide had turned and post-war politics began to loom, which gratified Churchill and Attlee but made the House of Commons little more than a simulacrum of the parliamentary democracy which was supposed to be one of the causes for which the war was being fought.
    Bevan saw the gap and devoted the next five years to trying to fill it. Primarily this meant attacking Churchill, which he did with a mixture of courage, verve and irresponsibility. His skill was that, although he talked a lot of presumptuous nonsense shot through with shafts of good sense, he never appeared defeatist. Some of his criticisms were ideological; Churchill was too much the prisoner of his class, whose ‘ear is too sensitively attuned to the bugle notes of Blenheim for him to hear the whisperingsin the streets’; but others were strategic and appealed more to disgruntled Tories than to loyal Labour members. Probably he never wanted to bring Churchill down. He had no serious candidate to put in his place, for he discounted Attlee and clashed with Bevin and Morrison as violently as he did with Churchill himself. He may have played with the idea of Cripps or Beaverbrook, but then went off each of them in turn. It was more that he genuinely believed that Churchill would be a better war leader if he had more criticism and less adulation (a recipe Bevan singularly failed to apply to himself when he established his own court in the 1950s); and that he had the daring to build up his own reputation by going for the biggest target on the field as Disraeli had done with Peel a hundred years before, as Lloyd George had done with Joseph Chamberlain fifty years later, and as Iain Macleod was to do with Bevan himself ten years into the future.
    Bevan’s high point was a censure debate in July 1942, just before the global strategic balance was changed by the German defeat in front of Stalingrad and Britain’s morale was transformed by Montgomery’s victory over Rommel at Alamein. On the first day of the censure motion Wardlaw-Milne, the dissident Tory mover, produced bathos by his suggestion that the Duke of Gloucester be appointed Commander-in-Chief. Bevan, opening on the second day, had to retrieve the position. He did so with deadliness. ‘The Prime Minister’, he said, ‘wins debate after debate and loses battle after battle.’ It was probably the most damaging remark, six months after Singapore and four months before Alamein, made against Churchill during the whole course of the war. The Prime Minister defeated the censure motion by 475 to 25, but as Rab Butler with typical ambiguous felineness subsequently remarked, ‘Churchill had had his day … but Aneurin Bevan had made his mark.’
    Bevan’s imagery was sometimes unforgettable. Churchill had described Italy as ‘the soft under-belly of the Axis’. As the Allies endeavoured painfully to fight their way up the peninsula over the switchback of the Apennines in 1943-4, Bevan dismissed the strategy as nonsense. ‘Is this the soft under-belly of the Axis? We are climbing up his backbone.’ On another occasion he comparedChurchill’s slow approach to a Second Front in France with the approach of an old husband to a young bride: ‘fascinated, apprehensive, sluggish’.
    Yet it would be a mistake to allow his lapidary phrases to obscure the