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foolish recklessness of many of his ideas. He was totally starry-eyed about Russia in 1941-4 and looked to Moscow not merely for a stubborn national defence but for the libertarian leadership of the world. This led him to advocate a Second Front for 1941; even 1942 or 1943, he held, would be dilatory. Had his advice been taken, he would have been a butcher on a scale that dwarfed Field Marshal Haig. He never bought the idea of the Duke of Gloucester as Commander-in-Chief but in 1941 he wanted the British Army put temporarily under the command of émigré Czech, Polish or French generals, and in 1942 he wanted the Soviet Marshal Timoshenko to command British troops in an immediate assault on Fortress Europe. In 1944-5 he began to be disenchanted with Stalin, and being always suspicious and reserved in his attitude to America he played with an ‘organic confederation’ in Western Europe comprising all the obvious countries, plus ‘a sane Germany and Austria’ with ‘an enlightened Britain’ graciously accepting leadership. But as soon as such a European union began to become a practical proposition in the 1950s Bevan shied violently away from it.
    Whatever his extravagances and inconsistencies, however, he emerged from the war as a colourful and famous figure, even if on the whole an unpopular one. Any elected office in the Labour Party continued to elude him, and in 1944 he had been very close to his second expulsion from it. He was obviously anathema to ‘patriotic’ opinion, and although he burnished his steel on Churchill this did not arouse any feelings of chivalrous courtesy in the latter. ‘As great a curse to his country in time of peace as he was a squalid nuisance in time of war,’ which were Churchill’s phrases in December 1945, well after victories had ceased to be elusive, was not the way in which one saluted a knightly opponent.
    Why, then, did Attlee make Bevan the youngest and most controversial of his Cabinet appointments after the Labour landslide?Of those who were in a position to influence Attlee, his claims could hardly have been urged by Bevin or Morrison, who were even more antipathetic to Bevan than they were to each other, or by Dalton, who had recently written of him as being ‘more than usually hysterical and abrasive’. Nor was there any obvious affinity between Attlee himself, ‘reek[ing] of the suburban middle-class values which Bevan detested’ as Michael Foot put it, and Bevan’s flamboyant bohemianism. (Bevan’s style was not suburban, whatever else it was. In 1944 he and Jennie Lee had removed themselves from the Berkshire countryside near Newbury to a fine house (cheap at the time) in Cliveden Place, between Eaton and Sloane Squares, as fashionable a London address as it is possible to imagine.)
    Attlee liked balancing between the different factions of the Labour Party and was careful never to commit himself to tribal loyalties. But he also liked the quick despatch of Cabinet business and neat administration. He must have regarded Bevan’s intoxication with words as the enemy of speed and at best a risky bet for neatness. And he increased the hazard by giving him a department with one of the heaviest administrative burdens in Whitehall. The Ministry of Health to which Bevan was appointed in 1945 was essentially the same partly misnamed ministry that Neville Chamberlain had preferred to the Exchequer in 1924. It embraced housing, local government and the Poor Law, as well as such limited responsibility as the state took before 1948 for hospitals and doctors.
    It was therefore a crucial department for the Labour Government’s impact upon the condition of the people. But it was also a ‘safe’ one in the sense which first Charles de Gaulle in the late 1940s and then François Mitterrand in the 1980s turned into a term of art when they were the only two French heads of state to accept Communists in their