Ernest Bevin by Adonis Andrew;

Author:Adonis, Andrew;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Barclay insists that even when in hospital Bevin’s ‘grip on affairs never really weakened’, recalling that the only time he ever received a reprimand was when he didn’t phone Bevin in hospital to tell him that hostilities had begun in Korea on 25 June 1950.

In meetings, as Barclay describes them, Bevin ‘often appeared rambling and chaotic and the conclusions reached were not always clear, but the senior members of the FO had learnt the way the Secretary of State’s mind worked and many of them were remarkably adept at producing at great speed a document which correctly represented his ideas’.25

‘He was still all right as far down as the neck,’ his doctor, Alec McCall, told Attlee, which was decisive in the decision to keep Bevin at the Foreign Office into 1951. When McCall advised against his last long overseas trip to the Commonwealth conference in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in January 1950, Bevin countered that he should go – and McCall should come with him. Which is what happened. When he got there, he was so immobile that he was carried up the stairs into the conference room in a richly decorated palanquin. Back in London in the spring of 1950 Kenneth Younger, his ministerial deputy, thought he was now ‘only half alive’ and the position was unsustainable, but added, ‘I have to admit that when he pulls himself together he usually does pretty well for short periods. In Cabinet he appears to be asleep, but then suddenly weighs in with comments which show that he knows exactly what has been said.’26 It is unlikely that the key decisions on the Korean War and the Schuman Plan would have been different had Bevin been fully mobile, although maybe shuttle diplomacy and physical presence would have made the rejection of Schuman more nuanced.

All this makes Bevin an interesting case for David Owen’s thesis as to the importance of sickness in political decision-making, influenced by his experience as both a doctor and a senior minister.27 Bevin in his last year in office is an extreme case of a decision-maker persisting through serious illness. Yet, he does not fit Owen’s pattern, which applies to Eden, of severe illness leading to poor decisions. Of the big mistakes Bevin made, none are obviously attributable to illness, and he continued to make broadly sensible judgements from his hospital bed. And he does not remotely fit into Owen’s other category of leaders whose cognitive faculties functioned well, but who developed a ‘hubristic syndrome’ that powerfully affected their performance. This never happened to Bevin. On the contrary, Bevin raises the opposite issue of how far serious illness in one who is cognitively sound and balanced, although performing well below par, should outweigh the benefits of someone less capable occupying their post.

Bevin’s career ended not in failure but in pathos. For his seventieth birthday, on 9 March 1951, in an unprecedented act, every member of the foreign service, from doorkeepers to ambassadors, contributed sixpence – ‘the docker’s tanner’ – towards a cake and a dinner service.

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