A Very Private Celebrity (11 page)

Chapter 4

Government minister – the fall

I
T WAS
1950 and the fag end of a revolution. The first post-war Labour government – the strongest in Britain's history – had come to an end. At the general election in February, Labour was returned again, but with a majority of only five. Labour's programme of social and economic reform, for which it had campaigned for a generation, had largely been carried out. Its ‘shopping list' for the next round of nationalisations showed that it had run out of steam on public ownership; only the incomplete nationalisation of iron and steel remained among the big manifesto intentions. Labour voters had run out of steam too. The historian Peter Hennessy wrote:

There was also a redrawing of boundaries, particularly in the London area, that favoured the Tories. All of this accounted for the loss of votes for Freeman in Watford, but nevertheless he won again, assisted by a visit to the constituency from Prime Minister Attlee. Freeman did not attend the count.

Labour's campaign had been lacklustre. The Big Five were exhausted. Foreign Secretary Ernie Bevin was seriously ill, often away or falling asleep in meetings. Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Stafford Cripps was failing fast, with a gastric illness that deprived him of food and sleep. Prime Minister Attlee suffered from gastric problems too, so he was in and out of hospital. That left Hugh Dalton, whose power – though not influence – was much reduced after he had resigned from the chancellorship in 1947, after inadvertently leaking Budget changes to a journalist. He was back in the Cabinet, but with a relatively minor post as Minister of Town and Country Planning.

That left Aneurin (Nye) Bevan, but he too was a spent force as Minister for Health – a post he had held since 1945. He was ambitious for one of the top two posts, but Attlee preferred Hugh Gaitskell as Chancellor when Cripps resigned in October 1950, and he preferred Herbert Morrison as Foreign Secretary when Ernie Bevin had to retire six months later in March 1951. Bevan was humiliated and intent on revenge. That January, he had agreed to move sideways to become Minister of Labour; his successor as Minister of Health, Hilary Marquand, did not have a seat in the Cabinet.

The stage was now set for the split in the Labour Party that contributed to the loss of the next general election, banished it to the political wilderness for the next thirteen years, and caused an interparty civil war of a ferocity Labour was not to experience again until the early 1980s. It was, said Gaitskell to Dalton, ‘a fight for the soul of the Labour Party'. It was a fight that cost Freeman his promising political career – one that some people thought might have taken him to party leadership and even beyond.

A year into the second Labour government, shortly after Freeman had steered through the iron and steel debate, Dalton spoke to Attlee again about him:

Dalton reported this to Freeman, who agreed he would accept the job if it were offered. Promotion was in the air. Michael Foot concurred with this: ‘Thanks to his extreme competence at the despatch box and elsewhere, he was clearly destined for early promotion.'
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As it turned out, this was the apex of Freeman's political career. Only two months later, on 23 April 1951, he resigned from the government. He did so with Nye Bevan and Harold Wilson, and this precipitated the split of the Labour Party.

The row had been simmering for several weeks. The presenting issue was whether or not Bevan, spoiling for a fight, would resign over the government's decision to impose charges on his precious
health service. If so, would his resignation, as Freeman believed, bring down the Labour government within weeks? Throughout this period – ‘this odious war of nerves, which is becoming totally intolerable' is how Dalton described it in his diary on 20 April – Dalton was both mediator and counsellor to Freeman, taking his task very personally. He begged Freeman to stay in the government like a forlorn lover:

In the event, this was true. What is more, the Labour establishment from Attlee downwards tried harder to keep Freeman than it did either Bevan or Wilson. He was offered a choice of jobs. So why did Freeman resign? Didn't he really want the seat in the Cabinet that was his for the taking?

Ten years ago, when I began writing this biography, I asked Norman MacKenzie to pose these questions to Freeman. Freeman replied that he resigned because he had given his word that if Bevan went, ‘so would I, and I didn't want to renege on my promise as others had done'. Personal principles were more important to Freeman than political ones – and once he made up his mind he never changed it.

One external event had brought about the split. This was the Korean War that Britain had engaged in since July 1950, fearing that a victory for Stalin and North Korea might well heat up the Cold War in Europe. The fear led to a massive re-armament programme in the United States and Britain. In January 1951, the new Chancellor, Hugh Gaitskell, proposed in Cabinet a colossal increase in the defence budget of 30 per cent, to total £4.7 billion spending over the following
three years. He acknowledged that this would divert over half a million workers into defence production, and adversely affect house building, investments and consumer spending. What is more, he volunteered that there was no certainty Britain would be able to obtain the additional raw materials or machine tools necessary to achieve this target: ‘There is a danger that the increased defence programme might, in practice, yield less and not more production within the next two years.'
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Nevertheless, the Cabinet agreed to the programme. It remained to be seen how the government intended to pay for it, and that was a matter for Gaitskell's Budget two months later. For Freeman, as an under-secretary at the Ministry of Supply, and therefore closely involved in the process, it was the re-armament proposals that became his resignation issue.

Gaitskell knew that the only way he could meet the costs of re-armament would be to curb expenditure on social services, particularly health, which had been protected under Bevan like a sacred cow. On 9 April, he informed the Cabinet of his Budget proposals. These included capping the National Health Service expenditure at £400 million and imposing charges for glasses and false teeth, which would produce £13 million. Bevan retorted that these savings were a serious betrayal of socialist principles and threatened that he would be obliged to resign if they were announced in the Budget the following day.

In the circumstances, the savings were very modest, but a personality clash inflamed the row. Bevan was the son of a Welsh miner. He had left school at thirteen and was propelled to greatness by a passionate belief in socialism. Gaitskell was the son of a civil servant. He had been educated at Winchester and Oxford University and lived in Hampstead. Bevan called him a ‘dessicated calculating machine'. What is more, this new-school Labourite had got the job Bevan had
coveted after a lifetime of service. The social divide ran through the party, though there were some like Freeman – a ‘Nye-ite' and member of the ‘Keep Left' group – who had crossed it. This is not to say there was no policy issue. For the Bevanites, it was a matter of socialist principle: for the Gaitskellites, it was good economic housekeeping.

Gaitskell refused to back down, threatened to resign himself, and was only given the go ahead by Attlee to announce the Budget on the morning of the announcement itself. ‘I'm afraid they will have to go,' said the Prime Minister, referring to Bevan and his supporters.
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Shortly before, Gaitskell and his wife Dora had been staying with the royal family at Windsor. The King had waggled his foot at his Chancellor and said: ‘I really don't see why people should have false teeth free any more than they should have a pair of shoes free.'
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Dalton provides in his diary an intimate account of the splitting apart of his party. He writes how his friend John Freeman twisted and turned in reaction to events – but, at the end of the drama, stayed loyal to Bevan:

That Sunday, 8 April, Wilson and Freeman spent a long evening at Bevan's home in Cliveden Place, persuading him to broaden his opposition from simply health cutbacks, hence Freeman's later remark: ‘When Nye had finally determined his course of action, Harold and I
made up Bevanism to give him a justification for it.'
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Freeman's claim is an exaggeration because Nye had resisted the colossal re-armament policy from the beginning, but it was the health issue that stirred him emotionally. Dalton's diary continues:

In fact, on that day, 10 April, Freeman wrote what Michael Foot MP (Bevan's biographer) called ‘a very powerful letter' to Bevan. His point was that Attlee intended to call a general election in the near future to increase the size of the Labour majority. If Bevan resigned in April, it would cause a split in the party that would lead to an election debacle ‘of 1931 proportions', whereas if Bevan campaigned during the election on the reasons for his threatened resignation, ‘three-quarters of the Labour movement would rally to you':

He ended, however, with the promise to stand by Nye whatever his choice: ‘The assurances I gave you this afternoon are in no way modified or withdrawn; but they do give me the right to address this last appeal to you.'
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To Freeman, then, personal loyalty was everything. True to his nature, however, he showed no apparent warmth or intimacy towards Bevan. Michael Foot, who was a witness to these events, makes that same point in his biography. Bevan, he writes, described Freeman as the most inscrutable of his Bevanite colleagues, calling him ‘the man from Saturn' (i.e. a man of mystery).

Bevan did agree, however, to postpone his resignation until the third reading of the Health Charges Bill on 23 April, should that come to pass. Back to Dalton's diary: