Citizen Clem: a biography of Attlee
JOHN BEW

It is almost impossible now to consider the political life and legacy of Clement Attlee without comparing the circumstances of the Labour Party during his 20-year tenure as its longest-ever serving leader with those of his party today. One reason for this is that in recent years it has become widely fashionable to evoke the name of Attlee and what are perceived now as the socialist achievements of the Government he led. At the time of Jeremy Corbyn’s election in 2015, there was even a fashion for his evangelical supporters to parade in T-shirts bearing the slogan “What Would Clement Do?”, which would surely have been a development as distasteful to Attlee personally as it is inappropriate to his record.

The irony as repeatedly delineated on practically every page of this magnificent biography is that today’s Left has wrongly appropriated Attlee’s name with little or no understanding of the man or his politics and even less comprehension of the ideas which drove him or the difficulties he faced. Attlee was not a hero in his lifetime, as the author John Bew has taken pains to emphasise, and would be astonished that he should be lionised as such by history. He mocked himself in his later years by anticipating that his death would be greeted by people saying: “I thought he died ages ago”.