The Grand delusion

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COVER IMAGE: © Jonathan Hordle/Rex Features COVER dEsIGn: alice-marwick.co.uk www.ibtauris.com

Written in the public glow surrounding the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, The Grand Delusion is a critical history of Britain’s post-war ‘establishment’ – with the Queen and her prime ministers at its heart. It explores the key questions: has Elizabeth II’s reign been good for the UK? Or has it represented six decades of missed opportunities, deepening inequality and failure to adapt?

Stephen Haseler argues that the Queen has helped set the tone for the country, that the lavish monarchy has created a culture that has encouraged prime minister after prime minister in their delusions of grandeur, rendering them unable to adapt to the loss of empire – an ‘empire fixation’ that has led to mistakes from the invasion of Suez in 1956 to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and on into the tragedy in Afghanistan. A consequence has been the constant search, over 60 years, for ‘a global role’ as a substitute for empire – a factor that led to the creation of the over-extended finance industry in the City of London. Haseler also shows how the monarchy and establishment have validated an outdated and seemingly entrenched class system, which over the years has led to aggregations of great inherited wealth and falling social mobility, and which has negatively affected Britain’s economy and its capacity to innovate.

The book recounts the relationships between the Queen and her twelve prime ministers. Many, most notably Harold Wilson and John Major, were deferential. But others, like Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, were not – and in their different ways represented a decidedly different vision of Britain to that of the Queen. Yet the Queen survived these two prime ministers. Thatcher’s free-market, middle-class revolution had little time for traditional England, particularly its rural attachments. And Tony Blair’s modernising agenda was incipiently republican, though, following the death of Princess Diana, it could be argued that he saved the royal family.

The Grand Delusion provides a political and social history of post-war Britain which is provocative, informative and entertaining, while at the same time shedding a deeply questioning light on the essence of Britain’s identity today.

Stephen Haseler is Emeritus Professor of Government and Director of the Global Policy Institute at London Metropolitan University. He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and has held Visiting Professorships at Georgetown University and Johns Hopkins University. He has been active in public life in Britain (Labour candidate, GLC Committee Chair and founder-member of the SDP) and has appeared regularly on TV (including BBC Newsnight) and radio (The Today Programme). He lives in West London.

He is the author of fifteen books on British and European politics, including The Battle for Britain: Thatcher and the New Liberals (I.B.Tauris); The End of the House of Windsor (I.B.Tauris); Super-State: The New Europe and the Challenge to America (I.B.Tauris); The Super-Rich: The Unjust World of Global Capital; Sidekick: British Global Strategy from Churchill to Blair; The Death of British Democracy and Meltdown: How The Masters of the Universe Destroyed The West’s Power and Prosperity.

sTephen haseler

Britain after Sixty yearS of ElizabEth ii

Stephen Haseler is Emeritus Professor of Government and Director of the Global Policy Institute at London Metropolitan University. He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and has held Visiting Professorships at Georgetown University and Johns Hopkins University. He has been active in public life in Britain (Labour candidate, GLC Committee Chair and founder member of the SDP) and has appeared regularly on TV (including BBC Newsnight) and radio (Today). He lives in West London. He is the author of 15 books on British and European politics, including The Battle for Britain: Thatcher and the New Liberals (I.B.Tauris), The End of the House of Windsor (I.B.Tauris); Super-State: The New Europe and the Challenge to America (I.B.Tauris); The Super-Rich: The Unjust World of Global Capital; Sidekick: British Global Strategy from Churchill to Blair; The Death of British Democracy and Meltdown: How the Masters of the Universe Destroyed the West’s Power and Prosperity.

the

Grand Delusion

Britain after sixty years of elizabeth II

Stephen Haseler

Published in 2012 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010www.ibtauris.com

Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010

Copyright © Stephen Haseler 2012

The right of Stephen Haseler to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978 1 78076 073 5

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British LibraryA full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of CongressLibrary of Congress catalog card: available

Typeset in Sabon by Dexter Haven Associates Ltd, London

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall

Acknowledgements vii

Preface ix

part 1 PRIDE AND EMPIRE 1

1 Coronation: pretence and pomp 3

2 The Queen, the Commonwealth and the bomb 13

3 Eden: no end of a lesson 26

4 Macmillan: a ‘Greek’ in the American empire 32

5 Douglas-Home: the Queen picks ‘her’ second prime minister 43

part 2 TUMULT, AND CHANGE? 53

6 Wilson: the ‘white heat’ of change? 55

7 Heath: failure of a radical? 64

8 Callaghan: end of an era 77

part 3 THATCHER’S JANUS-FACED REVOLUTION 85

9 The road to Thatcherism 87

10 Thatcher and the Queen: two visions of Britain 101

11 Thatcher: ‘Closer in spirit to Old Ironsides’ 118

part 4 THE BEGINNING OF ISOLATION? 133

12 Major and the birth of Euroscepticism 135

13 Murdoch and tabloid xenophobia 145

CONTENTS

part 5 AN EMPIRE OF FINANCE 161

14 Blair: saving the Queen, bottling Europe 163

15 Blair at the Millennium Dome: ‘simply the best’ 180

16 Blair’s ‘fatal attraction’ 191

17 Blair and the City: an empire of finance 208

part 6 THE RECKONING 227

18 The crash 229

part 7 JUBILEE YEAR: CELEBRATING AN ILLUSION 241

19 A jubilee for the British: hollowed out and in debt 243

20 A jubilee for the super-rich 253

21 Can Britannia adjust? 264

Notes 283

Index 297

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There is no source from which we can raise sufficient funds to enable us to live and spend on the scale we contemplate except the United States.

John Maynard Keynes, August 1945

Queen Elizabeth II was crowned on 2 June 1953, having ‘ascended’ to the throne to become monarch over a year earlier on 6 February 1952. The coronation ceremony, held in Westminster Abbey, anointed and crowned the British head of state. But Elizabeth Windsor was at the same time crowned Queen of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Ceylon and Pakistan, and also became Head of what was then called the British Commonwealth of Nations and ‘Supreme Governor’ of the Church of England. This ceremony was a truly important event – certainly for the post-war British.

The ceremonial opened as Elizabeth took her seat on the Chair of Estate, and then she stood along with the Garter Principal King of Arms, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Great Chamberlain, the Lord High Constable and the Earl Marshall, and then the Garter Principal King of Arms ‘presented’ the Queen to the audience to the east, south, west and north of the Abbey. He intoned, ‘Sirs, I here present unto you Queen Elizabeth, your undoubted Queen.’ And those present then ‘acclaimed’ their ‘sovereign’. Then the Archbishop asked of Elizabeth, ‘Will you solemnly promise and swear to govern the Peoples of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa, Pakistan and Ceylon, and of your Possessions and other Territories to any of them belonging

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or pertaining, according to their respective laws and customs?’ She then pledged to ‘maintain the laws of God and the true profession of the gospel’ and the ‘inviolable settlement of the Church of England’.

And then the coronation ceremony moved on to the mysterious ‘anointing’ and ‘crowning’. The ‘anointing’ was particularly mystical. Elizabeth’s crimson robe was removed and she proceeded to King Edward’s Chair wearing the anointing gown. This part of the ceremony was not televised (and in 1937 at the preceding coronation was not even photographed). The official explanation was that this element of the coronation service is considered sacred, and so concealed from public gaze. The Dean of Westminster had the task of pouring consecrated oil – described as ‘holy oil’ – from an eagle-shaped ampulla into a spoon – the filigreed spoon, the only component of the medieval crown jewels that survived Cromwell’s revolution – and the Archbishop of Canterbury anointed ‘the sovereign’ on the hands, breast and head. This anointing was completed while the assembled sang ‘Zadok the Priest’. The Queen was then invested with the royal bracelets and the royal robe, the sovereign’s orb, the queen’s ring, the sceptre with the cross and the sceptre with the dove. She was ‘crowned’ by the Archbishop of Canterbury as the assembled sang ‘God Save the Queen’. Thus was made legitimate – through this ancient ceremony – the new British head of state, Elizabeth II. Both the new Queen herself and the British political class took all of this extremely seriously. It was the foundation stone upon which Elizabeth II was to ‘reign’, and to represent the country as its head of state for the rest of the century and well beyond.

Almost as central to this ceremony as the new Queen herself was the role played by the Archbishop of Canterbury. For it was on his authority – acting, that is, on behalf of the national church and the divine power – that the British head of state was, so to speak, sworn in. At no point in the ceremony was the new head of state’s authority, even symbolically, deemed to rest upon the assent of ‘the people’ or institutions representative of ‘the people’. Intriguingly, reference to parliament was completely absent from the ceremonial. There was a point in the coronation called ‘the Recognition’ at which the assembled dignitaries on the four sides of ‘the Theatre’ (as the raised coronation platform was appropriately named) were actually asked to recognise ‘your undoubted Queen’ – but they were then instructed by the ceremony rules to shout, ‘God save Queen Elizabeth.’ As Randolph Churchill wrote in his book The Story of the Coronation, published to coincide with the great event, the coronation proves that ‘the dynastic principle has triumphed and is enshrined in the

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very heart of the theory of a modern constitutional monarchy, as it is, if we search our hearts, in ourselves.’1

The whole procedure was, in fact, ‘sanctified by the church’ – a kind of solemn contract between the Archbishop, representing both the established church and the divine, and the new Queen. Although the powers of royal ‘divine right’ to rule were long gone from Britain’s constitution, the office of monarch or ‘sovereign’ itself was still as late as 1953 legitimated by God. Elizabeth’s oath was to the Almighty and her office and authority was derived from Him.

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This ceremony possessed far more significance than simply establishing a new monarch. It was the first great public event of the mass television era, broadcast through the country, and watched later by film throughout the world (the Canadians saw it later that night) and celebrated from New York (where the Duke and Duchess of Windsor attended a coronation party) to Korea (where it was reported from the Korean War front that Commonwealth soldiers fired red, white and blue smoke shells at the enemy). It was showing Britain’s face to the world.

With this lavish, part-medieval, part-imperial, ceremony, offering few symbolic concessions to either the democratic age or post-war Britain, the message from the British establishment to the world was clear and unmistakable: Britain, which had been the greatest power in the world from the Napoleonic wars until the rise of American and German power, had survived the war, and the post-war austerity, and was back. The country, represented by her Queen, was still not just a great country, but a great power, indeed a world power. And on the eve of the coronation, at 11.30 on the morning of 29 May 1953, the imperial ‘world leadership’ role was nicely reinforced by the news that Edmund Hillary (with loyal Sherpa Tenzing at his side) had reached the top of Mount Everest. The newspapers talked of a ‘new Elizabethan age’ and it was obvious, as Harold Wilson was to argue over a decade later, that ‘Britain’s frontiers still ‘lay on the Himalayas’.

And Britain’s establishment was also affirming through this resplendent ceremony that the country’s old-fashioned class system was still in order, that there was indeed a continuing upper class with a firm view about its role both in post-war Britain, and indeed in the world which it used to rule.

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This bombastic coronation-cum-theatre was not just a Conservative government extravaganza, or piece of Churchillian theatre (although Churchill had a hand in constructing this royal show); rather it was a genuine expression of an all-party consensus. The Labour government’s Defence White Paper of 1948 described Britain as remaining a ‘great power’, and in 1949 the Labour Minister of Defence described the country as ‘a centre of world influence and power’. In March 1946 the Chiefs of Staff (Cunningham, Alanbrook and Tedder) had outlined a breathtaking and grandiose vision of a global Commonwealth defence system that would consist of four ‘world zones’, each with its own command structure (rather in the manner of the US Department of Defense during the Cold War and after): Mediterranean and Middle East; India; South East Asia; Australia and New Zealand. These unreconstructed ‘Masters of the Universe’ in the Foreign Office and the service ministries continued during 1947 to ‘pipe the imperial march and beat the world-power drum’.2

And the Labour government supported them. Just after becoming prime minister in 1945 Clement Attlee shocked his colleagues by arguing in a cabinet paper that Britain’s reduced strength as a country meant that its commitments should also be reduced. ‘The British Commonwealth and Empire is not a unit that can be defended by itself. It was the creation of sea power,’ he argued.3 But he was to be overruled in cabinet, not least by the new Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin. And by September 1947 the Labour Ministry of Defence was proposing, for 1949, to have a strength of 339,000 troops, with as many as 80,000 stationed outside Europe for the ‘world role’, and only 70,000 in Germany facing the increasingly menacing Soviet Union. And under Labour the defence build-up in 1951 for the Korean War had been so extravagant that even Churchill demurred at the cost.

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What these cross-party fantasists could not bring themselves to understand was that, for Britain, the war had been an unmitigated catastrophe. It saw Britain’s economy devastated and its power in the world seriously diminished. Britain’s war leader Winston Churchill, in some moods, at least recognised the magnitude of the country’s changed circumstances – in a poignant commentary at the very end of the war he ruefully suggested that his life’s work of defending the empire might

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all have been for naught. He also worried that his victory over Nazi Germany might have been bought at the price of allowing a new tyranny, the Soviet Union, to dominate Europe.4 Soviet Russia did indeed become the pre-eminent European power in the early months of post-war Europe – a stark fact that led most Western European governments to welcome the other new superpower as a balancing force. And as a result Britain’s real post-war strategic position – as opposed to its fantasy role – was, in Attlee’s words, as ‘an easterly extension of a strategic area the centre of which is the American continent’.5

In fact, Britain’s entry into an American-dominated sphere had been going on for some time. Britain’s decline and the USA’s rise had been almost a century-long story. In 1870, at the height of Victorian power and prosperity, Britain’s share of world manufacturing exports was 45 per cent; by 1950 it had fallen to 26 per cent; by 1989 to only 9 per cent. Britain’s share of manufacturing output reached 22.9 per cent of the world level in 1880; by 1913, on the eve of the Great War, it was 13.6 per cent; by 1938, on the eve of World War II, it was 10.7 per cent. In 1890 Britain was second only to the USA in iron and steel production (producing eight million tons of pig iron) but by 1913 the country was ranked third (producing only 7.7 million tons of steel, compared with Germany’s 17.6 million and the USA’s 31.8 million.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Britain still possessed something akin to a worldwide empire, but it was becoming a strung-out and somewhat ungainly, rickety affair. As early as 1884 the writer J.R. Seeley saw a future in which ‘they [Russia and America] will surpass in power the states now called great as much as the great country-states of the sixteenth-century surpassed Florence.’6 Some of Britain’s more acute political leaders, like Tory prime minister Lord Salisbury, sensed this growing weakness, and could see the writing on the wall well before the First World War. Joseph Chamberlain also saw the fragility of the empire and believed Britain’s imperial decline to be unavoidable unless the empire could be transformed into an imperial preference system – a trade bloc – that would compete with growing American economic power. And his son Neville, prime minister between 1937 and 1940, constructed a whole foreign policy based upon an assumption of British imperial weakness; his strategy of appeasement was a forlorn attempt to save what he could of the resources of the empire.7

For most of the first half of the twentieth century, though, British imperial propaganda was pumping out a different message – particularly to the young in the elite education system. In 1921 the South African

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General Smuts told the British that they had emerged from the Great War ‘quite the greatest power in the world’. As one young public schoolboy, educated to run the empire, later recalled, ‘Naturally we believed in the greatness of Britain and the permanence of the Empire. I think we believed in our hearts…that the creation of the British empire was the best thing that ever happened to mankind.’8 Greatness; and goodness too. In the 1930s schoolchildren were being informed that ‘We’re all subjects and partakers in the great design, the British empire…The British empire has always worked for the peace of the world. This was the job assigned to it by God.’9 In other words, the empire was ‘all that was noble and good’ – naturally so, as it was run by the successors of those Victorian colonial Englishmen who were, according to the historian R.C.K. Ensor, among ‘the most religious the world has ever known’.10 And it is more than likely that the future Queen, the young Elizabeth, would have had this kind of thinking, even its extreme form, imbued in her by her nannies and parents.

Yet by the early 1940s, co-existing with this message of imperial power – and goodness – was a new and stark reality: for Britain – ‘quite the greatest power in the world’ – was becoming increasingly dependent upon an outside power. There were two phases in this unfolding dependence. The first began when the country’s wartime rearmament programme became reliant upon American industry and technology. American machinery was needed to equip British industry for the production of tanks, aero engines and weapons. Britain also needed American steel, the essential ingredient for war-making. By 1940 Britain was effectively bankrupt. As the chancellor of the exchequer reported in February 1940, ‘we are in great danger of our gold reserves being exhausted.’11 By the end of 1940, with the Luftwaffe over the skies of England, the reserves had almost gone, and Britain started its slide into debt – with the USA as creditor. The British cabinet had a ‘confident expectation of abundant American help’.12 It was already clear what the war had wrought. The relationship between Britain and the USA had changed forever. As Correlli Barnett put it, ‘in that summer of heroic attitudes…when the English scanned the skies for the Luftwaffe and the sea for the German army…England’s existence as an independent, self-sustaining power was reckoned by the government to have just four months to run.’13 Britain went bankrupt in December 1940 when the gold and dollar reserves ran out.

And after 1940 Britain’s war effort – particularly the output of guns and aircraft – would become dependent on the American machine-tool industry: the country’s domestic machine-tool industry was simply too

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inefficient and unskilled to produce the quality and output of guns and aircraft needed. The design and manufacture of British tanks (particularly the Covenanter) remained a problem, and by the summer of 1942 the famous British 8th Army was equipped with almost twice as many American (Grants and Stuarts) as British (Crusader) tanks. Even in the sensitive and crucial radar industry Britain became reliant upon North America for sophisticated parts – such as magnetrons for the airborne interception radar for night fighters. It was estimated in 1943 that annual imports of radio components and equipment from the USA equalled four-fifths of British production. As with other war technologies, British inventive and theoretical science was first rate, but production and design were often below the standards of allies and potential competitors.

Britain also became reliant upon American financial goodwill. British reserves had run out by the early spring of 1941 and the country was in no position to repay America for war supplies. However, the Defense of the United States Act – otherwise known as ‘lend-lease’ – was passed by congress in March 1941, and thenceforth, for the rest of the war, Britain no longer needed to wage war within her own means. She became as dependent upon American strength as a patient on a life-support machine. Barnett described the dependence as being on a ‘heart-lung machine’.14

By 1944 the USA had hundreds of thousands of American troops in Britain, and had become the only sizeable foreign army to be stationed on British soil since the Norman invasion. It was soon clear that Britain would be unable to prosecute a second front without the USA, and this new subordinate position was soon confirmed when an American, General Eisenhower, became the supreme allied commander. In such circumstances the idea – central to the ideology of the English ruling classes – of Britain as an independent, ‘sovereign’ nation was extremely difficult to sustain. At the height of war Winston Churchill boldly stated that ‘I have not become the King’s first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British empire.’15 And at the end of the war he proclaimed that the empire had emerged ‘safe, undiminished and united from a mortal struggle’.16 The truth was that the empire was over. And with it went British independence. The historian, John Charmley summed up Britain’s situation in 1945, ‘Churchill stood for the British empire, for British independence and for an “anti-Socialist” vision of Britain’ (and he could have added a fourth point, that Churchill also stood for eliminating or weakening the Soviet Union). He then suggests that ‘by July 1945 the first of these was on the skids, the second was dependent solely on America and the third had just vanished in a Labour election

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victory’ (and he could have added that Churchill’s anti-Soviet vision had also just vanished, for the result of the war meant that the Soviet Red Army was now right at the heart of Europe).17

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Winston Churchill was marginalised by the Americans virtually from the first day that US troops arrived in Britain. He was a minor player at the wartime conferences of the ‘big three’ at both Tehran and Yalta; his idea for invading Germany through the ‘soft under-belly’ of Yugoslavia was vetoed, as was his vision of a bold forward thrust following D-Day; and his attempt to secure an agreement with the Soviet Union on Poland before the Red Army arrived there was ignored. The Americans, under both Roosevelt and Truman, saw Churchill’s various manoeuvres during the war as trying to secure a British sphere in the post-war settlement. The Americans, quite naturally, were keen to secure their own interests, which they saw as best pursued in Europe through a American–Russian condominium.

Churchill saw all this. He was no innocent. And out of dire necessity he accepted this new reality – and became the architect of Britain’s ‘junior partnership’ with the USA. For Britain as well as Churchill the war may well have been ‘our finest hour’. But it also saw the end of Britain’s independent sovereign ability to defend itself – for the country had been saved by forces and resources outside its control. It had, in effect, become a dependent of the new superpower in the West. For Churchill, and for most of the British, such dependency was a price well worth paying. But it was a price nonetheless. And as the war dragged on, in decision after decision Churchill was overruled by his American allies. He was called ‘the Last Lion’ by Churchill’s American biographer William Manchester, and his reputation in the USA was unsurpassed (and has remained so). Yet this great lion of a man was, on policy matters and geostrategy, effectively tamed. As power passed to the Americans during the war, Churchill’s wartime foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, once plaintively asked, ‘Can we not have our own foreign policy?’ And he further believed that ‘the common language should not delude the British into believing that the Americans also had common interests.’18

After 1945 Churchill continued to represent an image of British power and greatness when, in fact, he had presided over Britain’s ‘defeat’ – if ‘defeat’

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is to be defined in the way Churchill and Britain’s imperialists defined it: losing the independent ability to defend the empire and oneself and conduct an independent foreign policy. For Churchill it was, as Charmley argues, truly the ‘end of glory’; and Churchill knew it – and said so in his own words in the very title of his war history: ‘triumph and tragedy.’

Yet, long after the war, establishment British historians were continuing with the story not just of British resolve and heroism but also of the myth of Churchill and the British as being ‘victorious’. The approved narrative was that Churchill, not the Americans or Russians, ‘saved’ the country. It was an image that was to become a great source of post-war pride, but also a great source too of illusions about the country’s true place in the world.

American troops left the whole of Europe – including Britain – very shortly after the German surrender, and commentators could be forgiven for thinking that, maybe, with America gone, Britain could regain her independence and reclaim her ‘sovereignty’.

It was not to be. In the first few weeks of peace, post-war Britain was to be reminded of her new, reduced, status. On 21 August 1945 Washington announced a surprise decision to bring Britain’s credit facilities in the lend-lease deal to an abrupt end, and to do so without even consulting the British government. According to historian John Dickie the US action amounted to a ‘diktat’, which caused even in the timid-looking Clement Attlee an unlikely outburst of public rage. In London, Washington’s post-war treatment of her great ally was seen as hugely unfair. After all, during the war Britain had borne a far greater burden than had its US ally in the common cause of defeating Hitler. British casualties were over twice the American figure, and those killed and missing were three times higher; Britain’s losses in external investment were a huge 35 times greater than those of America; and Britain’s total expenditure on the war was 50 per cent greater than that of the USA. The British felt that such abrupt treatment was shabby, and even Churchill made a complaint about American high-handedness. In a rather forlorn and unusually critical statement the great man summed up Britain’s new position: he found it difficult to believe that ‘so great a nation…would proceed in such a rough and harsh manner as to hamper a faithful ally’.19

Britain needed a new loan to survive, and John Maynard Keynes summed up the country’s humiliation – and dependence on the USA – when, as chief UK negotiator in the loan negotiations with the USA, he argued that ‘the conclusion is inescapable that there is no source from which we can raise sufficient funds to enable us to live and spend

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on the scale we contemplate except the United States.’20 Britain secured the loan, but at a huge price. The terms set by Washington as it flexed its new geopolitical muscles were stiff – and they required of their wartime ally the full implementation of the long-held American strategic goal of ending Britain’s imperial-preference trading system.21

Ernest Bevin told the cabinet that he was ‘reluctant to agree to any settlement that would leave us subject to economic direction from the US’. But he did agree – using the argument that ‘were we to reject these terms’ it would mean ‘further sacrifices from the British people’.22 Again, as with Churchill before him, Bevin reckoned he had ‘no alternative’ but to accept the terms of American leadership.

Bevin, though, had one great advantage over Churchill in his dealings with the Americans. He had fewer sentimental ties, and fewer illusions. During his time as a trade-union leader Bevin had travelled in the USA meeting fellow unionists – the working men and women who mostly hailed from non-Anglo background: Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans and the like. He quickly came to understand that America was not England – certainly not the England of the great houses and country lawns of the American Anglos whom Churchill would have known. Bevin came to understand during his early time as foreign secretary that the new superpower pursued her own interests, not Britain’s – and that in Washington’s approach to Britain sentiment played a very small role indeed. And, in return, calculation, not sentiment, governed his attitude towards America.

While foreign secretary Bevin had some tough fights with the US administration – particularly over his opposition to the establishment of the state of Israel (Britain abstained in the UN vote setting up the Zionist state). But his overriding preoccupation in the early post-war years was to oppose Soviet power in Europe, and he did so by taking the lead after 1947 in creating NATO and bringing the power of America back into the European continent. He was Britain’s top cold-warrior, and as such he could be little other than a supporter of American power in the world.

Ernest Bevin was also a patriot. A ‘Great Brit’ nationalist who, with Attlee, took the decision to build the British nuclear bomb, he was, as Hugo Young put it, ‘the only man in the Attlee cabinet who faintly resembled Winston Churchill’.23 He was, in all senses, a big man – at ease with himself, confident, steadfast, direct. But in his relations with the Americans he was – for understandable reasons – another subservient bulldog. He knew that in the Cold War Britain survived and prospered only by courtesy of American power.