CHRIS MULLIN
Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin stands behind Clement Attlee at a meeting of the Big Three (UK, US and USSR) in Potsdam, Germany, in 1945
© BETTMANN / GETTY IMAGES
Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee are rightly recognised as giants of 20th-century British politics. Nye Bevan, too, gets a look-in for his role in founding the NHS. One name, however, is often overlooked: Ernest Bevin. In some respects, he was the most remarkable of them all. To the extent he is remembered now, it is for having been foreign secretary at that critical post-war moment when the political map of the world was being redrawn, and Britain was coping with the painful realisation that it was no longer a world power of the first rank. But there was much more to him than that. Bevin was a dominant figure in the labour movement from the late 1920s onwards. Without him, Attlee might never have become Labour leader and, even if he had done so, would not have survived long enough to become, arguably, our most successful peacetime prime minister. As Minister of Labour in Churchill’s war cabinet Bevin, more than anyone, helped to mobilise the workforce onto a war footing and to establish a broad social settlement between workers and employers that endured for more than 30 years.