Nigh on Impossible

The lesson of Bevan at the National Theatre

Nye Bevan in 1940

The legend at the conclusion of Nye, Tim Price’s play about Aneurin Bevan which is running at the National Theatre, reads as follows: “after 10 years of the National Health Service infant mortality had been reduced by 50%”. It’s quite the epitaph for a political career, quite the commendation for a man of remarkable oratorical virtuosity and a student in the exercise of power.

Those twin virtues are the clue to the conundrum of Aneurin Bevan. It is common to find, in the purity of ideological dogma and certainty, a brilliance of phrase and construction that makes for a compelling public prosecutor. The Labour left is full of people who have never departed from idealism and who speak all the more clearly as a result. The best, because most successful, example is Michael Foot, leader of the Labour party between 1980 and 1983 but also an acolyte of Bevan and the author of a monumental two volume hagiography of his hero Nye which does, at times, seem to have been plundered in pursuit of vivid episodes for this play.

Foot, for all his own beauty of expression, in the end does Bevan a disservice because, as John Campbell points out in the introduction to his more sober biography, he erects a pedestal and places Bevan, the sea-green incorruptible, on top of it. Yet that is not only to misunderstand Bevan, it is also to underestimate him. The really interesting thing about Bevan is that he was both the rhetorical ideologue of his day and, at the same time, a man envious of power and adept in its use. It is rare to find these two traits in one politician and that is what makes Bevan a man of enduring interest. Foot’s Bevan is a sentimental caricature, no matter how magnificently drawn. It is to the credit of Tim Price – and it makes the play – that he gets this right.