Harold Wilson. Peter Hennessy

Bevanite vote for the NEC, about which Wilson had some anxiety.⁶⁸ By now, however, Wilson was playing a different hand. He did not cease to make tribal noises. But these were accompanied by other, firm, signals that he stood for the sensible, moderate, responsible Left, not the wild and reckless Left represented by Aneurin Bevan.

      The new stance was helped by Bevan’s own behaviour, following his second resignation in three years. In September, Bevan made a biting attack on Gaitskell, in which he implied that the ex-Chancellor was a ‘desiccated calculating machine’. Some felt that the insult fitted the former President of the Board of Trade more closely. Wilson’s own calculation was simple: the deeper Bevan dug his own grave by outbursts of this kind, the better for his own reputation as a force for reason. ‘Harold may be a simpleton’, wrote Crossman, which of course was the opposite of the truth, ‘but I can’t help suspecting that his buoyant optimism was due to a partly conscious recognition that this speech had given him the Leadership.’

      Inch by inch, the gap dividing Wilson from Bevan widened. In November Bill Mallalieu, a leading Bevanite, leaked to the press that Wilson ‘had virtually opted out of the Group’. Privately, Wilson attacked the Left’s hardline newspaper, remarking that ‘Bevanism is impossible without Bevan but would be far better without the Tribune.’69 By this, of course, he meant that parliamentary Bevanism would be better off. To the ‘pragmatic’ Bevanite or Centre-Left MPs, the growing left-wing movement in the constituencies and trade unions had become an embarrassment: for Wilson, Crossman and their friends what mattered was the PLP, and constituency enthusiasm was something that could get out of control. Bevan, on the other hand, saw the movement as a bomb waiting to be ignited. The difference was important, especially as Bevan’s parliamentary base weakened. ‘The decline of the Bevanites is very marked,’ Gordon Walker observed later in the same month. ‘They were routed in the Party over SEATO & outvoted nearly 2–1 over the Paris Agreements and German rearmament.’ Wilson had noticed the same thing: he was determined not to be marginalized in the arena that mattered most.

      In March 1955 Bevan provoked another crisis by attacking the Labour front bench in a Commons debate on the issue of the first use of nuclear weapons, and by appearing to threaten a revolt against Attlee’s leadership. He was swiftly punished by having the whip withdrawn, and there was talk of expelling him from the Party. On the Right, Gordon Walker pressed for the extreme penalty, arguing that Bevan’s base in the constituencies had weakened, and his behaviour had isolated him.⁷⁰