Attlee's Great Contemporaries

Attlee was a writer of withering pen portraits

Since stepping down as prime minister, riches that would have done Croesus very nicely, thank you, have ineluctably accrued to Tony Blair. When Clement Attlee left Downing Street in 1951, however, Blair's far more illustrious predecessor had no such luck. The People's Party's greatest premier worried, by contrast, that he might not be able to provide sufficiently for his wife, Vi, should he predecease her. So he took to writing pen portraits, commentaries and book reviews for Fleet Street to supplement his income.

The Labour MP Frank Field has gathered a selection of these articles, from 1951 to 1966, which have never been published as an anthology before, and what sharp, witty and revealing masterpieces of concision they are. They also recast their author not as the worthy but somewhat dull dog, the "modest man with much to be modest about" as Churchill put it, that he is often remembered as today. Rather, he comes across as one of those unassuming men who are nevertheless conscious of their achievements, the knowledge of which allows them to aim delicious barbs and make quietly cutting judgements that are all the more authoritative precisely because they are not known for noisy, hasty pronouncements.

Here, for instance, is Attlee on the Fabian Beatrice Webb: "She was a most persuasive talker and had the gift, invaluable in a propagandist, of implying that agreement with her contentions was evidence of high intelligence in her hearer." Or, on another intellectual, Harold Laski, briefly chairman of the Labour Party: "He wanted to be a public figure and an éminence grise at the same time. You can't be both. I gave him a try as an éminence grise, but he started making speeches at the weekend. I had to get rid of him." And a most delicious and elegant swat at the family of the cabinet minister John Strachey, whom Attlee admired and whose early death he lamented: "His background – Eton, Oxford and a somewhat overspecialised set of relatives – had increased his desire to think but had not given him enough to think about."

There are nuanced observations on the Second World War generals Monty and Alan Brooke, Labour politicians Lansbury, Bevin and Bevan, and guidance for the honourable conduct of MPs that resonates particularly strongly at present.

Above all, however, what comes across is Attlee's decency, his moderation, and his very English form of socialism which combined a firm conviction in the necessity of building a new society with an unabashed patriotism and a practical monarchism; all of which would make the modern Labour politician distinctly queasy. It really was a different time. This is clear not just in the language Attlee uses – "what takes chaps into politics now" – as in his occasional admittance that for a public schoolboy like himself to join the Labour Party when he did carried a very real price.

"When I became a Socialist it meant that most members of the middle class, to which I belonged, felt that I had done something despicable... A young Socialist lawyer would find that Liberal and Tory lawyers would not be willing to give him briefs. The parents of the girl he wanted to marry... would look down their noses at him. In some cases there would be real social persecution."

This only increases one's admiration for Attlee, while his exasperation at loquaciousness, which crops up time and again, constantly amuses. Amazed that Lady Violet Bonham-Carter should write so good a first book at the age of 78, he comments, "I wonder why she hasn't started before. Too busy talking, perhaps." Field has done a great service in reminding us to turn our ears to laconic little Clem. This particular quiet man, these articles show, had rather a lot to say.