Word: bevans
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Rebel Nye Bevan, ostentatiously docile since the elections, leaped into action. At a secret Labor Party meeting, he had overpowered Leaders Clement Attlee and Herbert Morrison, who were urging mild criticisms of Butler. Bevan, angry over the new health-plan changes, demanded and got a Labor Party decision to move a vote of no confidence against the Tories. It was Attlee in the House who was called upon to move the vote, describing Butler's proposals as "irrelevant, unnecessary and unfair"-but the language was Bevan's. Then from the crowded back benches Nye Bevan rose amidst...
...performance was superb. It ran the gamut-cajoling, coercing, counseling, wheedling, joking, jeering. Enjoying the performance more than anyone was his chief target, Winston Churchill, who sat, fingertips touching with his hands slung between his knees, smiling benignly, occasionally rising to the bait in high good humor. Churchill, roared Bevan, "is not fit for his office." At this point Churchill interrupted to observe smoothly that Bevan was obviously still smarting from Churchill's wartime description of him: "a squalid nuisance...
...everyone reacted so good-naturedly. The Tory Daily Telegraph charged that Bevan "unrepentantly insists that a free set of false teeth is more important than the national survival." When time came for the vote of confidence, the Conservatives won handily...
Honorable Mention. "Told you so," jeered the Bevanites. Churchill could not deny it. Taunted by Rebel Nye Bevan, who insisted on quoting his own 1950 warnings that rearmament would wreck Britain's economy, Churchill sarcastically admitted: "I am giving Mr. Bevan an honorable mention in despatches, for having, by accident, perhaps not from the best of motives, happened to be right...
...ideas. For one thing, he now regards war as remoter than when he was lambasting Clement Attlee's defense plans: "I cannot feel that the danger of war is so great today as it was during the Berlin blockade of 1948." He also professed to be concerned, as Bevan is, by the "great and ever-growing U.S. atomic bomber base in East Anglia." U.S. airmen occupy 13 major airfields in Britain. Five of them, in East Anglia, are equipped to service strategic bombers. Churchill implied that by providing British bases for U.S. bombers, the Labor government had placed Britain...