How do we measure success and explain accomplishment in the world of politics? Is it, as historians of policy and ideas tend to believe, the adoption of innovative ideas and implementation of effective new measures to address current problems and challenges? Is it, as more sociological and cultural approaches suggest, a politician's alignment with popular aspirations and broad social developments of the day? Or is political success to be assessed by reference to what Robert Crowcroft calls the qualities of “leadership,” which he defines as a politician's ability to advance to the top by marshaling supporters and outwitting rivals, both within his (or her) own party and on the wider political scene? According to Crowcroft, the historiography of domestic politics during the Second World War, with its almost exclusive focus on the dramatic changes in public policy and popular mood during the “people's war,” has nearly exhausted the first two approaches. He suggests that the time is ripe for an examination of the long-neglected sphere of “leadership.” His intriguing new study explores this dimension in the wartime career of the leader of the Labour Party and first postwar prime minister, Clement Attlee.

Crowcroft's approach draws its inspiration from the variant of the historiographical school of “Tory history” or “high politics” associated most closely with Maurice Cowling. In a refreshingly direct introduction, Crowcroft distinguishes this school by its distinctive assumptions about human nature and, hence, the nature of the political relationships we create. We are, he asserts with a nod to St. Augustine, inherently flawed and selfish creatures, who instinctively “thirst for power and authority”(4). Accordingly, our politics need to be understood as a battleground for power and domination, where we engage in tactics befitting our grasping nature: competition, conspiracy, and intrigue. This is especially so in the case of the highest political stage at Westminster, which Crowcroft depicts as not only relatively autonomous of public opinion and electoral pressure but also largely uninterested in technical details of policy and disconnected from any genuine commitment to ethical values or ideology. Instead, politicians demonstrate “the primacy of individual interest and faction over principle and virtue”(4).

Crowcroft's analysis of Attlee's leadership during the war concentrates in part on the familiar challenges faced by his party within the Churchill coalition, including the making of the coalition government in the dark days of 1940, Labour's push for a more vigorous prosecution of the war effort, the consolidation in the hands of Labour ministers of responsibility for the home front, and efforts to persuade Churchill to take more seriously the promises of postwar social and economic reconstruction. Yet this is an account where the challenges of the war take a back seat to the Machiavellian political intrigues at Westminster. Every gesture, sign, and word is deciphered as an element in a byzantine game of devious plots and conspiracies, whose players were engaged in a ceaseless quest to manipulate or dominate one another. Crowcroft asserts that it was less the collectivist exigencies of the war effort or the radicalization of public opinion after Dunkirk than Attlee's skillful political management of Churchill and the Tories that brought his party, nominally a small minority in Parliament, the disproportionate influence that it came to enjoy during the war. Far from being, in Churchill's apocryphal jibe, “a modest man who has so much to be modest about,” Attlee emerges in this study as a consummate political operator who quietly dominated wartime domestic politics.

It is when discussing internal Labour politics that Crowcroft's analysis comes truly into its own. His richly detailed account highlights Attlee's deft containment of backbench discontents over the war effort, left-wing rebellions over the government's cold-shouldering of the Beveridge Report and other plans for postwar reconstruction, and party resistance to plans by Attlee and leading Labour ministers to prolong the Churchill coalition into peacetime. Attlee is again portrayed as masterful in walking the tightrope between his party and government as he handled the various challenges. However, it is Herbert Morrison, the home secretary and Attlee's greatest rival within the party, who emerges as the real (anti)hero of the book. Indeed, Morrison appears in Crowcroft's account as the prototypical politician imagined by “Tory history”: an inordinately ambitious figure, “who needed power like other human beings need oxygen”(162), and who schemed incessantly to unseat Attlee as the party leader. While seeking to attract the backing of discontented Labour activists by adopting the “guise of a socialist crusader”(201), Morrison privately urged a “coupon” election in order to preserve the coalition government after the war, an incongruous position that Crowcroft shows would have involved the sacrifice of many of the radical reforms Morrison demanded so loudly in public. Yet, in a last-minute effort to undermine Attlee, he abruptly switched his position at the very end of the war and became the champion of an immediate return to independent party politics. Though it is not quite clear why Crowcroft is so disapproving, since his deliciously sinister portrait of Morrison has him acting out the core assumptions of “Tory history,” he finds Attlee's nemesis to have been “Janus-faced”(165) and with “no real grounding principles besides ambition” (168).

Crowcroft's study offers an intriguing new perspective on wartime politics that sheds new light on behind-the-scenes struggles for political advancement and power at the top. Yet one is left wondering if his analysis can help us understand the truly important developments of the period. The historiographical approach of “high politics” may have explained much when applied by Cowling to Conservative politics of the 1930s, where defense of the beleaguered status quo may have crowded out ideological differences about the course of the future and the closed circle of the Tory elite may be seen as playing a high-stakes parlor game (Maurice Cowling, The Impact of Hitler: British Politics and British Policy, 1933–1940 [London, 1975]). However, it is difficult to see how Crowcroft's portrait of Attlee and other Labour Party leaders explains what he himself recognizes to have been their most significant accomplishment immediately after the war: the making of the mixed economy and the welfare state. As Crowcroft acknowledges at the outset, Attlee's primary historical importance is that he was to preside over “the rapid expansion of the boundaries of the state” that was to “reshape public life” for the next quarter century (10). Yet in an account that treats ideological and policy differences as merely instrumental in the political contest for power, it is simply not at all clear where the inspiration for this momentous reshaping came from, nor why certain policy alternatives succeeded over others. It may be insufficient to explain Attlee's success without taking into account the political skills and tactics that enabled him to hold onto his leadership position, but it is certainly not possible to explain the welfare state without considering its roots in the context of the very real contemporary policy and ideological debates.