But the other side of Attlee’s record, his anti-Soviet foreign policy and commitment to nato, was timeless and should be maintained at all costs. The domestic reforms of the 1945–51 Labour government were made possible by a unique post-war conjuncture and could not be extended or even preserved in contemporary Britain-so much for the ‘Spirit of ’45’. He writes regularly for the New Statesman, specializing in international affairs.īew set out his stall for the Attlee biography in a 2013 New Statesman essay, putting forward two lines of argument that were later picked up by his admiring reviewers. Bew also built up a record of political engagement as a stalwart of the hawkish, Atlanticist Henry Jackson Society from its foundation in 2005, before moving on to another right-leaning think-tank, Policy Exchange. These works were followed in 2011 by an admiring biography of Castlereagh, intended to rehabilitate the butcher of Peterloo, and in 2016 by Realpolitik: A History. Bew’s first books concentrated on his home region: a study of nineteenth-century Belfast unionism, and Talking to Terrorists, which purported to distil the lessons of the Northern Irish and Basque peace processes. Born in Northern Ireland, the son of historian-turned-Unionist peer Paul Bew, the book’s author now teaches at King’s College, London. John Bew’s biography of Clement Attlee has been greeted with almost universal acclaim: enthusiastic reviews, usually with an eye to the book’s contemporary significance, appeared in the Financial Times, the lrb, the Spectator, the Times and the Observer, and Citizen Clem went on to claim the Elizabeth Longford Prize for historical biography and the 2017 Orwell Prize.

John bew clement attlee