Ernest Bevin: Labour's Churchill

Description

Book of the year, The Spectator Political book of the year, The Times As a statesman, Ernest Bevin is second only to Churchill in impact and legacy. Born in abject poverty to a single mother, and with virtually no formal education, Bevin went on to become the founder of the largest trade union in British history and then made it to the top of politics and government. As Minister of Labour and National Service from 1940 to 1945, he was the nation's wartime mobiliser-in-chief. Clement Attlee, Churchill's Deputy Prime Minister, kept the wartime coalition in good administrative order, but it was the charismatic Bevin who really drove the domestic war effort. As post-war Foreign Secretary, Bevin was Britain's last world power envoy and did much to thwart Stalin's Soviet Union and to prevent Europe sinking back into conflict. No one did more to stabilise and democratise Europe and to pave the way for the European Union. In this major, wide-ranging new biography, Andrew Adonis brings to life one of our greatest statesmen - a politician whose light is often unjustly hidden beneath that of his more celebrated contemporaries.

Andrew Adonis was at the heart of the Blair-Brown government for twelve years, serving as Minister for Schools under Tony Blair and as Transport Secretary in Gordon Brown's Cabinet. Formerly, he was a journalist on The Observer and the Financial Times and a Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford. His previous books include 5 Days in May, acclaimed as 'a West Wing-style thriller' about the formation of the Cameron-Clegg coalition. A member of the House of Lords, he has twice been named Peer of the Year in the Channel 4 and Spectator awards.

Book of the year, The Spectator; Political book of the year, The Times; 'A biography brimming with colour and insight that brings both the character of the man and his many achievements vividly to life.' Andrew Rawnsley, The Observer