Welsh Journals

who have had to buy larger homes to house our collection of biographies to question the very shape of this book. What is described here as a 'Political Biography' is, of course, what used to be called a 'Life and Times'. Williams needs almost 800 pages of text and almost 200 pages of notes to tell the story of a politician who was never prime minister, who only held major office for one year and who died at the age of fifty-six. Of course, there is too much detail and excessive illustration, but more significant is the fact that nearly all the juicy and memorable passages (those which students will undoubtedly underline in the library copies) are lifted straight from the six diaries listed in the Source Abbreviations, and in particular from Gaitskell's personal diary kept between 1945 and 1956. The book finally clinches the place of the new political diary in the historiography of contemporary politics, but it is the knowledge that Gaitskell's and Dalton's diaries are to be published which forces one to conclude that 'enough is enough'. The time has come for historians to demand, first, the publication of edited diaries and source material, then biographical essays of the Strachey sort and, finally, major monographs on the broader patterns of politics. The truth is that Mr. Williams has dealt with issues that could have been more honestly and conveniently analysed in a book of the third sort. What we have here is a crisis-by-crisis history of the Labour Party between 1945 and 1963 written from Gaitskell's point of view; but what the historian should complain of is not the partisan judgement so much as the distorting perspective. On Gaitskell himself, Williams is more than fair. We are given sufficient evidence of the man's bravery, intelli- gence and rationality to feel that the author has deserved his final speculation that Gaitskell 'might have been the great peace time leader that twentieth-century Britain has badly needed, and sadly failed to find', and yet we are never allowed to forget that the man had serious political faults. His pedantry, over-sensitivity, naive tactical sense and the extent to which he was liable to misunderstanding are all abundantly documented, and we are told bluntly that he was not a natural opposition leader. In part, however, Williams squanders the objectivity he has fought to main- tain on Gaitskell by succumbing to an obsession with Aneurin Bevan. It was inevitable that any book aiming to establish Gaitskell's greatness should have to be brutally honest about Bevan and would perhaps have to assassinate Michael Foot both as a man and a historian (one should read this book in conjunction with Williams's article on Foot as a his- torian in Political Studies, March 1979); but one does tire of the way in which Bevan is slapped down and insulted at his every appearance in the early part of the book. This is highlighted later by a summing up of Bevan which is not entirely unfavourable. Yet the real distortion comes not in the judgments but in the failure to provide the full context. We are left in no doubt that the Bevan-Gaitskell rivalry was about personality and power rather than ideas, but Williams makes no effort to analyse in detail the party within which and for which these men were fighting. There is no background history of the party, no overall assessment of Attlee's days, no in-depth examination of the Party under Gaitskell's leadership and, perhaps most strangely, nothing on the Gaitskellites after 1963. In many ways, Stephen Haseler's The Gaitskellites