Attlee. A Life in Politics. By NickThomas‐Symonds. 2nd edn. London: Bloomsbury. 2023. xxiv, 328pp. Paperback. £14.99. ISBN 9780755636136.

As Clement Attlee famously wrote of himself in 1956, ‘Few thought him even a starter’. That someone seemingly so unassuming and ordinary should have led one of the most transformative governments of the 20th century helps to explain scholarship's longstanding and continuing fascination with the man. In his study of Attlee, first published in 2010, Nick Thomas-Symonds adds to this body of literature with an exploration of the extent to which the successes and failures of the first majority Labour government owed to Attlee's leadership style as chairman and consensus builder (p. 4). Given the scale and legacy of these accomplishments, such as the creation of the NHS to name but one, Attlee is a figure prone to mythologisation and hero worship. This is something the author skilfully avoids. The result is a concise and well-balanced biography that captures the remarkable nature of Attlee's life, his strengths, but also his weaknesses. To do this, Thomas-Symonds uses some new source material, including some from Attlee's time as a schoolboy at Haileybury College. Attlee had the unusual distinction of becoming a prefect despite not being on any sports team, which Thomas-Symonds relates to his early demonstrations of organisational abilities; abilities which would serve him well in his future political career (pp. 4, 8–9). Related to this was a crucial aspect of Attlee's leadership style. He was a chairman and compromise builder, rather than a forceful leader who sought to impose decisions, and he let his talented colleagues get on with their jobs. Other new sources Thomas-Symonds uses include material from Attlee's time working on the Simon Commission on the future of Indian self-government. Here Thomas-Symonds finds evidence for another crucial element of Attlee's leadership style – his focus on practical solutions to practical problems, and not on more abstract principles (p. 48). The result, in government, was a mixture of successes and failures. Pensions reform is chalked up as a success for Attlee's style of leading cabinet discussions towards firm conclusions based around compromises (p. 156). A failure, however, was the coal shortages in the winter of 1947. Attlee's hands-off approach relied on his colleagues to be successful, whereas the minister responsible for fuel and power at the time, Manny Shinwell, made errors that Attlee could have mitigated by getting involved sooner (pp. 199–201). Sometimes Attlee's failures relate to his not having applied his usual leadership style. This was the case with the resignation of the then Minister of Labour, Aneurin Bevan, over the decision by the Chancellor, Hugh Gaitskell, to impose charges on prescriptions and glasses. Had Attlee applied his usual abilities to find a compromise, Bevan's damaging resignation might have been avoided (pp. 243–4). To put it crudely, Attlee's leadership style worked, apart from when it did not, or when he did not apply it. In his original introduction, Thomas-Symonds argues that Attlee's fascination derives from his successes as much as his failures (p. 4). Partly from this, original reviewers of the book thought Thomas-Symonds's work was as much a negative biography as a positive one. This is something he recognises in the preface to the 2nd edition of the work, suggesting that one reason for the misunderstanding is that the most extraordinary achievements of Attlee's governments were detailed in just 14 pages in Chapter 16 (p. xvi). But there is evidence throughout the text that Thomas-Symonds was overall positive about the scale of the achievement of Attlee and his government, something which he emphasises in this preface, arguing that the intention was to produce a positive, although not uncritical account (p. xvii). This the author achieves very successfully. He also reiterates his conviction that Attlee's policy of partitioning India and setting a deadline was correct, but that it was enacted too quickly, the deadline being too soon (p. xvii). As such, the chapter on Indian independence in the new edition has not been changed. For the most part this is true of the rest of the text, and what changes have been made are minor and do not alter arguments made in the original edition. One such change is on page 191 where Thomas-Symonds notes his belief that there was anti-Semitism in the opposition of Ernest Bevin, the Foreign Secretary, to changing Britain's policy of minimal Jewish immigration to Palestine. With hindsight given the attack on Israel by Hamas in October 2023, before this edition was published, it feels a shame that more space could not have been given to exploring this issue in greater depth. But, by the same token, to have done so could have risked upsetting the balance between brevity and detail which Thomas-Symonds maintains so effectively throughout the book, and which makes it such an engaging and accessible read. All this serves to highlight the value of returning to consequential historical figures such as Attlee for re-evaluation. Along with the new preface, the main changes are an updated conclusion and the addition of a new introduction following Thomas-Symonds's election as a Labour MP in 2015 and subsequent promotion to Sir Keir Starmer's shadow cabinet. These are further supplemented by a foreword by Starmer himself. These suggest that another reason for the release of a second edition of the book is to highlight the lessons to be learned by a future Labour government. For Thomas-Symonds and Starmer, the key lesson is that following the Covid crisis such a government will need to show ambition on the scale of Attlee's. As Thomas-Symonds notes, in 1945 Attlee told his new ministers that they would be judged on what they succeeded at, not on what they attempted (p. xxii). Writing this review in June 2024, it looks likely that the next government will be a Labour one with Starmer as its prime minister. Whenever that government comes to an end, it is to be hoped that a third edition of this excellent study of Attlee will be forthcoming, with Thomas-Symonds's thoughts on whether Labour's ambition was matched by its actions.