Deep In My Heart, Dear

Aneurin ("Nye") Bevan, Labor's Health Minister, was in a reminiscent mood last week. But memories of a poverty-haunted childhood in Tredegar, South Wales, left the Minister of Health far from mellow. "No amount of cajolery and no attempts at ethical or social seduction," he told a meeting of Laborites at Manchester, "can eradicate from my heart a deep, burning hatred for the Tory party that inflicted those bitter experiences on me. So far as I am concerned, they are lower than vermin . . ." "What is Toryism," he asked later, "but organized spivery?"

"A professional trick," snorted the Tory Daily Express at these outbursts. "The more the Tories hate Mr. Bevan, the higher will be his prestige in his party." Just the same, Labor Party leaders who knew they had to woo former Tories in order to stay in power were appalled by the Bevan outburst (see cut). On Bevan's Chelsea house someone painted: "Vermin Villa--home of a loudmouthed rat."

Unchastened, Bevan put a restless foot back in his nimble mouth. Opening a maternity hospital at Holyhead, he said that men of Celtic fire were needed to bring about great reforms like the new health service. That was why, he explained, Welshmen were put in charge instead of "the bovine and phlegmatic Anglo-Saxons." How Bevan's Labor associates, including Anglo-Saxons Attlee, Morrison and Bevin, liked that one was not revealed. Unphlegmatic Anglo-Saxon Winston Churchill, however, put his head down and charged. Said he: "We speak of the Minister of Health--but ought we not rather to say the Minister of Disease; for is not morbid hatred a form of mental disease, and indeed a highly infectious form? I can think of no better step to signalize the inauguration of the National Health Service (see MEDICINE) than that a person who so obviously needs psychiatrical attention should be among the first of its patients."

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