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Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator,

and this week I'm very pleased to be joined by two greats of the modern Labour movement,

Alan Johnson, the former Home Secretary on Gordon Brown, and Andrew or Lord Adonis. And we're talking about a

semi-forgotten great of the Labour movement who is Ernest Bevan. And he's a subject of Andrew's

new biography, Ernest Bevan, Labour's Churchill. Welcome both. Great to be here. Andrew, can I start

with you just say, why do you call him Labour's Churchill?

He was at Churchill's right hand during the war, literally at his right hand. It was Ernie Bevin, who was mobilising the Home Front to a degree I hadn't realised until starting to study him properly while Churchill commanded the battlefront.

He also was a Churchillian figure in two other respects.

He had many of Churchill's personal characteristics, huge brilliance, larger than life, full of contradictions and all of that.

But also, as became very clear to me as I started writing about him, he was an imperialist.

He was very much a Victorian imperialist. He was very much a

Victorian imperialist. He was born in 1881, Churchill was 1875, so they were very similar generationally,

and they had many of the same assumptions. And even though one was obviously an aristocrat and the

other was a labourer's labourer.

They were imbued by many of the same notions.

At the other point, which is really interesting about them socially,

is that though Churchill was the grandson of a Duke and Ernie was a labourer's labourer,

neither of them went to university.

Both of them were in a fundamental sense self-made.

...