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Lead book review

It was Bevin, not Bevan, who was the real national treasure

Alan Johnson pays tribute to Ernest Bevin, a towering political figure too often forgotten

4 July 2020

9:00 AM

4 July 2020

9:00 AM

Ernest Bevin: Labour’s Churchill Andrew Adonis

Biteback, pp.400, 25

On a family holiday almost 40 years ago I visited Winsford, the village on the edge of Exmoor where Ernest Bevin was born (and Boris Johnson was raised). Having read the first book in Alan Bullock’s scholarly three-volume biography, I’d become a convinced Bevinite (not to be confused with the followers of Nye Bevan, his near namesake and bête noire).

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