WWhen Rishi Sunak announced a general election for 4 July, I cheered with joy. My play about the Labour government of 1945 had already been announced as part of Justin Audibert’s first season at the Chichester Festival Theatre. Now it seemed that for the first time in my life I had caught the zeitgeist. When Keir Starmer and Labour won in a landslide, it felt extraordinary.
The truth was that I had spent years researching, writing and rewriting for The Promise, a theatrical West Wing that would place the audience at the heart of the government that defined the Britain we live in today. The play had been programmed previously but cancelled due to the pandemic. My zeitgeist was more like a broken clock.
But the fact that it is being produced at the same time as a new Labour government comes to power is more than a happy coincidence. The parallels are striking. Before the 1945 election, the country was drunk on drink, reeling from years of European “troubles”. Whatever its proponents fantasised, Brexit was not the Blitz, but you get the idea. In 1945, as now, Britain was staggeringly in debt. Our relationship with the US was, as now, more awkward than special. The timing is not the same, but Harry Truman becoming president after Franklin D Roosevelt died in office must have felt as staggering as the awful possibility of a second Trump presidency. Then, as now, Russia was a threat. Unlike now – but with similar discomfort – the Middle East, India and the old empire all yearned for change. And two atomic bombs, obliterating Hiroshima and Nagasaki, heralded a new world order almost overnight.
Closer to home – despite the lack of 24-hour media coverage – Clement Attlee seemed to have even less charisma than “son of a toolmaker” Starmer. Both were under pressure from the left and right of the Labour Party, but both shared an understanding of how to win over middle England. In the end, both Labour governments won big, because the country was crying out for change.
The Promise started out as a play about the birth of the NHS. The Old Vic – inspired by the London Olympics opening ceremony and knowing my obsession with the NHS – wanted a party. We knew austerity was ravaging everything, but we didn’t know about Covid-19. This was before the banging of pots and the lack of PPE. We wanted to leave the theatre feeling excited about our country’s greatest social invention.
I was completely absorbed. Books, Hansard and Cabinet minutes showed that what I had imagined as Nye Bevan’s great revolutionary act had in fact been years in the making. Insurance arrangements at his own home Tredegar, the Beveridge Report and even emergency care during the war were all steps towards what eventually happened.
Then, staring back at me from a photograph taken in the garden of No 10 – a few yards from where Johnson and co partied during lockdown – was the only woman in Attlee’s cabinet, and I knew nothing about her. The familiar men – Herbert Morrison, Ernest Bevin, Stafford Cripps, Hugh Dalton, Nye Bevan – were all there. But Ellen Wilkinson? Her head tilted slightly upwards. A half-smile.
Little remembered now, Wilkinson persuaded the Labour Party conference in 1945 to break Churchill’s wartime coalition and force a general election. It is likely that when forming his cabinet, Attlee only decided at the very last moment to make Nye Bevan Minister of Health and Wilkinson Minister of Education. She could have become as famous as Bevan.
In 1945 Wilkinson was frail. She had been in Spain during the Spanish Civil War and in Germany, where the Nazis had seized power. She had been bombed during the Blitz, nearly killed in a glider crash, and suffered from asthma and heavy smoking. She may have been – like many senior government officials – dependent on stimulants. The winter of 1947 was the coldest on record, and Wilkinson fell ill again, collapsed and possibly overdosed.
The Promise is not a bio-drama about Ellen Wilkinson, but she was at the heart of a Labour government full of tough, dedicated politicians who had fought for the moment when they could create the country they dreamed of. But they were all battered and the problems seemed insurmountable.
As I understood her story, I began to understand the others. Bevan’s drive and compromise with advisors were almost inevitable when his idealism met pragmatic politics. The jockeying for position in government, the toxicity of frustrated ambition, even the old secret relationships, all became vital. The Promise became a play about individuals facing almost unimaginable odds in a landslide. It shows how personal, hard and even dangerous politics was and still is. At its core there is still a promise that, though only quietly made, is the great legacy of the Labour government of 1945 and central to what it means to be British: the NHS.