When Rishi Sunak announced a general election for 4 July, I whooped with joy. My play about the Labour government of 1945 had already been announced as part of Justin Audibert’s first season at Chichester Festival theatre. Now, for the first time in my life, it looked as if I had nailed the zeitgeist. When Keir Starmer and Labour won by a landslide, it felt extraordinary.
The truth was I’d spent years researching, writing and rewriting The Promise, a theatrical West Wing that puts the audience into the heart of the government that defined the Britain we live in today. The play had previously been programmed but cancelled by the pandemic. My zeitgeist was more like a broken clock.
But the fact that it is being produced just as a new Labour government takes power is more than a fun coincidence. The parallels are striking. Going into the 1945 election, the country was punch-drunk, reeling from years of European “trouble”. Whatever its proponents fantasised, Brexit wasn’t the Blitz, but you get my point. In 1945 Britain was, like now, staggeringly in debt. Our relationship with the US was, as now, more tricky than special. The timing is not the same, but Harry Truman becoming president after Franklin D Roosevelt died in office must have felt as mind-blowing as the dreadful possibility of a second Trump presidency. Then, like now, Russia was menacing. Unlike now – but creating a similar unease – the Middle East, India and the old empire were all straining for change. And two atomic bombs eviscerating Hiroshima and Nagasaki announced a new world order almost overnight.
Closer to home – although there wasn’t the 24-hour media scrutiny – Clement Attlee seemed to have even less charisma than “son of a tool maker” 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 life as a play about the birth of the NHS. The Old Vic theatre – inspired by the opening ceremony for the London Olympics and knowing my obsession with the NHS – wanted a celebration. We knew austerity was chewing through everything but had no idea yet about Covid-19. This was before banging saucepans and no PPE. We wanted to come out of the theatre thrilled by our country’s greatest social invention.
I dug in. Books, Hansard and cabinet minutes showed that what I’d imagined was Nye Bevan’s great revolutionary act had in fact gestated for years. Insurance schemes in his own home of Tredegar, the Beveridge report and even wartime emergency medicine were all steps towards what eventually happened.
Then, staring out at me from a photograph taken in the garden of No 10 – feet 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 upward. A half smile.
Now barely remembered, Wilkinson convinced the Labour party conference in 1945 to break up Churchill’s wartime coalition and force a general election. It is arguable that when he was forming his cabinet, Attlee only decided at the very last moment to make Nye Bevan the minister of health and Wilkinson the minister of education. She could have been as famous as Bevan.
By 1945, Wilkinson was fragile. She had been in Spain during the Spanish civil war and in Germany witnessed the Nazis seize power. She had been bombed in the Blitz, nearly killed in a glider crash and was suffering from asthma and heavy smoking. She was perhaps – like many senior figures in government – dependent on uppers. The winter of 1947 was the coldest on record and Wilkinson got ill again, collapsed and possibly overdosed.
The Promise is not an Ellen Wilkinson biodrama but she was at the centre of a Labour government filled with tough committed politicians who had fought for the moment where they could create the country that they dreamed of, but they were all battered and the problems felt insurmountable.
Understanding her story I started to understand the others. Bevan’s drive and his compromise with the consultants was almost inevitable when his idealism met pragmatic politics. The jockeying for position in government, the toxicity of frustrated ambition, even the old secretive relationships all became vital. The Promise became a play about individuals who, having won a landslide, faced nearly unimaginable odds. It shows just how personal, tough, even dangerous politics were and still are. At its heart is still a promise that, while only quietly made, remains the 1945 Labour government’s great legacy and at the centre of what it means to be British: the NHS.