Aneurin Bevan's MI5 file: security services watched the NHS founder for more than two decades
Aneurin Bevan, the Labour politician who drove the creation of the NHS, was monitored by MI5 from 1933 over his links with communists, according to files released to the National Archives - though an officer reviewing the aneurin bevan mi5 file after his death called it 'remarkably tame'.
Aneurin Bevan's MI5 file: security services watched the NHS founder for more than two decades
Opened in 1933 over communist links
MI5 first opened a personal file on Bevan in 1933, when he was the backbench Labour MP for Ebbw Vale in South Wales, citing concern about his links with known communists. An entry in the file said he had "inherited the evangelical fervour of his Welsh forebears and knows how to use it in the communist cause".
- Bevan was recorded as being "in close touch" with Harry Pollitt, general secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain
- Pollitt's members backed Bevan's plan to organise 'workers' freedom groups' to defend against capitalists
- He later fell out with his communist allies, who complained he was building a movement of his own
- By 1936 the two sides had reconciled, and Bevan supported the Communist party's application to affiliate with the Labour party
Doubts inside the Security Service
By 1943, an MI5 officer wrote that Bevan's activities were not a matter in which the Security Service should be involved, noting that he made the same remarks in Parliament frequently, as any copy of Hansard shows. The released papers contain nothing to indicate that MI5 ever tapped his phone or intercepted his mail.
The Macartney friendship and Attlee's warning
In 1949 MI5 grew concerned about Bevan's friendship with Wilfred Macartney, who had been convicted of spying for Russia in 1928. Recordings of Macartney's conversations suggested he was passing on information obtained by Bevan to Pollitt.
MI5 director general Sir Percy Sillitoe took the matter to prime minister Clement Attlee, who dismissed Macartney's claims as a "tissue of lies" but agreed to "warn" Bevan. Monitoring continued even after Bevan became a minister in the postwar Labour government that created the NHS.
A tame file, closed in 1975
After Bevan's death in 1960, an officer reviewing the security file wrote: "Considering what a controversial character Nye Bevan was, the file is remarkably tame."
The file was finally closed in 1975, 15 years after Bevan died.
