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Bevan did not promise, however, to told his tongue. Almost alone in the Commons he would heckle when the Churchillian grand strategy failed. "Merchant of discourtesy," snapped Churchill across the floor of the House. "Better than being a wholesaler of disaster," retorted Nye.
Foot leaves his hero on the eve of taking office as Minister for Health in the postwar Socialist government of Clement Attlee. It was the only real national power Bevan ever attained, and he put into operation Britain's system of free medical and dental services. The final ironies of his career lay in the future, when the prosperous electorate repudiated Socialism and bit the hand that fed it. What is more, it bit with Nye Sevan's free false teeth.
Another volume is promised, but Bevan in office is an anticlimax. He was the greatest of His Majesty's Opposition.