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As the polling began, a tense silence fell over the great hall. When Party Secretary Morgan Phillips received the paper bearing the result, his hand shook. By a vote of 3,270,000 to 3,022,000, the national executive's resolution supporting German rearmament had carried. The margin of 248,000 votes was even closer than it looked: only three days before, the executives of the woodworkers union had met, decided to reverse their anti-rearmament stand at the Trades Union Congress, and to switch their 129,000 votes to Attlee's side. Without that switch, the Bevan forces would have won by 10,000 votes and the official policy of the party turned to neutralism.
Gift from the Gods. It was not by any means Scarborough's only blow at the clamorous ambitions of Nye Bevan. He was soundly licked for party treasurer by his arch rival Hugh Gaitskell and, since he had deliberately refused to stand for sure re-election to the party executive, this left him without an official position in the party leadership for the first time in ten years.
Nye told his followers what he intended to do with his new freedom. "I know now that the right kind of political leader for the Labor Party is a desiccated calculating machine who must not in any way permit himself to be swayed by indignation," said he bitterly. "Power inside the movement no longer lies inside the executive. I am going outside to meet it where it does lie." It was a flat declaration of war on the party's leadership. By implication, Nye also declared war on the trade-union leaders, who, he hinted, did not represent their members' real wishes. Those leaders reacted promptly. "Mr. Bevan is a remarkable man, but his judgment is, so bad as to bring his genius to the gutter," snapped one unionist. "Apparently in his disappointment, Mr. Bevan has lost his head," said Arthur Deakin.
Bevan had suffered a humiliating and probably a final defeat in his dramatic drive to capture the Labor Party from the moderates. "The strange alliance of Bevanites, pacifists, nonconformists, free-elections-and-reunification-firsters, anti-Germans, carpetbaggers and bandwagon-jumpers and lunatic-fringers was shattered [at Scarborough] and became once more disparate and unhomogeneous," said the Manchester Guardian."This issue was for [Bevan] a gift from the gods, and he failed."
But no one had heard the last of Nye. He was free now, and eager to thump his tub at mill gates, dockyards, and pit heads, trying to woo the workers from their leaders. "Bevan may be dead" said one Laborite,"but he won't lie down."