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Lord Bruce of Donington
Veteran of the Attlee years who helped to set up the NHS and became an elder statesman in the Lords
But he lost his seat in the 1950 general election and did not stand at the general election in the following year. After trying once or twice without success to find a more secure Labour-held constituency, he gave up and was never to re-enter the House of Commons.
However his passion for politics was undiminished. Harold Wilson, to whom he remained close, made him a life peer in 1974 and appointed him in the following year to the European Parliament, as rapporteur for the Labour Group, a position he resigned in 1979 with the introduction of direct elections. (He had never believed in the European project from the start.) He then became opposition spokesman in the Lords on Treasury, economic and industrial questions and continued to deal with such matters in the Upper House until 1990. In the Lords he also made himself a severe and vociferous (sometimes long- winded) critic of the European Union.
In parallel with his political life, however, Bruce had, since the 1930s, pursued a career as a chartered accountant, specialising in taxation. This was interrupted by the Second World War, but when it became clear that he was not going to return to the Commons, he concentrated on his accountancy practice, which he also combined with business consultancy.
Donald William Trevor Bruce was born in Norbury, South London, in 1912, the son of W. T. Bruce, an insurance broker. He was educated at Donington Grammar School in Lincolnshire, after which, in the 1930s, he qualified as a chartered accountant. He had already enlisted in the Territorial Army, serving for four years from 1931.
He had originally been a member of the Conservative Party, but when, in 1931, the Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald formed his predominantly Conservative “National” Government, he joined the Labour Party. Although of an essentially Conservative family background, he was to remain staunchly Labour, joining the Fabians and, when it was founded after the war, the “Keep Left” movement in the party.
With war clouds gathering, he rejoined the Territorial Army in March 1939, and was commissioned in November of that year. He served in the Royal Signals throughout the war, being promoted to major in 1942. He spent the first part of the war in home postings before, in 1944, being appointed to Eisenhower’s intelligence staff, serving in France after the Normandy landings.
He was mentioned in dispatches and demobilised in May 1945, in time to fight the general election, for which he had been adopted by the Labour Party as parliamentary prospective candidate for Portsmouth North the previous November. It was an essentially two-horse contest — Major Bruce for Labour versus Lieutenant-Commander Howard for the Conservatives. In the event, Bruce won by 1,042 votes in a seat that had long been held by the Conservatives.
With the creation of the NHS — one of the new Labour Government’s most urgent and emotive programmes after the landslide election victory that brought it to power in July 1945 — Aneurin Bevan, the Health Minister, appointed Bruce his parliamentary private secretary. Early in 1946 Bruce was appointed a member of a mission to Sweden and Denmark (which was led by his neighbouring MP, Captain Julian Snow, Portsmouth Central) to investigate the way in which public health services functioned in those two countries.
He also acted to a certain extent as Bevan’s spokesman. But the demarcation lines of this function were never completely clear. And when, in 1948, he appeared in a letter to The Times written on ministry headed notepaper, to be expressing his minister’s opinion in rebutting criticism of the NHS, surprise was expressed that a lowly PPS should have arrogated to himself this function.
In the meantime, in October 1946 he had taken part in a famous backbench revolt on the Government’s official foreign policy. He was one of 21 Labour MPs who signed a letter to the Prime Minister, criticising what they saw as a “ganging up” between socialist Britain and capitalist America on world issues. In an article in the (now defunct) Sunday Pictorial Bruce deplored the tendency to trail “in the wake of the United States”, particularly in the question of the relations between Western democratic nations and the Soviet Union, a matter in which he felt that a socialist Britain was more likely to be a successful bridgebuilder than a “profit-grabbing, profit-seeking machine” like the American industrial system.
Fortunately for him, the left-wing Bevan agreed with him — which saved his political bacon. But in general, Bevan and Bruce were not really creatures of the same kidney, and they tended to draw apart. Bevan relied increasingly for the articulation of his views on another, and more influential, columnist among Labour MPs, Michael Foot.
In spite of his robust support for Portsmouth dockyard workers, Bruce was not able to survive the general election of 1950, which shattered the Labour majority. Boundary changes had done away with Portsmouth North and created a new constituency of Portsmouth West. Here his opponent, a regular army officer, Brigadier T. H. Clarke, shaded the result by 945 votes — and that was the end of Bruce’s Commons career.