Rachel Holmes (What makes a great Labour leader?, 27 September) provides a reminder of the fluidity of political reputations. I recall as teenager in the 1960s picking up on the pantheon of Labour leaders in my local branch in Glasgow. The settled view then was that Clement Attlee was only a little less of an embarrassment than Ramsay MacDonald (of whom some in the party at that time still nursed feelings of personal betrayal).

The welfare state was apparently nothing to do with Attlee but was the single-handed achievement of Aneurin Bevan. Attlee had been the grey, bloodless figure whose retreat from the true faith had forced the radical Harold Wilson along with Bevan out of the cabinet in 1951 and had then cleared the way for the traitor Hugh Gaitskell. It was really only in the later Thatcher years that the left decided that Attlee was the best prime minister of all time. We might be very surprised to see who’s where in another 50 years.

Norrie MacQueen

Perth

• Rachel Holmes’ article might have been selective in its research, as most articles are, but I think saying that Clement Attlee’s personal leadership qualities were hardly of the heroic kind stretched her opinions a little too far.

Attlee served as a junior officer in an infantry regiment at the Dardanelles, was invalided out with dysentery, insisted that he was put off the hospital ship at Malta and was returned to his unit at Suvla Bay. He was one of the last British soldiers to leave when the evacuation became inevitable and was posted to Mesopotamia, what we now call Iraq. He was wounded there – by shellfire I think – and was sent back to the UK. He recovered and was posted back to France in the summer of 1918.

Being in a situation where you are under fire and people are getting killed doesn’t make you better than others, but the experience of leadership in those sort of circumstances stays with you forever. Denis Healy was a beachmaster at the Anzio landings and poor old Harold Macmillan fought in the trenches in the first world war.

Being a management trainee in one of the esoteric professions like marketing or hedgefund dealing, or even going to every demonstration that has happened since 1970, doesn’t quite prepare you for real life. It’s not an argument for a cabinet of ex-squaddies, but rather frontbench people who have experienced real life.

Dick Muskett

London

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