12:05

Theresa May’s jibe that Jeremy Corbyn would be “alone and naked in the negotiating chamber” (see 12.54pm) if he was responsible for the UK’s Brexit talks was a deliberate echo of one of the bitterest and best remembered phrases in the Labour party’s internal history.

At the 1957 Labour party conference in Brighton, Labour’s shadow foreign secretary, Aneurin Bevan, who as health minister in the 1945 Labour government presided over the creation of the National Health Service, made a speech on the nuclear weapons issue containing the phrase that would haunt the Labour party for a generation.

More than 120 resolutions on nuclear weapons had been submitted to the conference. One, from Sunderland, demanded that a future Labour government “shall not under any circumstances produce or use any form of nuclear weapons”. Another, from Huddersfield proposed that “Britain should give a lead to the world by unilaterally renouncing the manufacture and use of the hydrogen bomb”.

The resolutions put Bevan, traditionally the darling of the constituency parties and the unchallenged leader of the postwar Labour left, in a quandary. In the weeks running up to the conference, Bevan gave a number of speeches which flirted with the idea of supporting the anti-nuclear cause in some way. But when he rose to speak he had already decided on a different course.

Making the argument that a unilateralist Britain would have no diplomatic leverage, Bevan retorted in his mellifluous Welsh voice that: “You will send a foreign secretary, whoever he may be, naked into the conference chamber.” A few minutes later, in a second devastating comment that made Bevan’s ally Michael Foot wince as if in pain, Bevan said of unilateralism: “You call it statesmanship. I call it an emotional spasm.”

It was, said the leftwing writer Mervyn Jones “the speech that put an end to Bevanism,” a movement on the left of the Labour party that had been dedicated to making Bevan party leader. After Brighton, Bevanism collapsed. Bevan himself was to die of stomach cancer at the age of 62, in 1960, the year in which Labour briefly adopted a policy of unilateral disarmament. But that devastating speech of 1957 has never been forgotten, not least by May’s speechwriters this week.