Labour conference

Working-class heroes, and middle-class ones too - but who will be voted Labour's greatest?

Delegates will pass judgment on shortlist drawn up by party's MPs
Clement Attlee
Clement Attlee, British Prime Minister from 1945-1951

Eleven years of New Labour government, of moderation, pragmatism and early nights, have not quenched the party's inherent radicalism or its romanticism. Give its MPs the chance to vote with their hearts, without their heads having to worry about possible consequences, and they will grab it.

So it came as little surprise that when the Guardian wrote to all Labour MPs earlier this year, inviting them to nominate Labour's greatest hero, the replies were less respectful of mere prime ministers than a comparable exercise among their Conservative colleagues.

In chronological order the four shortlisted contenders are: Keir Hardie, Labour's first MP (1892), the nearest thing it has to a founder; Clement Attlee, presiding mastermind of the postwar welfare state; Aneurin Bevan, charismatic architect of Labour's best-loved, most enduring institution, the NHS; and Barbara Castle, the woman prime minister Labour never had.

Of this foursome, their relative merits to be debated at the Guardian's Labour conference fringe meeting in Manchester at lunchtime on Monday, only Attlee occupied the highest office, though it should be admitted that Tony Blair tied with Neil Kinnock for fifth place.

It is surely too soon to judge Blair's long-term reputation. But David Blunkett (Attlee), Ed Balls (Bevan), Fiona Mactaggart (a late substitute for Patricia Hewitt on Castle) and the Labour historian and peer Kenneth O Morgan (Hardie) will each do their best for their candidate on Monday. The audience of delegates will then vote for the winner. The four proposers have each written an opening 500-word salvo for Guardian Unlimited.

Quiet, managerial and undemonstrative ("all substance and no show," as Margaret Thatcher noted in her memoirs), Attlee's achievement, in decolonisation as well as at home, is generally acknowledged except on the cold war left. He is clearly the odd one out, the summer breeze among the rhetorical thunderclaps and bolts of lightning.

But this distinction misses so much. Young Barbara Betts was, like Attlee, an Oxford-educated, middle-class socialist, whereas Hardie, grindingly poor, was required to leave school at eight, Bevan to go down the pitshaft at Tytryst colliery at 13. Each trod their own difficult path to socialism.

Major Attlee had to survive Gallipoli and the first British invasion of Iraq (1916), then turbulent politics as mayor of impoverished post-war Stepney, east London.

Self-educated Hardie had to pick his way through the diversions of Gladstonian liberalism, revolutionary Marxism and the jeers of Tories at Westminster for his dress code.

Barbara Betts had to battle a wall of prejudice against women, clever and ambitious ones in particular. One way or another they were all blacklisted, expelled or fired. Even Attlee fell foul of the party leadership when he backed the Poplar rates rebellion of 1921.

In his article on Hardie, Morgan argues that "without him the party would never have existed" - a strategist who saw that the working classes needed a political base that embraced middle-class socialists as well as the unions. He was a democrat, a feminist, a champion of decolonisation, an opponent of the first world war when most European socialist parties went patriotic.

What was more, so the young Hugh Dalton noted on hearing Hardie speak at Cambridge in 1907, he spoke with a "total lack of fear or anger". More Attlee there then than Bevan or Castle, both good haters who were loved - and hated - in return.

Churchill called Bevan "a squalid nuisance" for having the nerve to take him on at the height of his powers. The sentiment was reciprocated.

In promoting Bevan, Balls acknowledges his divisive role in Labour's locust years of the Bevanite-Gaitskell split of the 1950s. But he says that he deserves the prize as a visionary, as a pragmatist, and for his passion, which can still inspire 50 years after his early death.

Blunkett too tries to draw contemporary lessons. Policies such as rationing, vital during the war, later became a mistake. By 1951 "the world of choice, hope and optimism" had arrived - and Attlee's Labour missed the boat.

Barbara Castle? Hewitt says she should have been Britain's first woman prime minister - "what a role model: passionate, fiery and absolutely committed to social justice".

· Guardian debate: Labour's Greatest Hero. Chair: Polly Toynbee. Panel: Ed Balls; Fiona Mactaggart; David Blunkett; Lord Morgan. Monday September 22, 1-2pm, Charter Rm 3, Manchester Central

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