This is just one of the reasons why a new biography of Stanley Melbourne Bruce is welcome. Bruce (1883–1967) is the only prime minister who had a significant role in public life after his term was over, but the importance of his long term as Australian high commissioner in London (1933–45) was little understood at the time, or since. He was also the only prime minister who later became a member of the House of Lords, confirming the view in some circles that he was more British than Australian. These are among the ways in which he could justly be called the most misunderstood prime minister in our history.

David Lee begins his new biography of Bruce thus: ‘To Australians who know anything of him, Stanley Melbourne Bruce, prime minister from 1923 to 1929, was an Anglophile reactionary and wearer of spats, and one of only two federal leaders to ... lose his seat in parliament at a general election.’ The rest of the book, a succinct and well researched study, explains why this view is seriously awry. A concluding essay on ‘The Bruce Legacy’ ends by endorsing Robert Menzies’ assessment in 1962 that, as a statesman, Bruce was the ‘out-standing Australian of our time’. This is a striking judgement from an historian whose earlier writings displayed much more sympathy for Labor leaders such as John Curtin, Ben Chifley, and H.V. Evatt than for their conservative opponents, including Menzies and Joe Lyons.

The first part of the reassessment is to see Bruce as a skilled innovator in parliamentary politics. The coalition between the urban and rural conservative parties is so well established today that it is hard to imagine the federal political scene without it: but that coalition was a bold innovation when Bruce, leader of the Nationalists, joined with Earle Page, leader of the Country Party, to form what was always known as the Bruce–Page government in 1923. Anyone who thinks that dealing with cantankerous and independently minded rural members is a recent phenomenon should look again at the decade from the end of the Great War to the fall of the Bruce–Page government in 1929.

Lee points to the considerable negotiating skill, masked by an apparently nonchalant and imperturbable demeanour, displayed by Bruce, not quite forty, when he created this coalition government and sustained it for more than six years. He also brings out the unflappable negotiator’s alter ego, the impulsive politician who would sometimes go ‘over the top’ and take an all-or-nothing position when faced with a political impasse. This tendency – not unlike Gough Whitlam’s inclination to ‘crash through or crash’ – lay behind Bruce’s electoral defeat in 1929 as much as his inability to understand workers and their unions did. Bruce was intensely frustrated by the messy duplication of industrial relations functions between the Commonwealth and the states. He tried to crash through, first by a Commonwealth takeover, then by removing the Commonwealth from industrial relations. Instead, he crashed at the hands of the electorate.

The most important correction to be made about Bruce is implied in the subtitle. To call Bruce both an Australian and an internationalist will con- front generations of Labor supporters who have long caricatured him as a Tory more at home in Britain than in Australia, and as more inclined to support Britain’s interests in the world than Australia’s. Lee shows that Bruce was in fact an Australian internationalist in two senses. In the first place, he and many of the British political leaders with whom he dealt held quite different ideas on how the British Empire, one of the most important global institutions of the day, should work. Bruce held fast to the notion that the empire should speak with one voice in world affairs, but he wanted that voice to represent the interests of all self-governing parts of the empire, including Australia and the other dominions, as much as those of the United Kingdom.

Bruce shared this view of the best way to promote Australia’s interests in the world with many prime ministers before and afterwards, from Deakin and Hughes to Menzies and Curtin, but he was more inventive than most in pursuing it. When he found that the Australian High Commission in London was less effective than he wished in gaining access to the inner councils of the empire, he created his own parallel operation. Bruce dispatched another alumnus of Melbourne Grammar School, Richard Casey, to act as the prime minister’s personal representative in London, where a sympathetic cabinet secretary, Sir Maurice Hankey, gave him an office and access to the documents seen by cabinet ministers and the Committee of Imperial Defence. Lee expresses admirably the importance of this and other measures in demonstrating how Bruce sought to reconcile his Australian nationalism, his British imperialism and his broader internationalism. However, he might have said more about the effectiveness of the diplomatic work done by Casey and the officer appointed at the Australian end of this operation, Dr Walter Henderson, who is not mentioned.

Most of the early occupants of the Australian High Commission in London (which marked its centenary this year) were former prime ministers, but for the most part they treated it as a comfortable reward for past services to party and nation. When Bruce served in that position from 1933 to 1945, he turned it into a major base from which he could act not only as Australia’s representative but also as a largely independent actor in British politics. Such a role was anathema to Winston Churchill, who held a very different, London-centric view of how the empire should work. This contrast, as much as any specific policy or decision, lay at the heart of Bruce’s conflicts with Churchill over the way World War II was run. Bruce was not merely seeking to promote himself, but rather to embed the dominions into British policy making at the highest level. The differences between Churchill and Bruce were exacerbated by their personalities. As Lee rightly notes, Bruce could work well with many people of widely different backgrounds, but there were some individuals with whom he could not. Churchill was one: others included Billy Hughes and Littleton Groom, who, between them, did much to precipitate Bruce’s downfall as prime minister in 1929.

We know from David Reynolds’s In Command of History (2005) that Churchill distorted his six-volume history of World War II to make it seem that his arguments with Australian governments were largely confined to Labor leaders such as Curtin. In fact, Churchill clashed sharply on several occasions with Bruce and Menzies, both of whom resented the British leader’s attitude towards conducting any meaningful consultation with Australia and the other dominions. It was Clement Attlee, Britain’s postwar Labour prime minister, not Churchill, who nominated Bruce for the peerage.

Bruce was also an internationalist in another sense. To an extent that was little understood by most Australians of his day, he supported many of the aims and institutions associated with the League of Nations in the 1920s and 1930s, and the United Nations after 1945. Having served with distinction in the Gallipoli campaign, where he won a Military Cross as well as receiving the wound that led to his repatriation, Bruce was a strong supporter of the League of Nations and of other internationalist measures taken in the era when ‘appeasement’ was an honourable concept.

Part of his contribution was to act as an able chairman of major international conferences, including the Montreux Conference of 1937. But he also had strong views about tackling some of the major issues that underlie war and international tensions. He was especially important in the creation of the Food and Agriculture Organisation, an institution the creation of which preceded the formation of the United Nations Organisation.

The purpose of a biography is to integrate the personal with the political. Bruce was often seen as aloof and superior, the sort of Toorak toff who has little in common with mortals of lower social status. How much different would assessments have been at the time, and ever since, if the world had known that one brother had committed suicide when Stanley was sixteen; that his father committed suicide two years later, while Stanley was still at Melbourne Grammar School; and that his eldest brother, who had taken a paternal interest in his youngest sibling, also committed suicide twenty years later? Lee wisely does not venture far into psychological analysis, but it is not hard to see why Bruce might have presented a reserved appearance to the world.

Three writers have previously written complete or partial biographies of Bruce. All have had some value, but none has been adequate, and historians have long been conscious of an important gap in Australia’s political history. David Lee has filled that gap with a biography that is likely to remain a standard work for many years.