When Tony Blair this month broke the record set by Clement Attlee for being the longest continuously serving Labour premier, there was predictable carping.

Many unfavourable comparisons were made between him and the man who led Britain after the Second World War.

Attlee is a hero to many on the Left these days for his introduction of the National Health Service and for the widespread nationalisation he started, including that of the railways and the producers of power.

But for anyone old enough to remember them, those immediate post-war years were bleak and barren.

Some form of NHS would have probably been introduced if the Tories had been in power and it was the wartime coalition government that commissioned William Beveridge to produce the report that led to its introduction.

Because no proper agreement could be reached with the doctors and too little cash was made available, the new universal health service went off at half cock with consequences that can be felt to this day.

Attlee introduced his expensive social reforms without having the money to pay for them. He was adept at sharing the cake but there was almost no cake to divide. In fact there wasn't even very much bread. Although this staple commodity had not been rationed during the war, it was afterwards.

Other countries such as Germany managed to get the economy right first. Even though it had been ravaged and divided, it emerged during the late Forties as a far more prosperous place, which meant eventually it was able to provide better public services than were ever possible in Britain.

Under Attlee, life was grim. During the harsh winter of 1947 there was barely enough fuel and food to go round - ridiculous in a country with plenty of farmland and sitting on a sea of coal.

Nationalisation provided grindingly inefficient bureaucracy, of which British Railways was the best example.

All those who complain about the private train companies today should recall the monstrous inefficiency of BR, which led to the present mess. The huge debts also presaged the terrible cuts made by Dr Beeching in the Sixties.

Attlee's Government encouraged weak management both of public and private industry and over-powerful trades unions, which acted as an enormous brake on the economy.

Many of them used the blunt weapon of strikes to press for inflation-busting rises and to preserve the sort of Mickey Mouse practices that were particularly endemic on national newspapers.

The result was not the prosperity for workers that was increasingly being gained in more enlightened countries across the Channel.

Instead of joining forces with those countries and getting early into the Common Market, Britain preferred to remain economically isolated and politically more tied up with Commonwealth countries, who for the most part were straining to become independent.

It was only the extraordinary generosity of the USA through the Marshall Plan that kept Britain from bankruptcy. Yet she received little thanks for that and many people were as fervently anti-American then as they are today.

Attlee may be lauded by the Left now but he wasn't at the time. Left-wingers hounded and harried him to the point where in the end his elderly Cabinet lost confidence.

Despite winning the 1950 election, ministers sat like exhausted volcanoes until the contest of 1951 saw the Tories in for a long stint of 13 years.

There is little doubt that Attlee was one of the most decent and honourable men ever to have become Prime Minister.

A comfortably off ex-public schoolboy himself, he desperately wanted poor working families to see better times and did his best to achieve it. But as Churchill said, he was a modest man with much to be modest about.

Sadly Churchill, when he returned to power semi-senile and tired, did little to correct the abuses of the Attlee era and Harold Wilson's regimes in the Sixties and the Seventies made the same mistake.

It wasn't until Margaret Thatcher came to power that changes were made, with often brutal effects.

Tony Blair, for all his many faults, has presided over a booming economy and huge increases in spending on the public services, something Attlee never managed. But few people in this sultry August will thank him for that.