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Although out of the Cabinet Bevan had initiated a split within the Labour Party between the right and the left. For the next five years Bevan was the leader of the left-wing of the Labour Party, who became known as Bevanites. The Tribune Group, of which Bevan was the leading member, criticised high defence expenditure (especially over nuclear weapons) and opposed the reformist policies of Clement Attlee. When the first British Hydrogen bomb was exploded in 1955, Bevan led a revolt of 57 Labour MPs who abstained on a key vote. The Parliamentary Labour Party voted 141 to 113 to withdraw the whip from him, although such was his popularity that it had to be restored within a month.
After the 1955 general election, Attlee retired as leader. Bevan contested the leadership against both Morrison and Labour right-winger Hugh Gaitskell but it was Gaitskell who emerged victorious. Bevan's remark that "I know the right kind of political Leader for the Labour Party is a kind of desiccated calculating machine" was assumed to refer to Gaitskell, although Bevan denied it (commenting upon Gaitskell's record as Chancellor of the Exchequer as having "proved" this!). However, Gaitskell was prepared to make Bevan Shadow Colonial Secretary, and then Shadow Foreign Secretary in 1956. Bevan dismayed many of his supporters when, speaking at the 1957 Labour Party conference, he decried unilateral nuclear disarmament, saying "It would send a British Foreign Secretary naked into the conference-chamber". (This statement is often misconstrued. Bevan argued that unilateralism would result in Britain's loss of allies. In Bevan's metaphor, the nakedness comes from the lack of allies, not the lack of weapons)
In 1959 despite suffering from terminal cancer, Bevan was elected as Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. He could do little in his new role and died the next year. His last speech in the House of Commons, in which Bevan referred to the difficulties of persuading the electorate to support a policy which would make them less well-off in the short term but more prosperous in the long term, was much quoted in the years after.
| Preceded by: Henry Willink | Minister of Health 1945–1951 | Followed by: Hilary Marquand |
| Preceded by: G. Isaacs | Minister of Labour and National Service 1951 | Followed by: A. Roberts |
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