From victory to defeat
In 1945, Winston Churchill led the nation to victory – so why, weeks later, did voters turn on him in the general election?
Smithsonian Magazine
- Simon O'Hagan
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How did Winston Churchill, whose stirring words helped to keep the nation going through its darkest hour, lose a general election that took place just eight weeks after VE Day? This is the starting point for Postwar, David Runciman’s Radio 4 series that marks the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War.
It is one of the biggest conundrums in all British political history and one of the “mysteries of 1945 to be explained” over four weeks and 20 episodes in Postwar (starting on 9 June and continuing this week), says Runciman. He aims to shine a light not just on the tumultuous events that followed the war, but also on how those events formed the basis of how we live today.
While exploring the BBC archives for answers, the 58-year-old political historian uncovered one vital clue that explained how Churchill came to lose to his Labour opponent, Clement Attlee. “This is one of the big ironies, because Churchill was the supreme orator. He was the master of radio, and Attlee on the radio was frankly pretty terrible. It was the Tories’ secret weapon – just stick Churchill on the radio. But then Churchill made the catastrophic broadcast in which he said that if Labour got in, they’d be like the Gestapo. It was a disaster; Attlee’s response was very measured, very powerful.”
Labour’s use of radio served them well, says Runciman: “Unlike the Tories, Labour put up a range of voices, and they included women’s voices. There was Jennie Lee, there was Ellen Wilkinson. The Tories had no leading female politicians at all. People saw the Labour Party as a team that was in keeping with the spirit of the age. The Tories under Churchill seemed more like a personality cult.”
The Tories under Churchill seemed more like a personality cult
War had required Britain to operate as a collective. “We had become a country where the state had taken responsibility for health and education and everything. The question for people at the election was, who do you trust with this new state? And the answer was – well, not Churchill, because we don’t think he really believes in it. And we do trust Attlee. The Conservative line that the Labour Party weren’t patriots just didn’t work. No one believed Attlee wasn’t a patriot. We’d had a coalition government throughout the war; Attlee had fought alongside Churchill as his deputy.”
Listeners to Runciman’s series might come for Churchill but stay for Attlee – a figure whose modesty stands in stark contrast to the scale of the changes Labour brought about post-1945. “Why did I want to make this series? Well,” Runciman explains, “as someone said to me, there are hundreds of biographies of Winston Churchill, but hardly any of Clement Attlee.”
Runciman says he thought he knew the story of Britain and the wider world in 1945 pretty well, until he started exploring the BBC’s archives. “I discovered all these fascinating stories, and when you think of all the things that happened through 1945, it’s just the most incredible year,” he says. “The dropping of the atom bomb, the end of the war, the death of Roosevelt, the arrival of Truman, the creation of the United Nations, the beginnings of moves towards Indian independence… it takes your breath away what people lived through.”
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Something was built after the Second World War,” Runciman continues, “but people are now asking, is it still there? Maybe we are coming to the end of the postwar world – the end of the Atlantic alliance, the end of Nato. That was one of the things that was built then. So too were the NHS and the modern British welfare state. Our ideas of what the state owes us and what we owe the state were also built then – I wanted to explore all of that.”
Authors
Simon O'Hagan
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