He was just short of his 71st birthday, exhausted, in ill health and demoralized. Churchill now was the official leader of the opposition, but it took him more than a year to overcome his apathy and reengage with politics. It was only U. President Harry S. Until the last few days before the vote was held, Churchill and much of the country had been firmly convinced that he and his party would be returned to power with a large majority. On occasion, however, Churchill realized that he had little to contribute to the raging debate about the future of British society.
The six-week election campaign in June and July sought to sway voters exhausted by six devastating years of war. They wanted a view of a bright future. Soldiers in the field, too, were fed up with fighting and looked forward to a new age of prosperity and peace. Labour proposed a progressive social reform program that would transform the future of British society. Churchill and his party also conducted a poor election campaign.
Attlee pointed out that the speech showed Churchill to be ill-suited to being a leader in peaceful times. It was the first general election held in Britain in more than a decade. The same day, Clement Attlee, the Labour leader, was sworn in as the new British leader. During the next five years, he enjoyed an illustrious military career, serving in India, the Sudan, and South Africa, and distinguishing himself several times in battle. In , he resigned his commission to concentrate on his literary and political career and in was elected to Parliament as a Conservative MP from Oldham.
In , in the second year of World War I , Churchill was held responsible for the disastrous Dardanelles and Gallipoli campaigns, and he was excluded from the war coalition government. He resigned and volunteered to command an infantry battalion in France. However, in , he returned to politics as a cabinet member in the Liberal government of Lloyd George. From to , he was secretary of state for war and in returned to the Conservative Party, where two years later he played a leading role in the defeat of the General Strike of Out of office from to , Churchill issued unheeded warnings of the threat of Nazi and Japanese aggression.
After the outbreak of World War II in Europe, Churchill was called back to his post as First Lord of the Admiralty and eight months later replaced the ineffectual Neville Chamberlain as prime minister of a new coalition government. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin into an alliance that eventually crushed the Axis. He became leader of the opposition and in was again elected prime minister. In , he retired as prime minister but remained in Parliament until , the year before his death.
Hide this message. Skip to main content. Home History of the UK Government. Past Prime Ministers Clement Attlee. Is this page useful? Maybe Yes this page is useful No this page is not useful.
Thank you for your feedback. Report a problem with this page. What were you doing? In May his approval rating in the opinion polls, which had never fallen below 78 per cent, stood at 83 per cent. With few exceptions, politicians and commentators confidently predicted that he would lead the Conservatives to victory at the forthcoming general election.
In the event, he led them to one of their greatest ever defeats. It was also one for which he was partly responsible, because the very qualities that had made him a great leader in war were ill-suited to domestic politics in peacetime. Politicians are often rejected by voters because they have failed in office. But one of the reasons why Churchill lost the general election in was because he had succeeded in completing the almost superhuman task he had taken on in , and in a way this made him redundant.
His first act as prime minister in was to invite the leaders of the Labour, Liberal and Conservative parties - Attlee, Sinclair and Chamberlain - to serve in a Coalition Government.
This became the administration, robustly surviving external shocks and internal quarrels, that mobilised the British for total war, and it is hard to imagine anyone who could have played the role of national leader with greater success than Churchill did at that time. The conduct of the war, however, was his overriding passion, and military victory was by far the most important of his goals - thus everything else, including party politics, was secondary.
As a result, when the war came to an end and party politics resumed, Churchill suddenly found himself without a clear sense of purpose or direction.
He thought of the party much as a knight in medieval times thought of his horse, as a mount on which to go into battle. This single-mindedness could, of course, be seen as a great asset in a period of national emergency, but there is no doubt that Churchill neglected Conservative interests during the war years.
Meanwhile the Labour Party and its allies in the media ran an effective propaganda war on the home front. They vilified members of the pre-war Conservative party as having been appeasers of Hitler, and of having been responsible for the failure to re-arm Britain. And they painted the s in dismal colours as an era of poverty and mass unemployment. At the same time, they held out the prospect of a new social order that would ensure better housing, free medical services and employment for all.
The author of this, Sir William Beveridge, was an ambitious man, whose report went far beyond the terms of reference he had been given by the government. He produced what amounted to a comprehensive manifesto of social reform, including social security, a National Health Service, a full employment policy and other advances. The report achieved instant fame and approval, and the political agenda was transformed.
Henceforth until the end of the war, British politics were dominated by questions of social reform. Though Labour ministers were constrained by the need to maintain the unity of the wartime coalition, Labour politicians - and sympathisers outside the government - campaigned vociferously for the adoption of the Beveridge Report.
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