They didn't have the luxury of handing Churchill another handful of years simply out of gratitude. They needed big changes - the kinds of changes only Clement Atlee and the Labour Party wanted to provide. It was the right decision because Churchill had completed the mission of winning the war and was ill-fitted to deal with peacetime.
As historian Paul Addison, author of The Road to and Churchill on the Home Front, puts it: "It was the right decision because Churchill had completed the mission of winning the war and was ill-fitted to deal with the peacetime issues of the future at home, which were now the main preoccupation of the electorate. These issues had been outlined in a bombshell of a report whose shockwaves were felt even in the midst of the very real bombs of World War Two.
Published in , the Beveridge Report condemned the "giant evils" of life in Britain at the time, including "squalor", "want", and "disease". The Beveridge Report was devoured by a public hungry for change, and the Labour Party was ready to act on its recommendations.
As for Churchill and the Conservatives Churchill dismissed Beveridge himself as a "windbag and a dreamer", and was more focused on foreign policy issues than fixing his broken country.
No wonder that the once-popular wartime leader was viewed with such scepticism on the campaign trail. It wasn't simply because the public didn't want reminding of the war years. It was because they knew he wasn't committed to social reform and the welfare state. This time Churchill was victorious. In October , he became prime minister again and felt greatly vindicated. He used his remaining four years as peacetime prime minister to reengage with the Soviet Union and attempt to negotiate an early end to the Cold War.
Churchill retired in at the age of Portsmouth Climate Festival — Portsmouth, Portsmouth. Edition: Available editions United Kingdom. Become an author Sign up as a reader Sign in.
Winston Churchill giving his final address, during the election campaign, at Walthamstow Stadium, East London. Wikipedia, the collections of the Imperial War Museums. Author Klaus W. Larres Richard M. Yet he suffered a humiliating election defeat in A party in power is one under constant scrutiny, and it is not unusual that public support for a sitting government should diminish over time. Winston Churchill quotes. This is an article from Military History Matters. To find out more about the magazine and how to subscribe, click here.
The East End of London was flooded with rumours that he was planning a war against Russia. After polling on 5 July, Churchill and Attlee returned to Potsdam while the service vote was collected. On 25 July they returned home to await the results, which began to come in the following morning.
By the afternoon it was apparent that Labour had won by a landslide - with seats and an overall majority of in the House of Commons.
The notion that the Conservatives were defeated by 'the forces vote' is mistaken - as the opinion polls showed, the civilian vote was strongly pro-Labour - but war weariness was probably a factor against Churchill among civilians and servicemen alike.
The result plunged him into depression and his party into shock, but it was not quite as bad as it seemed. The first-past-the-post system gave an exaggerated picture of Labour's triumph, disguising the fact that just over half the electorate had voted against them. Churchill soon recovered his spirits.
He reinvented himself as a global statesman, doggedly retained the leadership of the Conservative Party, and confidently awaited what he saw as the inevitable reaction against Socialism.
He had, in fact, performed one great service for Conservatism. After the failure of appeasement and the disrepute into which the pre-war leaders of the Conservative party had fallen, he had restored the party's patriotic credentials and saved it from the possibility of a defeat far worse than it in fact suffered in His most recent book is Churchill the Unexpected Hero Oxford University Press, , and he is currently editing, with Jeremy Crang, a volume on the bombing of Dresden.
Search term:. Read more. This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets CSS enabled. While you will be able to view the content of this page in your current browser, you will not be able to get the full visual experience. Please consider upgrading your browser software or enabling style sheets CSS if you are able to do so. This page has been archived and is no longer updated. Find out more about page archiving. Politics in peacetime Between and Winston Churchill was probably the most popular British prime minister of all time.
Public opinion It seems likely that the result of the general election could have been predicted long in advance.
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