We raised a glass last Saturday evening, the four of us, to toast the 80th anniversary of the 1945 Labour government. None was old enough to remember the event itself, but three of us were born while Clem Attlee was prime minister. In a funny way, I still take a kind of childish pride from that inheritance, as if a piece of that distant era somehow transferred itself by osmosis into my DNA. A photograph of Attlee in old age, taken and given to me by the late Sally Soames, is a treasured possession too.
Our little group was certainly not alone this summer in marking Attlee’s anniversary. There have been TV documentaries and, most substantially, David Runciman’s fascinating Postwar series on BBC Radio 4. All of these start – and Runciman’s series also ends – with the same enduringly astounding fact about Britain in 1945. Weeks after Winston Churchill had led the country to victory in the war in Europe, the voters rejected him by a landslide in favour of Attlee’s Labour.
Yet Labour’s triumph was led by the least triumphalist or bombastic of men. Eighty years ago, on 26 July 1945, the Daily Mail, bullying and wrong as always, warned Labour to accept its expected defeat “like men, and not like spoilt children”. That evening, driven there by his wife in the family car, Attlee went to Buckingham Palace to become prime minister. Peter Hennessy records that Attlee’s audience with the equally self-effacing George VI began with a long silence. Eventually, Attlee broke it by announcing: “I’ve won the election.” To which the king replied: “I know. I heard it on the six o’clock news.”
Eighty years on, Labour’s win, with its Commons majority of 146, remains a dumbfounding event. Although it does not cancel out Churchill’s wartime greatness, it places his reputation in a wider context. Labour’s victory ushered in a postwar reordering of Britain and of its role in the world, embodied by Indian independence in 1947, the creation of the National Health Service a year later, and by the creation of Nato in 1949. And all this was overseen by a leader who was, in almost every aspect of his character, Churchill’s antithesis.
So far, so fairly familiar. Yet if Conservative Britain’s foundation myth was born in 1940, when the country stood alone under Churchill, modern Labour still sees its own finest hour in the “never again” mood that carried Attlee into office in 1945. Attlee knew what he wanted from his government – a comprehensive postwar welfare state in the wake of the Beveridge report – and he appointed some seriously stroppy big beasts as ministers to achieve it. He made a team out of his rivals. His stock has only grown with the years.
Just as Conservative leaders invoke Churchill and then Margaret Thatcher, Labour leaders of every stripe must still claim their inspiration from Attlee. No other Labour politician except Aneurin Bevan comes even close. All are measured against Attlee, not least Keir Starmer, another self-effacing Labour leader who seems good in a crisis and in whom admirers perceive hidden depths that are rarely shared with the public.
Even so, the comparison between the Attlee and Starmer eras is misleading and unhistorical. Steam-age Britain of 1945 and digital Britain of 2025 are different worlds. Unlike Starmer’s voters in 2024, Attlee’s were just emerging from a life-and-death war to which all else was subordinated. Defence spending was nearly 18% of GNP. Even at the end of 1946, almost 1.5 million people remained in uniform, policing an empire that held back an economy stretched to breaking point, and now dependent on US aid. But that is not the Britain we inhabit today.
There are, of course, echoes of Attlee’s agenda in Starmer’s. But they reflect radically changed times. Palestine is the latest of these. In 1945, Britain was the administrative power in Palestine, with 100,000 UK troops policing an increasingly violent conflict between Arabs and Jews, the latter increasingly post-Holocaust refugees. The issues divided the Middle East itself, as well as the Labour party and the alliance between Britain and the US, which favoured a scale of Jewish emigration that Attlee opposed.
Attlee was not an imperialist, and he often favoured self-determination. But his hand was forced, especially after the winter of 1947, by the brute fact that Britain could not afford its empire, not only in Palestine but in India and elsewhere. Attlee dumped the Palestine issue on the United Nations and pulled Britain out of India as fast as he could. Many died as a result. The US, on which Britain was economically and militarily dependent, became the chief western power in the Middle East. Eighty years on, Starmer’s difficult hand of cards on Palestine is still the one that Attlee dealt him.
It is hard not to warm to Attlee’s terseness, which at times could be devastating. “Not up to the job,” he replied when a junior minister asked why he was being reshuffled. “Thank you for your letter, contents of which have been noted,” he replied to the Labour grandee who urged a change of leader before 1945. Modern politicians, Starmer included, feel they must be at the media’s beck and call, while simultaneously avoiding saying anything of substance. Attlee felt no such need. “Is there anything else you’d like to say about the coming election?” inquired an interviewer at the start of the 1951 campaign. “No,” was Attlee’s reply.
Wonderful. Who would dare do that today? No one. This is a different world. A prime minister with Attlee’s no-nonsense briskness is as inconceivable as one with Churchill’s alcohol consumption. Attlee was a great Labour leader, yet he concealed Britain’s secret postwar nuclear programme from his cabinet, and the landslide of 1945 was followed by the collapse of 1950 and defeat the following year. Few now argue that the humbling of 1951 would have been averted by more socialist policies. It was simply an impossibly difficult time, in which Attlee grasped, as his biographer John Bew puts it, that “from the moment that Labour accepted the responsibility for governance, it could not afford to think in terms of utopias”.
Don’t romanticise Attlee. He does not need that. In any case, it is a mistake to judge today’s politicians by speculations about how those from earlier generations might have behaved if they were operating in today’s different conditions. That’s a mug’s game. It is as unhistorical in its way as attempts to wag your finger too relentlessly at the past for its inevitable failings. The case for Attlee in his own time is clear. That for Starmer, in his different time, remains in the balance. They are onboard recognisably similar boats, but they are not and cannot ever be borne by the selfsame river.