1945 United Kingdom general election

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 5th of July 1945, British voters went to the polls for the first time in a decade. The Second World War was not yet over. Japan had not surrendered. And the man who had led Britain through its darkest hours, Winston Churchill, fully expected to remain prime minister. He was wrong.

  When the results were counted on the 26th of July, the country had delivered a verdict that stunned Churchill's Conservatives and reshaped Britain for generations. The Labour Party, led by the quiet, methodical Clement Attlee, had won 239 seats and a majority of 146. A total of 324 new MPs entered the House of Commons that day, a record that would stand until 2024. The swing from Conservative to Labour was the largest since the Acts of Union in 1800.

  How did the most celebrated wartime leader in British history lose by a margin that large? What did British voters want that Churchill could not give them? And what had Attlee seen that Churchill had missed? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. A Decade Without an Election

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  Parliament had been sitting for nearly ten years without an election when King George VI dissolved it on the 15th of June 1945. General elections had been suspended during the war, meaning that the last contest voters had participated in dated back to 1935.

  VE Day, the Allied victory in Europe, had come less than two months before polling day. The war in the Pacific continued. Churchill had offered Attlee the chance to keep the wartime coalition running until Japan was defeated, but Attlee refused. The campaign that followed, compressed and urgent, would be fought on a single central question: what kind of country should Britain become after the war?

  The polls in some constituencies were delayed. Seats in areas observing local wakes weeks did not poll until the 12th of July, and Nelson and Colne polled as late as the 19th of July. The count itself was held back until the 26th of July to allow time to transport the votes of servicemen and women stationed overseas. Victory over Japan Day would not arrive until the 15th of August, meaning that when Attlee walked into Downing Street, the war was technically still being fought.

• 3. Two Manifestos, Two Visions

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  Labour's manifesto carried the title Let Us Face the Future. It promised nationalisation, economic planning, full employment, a National Health Service, and a comprehensive system of social security. The document proved so popular that it sold one and a half million copies.

  The Conservative manifesto, titled Mr. Churchill's Declaration to the Voters, acknowledged some progressive ideas on social issues but remained deliberately vague about postwar economic control. The party's association with the mass unemployment of the 1930s undercut its credibility on economic questions. Voters found the document unconvincing on the issue they feared most: the prospect of a return to the joblessness that had defined the interwar years.

  Behind Labour's proposals stood the Beveridge Report of 1942, a blueprint for a welfare state that had called for nationalised healthcare, expanded state education, National Insurance, and a new housing policy. Copies sold so widely that the report became a best-seller. Both parties had accepted many of its principles, but the Conservatives had argued that the reforms were unaffordable. Labour's willingness to commit fully to the Beveridge agenda gave voters a concrete choice, and in one opinion poll, 41% of respondents identified housing as the most important issue facing the country, far ahead of international security, which received just 5%.

• 4. The Gestapo Speech

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  Churchill's approval rating stood at 83% in May 1945, when the war in Europe ended. That number might suggest a foregone conclusion. The campaign told a different story.

  The most damaging moment came on the 4th of June, when Churchill delivered his first election broadcast. He accused Attlee of seeking to behave as a dictator and declared that a Labour government would "have to fall back on some form of a Gestapo" to impose socialism on Britain. This was a reference to the Nazi secret police, directed at a man who had served inside Churchill's own war cabinet. Attlee responded the following night, thanking the prime minister ironically for demonstrating the difference between "Churchill the great wartime leader" and "Churchill the peacetime politician."

  The writer and soldier Anthony Burgess, who observed Churchill among troops at the front, noted that Churchill was not nearly as popular with ordinary soldiers as with officers and civilians. Burgess recorded a telling detail: Churchill often smoked cigars in front of soldiers who had not had a decent cigarette in days. The gap between the prime minister's public image and the reality experienced by serving men and women would prove significant when those same servicemen cast their ballots.

• 5. The Weight of the 1930s

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  Labour had not always been the party of collective security. It had strongly supported appeasement until 1938. But by 1945, the Conservatives owned the memory of the 1930s in a way that could not be argued away.

  With the exception of two brief minority Labour governments, in 1924 and in 1929-1931, the Conservatives had held power for all of the interwar period. The appeasement policy pursued by Churchill's predecessors, Neville Chamberlain and Stanley Baldwin, had been thoroughly discredited for allowing Adolf Hitler's Germany to grow too powerful. Alongside appeasement sat the failures of the post-First World War settlement: the inflation, the unemployment of the Great Depression, and the broken promise of a "land fit for heroes." Many voters felt that although the First World War had been won, the peace that followed had been lost. The fear that a Conservative victory would repeat that failure was real, and Labour exploited it directly.

  The historian Henry Pelling identified a cluster of long-term forces behind the Labour landslide: the usual swing against the party in power, Conservative loss of initiative, deep fear of returning unemployment, the belief that socialist planning would run the economy more efficiently, and a widespread but mistaken assumption that Churchill would remain prime minister regardless of which party won. That last belief may have freed some Conservative-leaning voters to vote Labour without feeling they were removing Churchill from leadership.

• 6. Labour's Quiet Competence

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  Attlee had spent the wartime coalition years demonstrating something Churchill's campaign could not easily counter: that Labour could govern. As Deputy Prime Minister from 1940 to 1945, Attlee had earned a reputation for administrative competence that contrasted sharply with Churchill's sometimes chaotic personal style.

  Herbert Morrison had served at the Home Office during the war. Ernest Bevin had run the Ministry of Labour. These were not minor portfolios. The wartime coalition had given Labour figures real executive authority over domestic affairs, and voters had watched them use it. Labour repeatedly reminded the electorate that Churchill had been less interested in strengthening his party than in fighting the war, a point that frustrated many Conservative MPs and members at the time.

  There was especially strong Labour support in the armed services, where soldiers feared a return to the unemployment and homelessness that veterans of the First World War had experienced. Some argued that left-leaning teachers serving in the armed forces had shaped political opinion among troops, but that explanation has not carried much weight among historians. The failure of Conservative governments in the 1920s to deliver the promised postwar recovery was likely the stronger factor. Future prominent figures who entered Parliament in the Labour wave included Harold Wilson, James Callaghan, Barbara Castle, Michael Foot, and Hugh Gaitskell.

• 7. The Reckoning

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  The scale of the Conservative loss on the 26th of July went beyond anything the party had anticipated. The Conservatives shed 189 seats despite winning 36.2% of the popular vote. The 11.7% swing to Labour was the largest since the Acts of Union 1800, exceeding even the Liberal landslide of 1906 that had ousted a previous Conservative administration. It was also the first election since 1906 in which the Conservatives failed to win a plurality of the popular vote.

  The Liberal Party's collapse was almost as dramatic. It lost all of its urban seats and, with them, its status as a party of government. Its leader, Archibald Sinclair, lost his rural seat of Caithness and Sutherland by just six votes in a tight three-way contest, making him the last major party leader to lose his seat until 2019. The Liberal National Party, which lost two-thirds of its seats, fared even worse. It was their final election as an autonomous party; they merged with the Conservatives two years later, though they continued as a subsidiary party until 1968. Their leader, Ernest Brown, lost his seat and resigned from politics entirely.

  Future Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was among the defeated, losing his seat in Stockton-on-Tees, though he returned to Parliament at a by-election later that same year. The two walkover seats Labour won without a contest were the last uncontested seats in any British general election. Ralph Ingersoll had written in late 1940 that people told him Churchill was "simply the right man in the right job at the right time, the time being the time of a desperate war." The voters of 1945, it turned out, agreed.