1945
WINSTON CHURCHILL WROTE ALL HIS OWN speeches. He would spend as many as six or eight hours polishing and rehearsing his words to get the impact just right – and it was worth the effort. ‘Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties,’ he declaimed in Parliament on 18 June 1940, ‘and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”’
He cracked jokes: ‘When I warned them [the French government] that Britain would fight on alone whatever they did,’ he related at the end of December 1941, ‘their generals told their Prime Minister and his divided Cabinet, “in three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken.” Some chicken! [Pause] Some neck!’
By the beginning of 1942 Britain had been at war for more than two years and the tide of fortune was starting to change. Three weeks earlier, on 7 December 1941, Japan had bombed the US fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu in Hawaii, bringing America actively on to Britain’s side. At the same time the USSR, as a result of Hitler’s decision to attack her earlier that year, became an unlikely but extremely powerful ally. ‘So we had won after all,’ Churchill later wrote in his memoirs. ‘We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end.’
Germany and Japan would continue to fight – peace was still nearly four years away. But in 1942 people were already dreaming about the life they wanted when war was over, and their dreams were expressed by the social reformer William Beveridge, who took advantage of a government invitation to inquire into the social services to prepare a report that was effectively a blueprint for a cradle-to-grave ‘welfare state’. After the war, proposed Beveridge, a free health service, family allowances, and universal social insurance should produce ‘freedom from want by securing to each a minimum income sufficient for subsistence’.
Published in December that year, the Beveridge Report received a cool response from Churchill, but it struck a chord with the war-weary public. Six hundred and thirty-five thousand copies were sold – the best-selling government White Paper in history.*
Churchill would have done well to heed the sales figures. On 8 May 1945 he stood on the balcony of Buckingham Palace alongside King George VI to celebrate VE (Victory in Europe) Day, a solid-gold national hero. Britain had stood up to the tyranny of Hitler’s Germany, and the credit for surviving and meeting that challenge was very personally Churchill’s: his was the vision and resolution, his were the sweet and inspiring words.
But in the election that followed, the vision and the sweetness abandoned the great orator. ‘My friends, I must tell you,’ he said in his opening broadcast of the campaign, attacking the plans of the Labour Party, ‘that a Socialist policy is abhorrent to the British ideas of freedom.’ From statesman to politician again, in one short step. ‘Some form of Gestapo,’ he claimed, would be needed to enforce the apparatus of state control that went with the Labour Party’s plans to take over national resources.
This language horrified those who shared the vision of William Beveridge, but it would take some time to discover the nation’s verdict. The votes of British servicemen all over the world had to be gathered and counted, so there was a three-week interlude between polling day on 5 July and the announcement of the result. On the 15th Churchill flew to Potsdam, outside Berlin, for a victory conference with the new US President Harry Truman and Joseph Stalin, the leader of Soviet Russia, then flew back to London for the verdict – to discover on the 26th that he had been defeated, and catastrophically. Labour had won power in a landslide victory of 393 seats to 213. The British people wanted change, and after the hardships and sacrifices of war, they liked the sound of the welfare state. Churchill had outlived his usefulness.
The Potsdam Conference was still going on, and was not due to finish until 2 August. So it was the quiet and modest Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party and now Prime Minister, who flew out to Berlin to represent Britain in the final discussions. Truman, who was accustomed to American elections at regular, preplanned intervals, and Stalin, who was accustomed to no elections at all, must have been rather confused by Churchill’s rapid disappearance and replacement. But that was how democracy had come to work in Britain.