In the Cabinet reorganisation of February 1942 Attlee was appointed Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs as well as Deputy Prime Minister. Four days later he spoke to his new constituency in a luncheon speech in the City of London. Highlighting the contribution made by Commonwealth countries fighting side-by-side with British units, he declared that Britain was not alone in the dark days of 1940 – because the Commonwealth was there. Unity was essential to victory. Together Britain and the Commonwealth would rebuild civilisation, ‘discarding the evil and making more splendid the good.’1

There is a stark contrast between Churchill, aching to kill more Germans, to wreak terrible vengeance on the Nazis and their followers, and Attlee, referring once more to ‘civilisation’ and the need to improve conditions after the war. He was canny in never attempting to ape Churchill’s bellicose rhetoric. With every speech he improved his standing as a credible peacetime leader, fixing the image of Churchill as an irreplaceable asset in wartime, but only while the fighting raged. In March, in a speech during Stepney Warship Week, he personified the new spirit of optimism since the United States had entered the war. ‘If you had asked me in August 1940 whether in March 1942 we should still be holding Gibraltar, Malta and Egypt’, he said, ‘I could not have given you a very confident yes’.2

This was a rousing speech, once more not bellicose but positive. He had moved subtly but significantly from mere reporting to venturing strategic opinions. By linking August 1940 to March 1942 he associated himself with progress made. Without in any way attempting to remove credit from Churchill he underscored his position within the wartime team of rivals that had achieved this progress.

On the following day he made another ringing speech in Liverpool. After a lengthy tour d’horizon of the war he expanded a familiar theme. ‘This fight is not just a fight on the material plane,’ he said. ‘It is a spiritual contest between good and evil. Hitler is the incarnation of the dark side of the character of the German people. In every nation as in every human being there is a dark and a light side.’ Hitler aimed to destroy the civilisation ‘built up through the centuries on the teaching of Christ.’ The Führer and his followers hated freedom. Hitler, like Milton’s Satan, had said, ‘Evil, be thou my God’.3

He concluded with a rousing paragraph:

Every one of us has within him the Fifth Column of selfishness and indifference. If we wish to be worthy of the high duty to which this generation has been called we must purge our own souls and preserve in our everyday tasks the spirit of devotion and sacrifice displayed by so many of our fellow men and women in the days of the Blitz.

This speech, filled with religious references, was both tailored for the audience – in the archdiocese with the largest Catholic population in England – and a statement of Attlee’s ethical principles. In the struggle to preserve civilisation he explicitly linked civilisation with Christianity. If we accept Christian values, he often argued, then we will be led to socialism as the ethical successor to Christianity. Paying tribute to the courage of those who bore the hardships of the Blitz and appealing to them as the leader of the party that would reward that fortitude with a better life once the war was over, he grew from politician to moral leader.

As Leader of the Labour Party and Deputy Prime Minister, he sensed that power was almost within his grasp. Yet he never exploited his position to play party politics, despite pressure and suggestions that the Tories were less scrupulous.4 He remained loyal to the spirit of the electoral truce throughout the war, even writing to the Labour MP for Rhondda West to seek his support in supporting Sir James Grigg, a non-party coalition candidate.5

After the fall of Singapore Churchill dismissed David Margesson, the Secretary of State for War, replacing him with Grigg, the Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the War Office. This unconventional move necessitated finding Grigg a seat in the House of Commons and, with the appointment of the Member for Cardiff East to the County Court bench, a vacancy became available. Grigg may have been non-party as Attlee suggests, but his value to the direction of the war would be enormous – as his smooth working with General Brooke was to demonstrate – and this, for Attlee, was the only issue that was relevant.

Despite the optimism that he displayed publicly, the first six months of Attlee’s time as Deputy Prime Minister coincided with the low point of British morale. When Churchill replaced General Wavell with General Auchinleck as Commander-in-Chief Middle East in July 1941, the new C-in-C achieved initial success, relieving Tobruk and driving Rommel back to el Agheila. The apparent gains, however, were illusory as Rommel regrouped and routed the disorganised Eighth Army, forcing Auchinleck back into Egypt, where he established a defensive position at el Alamein.

In mid-June 1942 Churchill was in Washington for the Second Washington Conference and Attlee, once more ‘holding the baby’, reported on the situation to the House. He began his appraisal by reminding Members that three weeks before Churchill had predicted heavy fighting in Libya, but ‘whatever may be the result, there is no shadow of doubt that Rommel’s plans for his initial offensive have gone completely wrong and this failure has cost him dear in men and material.6

To Attlee now fell the task of apprising the House of the reversal that Auchinleck had suffered. He read Auchinleck’s report, which concluded with the passage, ‘The garrison is still fighting hard and a gallant attempt to save what appears to be an impossible situation is being made. But the fall of Tobruk is imminent if it has not already fallen.’ After a pause he continued, ‘This is the end of General Auchinleck’s statement. Since then we have received definite news of the fall of Tobruk.’7

Aware of the effect that this would have in Britain and of the renewed criticism of the direction of the war that it would fan, Attlee drafted and redrafted this speech, making many alterations of emphasis.8 Ultimately, however, there was bad news to report and Attlee characteristically performed the task in a crisp and businesslike way.

Unspoken in his report, however, were profound doubts about the direction of the fighting in North Africa. Earlier in June he had submitted a report to the Defence Committee, concluding that the Crusader tank had been hurried into production before defects had been identified and corrected. Rapid production had been obtained at the cost of reliability and fighting efficiency, and Eighth Army was fighting with tanks inferior to German tanks both in the quality of their guns and in reliability.9 On 6 July he sent a ‘secret and personal’ memorandum to Eden, detailing his concerns and suggesting that they might discuss them ‘prior to bringing the matter up more formally’. The memorandum poses fundamental questions concerning the organisation of troops, essentially concluding that ‘our military minds are establishment-bound’ and that Rommel, commanding from the front, was repeatedly outpacing the Allied forces who were hampered by an elaborate and cumbersome chain of command. This, together with the lack of coordination between land and air forces, was, he argued, the root cause of Auchinleck’s setbacks.10

During July 1942 Churchill became increasingly concerned about Auchinleck’s lack of offensive drive and flew to Cairo on 2 August, having previously made arrangements to fly on to Moscow to meet Stalin. On 5 August, after a typical day of touring bases, asking questions, forming impressions, he cabled Attlee in a positively chatty manner, almost as if he was formulating his ideas as he wrote. He had no recommendations to make at that point but was giving Attlee notice that these would soon be forthcoming. On the following day came the cable with its ‘drastic and immediate change … in the High Command’. He requested Attlee to present proposals to the War Cabinet to divide the Middle East command, to replace Auchinleck with Alexander, to replace Alexander with Montgomery and to put General Gott in command of Eighth Army.

In asking Attlee to present these sweeping changes to the War Cabinet, the Prime Minister reposed considerable trust in him. With the exception of having doubts about the division of the two commands, the War Cabinet accepted the Prime Minister’s proposals.

When Gott’s plane was shot down, Churchill asked Attlee to arrange for Montgomery to be sent to Cairo as soon as possible by special plane. The War Cabinet had already assembled at 11.15 p.m. to discuss the day’s cables; the Gott cable arrived during the meeting. The shocked Cabinet sat until dawn making necessary arrangements.11

From Cairo Churchill flew to Moscow with the unenviable task of informing Stalin that there would be no second front in Europe in 1942; he then returned to Cairo. From there he cabled Attlee with copies to Eden, Ismay and Portal concerning air support for the Soviet southern flank.12 Coordination to authorise action was left to Attlee. This method was also employed with a cable to Attlee, Ismay ‘and others concerned’ on 21 August concerning American handling of the Trans-Persian railway. On 20–21 August Churchill toured the Western Desert and reported to Attlee on his observations. The note is fully informative, detailed and comprehensive; its style shows clearly the friendly terms on which Churchill and Attlee operated.

In July the Home Intelligence Division of the Ministry of Information submitted a Reconstruction Report from which five main points emerged:

Fear of unemployment was the main concern among those who think about the future.

The second concern of general interest was about housing.

Among the intelligent minority education took the place of housing and with everyone else it took a good third place.

There was also great enthusiasm for a forward movement in the field of social security.

The problem of the post-war political settlement aroused less interest among the general public than any other problem of reconstruction. Only on the treatment of Germany was feeling strongly and emphatically expressed.13

It is clear, the Report concluded, that the public has some very definite and hopeful ideas about domestic reconstruction.

This must have been encouraging to the Labour Party as people’s principal concerns were in areas where Labour had committed itself to action. International affairs, beyond the curbing of Germany, were of little interest. It must, however, have been disappointing to Attlee that, according to the report, the Atlantic Charter ‘excites neither interest nor discussion’ and was thought ‘too nebulous’. On the other hand, Labour’s domestic policy for the post-war was congruent with the concerns of the majority of Britons.

Again, it was Attlee’s task to explain the dismal strategic situation. This involved a schedule of appearances in every corner of the country, designed to boost fading morale. In September he made a speech in Aberdeen that showed him at his most objective and direct. He firmly nailed his socialist colours to the mast of war aims and treated a Labour government as a natural sequel to wartime hardship.14

Patriotic in theme yet devoid of cliché, it was an inspiring address. He told the truth – and that directness was the basis of his appeal to both soldier and working man. The general lack of rhetorical flourish, moreover, ensured that when he did employ a rhetorical device it was effective. A response to the speech was printed in the local Aberdeen newspaper four days later:

To the Deputy Prime Minister who came on a weekend journey to this fair city:

We were glad to see you, sir, and glad to hear you. It is no news to you that you are not a Winston Churchill. When he was fashioned the mould was broken. But you have your own fine qualities, and one of them is a deep ingrained sincerity. That was the chief impression created by your speech, and it caused many of your hearers to revise the mental picture of you they had carried forward from the pre-war era.15

Attlee had grown in stature since 1940, particularly during 1942 when he had a full programme of speechmaking. His addresses during this period have a number of central themes to which he returns frequently – the Atlantic Charter, Hitler as Satan, the British tendency to self-deprecation, the contribution of the dominions, and the need to win the peace as well as the war – but he scrupulously wove new material into each speech. He never delivered a set piece and clearly took seriously each invitation; every address went through several drafts and was subjected to small but significant alterations. For his speech to the Royal Empire Society in December, for example, he declined to commit himself to a particular subject in advance, preferring to make the speech topical and more appealing.16

Within his own party, however, he continued to face criticism for his and his colleagues’ support of the coalition. Four days after the Aberdeen speech he defended that support to the NEC, bluntly reiterating party policy. There was individual criticism of Churchill, sometimes violent, he conceded. But the Labour Party still possessed confidence in his government and supported it, not blindly but fully and generously.17

At the end of October came the turning point in the Allies’ fortunes. Montgomery, who after taking command of the Eighth Army had insisted on taking time to rebuild morale, launched his long-awaited offensive at el Alamein. During the first three days of November Eighth Army broke through the German lines, forcing Rommel’s Desert Army to retreat. Over the next two weeks the Red Army first held Stalingrad, then launched an offensive to encircle the German Sixth Army. In the Pacific, American marines, after a three-month campaign, forced the Japanese onto the defensive on Guadalcanal and by the end of the year held the strategic initiative. In three different theatres victories, each of which proved to be a strategic milestone, had been achieved.

During the same period, three amphibious task forces under the command of General Eisenhower landed at Casablanca, Oran and Algiers. Apart from the military significance of the landings, the greater strategic importance had a massive rallying effect in Britain. The vast might of American industrial production was now committed to the defeat of Germany. Hitler’s fall was now merely a matter of time.

Ironically, the surge in morale created a novel set of problems for Attlee and the Labour Party. Success on the battlefield, long awaited, enabled the Tories to distract attention from post-war problems, encouraging Britons to exult in their changed military fortunes. Bevan accurately identified this tactic and subjected the government to continuing criticism. Attlee, persistently loyal to Churchill, but inevitably his future political opponent, was equally concerned at the propaganda benefit accruing to the Tories but powerless to counter it. Churchill met Roosevelt at Casablanca; the American President issued a call for unconditional surrender.

Claiming to have been surprised by Roosevelt, Churchill cabled Attlee and Eden to seek their opinion as to whether Italy should be included in the demand.18 They responded that ‘the balance of advantage’ was against excluding Italy as it would cause uncertainty in Turkey and the Balkans if Italy were not included; moreover, knowing that they would be forced to unconditionally surrender would have an adverse effect on Italian morale.19 Attlee delivered a comprehensive analysis of the strategic situation to the House of Commons when Parliament reassembled in the New Year,20 but he rightly assessed that it was Churchill and the Tory Party that would most benefit from the improved strategic situation.

He had few options. In a speech at Keighley in January he attempted to balance the books. For the first time, he told his audience, the United Nations held the initiative; the German war machine was no longer hurtling along from conquest to conquest. Victory, he said, would provide a great opportunity to rebuild Britain and the rest of the world. In Britain, however, there would be urgent problems in the fields of planning, reconstruction, physical rebuilding, land utilisation, location of industry, education, unification and extension of the social and allied services.21 To a nation now brimming with confidence this litany of difficulties to be overcome was an unwelcome depressant.

Churchill had defined his aim in one word – ‘Victory’. He had, in this blunt statement of ambition, limited his focus to the period it took to achieve that victory. Attlee, by contrast, repeatedly looked beyond the German surrender. This was not expressing a need to win at the Peace Conference but to ensure that the world was a better place once Nazism had been overcome. He identified with the common man. That identification was powerful, based on his recognition of what had preceded the war, the structural damage during the war and, as a result, the immense job of rebuilding from the ground up once it was over. But the constant reminder that the pre-war economy, already frail, would be immeasurably worse once the fighting was over was now less welcome.

During the first few months of 1943 Attlee and Eden, whom the Prime Minister used as his principal lieutenants, struck an informal but effective alliance when they combined in attempts to block Churchill’s more exotic plans. The first confrontation came soon after the Casablanca Conference when Churchill persuaded Roosevelt to join him in Turkey and pressure President Inönü to bring the Turks into the war. Attlee and Eden jointly cabled the Prime Minister that this would court either ‘a rebuff or a failure’.22 The latter, however, was relentless and, after four days of cables to and fro, the War Cabinet agreed to the démarche.23 In May, when Admirals Pound and King24 urged occupation of the Azores, the buccaneering idea appealed to Churchill and once more Attlee and Eden strenuously urged delay.25 Later in the war General Brooke frequently observed this alliance at work, privately grateful that there were others apart from himself who were willing and capable of standing up to the mercurial Prime Minister.26

From 17 to 19 February, twenty months after Greenwood had announced the Beveridge Committee, the committee’s report was debated in the House of Commons. Attlee was disappointed with the outcome of the debate, writing to Tom that, while Morrison had been first class, ‘so many of our fellows, good men not mischief makers, tend to use their hearts to the exclusion of their heads.’27

In March he wrote to George Shepherd, the National Agent of the Labour Party, expressing his concern that the party was losing prestige and asking for suggestions on how it might be restored. Given that the economic transition from war to peace would be infinitely harder than that from peace to war and that all of Europe would be in a state of economic distress after the war, it was vital to know whether the party was respected or held in contempt. People, he believed, were no longer thrilled by the prospect of a Labour victory; ‘the socialist case must be stated with positive vigour.’ He candidly defined the problem that faced him personally. ‘It is not easy to work with a man in the afternoon in the Cabinet Room’ he wrote, ‘and then in the evening appear to differ from him on the public platform.’28 As Bevan and Attlee had feared, in March Churchill made a pre-emptive grab for the moral high ground, announcing the government’s commitment to improve standards of living in Britain, the creation of a four-year plan of transition after Germany’s defeat, and hinting at the continuation of ‘a National Government comprising the best men of all parties who are willing to serve’.29

To a Labour Party meeting on 7 April Attlee restricted himself to a bland but firm statement: ‘No one can tell now when or under what circumstances the war will end or what will be the situation when a general election takes place … Meanwhile the Labour Party, like other parties, is entirely uncommitted and remains free to take its own decision at the appropriate time.’30

Put simply, this was an injunction to the left to back off, to await the outcome of events and to trust the Labour members of the coalition to consolidate the party’s position as Attlee had been consistently striving to do. Fears of a repetition of 1918, however, and memories of the catastrophic events of 1931 refused to evaporate. These concerns were intensified by successes of Independent Party and Common Wealth candidates in by-elections. Concern grew on the left that a unique opportunity was being squandered and that the electoral truce was a typical Tory trick. His only viable course, he reasoned, was to repeat the same message, associate Labour with the strategic successes, increase his visibility as a leader, and let events take their course.

Accordingly, he threw himself into an even busier round of appearances, spanning the widest possible social spectrum. In May a letter to Tom perfectly expressed his feelings:

Nonetheless, he showed no inclination to slow down. During June a plethora of diverse organisations contacted Attlee to invite him as a speaker. These included the English Speaking Union, Divisional Labour Parties, Youth Committees, High Commissioners, Ambassadors, the Child Health Planning Group, the Harrow Youth Rally, Harrow Girls Pre-Service Organisation, the Institute for British-American Understanding, Yugoslav House, the Anglo-Soviet Committee, the Corporation of London, the Newspaper Proprietors Association, the Conference of the British Federation of Social Workers, the New Zealand Society, the Women’s Temperance League, the Society of Labour Candidates, the Dunkirk Anniversary Concert, Wings for Victory Week – all requested his presence and 80 per cent of them were accepted. This shows a remarkable availability for a man of his commitments.32

Occasionally he paused to marvel at how his life had evolved; after nine years as party leader he remained modestly surprised at his success and wrote to Tom: ‘Last week Vi and I went to lunch with Admiral Evans to meet King Haakon and quite unexpectedly found Olive and Algy33 among the guests. As we said, it is the sort of thing we should have thought unlikely twenty years ago.’34

In a speech at Alloa he responded head-on in public to the criticism that Labour was making too little of its opportunities. Recognising that members of the party felt frustrated by a ‘government of all parties’, he stressed that an electoral truce was not a political truce and reminded his audience how far socialism had advanced over four decades. Ideas once regarded as silly or, at best, visionary had become part of the ordinary make-up of the vast majority of citizens.

For examples of this progress he cited two dramatic shifts. During the 1920s unemployment was viewed as a malady caused by individual defects. Now it was accepted that it was society’s duty to prevent unemployment. Second, apart from education and the Poor Law, there were practically no social services. With the Beveridge Report, Britain had come a long way from the Lloyd George Insurance Act.35

Labour Members of Parliament were demanding socialist solutions but the government must at the moment reflect the policy of all parties, he argued. Nothing will be achieved if all parties insist on partisan plans for the post-war period. Then, in a rousing finish, he restated his basic theme, the post-war problems. There would be difficulties, but he relied on people’s courage and ability to recognise that ‘we shall need all our energy if we are to win the peace.36

This was a stirring speech which, taken in conjunction with the speech at Greenock two days later, illustrates the changed war fortunes and, by association, the importance of a new government at war’s end to win the peace. While he spoke at Alloa, Alexander’s Fifteenth Army Group, comprising General Patton’s Seventh Army and Montgomery’s Eighth Army, were fighting their way inland from the landing beaches of Sicily. Operation HUSKY had been launched the night before and, for the first time, Allied forces were breaching the defences of Fortress Europe. Attlee assumed a new confidence, consistently hammering at the theme that the opportunities for reform offered by victory must not be squandered. The mistakes of 1918 must not be repeated. Without undermining Churchill’s war leadership, he began to speak like a potential post-war Prime Minister.

In Greenock he addressed the nature of democracy, ‘the cause for which we are fighting’. He looked back to people’s hopes in 1918 and ‘the period of disillusionment that followed’. Democracy could only survive if there was ‘a constant and real desire for it’. With that desire Britain would, at the end of the war, ‘offer to the world an example of how a nation can, without violence, adapt its social and economic life to the demands of a changing world and of new conceptions of social justice.’37

It was a splendid speech, delivered at a thrilling time as Anglo-American forces advanced in Sicily. The overarching themes are first that a socialist government had become more than a dream, that the opportunity for far-reaching social change will soon be a reality, and that together government and people could make it happen. Attlee’s confidence – as an orator and future leader – had soared. Possibly he too, for the first time, had come face-to-face with the certainty of the defeat of Germany and the proximity and scale of his post-war responsibilities.

Invitations to speak continued to cross Attlee’s desk in such volume that he decreed that none were to be accepted unless they were of direct concern to him.38 This somewhat indistinct criterion helped little, however, as the invitations ranged from the Stanmore Horticultural Society (in his home town), to an invitation to meet General Wavell (Viceroy-designate of India) and a reception given by the Free French for Général d’Astier de la Vigerie. His activities and involvement were so broad that his edict did little to liberate him. He knew, moreover, that he and Bevin, the two most visible ambassadors of socialism, held a pivotal influence in the political balance.

Thus in September he was in Carmarthen, urging listeners that ‘democracy is not an easy system. It may be destroyed from within as well as from without. It is not a method of government but an attitude towards life.’ It demanded a constant active striving, and so the battle for the things of the spirit would not end with the defeat of Germany and Japan.39

In November he spoke to the same theme in Plymouth. The endless round continued as Attlee strove at the same time to pre-empt complacency among the public and disruptive criticism from inside his party. His greatest virtuosity, however, was reserved for his radio address to the nation on New Year’s Eve.40

On that occasion, in one of his most moving addresses, Attlee spoke from his heart to the common man, stressing that everyone’s war effort was vital, that it had brought success and now all needed to plan together for the future. Paying tribute to the British people, he stressed his consciousness of their hopes and fears for the future. He was mindful too of the ‘great valour of the men and women serving the country’. It was, he said, a privilege to serve them.

It was an address, devoid of oratory or bombast, that struck a chord across the country. Attlee hit the right balance of confidence, optimism and humility. Sir John Simon and Edna Lloyd George were among the many that wrote to congratulate him. Letters of thanks flooded in. Even so, there was inevitably one complaint – from a farmer who was unhappy that he failed to give agriculture an adequate pat on the back.

He was gaining confidence as a speaker, both in person and on the radio. After a speech to the American Outpost on 26 January 1944 one of the group’s members wrote to the president, Arthur Goodhart, praising Attlee’s address as ‘one of the most perfect short speeches I have ever heard’. Goodhart himself, a King’s Counsel and no mean orator, added his opinion that ‘I don’t think you have done anything better’.41

Over the next three months Attlee continued to send the same message both within the Labour Party and around the country. The days of Dunkirk and the Blitz seemed to belong to history; the long-awaited invasion of north-west France was approaching; there was a growing complacency that the war was won and that Britain would soon enjoy the fruits of peace. Attlee was relentless in ‘gingering up’ the public and emphasising that there would be shortages and hardship in the aftermath of the war. In Sunderland and Hartlepool at the end of January, in Exeter in March, in Leeds in April he spoke with confidence of the need to continue to make sacrifices for some time yet in the knowledge that, in the long run, a socialist government would redress the ills of the 1930s and create a more just society. By then it was a familiar message, delivered with a realistic but not entirely welcome honesty, even as the coalition itself was beginning to divide along party lines.42

During the spring and summer of 1944 his schedule of engagements continued unabated; he was putting himself increasingly in the public eye in preparation for a post-war election. He was particularly active in speaking to youth groups – shades of Stepney – and he accepted a number of tickets for football matches at Wembley, occasions that enhanced his image as a ‘man of the people’. He had played football, turning out on one occasion for Fleet FC while staying with his aunt in Hampshire, but football ranked far lower than cricket in his hierarchy of sports. Appearances at Wembley were chosen for their political value.

The crescendo of public speaking culminated shortly before the invasion of Normandy, when he spoke in Birmingham. When he reminded his audience that ‘last Wednesday was the fourth anniversary of the formation of the present government’, the implication was clear: the clock was now ticking towards the end of the government’s five-year term. Suggesting, in an almost dramatic structure, that great changes were inevitable, he stressed the Labour Party’s decision ‘without hesitation to take responsibility and face all the difficulties of the situation’. But all that might count for little as ‘the real criterion of social change is the change in the assumptions that are accepted by the community. Their translation into action may take time and may be incomplete, yet it is the change in ideas that counts.’43

Change was desirable, inevitable. Moreover, he concluded, the war had prepared Britain for change. War, he explained, breaks down little selfish opposition. The flood of new ideas mounts and passes over the last barrier and a great advance is achieved. Three weeks before D-Day, when the Allied armies would ‘pass over the last barrier’ and achieve that ‘great advance’, Attlee linked the advance of socialism with the progress of the Allies.

For his last speech before D-Day he played on his home field. He accepted an invitation from the Rev. E. F. Bonhote, the Master of Haileybury, to visit the Senior Literary Debating Society of which he had once been a member. He gave a talk on ‘Parliament and Democracy’ at 6.00 p.m. and by 9.30 was on his way back to Downing Street. The visit was a success and Bonhote wrote to him the following day, expressing his regret that rationing had restricted the number of guests for dinner. ‘You must come again when you are Prime Minister,’ the letter concluded.44

He was able to take a short break from London at the end of August, when he visited Italy and North Africa. It was a rapid trip but full of memories of his tour of Italy with Edric and Violet twenty-two years before. He reported to Tom that he had visited Algiers, Naples, Rome, Florence, Siena, back to Algiers and home from Rabat. He was ecstatic to be in Italy, apart from Naples whose ‘lower orders’ appalled him. He spoke with pride of an apt quotation from Dante that he made to a monk at Cassino, was breathless at the Blue Grotto, thrilled to have an audience with the Pope (‘a gentle idealist’), impressed by the Colosseum in moonlight. He rhapsodises about the trip and seeing ‘little towns’ like Perugia from the air. ‘I saw a good deal of Gen. Alexander whose guest I was’, he concluded, ‘a very fine man.’45

It is not surprising that he found Alexander congenial. Attlee, a pragmatic man who liked to get the job done and done quickly, had a liking for generals who decided on tactics and implemented them; he had a huge respect for Brooke, who personified that virtue. Among the battlefield generals Alexander appealed most to Attlee. Described by his rivals as ‘wood from the neck up’, ‘Alex’ was an officer who took his orders, acted on them, and reported bluntly that they had been carried out – in a message to Churchill from Tunis he informed him in two sentences that there were no Germans left in Tunisia and he awaited further orders. Wavell, on the other hand, intellectual, artistic and ‘deep’, was considered ‘defeatist’ by Attlee, a judgement that he would recall in 1946.

August and September marked a watershed in Attlee’s public appearances. The war had entered a critical phase as the Allies converged on Berlin and the Japanese were driven back after the fall of Myitkyina. It was a thrilling month that gave the Allies hope that the German war would be over by the end of 1944. Operation DRAGOON landed a second force in southern France on 15 August and on the same day Alexander’s Army Group reached the Gothic Line in northern Italy. By the end of the month Paris had been liberated and the Red Army had taken Bucharest. For two months Attlee refused invitations, accepting only those to Labour Party events.

One such was at Whitehaven, shortly after the government’s proposals for social insurance were published. ‘Complaint has been made that these proposals took a long time to formulate’, Attlee commented. ‘They did, but the work had to be done by ministers heavily engaged in the task of carrying on the administration of the offices of the nation in wartime, and with a great many other reconstruction plans.’46

Once again, Attlee was resisting attacks from his own party. In his book, the aggressive Why Not Trust the Tories?, Bevan savaged the Tories for delaying both the report and any implementation of its proposals, interpreting these as part of a dark Conservative plot to inflict ‘death by words’.47 Attlee showed statesmanship in understanding wartime pressures on ministers. He, after all, was a member of the War Cabinet, which Bevan was not. To attack Churchill, the immensely popular war leader, would have been electoral folly. To attack the Tory Party, pointing out – as Attlee did in 1945 – that the party’s relations with Churchill were extremely ambivalent, was good politics.

The war did not end in 1944, but, with the collapse of German resistance on both fronts, as the Allied armies converged on Berlin, both British political parties squared off for the end of the coalition and the long-awaited general election. ‘All political parties are now busy selecting candidates for the general election’, Attlee declared at Woolwich in February.48 The gloves were finally off.

Four days later, speaking to the Bradford Labour Party, he talked openly of a general election. By now Belgium had been completely cleared, Budapest taken, Dresden firebombed. The surrender of Germany was imminent and the electoral truce effectively suspended. Reconstruction could begin after an election held between the surrender of Germany and the defeat of Japan. The Labour Party was prepared to go into that election to ask for a mandate. He was not, he said, afraid of responsibility. He wanted ‘to enter upon the task of ridding mankind from fear and want in the spirit of crusaders who set before themselves a lofty ideal towards which they strive.’49

This was a far cry from the pre-war Tory philosophy. Gone is Baldwin’s ‘Safety First’; banished are the tentative steps of Chamberlain. This is a strong, stirring call to join a crusade for the benefit of the human race. The coalition existed now in name alone. Both parties were making clandestine plans, preparing for what promised to be a fundamental clash of ideologies after five years of enforced cohabitation. There was no doubt that Attlee would lead the party at the imminent election, and even Churchill’s loyal lieutenants Eden and Cranborne ‘thought Labour would quite likely win’.50

Attlee had achieved an eminence that could hardly have been envisaged in May 1940. By unwavering loyalty to the wartime Prime Minister and by strict observance of the electoral truce he had established himself as a statesman of stature and ethical probity. By maintaining the position that only by national planning and socialist principles could the quality of life in Britain be improved he projected Labour as the inevitable post-war government; by efficient dispatch of government business in Cabinet he demonstrated that he could lead that government. All the pieces were in place; it remained only to display them to the electorate.

ENDNOTES

1 Bodleian: MS. Attlee, dep. 4, 23 February 1942.

2 Bodleian: MS. Attlee, dep. 5, 21 March 1942.

3 Bodleian: MS. Attlee, dep. 5, 22 March 1942.

4 For example, Jim Middleton, the General Secretary of the Labour Party, wrote to him, pointing out that since the transfer of Hugh Dalton to the Board of Trade (on 22 February) there was now no Labour representative involved in the direction of Political Warfare – it was now in the hands of Bracken and Eden. Bodleian: MS. Attlee, dep. 5, 3 April 1942.

5 Letter to William John MP, 3 April 1942. Bodleian: MS. Attlee, dep. 5.

6 Hansard, HC Deb, 23 June 1942, col. 1819.

7 Hansard, HC Deb, 23 June 1942, col. 1821

8 Bodleian: MS. Attlee, dep. 5.

9 Butler (ed.), Grand Strategy, volume 3, pp. 440–441.

10 Precisely the military tendencies that Attlee had complained of in 1923. See Chapter 4 above.

11 Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 4, ‘The Hinge of Fate’, pp. 464.

12 Ibid., pp. 511–512; for cable of 21 August, p. 513.

13 Bodleian: MS. Attlee, dep. 5, July 1942.

14 Bodleian: MS. Attlee, dep. 6, September 1942.

15 Aberdeen Bon Accord, in Bodleian: MS. Attlee, dep. 6, 10 September 1942

16 Bodleian: MS. Attlee, dep. 6, 15 December 1942.

17 Bodleian: MS. Attlee, dep. 6, 10 September 1942.

18 Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 4, ‘The Hinge of Fate’, p. 684. Prime Minister to Deputy Prime Minister and War Cabinet, para. 6, 20 January 1943.

19 Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 4, ‘The Hinge of Fate’, p. 686. Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary to Prime Minister, 21 January 1943.

20 Hansard, HC Deb, 19 January 1943, cols 92–102.

21 Bodleian: MS. Attlee, dep. 7, 27 January 1943.

22 Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 4, ‘The Hinge of Fate’, p. 700. Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary to Prime Minister, 21 January 1943.

23 Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 4, ‘The Hinge of Fate’, p. 703. Deputy Prime Minister and War Cabinet to Prime Minister, 25 January 1943.

24 Admiral Ernest King, the irascible American naval chief. His daughter, asked about her father’s temper, replied, ‘My father’s the most even-tempered man in the world. He’s always in a rage.’

25 Llewellyn Woodward, British Foreign Policy in the Second World War, p. 379.

26 Danchev and Todman (eds.), War Diaries of Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, Entry for 14 July 1944, p. 570.

27 Letter to Tom Attlee, 22 February 1943.

28 Bodleian: MS. Attlee, dep. 7, 10 March 1943.

29 The Times, 22 March 1943.

30 Bodleian: MS. Attlee, dep. 8.

31 Letter to Tom Attlee, 19 May 1943.

32 Bodleian: MS. Attlee, dep. 8.

33 Violet’s twin sister Olive and her husband, Admiral (later Admiral of the Fleet) Sir Algernon Willis.

34 Letter to Tom Attlee, 8 May 1943.

35 The National Insurance Act of 1911.

36 Bodleian: MS. Attlee, dep. 9, Speech at Alloa, 10 July 1943.

37 Bodleian: MS. Attlee, dep. 9, Speech at Greenock, 12 April 1943.

38 Bodleian: MS. Attlee, dep. 9, August 1843.

39 Bodleian: MS. Attlee, dep. 10, 3 September 1943.

40 Bodleian: MS. Attlee, dep. 11, 31 December 1943.

41 Ibid.

42 The drafts and final versions of his speeches in the first four months of 1944 are in his papers, Bodleian: MS. Attlee, dep. 13.

43 Bodleian: MS. Attlee, dep. 14, 13 May 1944.

44 Bodleian: MS. Attlee, dep. 14, 2 June 1944.

45 Letter to Tom Attlee, 4 September 1944. He described Alexander as the man for a campaign, whereas Montgomery was the man for a battle. Williams, Nothing So Strange, p. 234.

46 Bodleian: MS. Attlee, dep. 15, 7 October 1944.

47 Bevan, Why Not Trust the Tories, Chapter 3, ‘Death by Words’.

48 Bodleian: MS. Attlee, dep. 16, 11 February 1945.

49 Bodleian: MS. Attlee, dep. 17, 15 February 1945.

50 Eden, Memoirs, vol. 2 ‘The Reckoning’, p. 551.