The Labour government of 1945 included men of solid experience. Morrison, described by Harold Macmillan as ‘an almost Dickensian character’,1 had shown his worth as an accomplished, charismatic administrator. Bevin, the highly visible wartime Minister of Labour and, to quote Macmillan again, ‘the strongest man in the Labour government’,2 was instantly recognisable to the public. It was, curiously, the new Prime Minister who was the least known of Labour’s ‘Big Three’. Peter Hennessy in a 1995 lecture described him aptly as ‘decidedly diminuendo’.3

Attlee had constructed his Cabinet carefully, looking at his choices for offices from every angle, moving names about like a homeowner fitting furniture to a new house.4 It was no easy task; the talent pool was well-stocked, but with many newcomers, few of whom he had yet been able to assess. In the ten years since the last election the reins of government had been tightly held and there had been no intake of promising Labour Members. As a result, his first Cabinet was made up of older men; its average age was sixty-one and a half. Only six of the twenty members were under sixty.

From the outset, however, Attlee drove his team with the vigour of a far younger man. Evidence of his preference for action over words abounds.5 In a speech to an Oxford audience he later said that ‘the great thing in the Cabinet was to stop people talking’.6 Dalton recalled that he could name ‘two, perhaps three, ministers … who lost their jobs, at least for a while, because they talked too much in Cabinet.’7 Bevin was allowed some latitude as a raconteur, but members of Attlee’s Cabinet quote examples of ministers being summarily silenced. Wilson recalled an occasion when the Prime Minister opened a Cabinet with ‘Minutes of the last meeting’. A Scottish minister said, ‘Well, Prime Minister, I don’t disagree but I do remember a similar occasion three years ago.’ … Attlee cut in brusquely and demanded, ‘Do you disagree with the Minutes. No? All right. Agreed. Next item.’8

Roland Moyle, son of Arthur Moyle, Attlee’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, told a similar story to illustrate Attlee’s minimalist approach. After his secret decision to build an atomic bomb became known, Harold Davies, a Welsh backbench MP, subjected the Parliamentary Party to a ten-minute harangue on the horrors of nuclear warfare, describing in lurid detail the effects of radiation. Attlee paused a second before removing his pipe from his mouth. ‘Yes’, he nodded. ‘We must watch it. Next item.’9

This brusqueness in meetings led junior colleagues to feel that their work was not appreciated. Invariably polite in his dealings on a human level, he rarely bothered to do more than acknowledge a job well done; he expected nothing less and would have been astonished if anyone had accused him of bad manners. Jim Callaghan commented that when Attlee did congratulate him, he ‘blushed with pleasure, as it came from such an unaccustomed source.’10

Speedy and efficient dispatch of business required a small Cabinet with ministers who acted as ‘overlords’ for a number of policy areas, relying on committees to bring business to Cabinet. Morrison, after his success with London Transport in 1931, had overall responsibility for nationalisation; individual departmental ministers – Dalton, Shinwell, Bevan, Alfred Barnes, John Wilmot and James Griffith – had specific responsibility for preparing legislation for the transfer to public ownership and creation of plans for (e.g.) national insurance and the National Health Service.11

Committees, a central feature of the wartime coalition, proliferated in the post-war government, until 148 standing committees and 313 ad hoc committees had been created.12 Every major issue spawned a Cabinet committee, distinguishing Attlee’s style from the later fashion of centralised control vested in the Prime Minister and special advisers.

From 1940 to 1945 Attlee had repeatedly emphasised the approaching need to win the peace. Winning the war entailed austerity, but behind wartime austerity was the ringing clarion call of Churchill’s oratory, invoking Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde and Malplaquet, Trafalgar and Waterloo. Behind Attlee’s call for austerity there was coal rationing, bread rationing, an increasing, gnawing anxiety that there would be no peacetime El Alamein, no glorious victory to end austerity, no Sunday when church bells would ring. This was not what Britons felt they were owed; it was a puzzling kind of victory. Rationally, they understood the need for controls; emotionally, it was hard to accept that manufactured products must be kept from the home market in favour of an export drive, that Germany must be rebuilt while much of Britain was in ruins, that in a time of famine occupants of the British zone in Germany must be fed while Britons continued to suffer rationing. After initial euphoria, the question of who had won the war was on many lips.

The accuracy of Attlee’s predictions was brought home in a Cabinet Paper presented by Dalton in August. A survey of ‘Our Overseas Financial Prospects’, it warned of ‘almost desperate plight unless some … source of temporary assistance can be found to carry us over while we recover our breath – a plight far worse than most people, even in government departments, have yet realised.’13

On 16 August Attlee addressed the Commons on the subject of the dire economic situation facing Britain and all Europe, warning that ‘we are going to face difficult years, and to get through them will require no less effort, no less unselfishness and no less hard work, than were needed to bring us through the war.’14 Five days later, without warning, Truman cancelled Lend-Lease with effect from 2 September, explaining to the press that ‘the bill passed by Congress defined Lend-Lease as a weapon of war and after we ceased to be at war it is no longer necessary’.15

Attlee commented that this was untrue and the decision had been taken without adequate consideration of its consequences. He informed the Commons of Truman’s action and its implications. Britain was spending £2,000 million annually and receiving £350 million from exports and £450 million reimbursement from the dominions. ‘Thus’, he said, ‘the initial deficit with which we start the task of re-establishing our overseas commitment is immense.’16 To add to Attlee’s distress, Canada cancelled Mutual Aid at the end of the Japanese war. Initially enraged at the lack of prior consultation, he was mollified to learn that Canada was merely performing ‘a book-keeping operation’ and that ‘The end of Mutual Aid transfers will not end or delay the flow of essential civilian supplies to [Canada’s] allies’.17

Nonetheless, Britain needed to take drastic steps, not only to fund reforms that Labour had promised, but simply to survive. This required immediate action to give export trade priority over domestic rehabilitation, to restrict imports, and radical pruning of government overseas expenditure. The first two courses would ‘involve serious limitations on the restoration of civilian standards’. The third would impose ‘serious limitations on the strategic and diplomatic part which we can play in the rest of the world.’ It was far from certain that these steps would be adequate; they would, moreover, involve greater austerity than in wartime. Financial assistance would be needed and this could only come from the USA. To obtain a loan from Washington would necessitate ‘positive action to reduce obstacles to international trade in conformity with Article VII of the Mutual Aid Agreement.’18

Keynes, commenting that ‘The country was facing a financial Dunkirk’,19 was confident that a loan of five billion dollars would be forthcoming from Washington, part in the form of grant-in-aid and part as an interest-free loan.20 When the State Department insisted that credits to Britain were conditional on Britain’s readiness to forswear imperial preference, Bevin commented that, when he listened to Keynes and his ‘winged words’, ‘I seem to hear those coins jingling in my pocket; but I am not so sure they’re really there.’21 Further doubt was generated when loading of American supplies for Britain was suspended, pending agreement on credit terms. When Attlee acidly told Truman that ‘it is hardly necessary for me to assure you that if these supplies for the next month come forward to us as I have suggested, they will be paid for’,22 Bevin’s scepticism seemed justified.

Keynes and his delegation left for Washington in early September and encountered grave disquiet at Britain’s direction among Republicans in Congress. This was sharpened by anti-American articles and comments from Laski, giving the impression that Britain was governed by quasi-communists. During Keynes’ mission Attlee received letters, postcards and telegrams from concerned American anglophiles urging him to muzzle Laski.23

As the talks progressed, Dalton observed, the British team ‘retreated with a bad grace and with increasing irritation, from a free gift to an interest-free loan and from this to a loan bearing interest.’24 The amount of the loan was reduced, strings were attached and tightened; the conditions attached seemed ‘so tight that they might strangle our trade and, indeed, our whole economic life’, but the government had little option. Throughout September, October and November the Washington talks inched towards accord. Dalton and the Treasury continued to believe that some form of grant or interest-free loan was possible25, despite Keynes’ recognition that ‘we must substitute prose for poetry’.26

Keynes described the American attitude as ‘ruthless’27 but by early December terms were finalised and Attlee announced details in the Commons.28 There would be a line of credit for $3,750 million to facilitate Britain’s purchase of goods and services from the USA, to meet transitional balance-of-payment deficits, to help the UK maintain gold reserves, and to assist her multilateral trade. Further, there had been agreed a settlement of Lend-Lease and reciprocal aid with Britain owing the United States $650 million. The total amount loaned was $4,400 million for a fifty-year term at 2 per cent interest from 31 December 1951. A condition was that sterling be made convertible into dollars by July 1947.

Attlee took little part in Cabinet and committee discussions of the loan, involving himself far less than he did in negotiations with Ben Chifley of Australia or Mackenzie King of Canada. This is curious as the American loan was of vastly greater immediate importance. As Harold Wilson observed, Attlee was ‘tone deaf’ on economic matters29 and relied on Douglas Jay for analyses of the implications of American proposals.30 It is arguable that, had Attlee interceded with Truman, better terms might have been obtained more rapidly, but he allowed events to run their course.

The unreality of American expectations that their boys could be brought home immediately after VE Day was matched only by the naïve British expectations that the twenty-seven months that she had stood alone against Germany would be liberally rewarded once the war was won. That Britain could approach only America for a loan while that country was systematically dismantling the British Empire was ironic. The effect within the Labour Party was to drive a wedge between the Atlanticists and Crossman’s group that became ‘Keep Left’. This posed particular problems for Attlee, whose style of Cabinet management was to obtain consensus. Consensus is generally absent in times of crisis, particularly a novel form of crisis that has no tried, effective response. Not only were the Welfare State and the entire nationalisation programme threatened, but the ability of the country to survive at even wartime levels of austerity was doubtful.

Even before the American loan was secured, however, even while the issue of demobilisation was acute, Attlee decided to proceed immediately with plans for public ownership and control of vital elements of the economic system. In general, the extent of wartime controls, which the public had come to accept, greatly facilitated the process of nationalisation, the central feature of the election manifesto. As Attlee stresses in his autobiography, nationalisation was not an end in itself but an essential element in creating a society based on social justice.31

Attlee himself assumed the responsibility for prioritising the various initiatives in the sequence most likely to succeed. Figuring that most Tories, including Churchill, his most vociferous opponent, had already accepted the inevitability of the nationalisation of the Bank of England, he placed that at the top of his list. Between the wars, under the control of Montagu Norman, the Bank had moved closer to fulfilling the role of a central bank and thus the process was relatively straightforward. When Dalton spoke at the second reading of the Bill, he referred to its simplicity, pointing out that Churchill had already professed to having no objection to the move. It was, he argued, a model that would, ‘in due course, make a streamlined socialist statute.’ With only five clauses and three schedules, ‘it does the job which we intend to do’.32

The tone of the debate on the Bill confirmed that there was no concerted objection in principle; on the Tory benches there was a resigned acceptance of the inevitable. Dalton spoke with assurance; to Tory rearguard action Glenvil Hall, Financial Secretary to the Treasury, responded, pointing out that the Bank recognised that, in all matters of major policy, the Treasury had the last word. It was ‘a logical step that the relationship which has existed between the Treasury and the Bank, should be given something more than informal recognition, and should be put into statutory form, which … should give the Treasury the ultimate responsibility for saying what the policy should be.’33 The Tories baulked at that single issue, possibly a foretaste of more sinister control to come. A majority of 200 in the vote, however, ensured the ultimate outcome; on 14 February 1946 the Bank of England Act became law.

Attlee had chosen his first sortie well, but he expected no easy passage of his entire legislative programme. If he had any doubts, these were dispelled on 6 December, when the Opposition tabled a Motion of Censure, criticising the government for the ‘formulation of long-term schemes for nationalisation creating uncertainty over the whole field of industrial and economic activity, in direct opposition to the best interest of the nation, which demands food, work and homes.’34

Churchill, speaking first on the second day of the debate, made a spirited and wide-ranging attack on the government, concluding with the extraordinary claim that the government, not he, was partisan. Had the Tories won the election, he claimed, ‘my first thought would have been to seek the co-operation of the minority, and gather together the widest and strongest measure of agreement over the largest possible area.’ Instead Labour had introduced ‘party antagonism, bitter as anything I have seen in my long life of political conflict’. He charged the government with ‘trying to exalt their partisan and faction interests at the cost not only of the national unity but of our recovery and of our vital interest.’35

In response Attlee offered a powerful rebuttal, not merely of the charge but also of its motivation. Recently returned from Washington, he stood taller in the Parliamentary Party than ever. As Prime Minister responding to the Leader of the Opposition, he addressed Churchill very differently from his wartime manner as the latter’s deputy. In four months of office he had established himself as a vigorous leader and, according to Jim Callaghan, he ‘began to demonstrate his supremacy over his party and a growing mastery of the House’.36

There was no secret about plans to proceed with nationalisation, he said; it was central to the party’s manifesto. Why should Churchill be surprised at the government doing what it had pledged to do? As for bitter party antagonism, Churchill’s objections amounted to asking ‘Why, when you were elected to carry out a socialist programme, did you not carry out a Conservative programme?’ The government did not accept that when Churchill ‘suggested we should carry on the good old Conservative policies, he was speaking for the nation.’37

In a single speech Attlee, while paying tribute to Churchill’s war leadership, stripped away whatever remained of the Churchill mystique. He, the Prime Minister, was statesmanlike. His opponent was a mere party politician. It is not over-dramatic to treat the speech, which Roy Jenkins quotes as one of Attlee’s most accomplished,38 as one that consolidated his colleagues’ respect for him as leader.

Almost all retrospective analyses of Attlee’s leadership focus on the contrast between his retiring demeanour and the more charismatic style of his senior colleagues. One history of the Labour leaders contrasts the ‘tortoise’ with the four ‘hares’ – Bevin, Cripps, Dalton and Morrison – in his Cabinet.39 There was, of course, a fifth hare, the Leader of the Opposition. Attlee achieved ascendancy over all five by the simple expedient of being himself, specifically being the man he was at the time he lived. Of the four Labour hares, each had a characteristic that stood in the way of his being a successful leader.

Morrison was a magnificent No. 2, an attack dog able to implement the wishes of the chief executive. Like many able seconds-in-command, he did not see why he should not be No. 1. His strength in the Attlee Cabinet was as Leader of the House of Commons, in which role he excelled, driving colleagues relentlessly to keep legislation on track.

Dalton, larger than life, bombastic, though far from stupid, had a battery of things he hated – Germans, Americans, Tories, all were grist to his mill. He was also an inveterate plotter. Francis Williams believed that if Dalton had become Labour’s leader ‘he would have started intriguing against himself out of sheer habit’.40 If the key to negotiation is to be able to put oneself in the position of one’s opponent – a quality of critical importance for a chief executive – Dalton would have failed. He would have failed with great panache, but failed nonetheless.

Cripps was briefly viewed as a future leader when he returned from the Moscow embassy in 1942. But he owed his sudden popularity to the Russian struggle more than to his own talents for leadership. By the end of World War II his time had passed; by the beginning of the Cold War the basis for his wartime ascendancy was removed.

Bevin was the only Attlee lieutenant who could have won and held the leadership. He had the opportunity in July 1945 and twice in 1947, but, like Julius Caesar on the Lupercal, he did thrice refuse. Instead, his unswerving support allowed Attlee to do what Bevin readily admitted he did best – keeping the diverse and mutually antagonistic Labour Cabinet ministers harnessed to the same waggon.

As to Churchill, the fifth hare, Attlee was savvy enough to separate the image of the wartime leader from the reality of the leader of the Opposition, now under fire from his own party for lack of peacetime leadership and frequent absences from the Commons.41

In an article for The Observer in 1960 Attlee described his concept of leadership. In writing the article, ‘What Sort of Man Gets to the Top’, he may have had these months of 1946 in mind. To lead effectively, he wrote, a man should display ‘such things as moral or physical courage, sympathy, self-discipline, altruism and superior capacity for hard work.’ Leadership was not a prize to be grabbed, for: ‘Men who lobby their way forward into leadership are most likely to be lobbied back out of it. The man who has most control of his followers is the man who shows no fear. And a man cannot be a leader if he is afraid of losing his job.’42

In three sentences he neatly expressed the relative virtues and status of himself and Herbert Morrison.

In April 1945 the coalition government passed the Civil Aviation Act which established a Ministry of Civil Aviation. From there it was a short step, via a Labour government White Paper, to pass the 1946 Civil Aviation Bill. The cost of constructing Heathrow, purchasing land and building road and rail access would amount to £30 million, a figure that alarmed the Cabinet. Dalton suggested consideration of a site further from Central London.43 In the event, Heathrow was adopted.

The Bill established three separate companies, British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC), British European Airways (BEA), and British South American Airways Corporation (BSAA), which was absorbed into BOAC in 1949.44 As with the Bank of England Bill, this met with little opposition from the Opposition benches.

As an ironic footnote to the Bill it is amusing to read an exchange between Lord Winster, Minister of Civil Aviation, and the Prime Minister. Winster sent Attlee a report about requirements at Heathrow for an international airport, runways, access by rail and road, and the airports that could accommodate converted Lancasters. Three runways were envisaged as well as access by rail.45 Attlee responded that ‘possible’ road and rail access was not good enough.46 Transport should be phased to fit with the development of the airport. Nearly seventy years after that exchange rail access remains limited and the third runway is still under discussion.

During February 1946 the National Insurance Bill, which also had broad bipartisan support, had its second reading. Attlee pointed out, however, that the Bill needed to be seen in the context of broader reform, and that its success depended on full employment and a high level of national production. Both at the second reading of the Bill and in a debate on manpower he stressed the broad themes of the government policy. In the latter debate he returned to the familiar refrain that he had never promised immediate and spectacular results. He had made about fifty or sixty speeches, he said, and in every one of them stressed that the period was going to be difficult. The government needed to rebuild battered homes, schools and factories and to restore the normal peacetime life of industry. It needed to refill shops and homes which had been depleted of reserves, to create an export trade on a greater scale than ever before and to fulfil essential requirements abroad. It was, as well, he stressed, to remember that there were unavoidable responsibilities abroad. After six years of war and many years of neglect this would be a long process. Meanwhile 100,000 personnel were being demobilised each week and the government expected, barring external disturbances, to reach its target for reduction by the end of 1946.47

The issue of demobilisation became the weapon most used by the Opposition to discredit the government. This was not an abstract issue but one that affected the majority of families in Britain and, therefore, had immediate appeal.

The most important feature of Labour’s first-year programme was the Bill for the nationalisation of the coal industry. From the outset it was handled at speed; when Gaitskell moved the third reading of the Bill, he admitted that it had been hastily prepared.48

As early as October 1945 the Lord President’s Committee had resolved that speed was vital in order to demonstrate the government’s determination to the miners. The Bill was to be as short as possible and with terms sufficiently wide to avoid the necessity of legislation to amend it later. For example, to keep the Bill simple, there was no intention at this stage to provide for the nationalisation of distribution.49 Shinwell hoped to introduce the Bill before the Christmas recess and before the end of November he submitted a Bill, ‘substantially in its completed form’.50

Throughout the deliberations of Morrison’s committee Attlee was kept in the picture by Douglas Jay, who wrote incisive analyses of the Bill’s virtues and perceived shortcomings. The extent to which Attlee trusted Jay is clear from the simple manner of acceptance of Jay’s suggestions, normally ‘Yes – CRA’ scrawled at the foot of the page. Jay was a brilliant economist and a Prize Fellow of All Souls. At the end of his time at All Souls in 1937 he published The Socialist Case, for which Attlee wrote a foreword to the second edition in 1946. Jay’s analytical, humane and common-sense approach to economic issues appealed greatly to the Prime Minister. As a result the notation ‘Mr Jay to comment’ appears frequently on memoranda dealing with economic questions.

Jay was favoured by Attlee principally because he was not afraid to be the bearer of unwelcome news. Late in November he sent the Prime Minister an unsparing analysis of the problems facing the coalmining industry. ‘On present policy and prospects’, he wrote, ‘we seem threatened with a chronic shortage at home, and no exports whatsoever for some years, if not the lifetime of the present parliament.’ He questioned the committee’s assumptions about recruitment, pointing out that mining was the one industry in which the labour force was still falling. This he believed to be the root cause of low production. The fundamental question to be asked was, ‘Shall we raise earnings to the level necessary to restore coal exports? Or shall we abandon our coal export trade in order to adhere to a wage level which is really only an accidental survival from quite different conditions?’ There was a danger of ‘drifting into nationalisation while averting our eyes from this awkward problem’.51 It took some courage to speak out so critically of the handling of a central plank of the government’s programme, and it is to his credit that he did – and to Attlee’s that he continued to seek Jay’s advice.

The difficulties in the ‘speedily prepared’ Bill were ironed out by 393 amendments and the third reading was eventually moved in May 1946. Gaitskell commented that in discussions of the question of coal nine out of ten Tories had expressed the view to him that ‘There is nothing to be done about coal except nationalise it.’52 As he predicted, there was acceptance of the principle on both sides of the House and the third reading was passed by 324 votes to 143.

The 45th Labour Party Conference met in Bournemouth in early June. On the second day Attlee addressed the conference to report on the government’s ten months in office. The first steps of nationalisation had been completed; the Cable and Wireless Bill and the Civil Aviation Bill were in committee. He spoke with confidence, assuring the delegates that the government was proceeding at a reasonable pace, not overloading the machinery but planning ahead. Seventy-three Bills had been introduced and fifty-five had already received the Royal Assent.

The Opposition, he said disparagingly, had gone to the country with a five-year plan. It would have taken them five years, he said, to have done what the Labour government had done in ten months. He credited the Parliamentary Party, saying ‘I have never known a Parliamentary Party with so many Members so capable of putting Labour’s point across.’

There were, he admitted, problems that were less easy to solve: demobilisation and housing. The building programme was moving forward, Attlee assured his audience, but it could only advance if the materials and manpower were available. There had been progress, and this would continue steadily.

Steadiness was the central theme of his address. Many difficulties at home had been foreseen; many, equally, were unforeseeable. Britain’s responsibilities, he continued to maintain in 1946, were both to Britons and to other countries. Food shortages, coal and transport shortages were foreign problems as much as home problems.

We are holding a firm balance between our responsibilities to our own people and our responsibilities to peoples of the world, and we are striving, and with success, to get the world food problem viewed not as that of a scramble for every country to get its own, but for all of us to overcome these years of dearth and, in the future, to have a world that is free from want.53

It was a difficult balance. Attlee’s insistence on ensuring adequate food in other countries led directly to shortages at home. In May he sent Morrison to Washington to request the Americans, whose food was not rationed, to ship grain to avoid famine in Germany and India. Washington agreed, provided Britain would forego 200,000 tons of her wheat allocation in September. A less than attractive deal threatened to cause a furore when Morrison announced the result of his negotiations in the House.54 He succeeded in provoking Tory anger, American concern – as they claimed that this was a proposal not a commitment – and the resignation of Sir Ben Smith, the Minister for Food, furious that Morrison, and not he, had been made responsible for solving the shortage. As an added demerit, the shortfall of 200,000 tons of wheat guaranteed that bread rationing would be introduced.

Appointing John Strachey to succeed Smith and accepting that bread rationing, while unpopular, was another necessary hardship for the time being, Attlee refused to be pressured, even when the Opposition seized on this as another example of lack of planning. Morrison, by contrast, perhaps perceiving another opportunity for him to replace Attlee, certainly aware of the adverse effect on popular opinion that bread rationing would cause, on 19 July demanded a Cabinet meeting the following day. Attlee, in Durham with four other Cabinet members, brushed this aside, refusing to allow the bread crisis, despite its dramatic symbolism, to divert him from his course. Bread rationing was introduced on 22 July and remained in force for two years.

The alarm generated by the crisis, however, convinced him that several of his ministers were finding it hard to stay the course. Morrison, he felt, had broken ranks in fuelling the mood of alarm; there were signs that Bevin and Cripps were suffering from overwork. The Cabinet suddenly had the air of a group of tired old men and he was impatient to promote younger men. Much encouraged by Gaitskell’s handling of the coal nationalisation and, after a year, having had time to assess the new talent at his disposal, he decided that the time was right for a Cabinet reshuffle. At the same time he would implement two changes that had long been in his mind: to reduce the size of the Cabinet and to subordinate the three service ministers to a Minister of Defence.

Two speeches from 1946 illustrate Attlee’s resolve in the first seventeen months of the Labour government. Speaking in Newcastle in May he told his listeners:

In November, in a speech at the Mansion House, he again spelled out HMG’s refusal to be diverted. He had always warned that hard times lay ahead, but the government recognised the problems and was competent to solve them. Demobilisation was on track with 4,000,000 already released; exports were surging but it would take longer than fifteen months to undo the damage of six years. The target was 175 per cent of the pre-war level and the balance of payments was a problem. Food remained a challenge, as did reconstruction, particularly given the shortages of timber, iron, coal and steel.56

It had been a remarkable year and Attlee had patiently tackled issues as they arose. He remained steadfastly loyal to Labour’s election promises while many around him wavered. He ended 1946 with his hands firmly on the levers of power, having greatly improved his personal standing in the country.

ENDNOTES

1 Macmillan, Tides of Fortune 1945–55, p. 54.

2 Macmillan, Tides of Fortune 1945–55, p. 55.

3 Peter Hennessy, ‘A Sense of Architrechtonics: Clement Attlee, 1945–1951.’ Lecture at Gresham College, 7 November 1995.

4 MS. Attlee dep. 18. Also CAC: ATLE 1/17 for a detailed list of appointments and committees. He also described the process as similar to selecting a cricket team. Morrison was an all-rounder, Cripps and Bevin could score a century on a good day. Bevan was a fast bowler (‘There’s no one to touch Nye when he’s got his length. Doesn’t always find it though.’) Williams, Nothing So Strange, p. 233.

5 TNA: PREM 8/432, Memorandum of 8 October 1947 illustrates his views on brevity and the best use of time.

6 The Times, 15 June 1957.

7 Dalton, High Tide and After, pp. 17–18.

8 Lord Wilson, ‘Attlee, the Reasonable Revolutionary’. Cited by Hennessy, Lecture at Gresham College.

9 Dellar, Attlee As I Knew Him, p. 36.

10 Dellar, Attlee As I Knew Him, p. 21.

11 The PM’s concept of ‘overlords’ is set out in a memorandum after a Cabinet reshuffle in a Note on ‘Cabinet Business and Procedure’, 18 October 1947, TNA: PREM 8/432, CP (47) 288.

12 Morgan, Labour People, p. 139.

13 TNA: PREM 8/35, fol. 448, CP (45) 112, 14 August 1945.

14 Hansard, HC Deb, 16 August 1945, col. 101.

15 The Public Papers of the Presidents, Harry S. Truman, 1945, 107, p. 235.

16 Hansard, HC Deb, 24 August 1945, cols. 956–957.

17 Cable traffic between CRA and Mackenzie King, TNA: PREM 8/35 fols. 27Ff, 25, 17–31 August 1945.

18 Sir Norman Brook to CRA, TNA: PREM 8/35, fol. 432Ff, 23 August 1945.

19 Keynes, ‘Our Overseas Financial Prospects’, cited by Radice, The Tortoise and the Hares, p. 136.

20 TNA: PREM 8/35, fols 427ff, 23 August 1945.

21 TNA: PREM 8/35, fols 422ff, 31 August 1945. Harrod, The Life of John Maynard Keynes, p. 596.

22 TNA: PREM 8/35, fol. 403, T.77/45, 1 September 1945.

23 Bodleian: MS. Attlee, dep. 22.

24 Dalton, High Tide and After, pp. 74–75.

25 TNA: PREM 8/35 passim, especially fols. 334, 254–258, 250, 194–198. Only on 22 November (folio 113) did Dalton grasp that Britain would receive no interest-free loan.

26 TNA: PREM 8/35, fol. 295, NABOB 177, Keynes to Dalton, 18 October 1945.

27 TNA: PREM 8/35, fol. 318, NABOB 132, Keynes to Dalton, 9 October 1945.

28 Hansard, HC Deb, 6 December 1945, cols 2662–70.

29 Harold Wilson, A Prime Minister on Prime Ministers, p. 297.

30 TNA: PREM 8/35 fols. 259–262, 208, 77. Compared with Dalton’s wishful thinking, Jay’s memoranda are models of clarity.

31 As It Happened, pp. 228–229.

32 Hansard, HC Deb, 29 October 1945, cols. 44–50.

33 Hansard, HC Deb, 29 October 1945, col. 153.

34 Hansard, HC Deb, 6 December 1945, col 2530.

35 Hansard, HC Deb, 6 December 1945, col 2534.

36 Harris, Attlee, p. 317. From a conversation between Harris and Callaghan.

37 Hansard, HC Deb, 6 December 1945, cols. 2551–52.

38 Roy Jenkins, Purpose and Policy, pp. 27ff.

39 Giles Radice’s portrait of the Labour leaders, The Tortoise and the Hares.

40 Williams, ‘Nothing So Strange’, p. 135.

41 Attlee later charged Churchill with treating the House of Commons as a place where he went to make speeches.

42 The Observer, 9 February 1960.

43 TNA: PREM 8/136, Cabinet Meeting, CM (46) 4th Conclusions, 10 January 1946.

44 TNA: PREM 8/136, CP (46) 110, 14 March 1946.

45 TNA: PREM 8/136, Winster to CRA, 4 January 1946.

46 TNA: PREM 8/136, CRA to Winster, 7 January 1946.

47 Hansard, HC Deb, 27 February 1946, cols 1953–54.

48 Hansard, HC Deb, 20 May 1946, col 45.

49 TNA: PREM 8/295, LP (45) 35th Meeting, 2 October 1945.

50 TNA: PREM 8/295, LP (45) 238, 21 November 1945.

51 TNA: PREM 8/295, Jay to CRA, 26 November 1945. He also took a view diametrically opposed to that of Dalton when he argued that directors of nationalised industries should be paid on the same scale as their counterparts in private industry. It was irrelevant that the chairman of a nationalised concern would earn £10,000 a year, as against £5,000 for a Cabinet minister. The alternative to paying competitive salaries would be ‘the failure of the government’s general policy of nationalisation’. TNA: PREM 8/295, Jay to CRA, 10 December 1945.

52 Hansard, HC Deb, 20 May 1946, col 57.

53 Bodleian: MS. Attlee, dep. 38.

54 Hansard, HC Deb, 23 May 1946, col. 549.

55 Bodleian: MS. Attlee, dep. 36, 27 April 1946.

56 Bodleian: MS. Attlee, dep. 44, 9 November 1946.