The Election Landslide That Changed Britain

Thank you for listening to We Have Ways of Making You Talk.

Sign up to our Patreon to receive bonus content, live streams, and our weekly newsletter with money off books and museum visits as well.

Plus, early access to all live show tickets.

That's patreon.com/slash we have ways.

Attention, all small biz owners.

At the UPS store, you can count on us to handle your packages with care.

With our certified packing experts your packages are properly packed and protected

and with our pack and ship guarantee when we pack it and ship it we guarantee it because your items arrive safe or you'll be reimbursed visit the ups store.com slash guarantee for full details most locations are independently owned product services pricing and hours of operation may vary see center for details the ups store be unstoppable come into your local store today At blinds.com, it's not just about window treatments.

It's about you, your style, your space, your way.

Whether you DIY or want the pros to handle it all, you'll have the confidence of knowing it's done right.

From free expert design help to our 100% satisfaction guarantee, everything we do is made to fit your life and your windows.

Because at blinds.com, the only thing we treat better than windows is you.

Visit blinds.com now for up to 50% off with minimum purchase plus a professional measure at no cost.

Rules and restrictions apply.

There can be no doubt that socialism is inseparably interwoven with totalitarianism and the abject worship of the state.

Liberty in all its forms is challenged by the fundamental conceptions of socialism.

There is to be one state to which all are to be obedient in every act of their lives.

This state is to be the arch employer, the arts planner, the arch administrator and ruler, and the arts caucus boss.

A socialist state, once thoroughly completed in all its details and aspects, could not afford opposition.

Socialism is, in its essence, an attack upon the right of the ordinary man or woman to breathe freely without having a harsh, clumsy, tyrannical hand clapped across their mouths and nostrils.

But I will go farther.

I declare to you, from the bottom of my heart, that no socialist system can be established without a political police.

Many of those who are advocating socialism or voting socialists today will be horrified at this idea.

That is because they are short-sighted.

That is because they do not see where their theories are leading them.

No socialist government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently worded expressions of public discontent.

They would have to fall back on some form of gestapo.

No doubt very humanely directed in the first instance.

That was, of course, Winston Churchill in his June the 4th, 1945 election broadcast.

It's literally like he's in the...

And it's extraordinary, isn't it?

Yeah.

I've got to say, I think your church impersonation has got better.

I agree.

Over the many years.

And it's the sort, you know, he couldn't do his R's.

It's a slight lisp, isn't it?

Not lisp, it's actually the sort of couch in the mouth.

He had to really work on his voice and his oratorical expression.

But that was, of course, Winston Churchill in 1945.

And welcome to We have Ways of Making You Talk, the Second World War podcast with me, Al Murray, and James Holland.

Former comedian, according to Private Eye, I am.

Yeah, you're not anymore.

Yeah.

Not funny.

Not anymore.

I mean, and I think it's apposite that that was an article in Private Eye about Downing Street and that we're looking at the khaki election today.

And

I think.

I just want to reassure you that I still find you funny.

Well, that's a relief.

I mean, you know, you can always build on a fan base of one and work up.

I rest my case.

But I think what's interesting about

this part of the story of the Second World War, the khaki election and the arrival of Labour as finally as a sort of credible political force in British politics.

Yes, because there'd been the two Ramsey MacDonald governments, one in the 20s and one in the kind of early half of the 30s.

But there was a sense, wasn't there, that while Labour had become the kind of main opposition,

it was still a kind of a juvenile party.

Yes, exactly.

It's a phrase.

And had not known which way to jump in the late 1930s.

So openly pacifist elements of the party, other parts of the party that had sized the Nazis up, people very much on the left who wanted to accommodate, would do what the Soviet Union, would use the Soviet Union as their compass, really.

So there is the terrible problem on the left when Molotov-Ribbetrop happens in August of 1939, where people on the

far left literally, what do we do?

This isn't our war.

You know,

there is confusion, which is in the trade union movement as much as anywhere else.

And of course, you know, the trade union movement is at this point the core to the labor power as much as anything else and its ability to exert influence during the war itself.

But also there's the horns of the buffalo, aren't there?

Yeah.

The right wing and left wing.

That they almost meet again.

They sort of curl around and kind of meet again.

And the classic example of that is Oswald Mosley, who's a Labour MP, then probably goes over to the dark side and sets up the British Union fascists.

Having slithered all over the place, and, you know, at one point is working with Maynard Keynes on an economic plan.

Fascinating.

Before Mosley goes fash, does actually work with him.

So

there's the peculiar business with Mosley where, to some extent, he's done his homework.

Anyway, the thing about the 1945 election, though, it's characterised by lots of different things, isn't it?

People think of it as people in the forces swinging it.

Certainly there are people in the army who are very unhappy with the work of the Army Educational Board, getting the men to read the beverage report, sitting down and having discussions about what the new country will be like after the peace.

Yeah, yeah.

People at the top in the...

That is really happening.

That is genuinely happening.

Of quite how much attention Tommy Atkins at the back picking his nose is paying or how much he's taking in these ideas.

Obviously, we can never know.

Well, no, and obviously the people that have been writing diaries and letters are going to be a little bit more kind of of a literary bent and more likely to read it.

So it can give a sort of distorted view.

But I've certainly read personal accounts of people in Calcutta, you know, getting it and reading it and accounts of people in Sicily reading it.

Yeah, exactly.

And also the officers writing up these Army Educational Board meetings tend to be social democrats in their leaning and tend to be leaning in the direction of a Labour government.

But the thing to remember about the 45 election, and we've got some, there's some polling data we'll look at in a minute.

And obviously, polling is very, very different in the 1940s.

It's Gallup mainly.

It's very, very different to our understanding of polling.

The way they develop their samples, the way they ask their questions.

Do they?

In what way?

Oh, it's in its infancy.

They're just literally figuring it out.

Right, okay.

It's a brand new thing.

You've got mass observation as well, and they're sort of running alongside one another.

And the government are going to mass observation and asking.

Well, we should just remind people what mass observation is.

So this is set up by postgraduates in the 1930s to gauge the mood of the British public.

And they encourage people to write diaries and keep diaries and hand them in.

They get pseudonyms

for each person.

And they also do straw polls on the street, asking them sort of, you know, everyday questions.

And these are, you can still read all these.

All the collections are in the University of Sussex, but there are published books of them and they're all just absolutely fascinating.

And they sit in pubs and listen to what people are saying.

They do that as well.

They do a lot of evening.

Yes, they do that as well.

Which I think is, you know, it's literally man on clap and omnibus some of it, which I think is really, which is quite interesting.

But this is all new and in its infancy.

But what is clear is that people like Churchill, but they don't like the Conservative Party.

And we know it's a national government.

And, of course, the great virtue of the 1940s government is it is a national government.

And Labour of Attlee, basically, you can argue that it's Attlee that installs Churchill.

It's Attlee that goes, all right, fine, in May 1940, the politician we can work with in the Conservative Party is Winston Churchill.

Yeah, so what is it particularly about the Conservatives that the masses don't like?

Oh, it's their war.

They got us into this mess.

So it's not that they're all posh red trousers.

Well,

it's all tied up in that.

After all, the Tory pitch is the right to rule, isn't it?

That

we're the people who ought to be in charge because we've always been in charge.

It's a class aspect.

And also, yeah, it's their war.

They're the party of appeasement.

They're the party of the Great Depression, arguably.

And the problems with poverty and squalor that Labour have been fighting against in the decades preceding the war.

This is a chance to sort of reboot and restart and put the Conservative legacy behind people.

And Labour are doing this to go legit, to prove they can be part of a working government.

And the war is an amazing opportunity.

But also in political thinking, the war is an opportunity to prove that planning works, that state intervention in the economy works, that, you know, essentially what we would call Keynesianism works.

that it's a way of making society run more efficiently and that it's not an intrusion of the state, it's using the state for good and doing things more efficiently.

Labour, in their pitch in 1945, are very much talking about, you know, they're not saying socialism ideologically, they're saying it's the logical choice to make society run better, to improve your lives.

You need a planned economy and you need things planned, not the way things have been done before, not the old way.

And the Tories are absolutely tarred with being the old way of doing things.

What we should just remind everyone is it is the Conservatives, obviously, that are in power.

Yes.

They have been elected in power.

First was Stanley Baldwin.

Then he resigns and Chamberlain takes over.

Chamberlain is, obviously, the Neville Chamberlain is the Prime Minister when Britain goes to to war in September 1939.

And it is the Conservative Party that remains in power until the 10th of May.

When the 9th of May, Chamberlain resigns.

There is a new government that needs to be formed.

And the only way that can be formed is if it becomes a nationalist government, i.e.

with representatives from all the three major parties, the Liberals, Labour, and the Conservatives.

And Churchill takes over as Prime Minister with a war cabinet of five men, which includes Lord Halifax, who is a Tory peer, so he's in the House of Lords, Chamberlain who is obviously no longer Prime Minister but still a kind of titan of British politics and Conservative politics and two Labour men Clement Attlee and Arthur Greenwood.

Yeah, that's right.

And the war cabinet changes over the over the course of the war and the wider government also changes over the course of the war.

But Attlee and Greenwood remain in the inner sanctum of power in the nationalist government until 1945 in the Kharki election.

Yeah, that's right.

So that's just the context for this.

Yeah, this has very much been Labour have refused to work with Chamberlain up till this point, have refused to come into a national government once war breaks out.

And this is their opportunity.

And it's very much their approval that means that Churchill can be PM.

Exactly.

It is a coming together, the major political parties in the British state, but it is also Labour going, okay, if you want to proceed, you're going to have to include us.

And they're grabbing the moment because the thing to remember is these people are politicians and they're after power.

Because of course they are.

It's not.

But they also prove very effective on that.

And one of the things that's really important when you're going to form a government is you do need people who know what they're talking about.

And you need people of experience without wanting to get too political.

This is one of the sort of the headaches for reform, is that they don't have anyone who has any experience.

Should they suddenly, in four years' time, suddenly get to power.

They wouldn't have anyone with any ministerial experience whatsoever.

But, you know, that is, you know, regardless of what one's politics are, that's quite an issue.

But suddenly what you've got is, you know, Attlee and Greenwood and others prove themselves to be incredibly competent.

in the nationalist government.

You know, they do really, really good stuff.

As do, frankly, some of the Liberal ministers as well.

But this is what's interesting about churchill though is because although churchill's a busted flush politically within the conservative party he is deeply experienced you know he was chance exchequer he was minister for armaments in the first world war and before that and he'd been at the admiralty he is hugely experienced out of the emistry i think as well exactly so he's coming in with competence the fact that his party really doesn't like him is a different matter and it's so he's an outlier isn't he yeah and he absolutely has to work to fix relationships with the party him being massively popular obviously helps and he has huge public popularity again backbench MPs behave the way they always have done.

If they've got a very popular leader, they'll back him, won't they?

If the public really like the leader, they'll swing around behind him.

And Churchill's relationship with the Tory Party has to sort of alter.

And in 1940, after all, he's not leader of the party until after Chamberlain's death.

Chamberlain remains leader of the Conservative Party until he dies.

Can't he?

Yes, he does, yeah.

In November 1940.

Exactly.

And then Churchill, all right, fine.

I'll become leader of the party.

If I have to.

Yeah, yeah.

And because Churchill's been picking, not only has he crossed the floor to the Liberals, he came back.

So they really don't like him.

Well, he starts his parliamentary career as a liberal.

Yeah.

You know, he's a home secretary, isn't he?

In the late 1910s.

Because he sets up labor exchanges.

Yeah, that's right.

And he's responsible for national insurance in its embryonic form as well with Lloyd George.

Look, any politician who's been around as long as Winston Churchill will have worn many, many hats.

But the fact is, is by 1940, you know, he's backed Edward VIII, he's backed Indian independence.

He's refused Indian independence as an idea.

These are toxic positions one way or another.

His stroke of fortune is he's right about Nazi Germany.

He's right about the threat.

You know, the way things move and change.

Anyway, but the point is, if you look at the opinion polling data from 1943 to 1945, like Gallup, the Tories tend to be from July 43 all the way through to the election.

There's a swing up in the polling just before the Kharki election.

In July 43, they're on 33%, 31%,

31.5% in December 43, January 44, 28%,

27.5% in February 45.

So they're having a rough ride.

And Labour labor tend to be around 47, 45%.

Which is huge.

Yeah.

Across that whole period.

And in our system, first past the post, that's a great big express train coming at you, isn't it?

That's amazing.

The lowest they get to is 45%.

This is Labour.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The lowest they get is 45%.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

June 1945 and January 1944.

Isn't that interesting?

Yeah, it's amazing, isn't it?

And the Liberals, of course, have undergone this thing where the party has imploded completely when the general franchise comes in after the First World War.

The best they do is 15%, the worst they do is sort of 10.5%.

Which means the Labour lead is generally double figures.

It narrows as the end of the war comes and the election approaches, but then when the election actually happens, the lead widens again.

13.5% lead.

Yeah, yeah.

It's not a spoiler, this.

Labour get 49.7% of the vote in the khark election.

I mean, that's a huge number.

I mean, that's a landslide.

That's a crushing landslide.

It's quite clear that the public are now as radical as they ever have been.

Well, economic crisis and war do tend to throw politics up into the air.

Well, but it's interesting that in this instance they turn left.

You know, other populations have turned right in those sets of circumstances, haven't they?

Radicalized around a different issue.

Basically, what the war has done is it's ended the sort of the case against state intervention and state planning.

There's a case against it the whole time in the 30s, the political arguments of the 30s.

There's an idea that it's socialism is a bad thing.

And by 1945, people think, well, maybe it's not.

Maybe nationalization is a way forward.

Well,

I think for so many people, you know, the concept of socialism is kind of, you know, just a quarter of an inch left

to the right of communism.

Of course, it's not.

Yeah.

It's not as extreme as that.

And socialism in 1945 is not, it's a very different beast.

It's about slightly more centralized control.

It's about greater share of wealth and so on.

There's a lot of nationalization in things.

Yes.

What is the principle behind nationalization?

Well, the basic, you take the railways into public ownership.

So you take them off the old LNG.

But why would your voting man think that's a

good thing?

It's going to work better.

I mean, this is interesting because 54% of respondents are in favour of nationalising rail.

So that kind of maps pretty, that maps over the Labour 47%, doesn't it?

It's higher.

26% of people opposing.

And this is in the era of, is your journey really necessary?

You know, where basically they're trying to tell you not to travel by train.

I mean,

why?

Well, because then you're clogging it up.

Oh, I see.

Only necessary journeys, Jim.

Because there aren't that many cars.

Yeah, yeah.

The roads aren't all Tom McAdams at this point.

And

the railways are just overwhelmed by the huge amount of people that are using them, going in and out of cities.

But it's quite a sales pitch, isn't it?

Is your journey really necessary?

Please don't take the train if you can possibly avoid it.

That's amazing.

But you do have 56% of the population.

They want radical reform and they want society to be rebuilt.

Once you're over half, it's irresistible, isn't it?

Politically.

But how much do you really think the beverage report makes a difference?

Well, because I know about the cues going around the sort of, you know, His Majesty's Stationery Office building in Whitehall, you know, waiting for it to be published and everyone wanting to read it.

But, you know, does it have a really big impact?

Yeah, it does.

It absolutely does, doesn't it?

Yeah, and people who were able to listen to me have a real wormhole chat with Kit Covell about this.

Is that it comes after Alamein, Jim?

Yeah.

Timing is everything in politics.

And of course.

The beverage report materializes just after Alamein.

So there's this feeling that we've turned a corner.

We can win this.

We know how to win now.

And so we can look beyond.

Yes, because it's published at the very beginning of January, isn't it?

And it goes to the Parliament about that time.

Yeah.

November, I think it is, is when it's presented to Parliament, isn't it?

42.

So what you've got is this sense of we're now going forward.

And so what is the peace to be?

And, you know, it performs that dual function is that Jonathan Finnell talks about, is that it performs a dual function.

It says to the citizen and the soldier and his family what the deal is now, what's to come.

And Beveridge is very clever at like basically including everybody in the idea.

So he does say, you know, this is the, it's not a bottomless pit.

This is the thing you've got to pay into.

So if you're a Tory, you aren't going, it's something for nothing.

It's just one great big freebie.

No, sure.

And how much do you think the kind of sort of flattening of class structure had played a part in the war?

Because, you know, suddenly you have got grammar school boys as officers and so on.

And you've also got public school boys in the ranks.

I think that commingling is incredibly important.

It's kind of like there's a social democratic experiment going on as a result of conscripting vast chunks of people.

Yes, but I also wonder whether a lot of it is also to do with the interaction with other troops.

Yeah.

You know, I mean, Australians and New Zealanders are nothing like as deferential to officers as they are in the British Army.

Yeah.

Ditto-Canadians.

Yeah.

And of course, particularly so Americans.

And of course, what the British public and British armed forces are also seeing in the Americans is a highly modernized world.

I mean, you know, America is the most modern country in the world.

Britain might have started the war with the largest empire and the largest trading empire and consider itself top dog.

But it's hard to sustain that when you're you're seeing Americans with their modern clothes, their modern kit, chewing gum, you know, nylons and lots of money.

And also, your propaganda has swung wholly behind the Soviet Union.

Right.

From a nation point of view, you're suddenly more left-leaning.

Yeah, yeah.

And you're saying the Soviet Union isn't so bad after all.

And in fact, a great big planned economy is delivering incredible results.

Look at their sacrifice.

These left-wing ideas are clearly something to believe in.

And there's such sympathy for the Soviet Union.

And we talked about this the other day.

You know, the idea that you'd turn turn the war around and fight the Soviets at the end of the Second World War.

Yeah, forget it.

Forget it, because people love them.

They love them at this point.

And they love them.

So it's being exposed to all these other things.

And also, I think you really can't underestimate the shadow of the failure of Dunkirk.

The initial ruling class entry into the war is a failure.

And that comes on top of the First World War and slaughtered.

Exactly.

The ruling class leading the nation into this, out of this golden age of

Edwardian britain and you've got that then you've got then you've got economic downturns in the 1920s you know the general strike of 1926 then you've got the wall street crash and the depression and the class divides in the 1930s are more stark than they've ever been before well and they're the language of politics on the left as well they they speak explicitly in class terms in a way that we don't anymore then then you know the ruling class get you into another war and then dunkirk is such a disaster and guilty men you know Michael Foote after all.

Yes, yes, yes.

And the influence of guilty men, guilty men sets the tone, I think.

And then the way the war runs and all these different things that are in the mix are what leads the public in the direction they're going.

In January 1945, although people are leaning against the Conservative Party, 72% of people are satisfied with the government's conduct of the war and particularly Churchill's personal popularity.

So as they go into this election, they've got this terrible, terrible dilemma, the Tories, which is that people really like Winston Churchill.

But they hate them.

But they hate them.

I wonder whether what you're seeing in the Kharki election of 1945 is this, suddenly everything coming together.

The residual blame for the slaughter of the First World War, even though Britain came out victorious.

The kind of economic downturns in the 1930s, the sense even before 1939 that the British Empire is very much on the wane, free India and all the rest of it and so on.

That reaches Britain.

So you've got a softening of class structures already.

Then you have the softening of class structures because of the democratization of the war and the fact that you know everyone's needed and so people are rubbing shoulders in a way that they perhaps weren't before the war then you have the kind of interaction with overseas troops international troops and especially so the americans and you've got the fact that you've had a labor government labor politicians involved in the government add it all together and the sense that the world has changed irreversibly by the experience of the war.

And after all, let's not forget it, it's the most cataclysmic war the world has ever known.

And Britain has been at the forefront right from the start, right to the end.

Add all that together.

Suddenly, you've got a perfect storm if you're the Conservatives.

Yeah.

You know, suddenly it doesn't seem quite so surprising after all.

Well, that's a very good point, though, Jim, that you say it is the most cataclytic war.

Because in my lifetime, the Falklands War is a thing I remember from when I was like 14, right?

And that changed absolutely everything.

And that's like five weeks.

Save Thatcher, didn't it?

Save Thatcher completely and embedded the Thatcherite revolution in government as a result.

And that's very, very small beer, but I can't.

Let's do Jilly Cooper novels and everything.

Exactly.

So basically, what happens, there's going to have to be an election.

You have this incredible thing where Max Beaverbrook says to Churchill, he says, we should have a referendum, not call an election, because he's only really talking to Beaverbrook and Brendan Bracken.

That's where he's getting his political advice.

He's not engaged with public opinion at all.

He's not really been interested because he's got, as he sees it, bigger fish to fry, really.

We all know why we're in this war.

Too bad.

I'm not going to pay attention to stuff.

The public like him, but not the party.

They feel it's time for a change.

Everything's being skewed left by the experience of the war.

So we'll take a break.

we'll come back and look at what campaign strategies the parties adopted.

Welcome back to Weird Ways of Making You Talk, where we're getting to grips.

We don't normally do politics, do we?

So let's look at the campaign strategies that the parties adopted.

So the Conservative Party's campaign is Conservative Party, what Conservative Party?

They don't campaign.

Churchill campaigns on a national ticket.

He just leaves them out of the, you know, out of the whole thing.

And the Conservative Party.

Yeah, exactly.

Natural.

It's like sort of muttered very quietly.

And his manifesto is Winston Churchill's declaration of policy to the electors.

And the slogan is, vote national, help him finish the job.

So they just don't even mention the Conservative National.

Okay, that suggests they know they've got a problem.

Oh, they know.

Oh, they know.

They know they know they know.

But they're thinking he's so popular, right?

And Max Beaverbrook is saying, don't do it because you're going to lose.

Well, Well, first of all, Beaverbrook, like I said, does thinks...

Become a dictator.

Become a dictator.

I mean, yes, JR, our producer's just popped up.

If you think of him as an independent candidate, he actually did very well versus party politics.

Yeah, as a one-man band, he plays the best tunes, doesn't he?

But, you know, campaign meetings have him in his military uniform.

He does mass rallies, touring the country.

Although there's a fair deal of heckling and booing and stuff going on, you know,

it's quite lively.

He has backing from Beaverbrook's papers, The Express, The Evening Standard, News of the World.

And it's all about the dangers of Labour's welfare state and socialism.

Yes, and a new Gestapo.

And the Gestapo gaff, which we'll get to in a minute.

I mean, what's interesting, though, if you read it, don't read it because I've done it for you, ladies and gentlemen, it does include, this is interesting, a promise to create a comprehensive health service covering the whole range of medical treatment from the general practitioner to the specialist and from the hospital to convalescence and rehabilitation.

And to reintroduce legislation for this purpose in the new parliament.

So the idea that the Labour Party have hijacked the Beveridge Report and the Conservative haven't is nonsense.

Yeah, really.

But Labour are more associated with those ideas.

Labour are more associated with the idea of a clean sweep.

They are better positioned and they've done a better job of positioning themselves, but they're better positioned.

Got it.

But it's interesting, you know, there is a pledge for a National Health Service, but what is lacking is it's not saying from the cradle to the grave.

It's got none of the political grease around it to sell it in.

And anyway, no one trusts the Conservative Party anymore.

They might trust him.

And they ignore the record of the Conservative Party and leave it out.

There's nothing in the manifesto about their actual record.

it's whereas labor able to associate themselves with the success in the war of planning and a planned economy and and that idea and i think we can't leave the soviet union out of this in terms of the idea that maybe it does work maybe socialism does work because look they're winning yeah and there is the gestapo gaff yeah yeah yeah yeah which you mentioned in the yeah which i read in the thing yes when you when you brought churchill back into the room yeah exactly there's lots of argument about how significant this is but it does encapsulate how out of touch he is you just can't you can't talk in those terms can you at this stage?

No, you can't.

And things have been pretty fruity.

The British are a mild and moderate people.

They don't put up with people like Gestapo.

We don't do revolution and extremism.

Although, part of the situation here is that it's Labour that's pulled the plug on the national government.

After VE Day, there's a party conference at the end of May, and they go, we can't, now the war with Germany is over, we cannot continue as part of this government.

It's got to change.

There's been too much water under the bridge.

We've got to change.

And they really, by the end of the war, they really hate being in coalition as part of the national government.

The Labour people really don't like it.

they find it frustrating.

They're like, we need to be set free to do our own thing, and the war is holding us up.

And they very much feel like that.

So, when they, you know, they aren't going to wait for the end of the war in Japan, because after all, how long will that be?

Just because, and it's the thing we've gone on about in our Victorian Europe stuff, just because we know it's three months, they certainly don't think that in May 1945.

If you're a you know, trade union official, you don't think that you, you know, of course, you don't know about the absolutely

Attlee, though, deals with the Gestapo broadcast the next evening, and it's really clever what he says.

Yes, brilliant.

It highlights the contrast between Winston Churchill, the great leader in a war of a united nation, and Mr.

Churchill, the party leader of the Conservatives.

So, bam.

There you go.

Yeah, yeah.

That's who he is, folks.

He's a Tory.

You know, lots of people think, well, he's just basically torched his entire reputation as a national leader by coming down into party politics.

He's no longer a statesman.

He's just another politician.

And actually, lots of people all over the country remember as unreliable, as

difficult, and having a tattered reputation in the 30s.

I mean, it's interesting, though.

Julian Amory is so impressed with this rebuttal, he thinks he wonders whether he's a conservative at all.

You know, Chips Channon reports that his colleagues are cock a hoop at Churchill's speech, because Chip Channan's wrong about everything.

Absolutely, everything.

He's completely reliable.

If you want an arrow pointing at directly the wrong opinion, Chips Channon will be the man to fire it.

Reliably, every time.

Every single time.

There's Cuthbert Hedlam, who's a veteran Tory MP from Newcastle.

I mean, what's interesting is places we think of as solid Labour from way back are solid Tory.

You know, working-class, the working-class Tory vote is a very real thing in the 1920s and 1930s.

He says he thought the speech might have not appealed to the sensible people, but nonetheless recognise

there are few sensible people,

and that the party's rank and file would no doubt welcome a good fighting speech.

And there you have an example, and we've seen this in recent years, where a leader appeals to his party, but not to the country, and then is amazed when the country says no thanks.

We've had a lot of that in politics.

And speaking to your party in the time of a general election is generally a waste of time.

You've got to speak to everybody, haven't you?

Yeah, of course.

So to see Churchill, who so many people regard as a consummate politician, making such a basic error, I think is quite interesting.

And there's Major David Renton, who's running as a national liberal candidate in Huntingtonshire.

He thought the speech was simply a joke.

Amazing.

So there's mixed views.

And the thing is, is no one really knows how this lands.

49% of the people are reported listening to Churchill's broadcast during the election, but we don't really know how it lands.

And anyway, I think the thing we've seen in the polling data is people's minds are made up, right?

You know, and you look at our last general election here, people had made their minds up that the Tory government, the Sunak government had to go.

And so the sort of the wobbles and errors, I mean, I think him leaving D-Day early made made him look foolish, but he was already toast.

And so the Gestapo gaff, you can probably weigh like that, that Churchill, they've had it.

The Tories have had it by this point.

Yeah.

Yeah, I can't see how this would have made it.

I think this is just sort of, you know, it's icy on the cake.

Yeah, it underlines it, it doesn't it?

And then Labour's campaign, it's an active campaign.

It's focused on social reform, housing, debt, rebuilding the country.

Well, that's not forgotten.

You know, half the country's in ruins.

I mean, all the cities, the cities are still huge piles of rubble.

Yeah.

You know, the last V2 is in March.

Yep.

I think in beckenham in kent yeah you know so it's incredibly recent that they've been under fire yeah the country is run down worn out

looking bashed about a shadow of its former glorious past and a party that's saying you know we're going to rebuild britain in a kind of new new world that's exciting isn't it new jerusalem new jerusalem yeah new jerusalem yeah yeah and so you can you completely see they're also holding large meetings aren't they and they're canvassing in industrial areas and union halls that's right and again stressing post-war housing, job security, you know, a proper land fit for heroes rather than the empty promises of the First World War of 1918.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Bevin's, you know, touring Ernie Bevin, for instance, he's touring constituencies.

He recounts the condition of the working man.

So basically, what he's saying is we're not going back to the 30s.

We're not going back to poverty.

We're not going back to the way things were.

I think what's interesting, though, is absolutely every single person in this election campaigning at that level, the people who've been cabinet ministers or been ministers, they know actually that when the peace comes, how broke the country is and how little room for maneuver they've really got.

And they know that.

And the last thing you want to do is be in power.

Yeah, exactly.

Let some other mug deal with it.

Well, exactly.

They know rationing is going to have to continue.

They know austerity is going to be the order of the day.

And yet they are also at the same time going around promising a new Jerusalem.

So that's politics, though, right?

I think it's very interesting that all of these people know perfectly well, like, what a fix they're in, what a bind they're in, but they're going to campaign for this bold future.

And the Labour campaign centers on its manifesto is called Let Us Face the Future Together.

And they build that idea around the beverage welfare programme of dealing with want, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness, as he, as he called them.

And they're promising full employment, aren't they?

Free secondary education, national health service, of course, famously, you know, finally introduced by Nye Bevin.

Nationalization of key industries.

And they're emphasizing their own competence

and their own unity, but also the fact that they have been in government.

It gives them, you know, they've now got experience you know attlee and and and others who've been involved in the in the wider cabinet as well as the war cabinet you know they can bring that experience to bear and their campaign also completely leans into the tory dilemma chia churchill vote labor is one of their slogans yeah

i mean it's cheeky yeah it's good though it's it's it's cheeky but good yeah and they're it's all about winning the peace then the liberal the liberal party is archibald sinclair and if people look up what archibald sinclair archibald sinclair looks like so archetypical of a smooth British liberal politician from the middle of the 20th century.

He was very good.

He was very good as Minister for Air.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

But basically, they campaign as moderates who've supported the national government.

They run a low-key campaign.

They're overshadowed by the two main parties.

And it's the absolutely classic liberal campaign this.

Sinclair loses his seat, but 800,000 more people vote liberal.

But because they've got...

first past the post, they're poor spread, they gain fewer seats.

So it's the classic liberal thing of they get a swing to them but it amounts to nothing yeah you know so hanging over all of this as i said i mentioned a moment ago is that everyone knows everyone in politics knows the country's broke they know whatever promises they make are going to result in the continuation of rationing price controls and all the other wartime structures they've the country's faced they know they're in for a long haul they know they're in for the long haul but 84 of voters have polled before the election have made up their minds that's amazing it is isn't it it's incredible one thing we need to talk about is the electorate there's not been a general election since 1935 that's the other thing to remember.

10 years.

10 years.

Chamberlain had no mandate, as we would see it.

Churchill had no mandate, which is part of the argument for having an election to refresh the mandate.

There's 8 million new voters who've come into play since the last general election.

Just so everyone knows, you know, Britain's population is about 44 million in 1945.

Exactly.

And it's people, men and women over 21 who could vote.

As I said, the last general election in 1935.

So you've had a whole generation coming of age during the war while these arguments we've been talking about have been playing themselves out.

And I think that's really significant too into what happens in the electorate.

And you need a residential qualification for election on January 31st, 1945.

Well, that's a bit awkward, isn't it?

Yeah, because people have been bombed out.

Yeah, and also, and if you've been in the army for four years and you've been all around, you haven't got home.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

And two-thirds of service personnel are entitled to cast a vote.

And two-thirds of those who are entitled to cast a vote do cast a vote.

That's amazing, isn't it?

Yeah.

Because I guess

if you've got to be 21 to vote, you've got loads of 18 and 19 rolls and 20 rolls in your arms.

So, so, so, which I think they've been fighting for it, and they're not allowed to vote.

Exactly.

Which I think chips away a little at the idea that it's the services who win it, because after all, there's a whole load of people who are in who have no voice, which is, which is amazing.

Particularly if you're now, from our point of view, 80 years later, painting it's a war for democracy.

Well, hold on a minute.

You know, Tommy Atkins, 19 in Burma, has no vote.

There's always ironies to look at.

And then, for instance, so in Plymouth, you have 15% of the electorate as are service personnel so that's enough to swing a seat right yeah lower rates elsewhere where the population's in flux because after all the population is in flux because people have been bombed out they're moving and and people are moving all the time because of the having to move house because of the war so of the 25 million 85 978 men and women who voted in 1945 only 1 701 000 so 6.8 percent were in the services that's interesting isn't it article seemed it was more than that yeah well but that's because as i said two-thirds of the people in the service is entitled to vote and two-thirds do vote.

So that chips away at the bigger figure, right?

And there's all these youngsters we were talking about.

One of the arguments you will read is that, nevertheless, it's the families are part of the picture.

Labour has an advert of one of their adverts is let them finish the job with new houses and jobs.

You have this idea, and it's Jonathan Finnell who particularly makes this argument.

It's not just the soldier who's voting.

He's writing home to his family and saying, vote, Labour, please.

He's writing to his family.

His family are also part of this phenomenon of the Army Educational Board educating people, you know, the sort of outbreak of socialism in the Army.

It's not just the soldiers, it's their families, and it's the relate, you know, it's the idea that they're working towards something new together as a people.

There's a cartoon of a Tommy in the Daily Mirror offering a wreath labeled Peace and Victory in Europe, and he's all patched up.

And he's saying, here, here you are, don't lose it again.

So there's very much

this idea.

There's a letter from an NCO in Italy that says, Yeah, I love this.

This is brilliant, isn't it?

Will you read it, Gordon?

Yeah.

For God's sake, if you have to vote before I arrive, don't give it to the government.

Vote for the Labour candidate, even if he's only a rag and bone merchant.

Well, we know how much Tommies were enjoying the Italian campaign.

Yeah, well, there we are.

There we are.

It's interesting that this takes anyone by surprise, I think.

People now go, how on earth could Winston Churchill lose in the election at the end of the Second World War?

Well, well, well, you know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You've brilliantly unpicked this.

And, you know, it seems amazing that he could even have hoped to have won it.

Yeah, exactly.

There's tons in play.

And then, of course,

it's interesting, though, isn't it?

Britain can hold a general election in 1945.

No, no, no, it's really, really impressive, I think.

It's extraordinary, isn't it?

Yeah, it really is.

You know, because actually holding an election, you know, does require campaigning, but it also requires casting of votes.

And, you know, those votes have to be organized.

An electoral role

and an electoral roll and all that kind of malarkey.

With all the dislocation that's happened, it's absolutely incredible.

Yeah.

And it happens pretty seamlessly, doesn't it?

All things considered.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

So the candidates, there's a total of 1,683 candidates.

They're standing for 640 seats.

Yeah.

624 national, excuse me,

Conservative.

604 Labour, 307 Liberals.

23 Commonwealthers and 21 Communists.

With a remainder, they're independents and independent Labour Partyers and Scottish, Irish, and Welsh nationalists and what have you.

But a sample of Conservative and Labour candidates suggests that there are quite a lot of common characteristics.

Overwhelmingly male.

You know, Nancy Astor, you know, broke the mold in the 1920s, but hasn't done much more than that.

Fewer than 5% of women and relatively young, which I think is interesting.

Average age 46.

Yeah.

That's actually younger than I would have thought.

Yeah.

Yes, you think of them as oldies and 60s because you'd have thought a lot of the 40s would be away, away in the war, wouldn't you?

Yeah.

Half had seen military service, which I, again, I think is interesting, isn't it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, 24 MPs lose their lives during the war in uniform.

Including Flash Kellett, the former commander of the Show with Rangers Yeomanry.

Yeah.

They go out to Palestine in 1940.

He's killed in Tunisia in early 1943.

Yeah.

And then the outcome is Labour winner, historic landslide, 393 seats, the Conservatives, 197.

I mean, that's whopping.

It's entirely emphatic.

12-point slip swing, one of the largest ever.

You know, the analysis is that Labour have planned very well for this election, and it's their appeal to post-war ideals more convincing than the Conservative call to finish the war.

It's about winning the peace, rebuilding Britain.

You know, you've got Labour on 49.7% of the vote, as we said at the start.

The Tories on 36.2% of the vote.

The Liberals on 9% of the vote,

losing seats.

And in Churchill's seat in Woodford, an Independent got 10,000 votes.

That's absolutely amazing.

So there is pushback.

It is a shot for Churchill, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it absolutely is.

He's completely...

Well, not least because it means he now has to come back from the Potsdam Conference and hand over to Vatley.

And all that power, you know, and his personal management of that level, of the very high level of things, gone.

It is as dramatic, isn't it?

I think as Roosevelt to Truman, this change.

Yes.

Yes.

And I think, and I also think it's a not dissimilar scale in terms of both Churchill and Roosevelt have this enormous, you know, geopolitical understanding.

They're men of the world.

They understand international politics and how the world goes around.

And they both have,

Churchill sort of strong-armed slightly into the Atlantic Treaty, but buys into the Rooseveltian post-war vision for a kind of long-term peace.

There's absolutely no question about it, you know, champion of freedoms and liberalism and all the rest of it.

But Attlee is also, despite being in the war cabinet, is also, you know, first and foremost, a domestic politician, just as Truman was, and has to kind of man up and kind of snatch the kind of the seriousness of the situation, the critical burden that's fallen upon his shoulders as the new prime minister, very, very quickly and does so, just as Truman does so.

So, yeah, I I do think there's quite a lot of parallels.

And, you know, he's also a very sort of genial fellow as well.

Yeah.

I mean, the main, I suppose the main difference between him and Truman is that because Attlee's been deputy prime minister right at the heart of it, he's exhausted.

All the Labour people, one of the things that then plagues the Labour government as they go into the late 40s is they're all worn out.

They're all absolutely knackered from being in government at a time of such colossal intensity.

And so they do end up out of steam, out of ideas and out of puff, really, because

and also because, as we've said before, the war may have ended, but the economic problems that it's brought are only right there to then have to deal with.

Well, I mean, clearly, I mean, Labour does the Conservatives a huge favour because they come back in a power in 1950 or whatever.

Yeah.

And Churchill is elected.

And they've had a chance to kind of sort of take a deep breath.

And they haven't, you know, they haven't got to deal with the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and all the kind of horrors that come with that.

Yeah, it's interesting.

But honestly,

that's fantastic.

I mean, that's a tour de force.

It's just

so, so interesting.

It is, it is, isn't it?

And I think we often just leave it out when we're looking at the war.

And I think sometimes, after all, what's going on in the Labour Party is different people are asserting themselves.

Like, how important Michael Foote is to the sort of intellectual temperature of the Labour Party.

And then I remember him as a sort of ridiculed, loony lefty in a donkey jacket from the, you know, the time of the Falklands.

Yeah, with his glasses and his shacky hair.

Yeah, and being seen.

And I often, when I was looking into this and reading, and there's a very good book by a guy called called Phil Tinline called the End of Consensus which is about Labour Party politics really really interesting Foote is such an important figure in all of this and I often think that a big part of how mauled he was in the 80s when he was Labour leader was was like revenge being served cold by old conservative people who know how important Foote was to the landslide, you know.

I think it's absolutely right that we do this and look at this, because I think the one thing that people should never, ever lose sight of is the interconnectivity between war, economics, and politics.

It is as much the brotherhood as Alexander's brotherhood that he's talked about of air, land, and sea, you know, in terms of how you portray your war.

I mean, it is absolutely, they're all completely, completely interlinked.

And we've both been doing our separate kind of work on this over the last few months, and it's just been absolutely fascinating.

But that was brilliant.

That was really

fascinating.

Thanks, Jim.

Thanks, everyone, for listening.

There's a sort of sidebar pod where I'll be talking to Kit Covell, who wrote an amazing book called Blue Jerusalem, which is about Conservative Party politics during the war.

Some of it is bonkers.

Well, I was sorry to miss out on that, but I can't wait to hear it.

Oh, it's really great.

It's really great.

Thanks everyone for listening.

Don't forget, of course, that if you want to hear us talk about this, you know, live like we're rock stars, and it's not unlike that, is it, Jim?

There do come to We Have Ways Fest in September, September the 12th to the 14th at Black Pit Brewery in Buckinghamshire, next door to Silverstone Racetrack, where we have a whole weekend of people chewing this kind of cud, this exact sort of thing, as well as great big, dirty green vehicles, the opportunities to buy clothing that might raise an eyebrow.

All that sort of thing.

Living historians, entertainment, a few drinks maybe to be taken.

And we look forward to seeing you there.

We have wastefest.co.uk.

Also, there's our new website, www.headquarters.com.

Isn't it, Jim?

It's a.com.

Yep, dot com.

Basically, all of our World War II activities corralled and put into.

We've built a defensive defensive perimeter out of biscuit boxes, not unlike Rourke's Drift, and we've put

all of our World War II activities inside that biscuit box perimeter.

Do go and have a look and keep listening.

Thanks very much, everybody.

We'll see you soon.

Bye-bye.

Cheerio.