#67 Clement Atlee

What this episode covers

Attlee was Churchill’s lame duck deputy PM. In fact he was the first Deputy PM the UK ever had. I didn’t realise this, but in the UK the role of the Deputy PM isn’t like you’d expect, like it is in Australia or like the Vice-President in the USA. The Deputy PM doesn’t take over if the PM is incapacitated or resigns. If the PM is sick or dies, the Deputy does NOT take over. In the UK, only the sovereign can appoint a PM. So having a Deputy who is PM-in-waiting is seen as a no no. One argument made to justify the non-existence of a permanent deputy premiership is that such an office-holder would be seen as possessing a presumption of succession to the premiership, thereby effectively limiting the sovereign's right to choose a prime minister. But of course you might think “well surely the Monarch can just say “okay I make you PM and I make you Deputy PM and therefore you’ll take over if something happens”, but apparently that would be too much work. Attlee was the Deputy PM because the Churchill war ministry was a coalition government of men from both major political parties, handpicked by Churchill. The idea went back to the first World War, when both Asquith and David Lloyd George had a coalition government in which Churchill was a minister, and back then he was with the Liberal Party, because he’d quit the Tories for a while. And Attlee was the leader of the Labor Party. In fact he was the leader for 20 years, from 1935 - 1955. Not a bad run. Now remember that Churchill himself HATED socialists more than he hated wasting a cigar, so it was a pretty remarkable thing that he found a way to work with these guys, and it’s something I can respect him for. Anyway, the UK election had happened before Potsdam, despite Attlee suggesting they should wait until after the defeat of Japan, but the results were still being tallied. On July 25, the conference took a two-day break so that the most senior British officials could return to London for the tabulation of the votes. There was a three week delay between the vote on July 5 and the results to give the 3 million troops still overseas time to cast their votes. Everyone, including Attlee and the British communists, expected Churchill to win, all that seemed in doubt was the size of the majority.. But Churchill later claimed that before he left Potsdam he had had a nightmare. “I dreamed that my life was over,” he later recalled. “I saw it—it was very vivid—my dead body under a white sheet on a table in an empty room. I recognized my bare feet projecting from under the sheet. It was very life like. . . . Perhaps this is the end.” I wonder if his corpse was smoking a cigar? The elections produced a historic surprise, of course - it was a landslide victory for Labour and Clement Attlee. The Conservative majority in the House of Commons disappeared as the number of Tory seats plummeted from 585 to 213. Labour emerged as the dominant party, meaning that Clement Attlee would return to Potsdam as Britain’s prime minister, and that Churchill would at least temporarily leave government. Churchill briefly thought about returning to Potsdam and forcing the new Parliament to vote him out, but he soon bowed to the inevitable and resigned. Attlee offered Churchill and Eden the chance to return to Potsdam with him as advisers, to show the world the continuity of the British system, but both declined. Attlee himself could hardly believe that he and his party had won, and by such an enormous margin. When he went to Buckingham Palace to meet the king, George VI told Attlee that he looked quite surprised to have won. “Indeed I certainly was,” Attlee replied. Needless to say - everyone back at Potsdam was in shock. No one quite knew what to make of the change; Winston Chur Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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