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By Root 290 0

“Party ties have been considered honourable bonds,” Churchill declared on June 4, in his first party political broadcast of the election, but a few moments later he harmed the Conservative cause when he said, with the deep foreboding that he felt: “No Socialist Government, conducting the entire life and industry of the country, could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently worded expression of public discontent. They would fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head; and it would gather all the power to the supreme Party and the Party leaders.” Churchill added that “a Free Parliament is odious to the Socialist doctrinaire.”

The phrase “some form of Gestapo” caused a furore. Churchill’s wife had begged him not to use it.

Churchill continued campaigning. One of the disadvantages facing the Conservatives was Churchill’s own long pre-war campaign against their failure to prepare Britain adequately for war. He was no longer speaking as a war leader but as head of a party he himself had spent so much time discrediting, and against a party much of whose proposed legislation drew on what he himself had supported—and brought onto the Statute Book—in his earlier years. In his second broadcast on June 13, at the suggestion of his daughter Sarah, he elaborated on Beveridge’s Four-Year Plan. “I announced this to the nation two years ago,” he said, “under the simple watchword of ‘food, work, and homes.’ Of this extensive plan as yet only education and family allowances stand on the Statute Book, and they are yet to be carried into full effect. But we have left social insurance, industrial injuries insurance, and the National Health Service to be shaped by Parliament and to be made to play a dynamic part in the life and security of every family and home.”

Churchill spoke with sincerity and conviction, but the public remembered too vividly the “Gestapo speech” and looked to the Labour Party, not to the Conservatives, to move forward along the lines of social reform that Churchill so wanted. What he condemned, he said, “on the most severe terms,” was the “Socialist effort to drag their long-term fads and wavy Utopias across the practical path of need and duty.”

The General Election results were to be announced on July 26. Churchill flew back half way through the “Big Three” Potsdam Conference to hear them. Attlee flew back with him. The Labour Party, with 393 seats, won an absolute majority of 146 over all the other parties. The Conservative seats fell from the 585 achieved in the previous General Election in 1935 to 213. For the first time in British history, the Labour vote was higher than that of the Conservatives (11,995,152 as against 9,988,396). Clement Attlee became Prime Minister and returned to Potsdam alone to negotiate the postwar settlement with Stalin and President Harry S Truman.

The election results were an accurate reflection of party conflicts and public desires that had been in abeyance while Churchill was wartime Prime Minister. They represented a return to the free forces of public expression and the search for votes in favour of one party’s program against another’s. The Labour Party program of social reform—including nationalization of the railways, which Churchill had advocated twenty years earlier—helped secure a majority of the nation’s votes and brought the Labour Party to power.

There was another factor that worked against a Conservative victory: the memories of its pre-war appeasement policies and neglect of Britain’s defences. Lord Beaverbrook (the Canadian Max Aitken), himself a pre-war pro-appeasement Conservative, wrote to a friend when the election results were known: “The main factor in the political landslide here lies way back in the years 1938–40. It was about that time that the great mass of middle-class opinion in Britain decided to punish the Conservatives. It is unfortunate that the blows intended for the heads of Mr Chamberlain and his colleagues should fall