Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [304]
Labour leader Clement Attlee at first favoured sustaining the coalition government and delaying a general election until the defeat of Japan. His party, however, was minded otherwise. On May 23 the coalition was dissolved, after five years and thirteen days of office. There was an emotional farewell gathering of ministers at Downing Street. Then Churchill set about forming a new ministry, without Labour and Liberal members. An election was called for July 6, which almost every pundit anticipated that the Tories would win. The nation’s gratitude to Winston Churchill, it was assumed, outweighed its undoubted alienation from the Conservative Party.
Yet, for those who sought evidence about the mood of the British people, much had been available since 1939. On July 3, 1940, the American general1099 Raymond Lee had lunched in London with an unnamed Tory MP who asserted his conviction that even if Britain won the war, Labour would govern afterwards. By 1945, roosting time had come for many old chickens. Anthony Eden, widely perceived as the brightest star of his Tory generation, disliked his own party even more than did Churchill. He wrote during a visit to Greece about his sense of remoteness from British soldiers he met, and his doubts about how to reach them on the hustings:
It would be the highest honour1100 to serve and lead such men. But how is one to do it through party politics? Most of these men have none, as I believe that I have none. And how is this General Election to express any of this, for they could not be farther from the men of Munich in their most extreme form, for whom I have to ask the electors to vote. It is hell. Curiously enough W[inston] doesn’t seem to feel any of this and is full of the lust for electoral battle, and apparently content to work with men afterwards, with many, probably most, of whom he doesn’t agree. No doubt he is confident that he can dominate them, but I feel a responsibility to ask the electorate to vote for them.
British soldier Edward Stebbing had written back in November 1940, “There are … many who think that this war1101 will only be worth fighting if there is a new order of things to follow.” Everything that had happened since strengthened this belief in the minds of many British people. In December 1944 the Wall Street Journal displayed notable prescience, identifying popular anger in Britain towards Churchill’s Greek policy with a deeper rejection of old Tory imperialism: “It is clear that the Churchill government1102 will last out the war in Europe, but the chances of its return to office when the election after victory is held are more doubtful. It is not very likely that Mr. Lloyd George’s [1919] ‘khaki election [victory]’ will be repeated.”
The Mayhews were an upper-middle-class Norfolk family, of whom in 1945 one younger scion, Christopher, was standing as a Labour candidate in the county against a Tory who was a former member of a notorious right-wing movement—the Link. Mayhew’s uncle, Bertram Howarth, secretary of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, wrote in a family newsletter: “[I am] in the throes of a mental political upheaval1103. I believe I have voted Conservative all my life, but unless something epoch-making happens between now and the General Election, I can’t do it again.” His wife, Ellie, district commandant of the local Women’s Voluntary Service, felt likewise: “Personally I cannot vote for our sitting [Tory] member; he is stupid, elderly and reactionary … He was the sole MP to vote against the Beveridge Report. So I shall have to be a Liberal.” When Churchill spoke optimistically about his election prospects to General Bill Slim, home on leave from Burma, Slim responded with characteristic bluntness: “Well, Prime Minister, I know one thing1104. My Army won’t be voting for you.”
A tide of sentiment was sweeping British people of all classes, driven by determination to build a new future rather than cherish pride in the past. Churchill himself said back in 1941, of the state school boys