The 1945 Election Defeat
How the man who won the war lost the peace -- Churchill's shocking rejection by British voters just weeks after victory in Europe.
The Shock Result
On July 26, 1945 -- less than three months after Germany's surrender -- the results of the British general election were announced. Clement Attlee's Labour Party won a landslide: 393 seats to the Conservatives' 197. Churchill, the war hero who had inspired the nation through its darkest hours, was out of office. He was 70 years old.
The result stunned the world. Stalin refused to believe it at first. In the United States, commentators struggled to explain how voters could reject the leader who had saved them from Hitler. Churchill's wife Clementine, ever perceptive, suggested the defeat might be a blessing in disguise. Churchill replied: 'At the moment it seems quite effectively disguised.'
But the result was not as surprising as it appeared. The election had been delayed throughout the war; the last general election was in 1935, ten years earlier. British voters did not reject Churchill personally so much as they rejected the Conservative Party and the pre-war order it represented. The 1930s -- mass unemployment, appeasement, the means test -- were associated with Conservative governance. Voters wanted a new society, not a return to the old one.