238. Decline to defeat

Circumstances seemed unfavourable for a Labour victory in a 1950 election but, when it was held, Attlee managed to lead his party to the second win in its history. It took a majority of the popular vote, and even a majority of parliamentary seats, though way down from its previous landslide to a mere five.

With that small majority, it was poorly placed to deal with the continuing financial difficulties of the country. These were made worse by involvement in the Korean War, which meant rearming. The funds for the war had to be found somewhere, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, a rising star of the Party, Hugh Gaitskell, decided that had to come in part from raiding the National Health Service and the Social Insurance Fund.

In disgust, the architect of the health service, Nye Bevan, resigned from the government. With him went another young rising figure, Harold Wilson, who had become the youngest cabinet minister in Britain in the whole of the twentieth century. At that stage he stood with the left and with Bevan, though later he would turn on his mentor, taking a seat in the Shadow Cabinet when Labour was back in Opposition, a seat vacated precisely by another resignation on principle by Bevan.

There were difficulties internationally too, with the Mossadegh government in Iran set to nationalise British oil industries there, and nationalist forces in Egypt putting pressure on the British garrison guarding the Suez Canal. Attlee’s friend and loyal supporter, the long-time Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin had died in April 1951, and his successor Herbert Morrison wasn’t up to the job, adding these foreign crises to the burden on Attlee.

With Bevan’s left-wing group organising against him and making his parliamentary majority look decidedly fragile, the aging and tired Attlee called another election. Held on 28 October 1951, it saw Labour at last lose its majority and the Conservatives win one.

Attlee was out. Churchill was back.

Illustration: The Royal Festival Hall in London, souvenir of the 1951 Festival of Britain, itself marking the centenary of the Great Exhibition in Victorian times. Photo by a Wikipedia contributor. Public Domain.

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License