42. The business of empire is business

‘The wind of change’ was the other famous phrase of Harold Macmillan’s, along with ‘You’ve never had it so good’. It came in a speech in which he talked about how a movement had grown up in many count...

4 Maj 202514min

Macmillan overcame the terrible legacy of the Suez catastrophe and, running an economy focused on growth to fund increasing living standards, giving him the opportunity to annouce that people had neve...

27 Apr 202514min

Anthony Eden started his premiership well, chalking up a general election win and the lowest level of unemployment Britain has seen at any time since the Second World War. Little else went well, howev...

20 Apr 202514min

The old man was back. The Conservatives won the 1951 election and Winston Churchill returned to Downing Street. And he really was an old man – nearly 77 when he took office. To many, he it seemed incr...

13 Apr 202514min

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 vo...

6 Apr 202514min

What Attlee’s government had shown was that, though it regarded itself as Socialist, it was a very distinctive kind of Socialism and heavily influenced by Liberal thinking. Where a more Marxist Social...

30 Mars 202514min

Of the five ‘giant evils’ William Beveridge identified, the Attlee government set out to deal with want through social security, squalor through better housing, ignorance through more schooling and di...

23 Mars 202514min

In the July 1945 general election, the British public offered Winston Churchill, as he put it himself, the ‘order of the boot’. A victorious war Prime Minister was kicked out. In his place, his deputy...

16 Mars 202514min