Clement Attlee

Born in Putney, London, England into a middle-class family, and educated at Haileybury and University College, Oxford, Attlee trained as a lawyer. He turned to socialism after working with slum children in the East End of London. Good works for the poor did not attract him; he did not want there to be any poor. He left the Fabian Society and joined the Independent Labour Party in 1908. Attlee became a lecturer at the London School of Economics in 1913, but enlisted promptly for World War I.

Having reached Major, and been seriously wounded, he became mayor of the London borough of Stepney in 1919 and a Labour MP for Limehouse in 1922. He was Ramsay MacDonald's parliamentary private secretary for the brief 1922 parliament.

Attlee served in the first two Labour governments, as under-secretary for war in 1924 with Stanley Baldwin, then as Postmaster General under MacDonald. He actively supported the General Strike. In 1928 he reluctantly joined a royal commission on India.

In 1930, Labour MP Oswald Mosley attacked his own government favouring Keynesian action against unemployment, and lost. Attlee got Mosley's old job as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. He was Postmaster General in 1931, when most of the party's leaders lost their seats; this helped him win the deputy leadership under George Lansbury. Attlee, and Labour, opposed appeasement. He became leader in 1935, and remained until 1955.

In the World War II coalition government, three interconnected committees ran the war: Churchill chaired the war cabinet and the defence committee. Attlee was his regular deputy in committee and in parliament, and chaired the lord president's committee, which ran the civil side of the war. Only he and Churchill remained in the war cabinet throughout. Attlee was Lord Privy Seal (1940-2), Deputy Prime Minister (1942), Dominions Secretary (1942-3), and Lord President of the Council (1943-5).

The landslide "Khaki election" returned Labour to power in 1945, Attlee becoming prime minister. The party had clear aims. Reforms took place, including the nationalisation of utilities and creation of the modern Welfare State. India became independent, and Britain's role in Palestine ended. Attlee's Health Secretary, Nye Bevan, was at the forefront of creating the National Health Service.

The substantial enactment of its manifesto commitments earned Atlee's government a contemporary level of esteem matched by few previous or later administrations. Its political opponents were sometimes caricatured as having nothing to criticise in its record with the sole exception of the Tanganyika groundnut scheme[?], a plan to cultivate tracts of what is now Tanzania with peanuts. This enterprise was abandoned at substantial financial loss to the tax payer.

The Labour Party was returned to power in the general election of 1950. The large reduction that it suffered in its parliamentary majority was mostly due to the Conservative opposition recovering support at the expense of the Liberal Party.

Labour lost the General Election of 1951 after being weakened by splits exacerbated by strain of financing British involvement in the Korean War. Attlee led the party in opposition until 1955, when he retired to the House of Lords as the 1st Earl Attlee. He died in 1967.

Churchill famously described Attlee as "a modest little man with a lot to be modest about". Attlee's self-description was in the form of a limerick:

Few thought he was even a starter.

There were many who thought themselves smarter.

But he ended PM, CH and OM,

An earl and a Knight of the Garter.