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Between VE-day and VJ-day a General Election for Parliament was called — the first for 9 years. The Labour Party, which had played a big part in the war-time coalition government decided it should be a real election between two main rival parties.
Winston Churchill threw himself into campaigning, though at first sight it looked as though he couldn’t lose. When he did a tour of South London constituencies in support of ‘National’ candidates he stopped in West Norwood, where his son-in-law Duncan Sandys was seeking re-election, and I was one of the vast crowd which went to see, to cheer, and to hear.
He was cheered to the skies when he arrived and when he left; those were cheers for the triumphant war leader.
But as he spoke the applause was more muted. The decision of the Conservatives and a few National Liberals to present themselves as ‘National’ candidates probably earnt them more resentment than respect, for they seemed to be implying that they were more patriotic than such men as Clement Attlee, Herbert Morrison and Ernie Bevin, three men who had enjoyed high profiles at home in promoting the war effort. This was going to be an election about ideologies, and many people disliked what they had seen of Churchill’s ideology before the war.
This was quite clear when I went to one of Duncan Sandys’s local meetings. He was mercilessly heckled until the situation in the packed room became alarming. He was defeated in the election, as was the National Party as a whole.
Grateful as they were for Churchill’s wartime leadership, the majority of people, especially those who had fought and suffered, saw him and his brand of politics and the war itself as belonging to an old order which this war must be allowed to sweep away in a way the first world war had failed to do. It was time for new leaders with new ways of looking at domestic and world affairs.
So Clement Attlee went to the resumed Potsdam Conference along with Harry Truman (replacing the recently deceased Roosevelt) and Josef Stalin (still as large as life); and they tried, with mixed results, to create order out of the European chaos.
Disquiet was growing, however, about the democratic and liberal credentials of one of our ‘allies’, reflected in the joke which was going round about a woman in Moscow who said, on having the election result explained to her, ‘How sad; I suppose now they’ll shoot poor Mr Churchill.’
Happily they didn’t.

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