Attlee to Douglas-Home

Abstract

When Attlee left office he had been prime minister for six years and three months and before that Churchill’s deputy in the War Cabinet for five years, and he had been leader of the Labour Party for 16 years (since 1935). He was 68 years old, exhausted after 11 gruelling years in government, and had been hospitalised twice while prime minister, in 1948 and 1951, suffering from duodenal ulcers. It might have been thought a good moment to step down. Attlee’s wife would have liked him to retire. A year or two earlier a retirement cottage had been bought in the Chilterns, a few miles from Chequers, a place the Attlees had grown to love. Attlee himself later admitted he wanted to go after the 1951 election.¹ However, there was no call from within the party for him to quit and when parliament reassembled Labour MPs re-elected him as leader unopposed and by acclamation. Labour had lost the 1951 general election only narrowly, polling more votes than the Conservatives who had only a small 17-seat majority. Attlee had high approval ratings and was an undoubted electoral asset. The Conservatives might not last long, it was thought, and the pendulum might swing in Labour’s direction sooner rather than later.