Clement Attlee

Clement Richard Attlee, 1st Earl Attlee, (3 January 1883 – 8 October 1967), was a British Labour Party politician who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1945 to 1951. He was the Leader of the Labour Party from 1935 to 1955. In 1940, Attlee took Labour into the wartime coalition government and served under Winston Churchill, becoming, in 1942, the first person to hold the office of Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He went on to lead the Labour Party to an unexpected landslide victory at the 1945 general election; forming the first Labour majority government, and a mandate to implement its postwar reforms. The 12 percent national swing from the Conservatives to Labour was unprecedented at that time and remains the largest ever achieved by any party at a general election in British electoral history. He was re-elected with a narrow majority at the 1950 general election. In the following year, Attlee called a snap general election, hoping to increase his parliamentary majority. However, he was narrowly defeated by the Conservatives under the leadership of Winston Churchill, despite winning the most votes of any political party in any general election in British political history until the Conservative Party's fourth consecutive victory in 1992. Attlee remains the longest-ever serving Leader of the Labour Party. First elected to the House of Commons in 1922 as the MP for Limehouse, Attlee rose quickly to become a junior minister in the first Labour minority government led by Ramsay MacDonald in 1924, and then joined the Cabinet during MacDonald's second ministry of 1929–1931. One of only a handful of Labour frontbenchers to retain his seat in the landslide defeat of 1931, he became the party's Deputy Leader. After the resignation of George Lansbury in 1935, he was elected as Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition in the subsequent leadership election. At first advocating pacificism and opposing rearmament, he later reversed his pos