Clement Attlee

Clement Richard Attlee, 1st Earl Attlee, KG, OM, CH, PC, FRS (3 January 1883 – 8 October 1967) was a British politician who was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1945 to 1951 and the Leader of the Labour Party from 1935 to 1955. Attlee was the first person to hold the office of Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, serving under Winston Churchill in the wartime coalition government, before going on to lead the Labour Party to a landslide election victory in 1945 and a narrow victory in 1950. He became the first Labour Prime Minister ever to serve a full five-year term, as well as the first to command a Labour majority in Parliament, and remains the longest-ever serving Leader of the Labour Party.

First elected to Parliament in 1922 as the MP for Limehouse, Attlee rose quickly to become a minister in the minority government led by Ramsay MacDonald in 1924. In 1931, after Labour suffered a heavy election defeat, he was elected its Deputy Leader. Four years later, he became the Leader of the Labour Party after the resignation of George Lansbury. At first advocating pacificism and appeasement, he later reversed his position and by 1938 became a strong critic of Neville Chamberlain's attempts to appease Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. He subsequently took Labour into the Churchill war ministry in 1940. Initially serving as Lord Privy Seal, he was appointed Deputy Prime Minister two years later. With the end of the Second World War in Europe in May 1945, the coalition government was dissolved and Attlee led Labour to win a huge majority in the ensuing 1945 general election two months later.