The Labour Party came of age in 1945. As the Second World War drew to a close in Europe, the coalition government* of Conservative and Labour forces which had governed Britain since 1940 broke apart. Winston Churchill, the nation’s inspirational wartime Prime Minister, now called upon the electorate to return him as the head of a new Conservative administration; he alone, Churchill claimed, was capable of dealing with the domestic and international legacy left by six years of war against Nazi Germany. Among politicians and commentators, it was widely anticipated that Churchill would sweep back to power in the general election of July 1945, just as Lloyd George had triumphed in 1918 as ‘the man who won the war’. But this prediction proved to be wildly inaccurate. As the election results filtered through, it became apparent that the Labour Party had won a landslide victory. At the last pre-war election, held in 1935, Labour had trailed the Tory-dominated National government* by more than 200 parliamentary seats. In 1945, however, Labour secured nearly half the popular vote, winning 393 seats, compared with 210 for the Conservatives. On an average swing of 12 per cent, Labour made sweeping gains in towns and cities across the nation, capturing scores of constituencies that had never before returned a Labour member to the House of Commons. Hence it was not Chur­ chill but the relatively unknown Labour leader, Clement Attlee, who went to Buckingham Palace to accept an invitation from the King to form Britain’s post-war government (16). The war years had clearly wrought a remarkable political transformation. ‘We’, one Labour MP was reputed to have shouted at his opponents across the floor of the Commons chamber, ‘are the masters now’ (32).