Clement Attlee

Elected in a surprise landslide in 1945, Clement Attlee was the first ever Labour leader to command a majority government. At the helm for twenty years, he remains the longest-serving leader in the history of the Labour Party. When his government was voted out in 1951, it left with Labour's highest share of the vote before or since. And yet today he is routinely described as 'the accidental Prime Minister', dimly remembered as a politician who, by good fortune, happened to lead the Labour Party when Britain was disillusioned with Tory rule and ready for change. Michael Jago argues that nothing could be further from the truth. Clement Attlee: The Inevitable Prime Minister, newly updated in this paperback edition, traces the life of a middle-class lawyer's son who, appalled by the squalid living conditions in London's East End, relentlessly pursued his ambition to create a more egalitarian society. Introducing the NHS and the cradle-to-grave Welfare State, in just six years his government changed the face of twentieth-century Britain for ever.