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Attlee and Churchill review – a deft account of a terrific double act

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/14/attlee-and-churchill-review

Leo McKinstry’s excellent study of two British political titans underlines the inadequacies of today’s leaders

At the state funeral of Winston Churchill, one of the pallbearers was Clement Attlee, his wartime deputy. The massive TV audience witnessed a deathly frail Attlee stumble as the lead-lined coffin was carried up the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral. It was a mark of their deep mutual esteem that Churchill had asked for Attlee to be one of his bearers and Attlee had insisted on performing the honour despite his ill health.

Thrown together in the dark hours of 1940, the two men forged the cross-party coalition that saved their country from the menace of Nazism and then, when Hitler was done, contested each other at the ballot box for mastery of postwar Britain. In this terrific account of an extraordinary double act, Leo McKinstry rightly contends that their relationship was “unprecedented in the annals of British politics”. A five-year wartime partnership between two leaders, followed by a decade of peacetime competition between them, is unlikely to be repeated.

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