The Burden of Victory: The Long Shadow of 1945
Part 1: Why do British Prime Ministers seem to fall with such relentless regularity? In a two-part series, we examine the deeper historical forces that have made modern Britain increasingly difficult to govern.
Keir Starmer’s abrupt resignation last month made him the sixth British Prime Minister in barely a decade to leave office broken by his country’s increasingly unforgiving political system.
The revolving door had sprung in motion when David Cameron resigned in 2016 after gambling - and losing - on Brexit. Theresa May followed in 2019, defeated by the parliamentary deadlock that consumed her premiership. Boris Johnson fell in 2022 amid mounting scandals. Liz Truss lasted just forty-nine days before financial turmoil forced her departure. Rishi Sunak was swept from office in Labour’s landslide victory of 2024.
Now Starmer, despite entering Downing Street with one of the largest parliamentary majorities in modern British history, has joined the growing list of Prime Ministerial casualties.
His immediate downfall had proximate causes. Months of internal Labour unrest, unpopular policy reversals, bruising local election defeats and finally, Andy Burnham’s emphatic victory in the Makerfield by-election fatally undermined his authority. And yet, these do not fully explain why yet another British Prime Minister proved so politically fragile.
While the the instinct is to search for contemporary explanations, a closer study reveals a deeper pathology. Britain is no longer merely changing Prime Ministers with unusual frequency. Like Saturn in the old revolutionary aphorism, the British state has acquired a habit of devouring its own political children.
The origins of Britain’s current political instability lie much deeper, and paradoxically in the hour of the country’s greatest triumph.
The victory of 1945 defeated Nazi Germany, but it also transformed the exhausted British state in ways that continue to shape its politics eight decades later.
Every Labour Prime Minister since Clement Attlee has inherited not merely an office but a post-war state whose political responsibilities steadily expanded even as Britain’s economic and geopolitical power gradually diminished.
“Until August 1914,” wrote A.J.P. Taylor in the immortal opening sentence of English History 1914–1945, “a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state.” Thirty-one years later, Britain had become precisely the opposite polity. Government was now responsible for housing, healthcare, pensions, education, employment and economic planning.
Mirage of the Landslide
Every Labour leader governs beneath the long shadow of 1945. It remains the part’s secular creation story. Winston Churchill, who had led Britain through its darkest hour, was dismissed by an electorate that no longer sought a wartime saviour but a peacetime architect. In his place came Clement Attlee, Churchill's quiet and self-effacing deputy, armed with a commanding majority of 146 seats.
The contrast between the two men has become one of history’s enduring ironies. Churchill mocked Attlee as “a sheep in sheep’s clothing” and delighted in portraying him as a colourless nonentity. It was Attlee’s very ‘ordinariness’ that proved to be his greatest political strength. As historian John Bew details in his splendid Citizen Clem (2016), beneath Atlee’s unassuming exterior lay extraordinary resilience, steel and administrative genius. George Orwell admired Attlee precisely because he lacked theatrical ambition or personal vanity. Bew aptly describes him as perhaps the least romantic revolutionary in British history - a leader who transformed Britain not through soaring rhetoric or ideological fervour but through quiet competence, collegiate leadership and an unwavering sense of public duty.
Without cultivating a personality cult or claiming the mantle of history, Attlee presided over one of the most radical democratic revolutions of the twentieth century.
Labour’s legendary triumph had coincided with one of the bleakest economic inheritances in modern history. The Second World War had destroyed roughly a quarter of Britain’s national wealth. Exports had withered; infrastructure lay battered. Overseas investments, the financial foundation of British power before 1914, had largely been liquidated to finance the war effort while national debt reached levels unprecedented in peacetime.
Then came the geopolitical reckoning. In August 1945 President Harry Truman abruptly terminated Lend-Lease, the American programme that had sustained Britain’s war economy. John Maynard Keynes, dispatched to Washington to negotiate emergency assistance, described the episode as a “financial Dunkirk.” Britain had escaped military annihilation only to confront economic dependence.
Historian Correlli Barnett saw in this the central tragedy of post-war Britain. In his The Audit of War (1986) and other books, he argued that successive governments prioritised social reconstruction while neglecting the productive and industrial foundations upon which national power ultimately depended. However, David Edgerton has challenged this declinist interpretation, insisting that post-war Britain remained wealthier, more technologically sophisticated and more resilient than its critics acknowledged. Yet even Edgerton accepts that Britain after 1945 had become a fundamentally different nation - less an imperial power than a modern national state adjusting, often painfully, to diminished global influence.
When Starmer secured his own landslide nearly eight decades later, the echoes of 1945 were difficult to ignore. Once again Labour inherited a country beset by economic malaise and institutional fatigue. Again, the long-serving Conservative government had exhausted its political capital. And once again, voters turned to Labour less out of ideological fervour than in the hope that a competent government might restore a sense of national purpose.
Of course, an important distinction here is that Attlee’s victory rested on one of the broadest popular mandates in modern British history, with nearly 48 per cent of the vote. Starmer, by contrast, secured one of the largest parliamentary majorities ever recorded with just 33.7 per cent of ballots cast - the lowest vote share for any majority government in British history.
Constitutional historian Vernon Bogdanor has long argued that Britain’s First-Past-the-Post system was designed for an era of stable two-party competition. In an increasingly fragmented electorate, it can manufacture commanding parliamentary majorities from remarkably slender electoral foundations.
The British public did not embrace Starmer with anything like the confidence it had invested in Attlee. Rather, it used the electoral system as a constitutional wrecking ball to demolish a Conservative government that had run out of road.
Equally striking was the difference between the two Labour parties. Attlee’s Cabinet remains one of the most formidable collections of political talent in modern British history. Ernest Bevin, a former dockworker, became one of the architects of NATO. Aneurin Bevan, a Welsh miner, built the NHS. Stafford Cripps imposed austerity with an almost monastic discipline. While they often disagreed, they were nonetheless united by a shared understanding of the national emergency Britain faced.
Starmer, of course, has inherited a Labour Party fundamentally different from Attlee’s. What united Attlee’s Labour was class. What united Starmer’s was largely opposition to Conservative rule.
Roy Hattersley once lamented that Labour had evolved from a movement rooted in trade unions and industrial communities into a professional managerial class. Starmer himself, a former Director of Public Prosecutions, embodied that transformation. His authority rested not on deep roots within the Labour movement but on a reputation for competence. That proved a remarkably fragile foundation once the economic constraints of government collided with mounting discontent inside his own party.
Vulnerability of Competence
History suggests that governments rarely fail for want of administrative competence alone. They falter when competent administration collides with structural realities that no amount of managerial skill can overcome. The lesson became apparent during the exceptionally severe winter of 1947 that froze coal inside railway wagons, paralysed electricity generation, closed factories and exposed the fragility of Britain’s post-war recovery.
The crisis exposed the uncomfortable truth that however ambitious the machinery of the state, its administrative capacity remained hostage to Britain’s shrinking economic foundations. Starmer has inherited a remarkably similar predicament.
His government confronted stagnant productivity, collapsing local government finances, crumbling infrastructure and an NHS burdened by millions awaiting treatment. Like Attlee, he believed that disciplined administration could stabilise a system under immense strain. But competence proves a remarkably fragile political asset when the underlying economy remains anaemic.
Late Prime Minister Harold Wilson once joked that Labour’s victories owed less to socialist enthusiasm than to Conservative exhaustion. There is some truth in that jest: Labour has often entered office at moments of national exhaustion rather than national confidence. It governs when Britain becomes difficult to govern. Attlee inherited bankruptcy. Wilson inherited industrial decline. James Callaghan inherited inflation and trade-union militancy. Gordon Brown inherited the global financial crisis. Starmer inherited stagnant growth and a fractured social contract.
The coalition Labour now seeks to govern has also become infinitely more unstable than Attlee’s. The disciplined industrial working class that formed Labour’s backbone has fragmented into an uneasy alliance of metropolitan graduates, public-sector professionals, ethnic minorities and the remnants of its traditional patriotic working-class base. Immigration illustrates the contradiction with unusual clarity. One section views migration through the language of liberal cosmopolitanism; another regards it as a direct challenge to wages, housing and national cohesion. Attempting to satisfy both has left Labour chronically vulnerable to accusations of inconsistency from every direction.
The deeper lesson lies with Britain’s political system itself. Churchill had initially denounced Labour’s programme with his infamous “Gestapo” speech, warning that socialism required authoritarian policing. The postwar electorate had rejected such hyperbole.
The Conservative Party eventually recovered because one of its leading thinkers, Rab Butler, who later served as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Deputy Prime Minister, recognised a fundamental political truth. Through the Conservative Party’s Industrial Charter of 1947, Butler accepted the essentials of Attlee’s post-war settlement, embracing full employment, the mixed economy and the National Health Service.
In effect, the Conservatives abandoned outright ideological opposition to democratic socialism and the welfare state, choosing instead to compete over who could administer the new settlement more effectively. That capacity for grand synthesis appears largely absent today.
Starmer assumed that promising competent administration while avoiding ideological confrontation would be enough to govern a country exhausted by years of political drama. It was not. Managerial moderation can steady a government, but cannot provide a nation with purpose.
The tragedy, however, is now larger than Labour itself. Every British Prime Minister inherits a post-war state built upon expanding public expectations even as Britain’s relative economic and geopolitical power has steadily diminished. The contradiction is no longer merely political; it has become structural.
Westminster still asks governments to reconcile ambitions that have become increasingly difficult to reconcile: generous public services with restrained taxation, global influence with diminished power, and political stability with an electorate that has grown ever more fragmented. Electoral landslides cannot suspend the laws of political economy. If anything, they magnify them by raising expectations that governments are ultimately unable to fulfil.
Starmer merely rediscovered this dilemma. The inheritance of 1945 was not simply the welfare state but a permanent tension between what Britain expects from its governments and what the British state can sustainably provide. That is the true burden of victory, and the cross that every Prime Minister since Attlee has, in one form or another, been forced to bear.
Comments