We raised a glass last Saturday evening, the four of us, to toast the 80th anniversary of the 1945 Labour government. None was old enough to remember the event itself, but three of us were born while Clem Attlee was prime minister. In a funny way, I still take a kind of childish pride from that inheritance, as if a piece of that distant era somehow transferred itself by osmosis into my DNA. A photograph of Attlee in old age, taken and given to me by the late Sally Soames, is a treasured possession too.

Our little group was certainly not alone this summer in marking Attlee’s anniversary. There have been TV documentaries and, most substantially, David Runciman’s fascinating Postwar series on BBC Radio 4. All of these start – and Runciman’s series also ends – with the same enduringly astounding fact about Britain in 1945. Weeks after Winston Churchill had led the country to victory in the war in Europe, the voters rejected him by a landslide in favour of Attlee’s Labour.

Yet Labour’s triumph was led by the least triumphalist or bombastic of men. Eighty years ago, on 26 July 1945, the Daily Mail, bullying and wrong as always, warned Labour to accept its expected defeat “like men, and not like spoilt children”. That evening, driven there by his wife in the family car, Attlee went to Buckingham Palace to become prime minister. Peter Hennessy records that Attlee’s audience with the equally self-effacing George VI began with a long silence. Eventually, Attlee broke it by announcing: “I’ve won the election.” To which the king replied: “I know. I heard it on the six o’clock news.”

Eighty years on,........

© The Guardian