Parties and Institutions 1951–56

Abstract

Coming after a decade of privation, and before another decade of unease about whether prosperity could last, the five dulcet years of what one historian calls ‘Churchill’s Indian Summer’ permitted an extraordinary set of real gains in economic and social life by almost every individual and group in Britain. Part of this can be credited to the government’s managerial skills, at home and abroad; yet these might hardly have existed had it not been for the metamorphosis which occurred in Opposition. The electorate had not trusted the Tory Party in 1945 — nor in 1950. That it did so in 1951 was partly fortuitous, partly a result of a slow-growing transformation begun at the centre, quite deliberately, by younger men than Churchill, who feared that otherwise their party would be relegated, perhaps permanently, like the old right in France, Belgium and Scandinavia.