It’s May 1945: Britain celebrates victory and cheers Winston Churchill. But those who fought the war want a better, fairer world, and only Labour is offering it.
But the Labour Party is led by a nonentity, ‘a modest little man with plenty to be modest about’. He says almost nothing. He sits in his grey suit and puffs his pipe.
One wit remarked, ‘An empty cab drew up and Clement Attlee got out.’
How can the insignificant, passionless little Labour leader Clem Attlee defy Churchill, a virulently hostile press - and plots and skulduggery from within his own ranks – to bring in a social revolution? All at a time when Britain was bankrupt after the Second World War.
Francis Beckett is an author, journalist and playwright. The best known of his 19 non-fiction books is Clem Attlee: Labour’s Great Reformer – and this is the latest of his five plays.