On VE day, 8 May 1945, euphoria and relief mingled with apprehension. With 750,000 homes destroyed, many of the four million servicemen demobilised came back to bombed homes and the dole queue. The Conservative Party and their supporters thought the election –set for July 5 –was in the bag. In the event, the public demanded and then voted for change. The great hope was that 1945 would offer a clean start –Year Zero –with history reset.

When Labour won a landslide victory in the election of 1945, with a majority of 146, one not to be surpassed until 1997, no one was more surprised than the party's leader Clement Attlee and his wife Vi. ‘Vi went round for months telling people the Attlees “expected Churchill to win.” ‘

When the new prime minister went to the Palace, the self-effacing, pipesmoking Attlee was driven by Vi –dressed in her Sunday best –in their modest family saloon, the same car used to cross the country during the election campaign. It was a striking symbol of the change about to sweep Britain. When he informed King George VI that Labour had won the election, the king is reported to have said, ‘I know. I heard it on the Six O’Clock News.’

Treachery

The result was a jolt to the old elites. They expected Churchill to win, their fortunes to be restored and the old order to bounce back along with the servants, the lifestyles and the deference. On the day the results were announced, London's most prestigious hotels had laid on special lunches for their clients. “But this is terrible –they’ve elected a Labour Government, and the country will never stand for that!” declared one horrified diner at the Savoy. ‘I am stunned and shocked by the country's treachery’, wrote ‘Chips’ Channon a day after the result. Some years later, Peregrine Worsthorne, a man with an impeccable patrician background and later editor of the Sunday Telegraph, wrote that he would ‘never forget the panic that hit some of my rich fellow officers when the news of Labour's victory reached our mess in Holland.