Winston Churchill Conservative Clement Attlee Labour The 1945 United Kingdom general election took place on Thursday 5 July 1945.

[b] With the Second World War still fresh in voters’ minds, the opposition Labour Party under the leadership of Clement Attlee won a landslide victory with a majority of 146 seats, defeating the incumbent Conservative-led government under Prime Minister Winston Churchill amidst growing concerns by the public over the future of the United Kingdom in the post-war period.

Opinion polls when the election was called showed strong approval ratings for Churchill, but Labour had gradually gained support for months before the war's conclusion.

[3] For the Conservatives, the Labour victory was a shock,[4] as they suffered a net loss of 189 seats although they won 36.2% of the vote and had campaigned on the mistaken belief that Churchill would win as people praised his leadership during the war.

Clement Attlee, the leader of the Labour Party, refused Winston Churchill's offer of continuing the wartime coalition until the Allied defeat of Japan.

The Labour manifesto, Let Us Face the Future, included promises of nationalisation, economic planning, full employment, a National Health Service, and a system of social security.

[9] In May 1945, when the war in Europe ended, Churchill's approval ratings stood at 83%, but the Labour Party had held an 18% poll lead as of February 1945.

Future prominent figures who entered Parliament included Harold Wilson, James Callaghan, Barbara Castle, Michael Foot and Hugh Gaitskell.

Future Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan lost his seat, but he returned to Parliament at a by-election later that year.

[12]The historian Henry Pelling, noting that polls showed a steady Labour lead after 1942, pointed to long-term forces that caused the Labour landslide: the usual swing against the party in power, the Conservative loss of initiative, wide fears of a return to the high unemployment of the 1930s, the theme that socialist planning would be more efficient in operating the economy, and the mistaken belief that Churchill would continue as prime minister regardless of the result.

Possibly for that reason, there was especially strong support for Labour in the armed services, which feared the unemployment and homelessness to which the soldiers of the First World War had returned.

It has been claimed that the left-wing bias of teachers in the armed services was a contributing factor, but that argument has generally not carried much weight, and the failure of the Conservative governments in the 1920s to deliver a "land fit for heroes" was likely more important.

Labour continued to attack prewar Conservative governments for their inactivity in tackling Hitler, reviving the economy and rearming Britain,[16] but Churchill was less interested in furthering his party, much to the chagrin of many of its members and MPs.

Churchill's personal popularity remained high; hence, the Conservatives were confident of victory and based much of their election campaign on that, rather than proposing new programmes.

Denouncing his former coalition partners, he declared that Labour "would have to fall back on some form of a Gestapo" to impose socialism on Britain.