Well the election result shocked everyone.
And the rest of the contingent at Potsdam weren’t very happy about it either.
We might think that the Soviets would be please to be dealing with a British government made up of socialists.
But that wasn’t the case.
Stalin didn’t like Attlee or the British Labour Party.
Despite Churchill’s attempts during the election to paint Labour as pro-Soviet, neither Attlee nor Stalin saw themselves as fellow travellers.
To the Labour Party, Soviet-style economic models were horrible.
To the Soviets, the Labour Party seemed no less capitalist or imperialist than the Tories.
Far better, in Stalin’s mind, to deal with the Churchill devil he knew rather than the Attlee devil he most certainly did not.
Attlee wrote: “I knew from experience,” he wrote, “that the communists had always fought us more vigorously than the Tories because they thought we offered a viable alternative to communism. They regarded the Tories as advocates of a dying cause while they thought we were a rival”
The British of course were horrified.
Cadogan called Churchill’s defeat “a display of base ingratitude” on the part of the British people and “rather humiliating for our country.”
Field Marshal Alan Brooke saw the timing of the election itself as another in a long line of Churchill’s mistakes in domestic politics, and one with potentially catastrophic repercussions.
“What a ghastly mistake to start elections at this point of the world’s history!” he wrote in his diary that night, “May God forgive England for it.”
Brooke blamed Churchill personally, saying, “If only Winston had followed any advice, he would have been in at any rate till the end of the year!”
Instead, Brooke noted, Churchill had counted on his personality to carry the election, just as he had counted on his personality to win over Truman and Stalin.
Tragically, he had failed at both.
Some tried to tell Churchill that the British people had not rejected him personally, but the Conservative Party in general.
The data, however, tell a different story.
The Tories actually performed worse in districts where Churchill himself had campaigned.
Clearly, he had lost the faith of the British people even if he could not quite figure out why.
“It may well be a blessing in disguise,” Clementine told him.
“At the moment,” he replied, “it seems quite effectively disguised.”
Attlee himself thought the result had more to do with the economic policies of the Tories in the 30s and the appeasement of Hitler - nothing Churchill could personally be blamed for.
Churchill returned to No. 10 Downing Street for one last meeting as prime minister.
He told Eden that he expected his own political career to be at an end, but that Eden would himself one day return to Downing Street as prime minister.
Churchill appeared to Eden as “pretty wretched, poor old boy.”
Losing the election, Churchill told Eden, was “like a wound which becomes more painful after the first shock.”
The British government had even taken away his bodyguards,
The American delegate Walter Brown observed that “the Empire he had saved did not think enough of him to keep a guard for a single night after he had been defeated.”
Churchill drove down to Chequers for a final weekend at the country home of the prime minister, writing his name and “FINIS” in the guest book as his tenure as Britain’s wartime leader came to an end.
The end was pretty harsh: no one even asked Churchill to deliver an address to the nation when the Japanese surrendered in August.
Churchill told Lord Moran that “it would have been better to have been killed in an aeroplane or to have died like Roosevelt.”
When the king announced he was awarding the Order of the Garter to Eden, Eden replied
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