>>17817230>The amount of incompetent morons that took over the country after the war is bafflingI put it down to the Attlee landslide. Churchill had thought that his victory in '45 would be the most assured thing in his career, and was mortally personally and politically wounded when he lost by such a margin. Attlee, likewise, had not really expected to win, and Labour was factionally riven. This is subjective, but I rate Bevin and Gaitskell as brilliant men who ought to have been given a lot more power, Cripps as a clever man who happened to be wrong about a lot of things, Morrison as a snake in human flesh much like his nephew Peter Mandelson, Bevan as the human embodiment of the Zinoviev letter, and pretty much everyone else as a non-entity. How could they be otherwise, with no practical experience in government and everyone who was too close to Ramsay Macdonald reviled as a traitor to the Labour movement? Anyway, Labour obviously bled support every year subsequent to their election, but Churchill then limply regaining power did not dispel the Tories' confidence, which was holed below the waterline. They, too, were riven with conflict between Rab Butler and Harold Macmillan, and couldn't really manage to do more than competently manage the fallout from the wrong decisions already taken by the Attlee administration. I think if Gaitskell had won in '59 then he might have been able to shape Labour into something much more competent, but alas he lost, there were five more years of zombie managerialism, and the used car salesman Harold Wilson and paedophile Edward Heath were than allowed to continue (mis)managerialism for another two decades. It was over by Callaghan, though I think he would have done a much better job than Wilson in the sixties.