
Clement Richard Attlee, 1st Earl Attlee, KG, OM, CH, PC, FRS was a British Labour Party politician who served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1945 to 1951, and as the Leader of the Labour Party from 1935 to 1955. He was the first person ever to hold the office of Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, serving under Winston Churchill in the wartime coalition government, before going on to lead the Labour Party to landslide election victories in 1945 and 1950. He became the first Labour Prime Minister ever to serve a full term, as well as the first to command a Labour majority in Parliament, and remains to date the longest-ever serving Leader of the Labour Party.
First elected to Parliament in 1922 as the MP for Limehouse, he rose quickly to become a minister in the minority government led by Ramsay MacDonald in 1924. In 1931, after the Labour Party had suffered a disastrous election defeat, he was elected Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. Four years later, he became the Leader of the Labour Party after the resignation of George Lansbury. After reversing Labour's previous policy of pacificism and appeasement, he became a fierce critic of Neville Chamberlain's attempts to negotiate with Adolf Hitler. After the outbreak of the Second World War, he took Labour into the coalition government formed by Winston Churchill. Initially serving in the Cabinet as the Lord Privy Seal, he was appointed Deputy Prime Minister two years later. In 1945, the coalition government was dissolved, and Attlee led Labour to win a huge majority in the ensuing general election.