Portal:London/Showcase biography/09 2010

Statue of Attlee, formerly standing outside Limehouse library; it is now on the Mile End campus of Queen Mary, University of London.

Clement Attlee , KG, OM, CH, PC, FRS (3 January 1883 – 8 October 1967) was a British Labour 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 also the first person to hold the office of Deputy Prime Minister, under Winston Churchill in the wartime coalition government, before leading the Labour Party to a landslide election victory over Churchill's Conservative Party in 1945. He was the first Labour Prime Minister to serve a full Parliamentary term, and the first to have a majority in Parliament.

The government he led put in place the post-war settlement, based upon the assumption that full employment would be maintained by Keynesian policies, and that a greatly enlarged system of social services would be created – aspirations that had been outlined in the wartime Beveridge Report. Within this context, his government undertook the nationalisation of major industries and public utilities as well as the creation of the National Health Service.

From 1906 to 1909 Attlee worked as manager of Haileybury House, a club for working class boys in Limehouse run by his old school. Prior to this, his political views had been conservative, but he was shocked by the poverty and deprivation he saw while working with slum children, and this caused him to become a socialist. He joined the Independent Labour Party in 1908, and became mayor of Stepney in 1919. At the 1922 general election, Attlee became MP for the constituency of Limehouse, which he represented while Prime Minister.

In 2004, he was voted the greatest British prime minister of the 20th century in a poll of 139 professors organised by MORI.

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