Back from a mini tour of Yorkshire and Stockport and cheering for supporting act Indignation Meeting
Attlee and Churchill by Leo McKinstry
Revealing account of two politicians who were allies in war and adversaries in peace
Clement Attlee
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A uncomfortably misogynistic authorial voice that sometimes seems to lack insight troubles FIONA O’CONNOR
THIS fascinating study of Clement Attlee and Winston Churchill focuses on how their lives became intertwined almost from the very beginning, leading to a great linkage during the second world war and separate, but still in many ways parallel, lives thereafter.
Author Leo McKinstry has certainly done his homework in discovering those parallels. In 1911, Churchill had one of his periodic rushes of blood to the head when, as Home Secretary, he personally supervised the “Siege of Sydney Street” in east London.
At the same time Attlee, working at a charitable organisation where his experiences saw him move from his early conservatism to socialism, wandered by as the Sydney Street drama reached its climax, a gunfight between two Latvian revolutionaries and the police and army.
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