Winston Churchill once described Clement Attlee as a modest man with much to be modest about – and up to a point he was right. Attlee was in many ways the epitome of bourgeois respectability: he was privately educated, had a house in the London suburbs and liked nothing better than to occupy his spare time by cracking the Times crossword or catching up on the cricket scores.
Yet in 1945, the British public chose the modest man over the wartime hero, and Attlee showed over the next six years that a politician does not have to be charismatic to be effective. A modest man turned out to be one of the few UK prime ministers of the 20th century who actually changed Britain.
