Advent 12

Clement Attlee, Prime Minister between 1945 and 1951: the man who in those six years set the agenda for the politics of the United Kingdom for more than a quarter of a century. Mass nationalisation, the NHS etc etc. All else that followed in that quarter century was a botched impression of Attlee's managed economy. His, then, was the world in which I grew up notwithstanding that he had been out of office for  nine years by the time I was born. The assumption of the permanence of socialism was not meaningfully questioned until I was old enough to vote. As legacies go you have got to say that is pretty impressive

He led the Labour Party for twenty years and on his retirement accepted an hereditary earldom. His grandson, the Third Earl Attlee, sits on the Conservative benches in the House of Lords.