Churchill's Indian Summer: The Conservative Government, 1951-55

by Anthony Seldon

Winston Churchill was seventy-six when the Conservative Party won the 1951 General Election. At the third attempt since the end of the Second World War he had finally been returned to power by the will of the people. A lifetime's ambition had been achieved after nearly a half a century in Parliament.

Yet the Conservative Government he led between 1951 and 1955 remains largely unchronicled. The thirty-year-old rule on Cabinet papers means that not until 1986 will all the material on Churchill's last years as Prime Minister be released.

But Anthony Seldon, a research fellow at the London School of Economics,, has circumvented the problem by interviewing over two hundred surviving politicians and civil servants and gaining access to a multitude of hitherto unpublished papers and diaries, including those of former Cabinet Ministers.

The Churchill of the period has been portrayed, thanks principally to the diaries of his doctor, Lord Moran, as increasingly ga-ga. Seldon, from his interviews and studies of the papers, believes this view to be exaggerated. He portrays Churchill in the autumn of his years, enjoying an Indian summer and determined to achieve a summit meeting with the Soviet Union so that he might hand over to his successor with the world in a better state than when he took office.

667 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Sir Anthony Francis Seldon, FRSA, FRHistS, FKC, is a British educator and contemporary historian. He was the 13th Master (headmaster) of Wellington College, one of Britain's co-educational independent boarding schools. In 2009, he set up The Wellington Academy, the first state school to carry the name of its founding independent school. He was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham from 2015 to 2020. Seldon was knighted in the 2014 Birthday Honours for services to education and modern political history.