Prime Minister
As Prime Minister, Attlee appointed Ernest Bevin as Foreign Secretary and Hugh Dalton was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer (although it had widely been expected to be the other way around). Stafford Cripps became President of the Board of Trade, Herbert Morrison was given the post of Deputy Prime Minister and given overall control of Labour's nationalisation programme, Aneurin Bevan became Minister of Health, and Ellen Wilkinson, the only woman to serve in Attlee's government, became Minister of Education.
Attlee's government proved itself to be a radical reforming administration. In the 1945-46 session alone, pensions and other benefits were substantially increased, and from 1945 to 1948, over 200 public Acts of Parliament were passed, with eight major pieces of legislation placed on the statute book in 1946 alone.
Read more about this topic: Clement Attlee
Famous quotes related to prime minister:
“Sometimes it takes years to really grasp what has happened to your life. What do you do after you are world-famous and nineteen or twenty and you have sat with prime ministers, kings and queens, the Pope? What do you do after that? Do you go back home and take a job? What do you do to keep your sanity? You come back to the real world.”
—Wilma Rudolph (1940–1994)
“No woman in my time will be Prime Minister or Chancellor or Foreign Secretary—not the top jobs. Anyway I wouldn’t want to be Prime Minister. You have to give yourself 100%.”
—Margaret Thatcher (b. 1925)
“If one had to worry about one’s actions in respect of other people’s ideas, one might as well be buried alive in an antheap or married to an ambitious violinist. Whether that man is the prime minister, modifying his opinions to catch votes, or a bourgeois in terror lest some harmless act should be misunderstood and outrage some petty convention, that man is an inferior man and I do not want to have anything to do with him any more than I want to eat canned salmon.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)