Clement Attlee - Return To Opposition and Retirement

Return To Opposition and Retirement

Following the defeat in 1951, Attlee continued to lead the party in opposition. His last four years as leader are widely seen as one of the Labour Party's weaker periods. The party split between its right wing, led by Hugh Gaitskell, and its left, led by Aneurin Bevan. Many Labour MPs felt Attlee should have retired after the 1951 election and allowed a younger man to lead the party. Bevan openly called for him to stand down in the summer of 1954. One of his main reasons for staying on as leader was to frustrate the leadership ambitions of Herbert Morrison, whom Attlee disliked for political and personal reasons. (Ernest Bevin had died shortly before Labour lost office.) At one time, Attlee had favoured Aneurin Bevan to succeed him as leader, but this became problematic after Bevan split the party.

In an interview with the News Chronicle columnist Percy Cudlipp in mid-September 1955, Attlee made clear his own thinking together with his preference for the leadership succession, stating that

‘Labour has nothing to gain by dwelling in the past. Nor do I think we can impress the nation by adopting a futile left-wingism. I regard myself as Left of Centre which…is where a Party Leader ought to be…It is no use asking, “What would Keir Hardie have done?” We must have at the top men brought up in the present age, not, as I was, in the Victorian Age.’

At 72 years of age, Attlee contested the 1955 general election against Anthony Eden, which saw the Conservative majority increase. He retired as leader of the party on 14 December 1955, having led Labour for twenty years, and was succeeded by Hugh Gaitskell.

He retired from the Commons and was elevated to the peerage to take his seat in the House of Lords as Earl Attlee and Viscount Prestwood on 16 December 1955. In 1958 he was, along with Bertrand Russell, one of a group of notables to establish the Homosexual Law Reform Society. The society campaigned for the decriminalisation of homosexual acts in private by consenting adults, a reform which was voted through parliament nine years later.

He attended Churchill's funeral in January 1965. He was elderly and frail by that time. He had to remain seated in the freezing cold as the coffin was carried, having tired himself out by standing at the rehearsal the previous day. After the service, Attlee had to be helped down the steps of St Paul's Cathedral by Sir Anthony Eden and a Guards officer.

A heavy pipe and cigarette smoker from an early age, Attlee had breathing problems in his later years. He lived to see Labour return to power under Harold Wilson in 1964, but also to see his old constituency of Walthamstow West fall to the Conservatives in a by-election in September 1967. He died of pneumonia at the age of 84 at Westminster Hospital on 8 October 1967.

On his death, the title passed to his son Martin Richard Attlee, 2nd Earl Attlee (1927–91). It is now held by Clement Attlee's grandson John Richard Attlee, 3rd Earl Attlee. The third earl (a member of the Conservative Party) retained his seat in the Lords as one of the hereditary peers to remain under an amendment to Labour's 1999 House of Lords Act.

When Attlee died, his estate was sworn for probate purposes at a value of £7,295, a relatively modest sum for so prominent a figure. He was cremated and his ashes buried in the nave of Westminster Abbey, close to those of Lord Passfield and Ernest Bevin.