I wonder how much of it has to do with his successfully prosecuting a war. In the US, we hold up FDR, Lincoln, and Wilson, all wartime presidents. On the other hand, the Brits did dump Churchill from office before lionizing him later.
No, the British public always loved Churchill after WWII, even the ones that voted him out of office. They all knew that he was a great man who was the man of the hour for getting Britain through the war.
He was however a Tory, and the British public didn’t want to see the Tories in power again, they wanted a government that promised a socially democratic capitalist welfare state, rather than a continuation of the pre-war status quo.
“In the US, we hold up FDR, Lincoln, and Wilson, all wartime presidents”
Two out of three ain’t bad. Wilson was a disastrous president by many accounts, including mine.
He did hold his own constituency in the 1945 election. His party was dumped and thus he lost power. I clearly remember that election as a small boy. The awful postwar years of WW1 were fraught with unemployment in Britain. The hard line old Tories were known to be unyielding to the unemployed. Not Churchill though.
The leftists dealing on pure emotion as usual, said the Conservatives would bring back unemployment and misery. All lies of course. People had been so happy with the full employment of the WW2 years, now they were scared. The famous cartoon of the "Sunday Pictorial" showed a gaunt woman kneeling down scrubbing a floor. Nothing to do with unemployment. The theme was hammered home -Conservatism equals unemployment.
The Conservatives under Churchill got back in power after five years hiatus. I got back from National Service overseas under a Conservative government. There was absolutely full employment under their new regime. The public had been coerced with pure fear.
Please excuse the ramble.