In one of Boris Johnson’s opening salvoes of the 2019 campaign he said of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party:
‘they detest the profit motive so viscerally…they point their fingers at individuals with a relish and a vindictiveness not seen since Stalin persecuted the kulaks.’
Boris Johnson is no Winston Churchill. But in making that claim, the Prime Minister evoked one of his most illustrious predecessor’s greatest campaigning mistakes.
For in a radio broadcast during the 1945 election campaign Churchill claimed a ‘socialist government’ led by Attlee, aimed to control ‘the entire life and industry of the country … [and] would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo’.
Churchill’s speech is now remembered as one of the most misjudged in political history. It did not change the result: Labour was probably always going to win. And it certainly did not make voters see Attlee as the monster the Conservative leader’s rhetoric implied he might be.
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