Winston Churchill in Labour

In mid-1940 a pro-peace section of the Conservatives move to replace him with Halifax.

Attlee, Simon and the King still wanting to continue the war, but the King is unwilling to ask Churchill's rump War Conservatives to form government, even though Labor plus Liberals plus War Conservatives look likely to have the support of the House.

Attlee then invites Churchill to join the Labor Party, moves the motion that he is elected as leader, and the King asks Labor to form a government.

Churchill is returned as Prime Minister of what he calls the National Government ...

Churchill can't be replaced as Prime Minister unless he resigns and instructs the King to appoint Halifax. Which he won't do.

What you'd need to happen is the King sacking Churchill on his own accord, and installing Halifax. Who would then be subject to a vote of no-confidence in the House. If the vote succeeds, under normal circumstances you'd have an election - but in the middle of the War, I think Halifax then advises the King to recall Churchill. No change of party required.

The King's authority is, of course, terminally weakened. Another abdication might be on the cards (14 year old Queen Elizabeth II?).
 
This scenario is ASB. A Churchill who joins Labour would be completely unrecognizable from the Churchill of history. It's so far beyond counter-historical, it may as well be anti-historical.
 

Ian_W

Banned
Churchill can't be replaced as Prime Minister unless he resigns and instructs the King to appoint Halifax. Which he won't do.

What you'd need to happen is the King sacking Churchill on his own accord, and installing Halifax. Who would then be subject to a vote of no-confidence in the House. If the vote succeeds, under normal circumstances you'd have an election - but in the middle of the War, I think Halifax then advises the King to recall Churchill. No change of party required.

The King's authority is, of course, terminally weakened. Another abdication might be on the cards (14 year old Queen Elizabeth II?).

You're right. But it was the best I could do :)
 
This scenario is ASB. A Churchill who joins Labour would be completely unrecognizable from the Churchill of history. It's so far beyond counter-historical, it may as well be anti-historical.

Oh, it's not ASB. One can construct Churchill's background to make him a socialist. It's just it can't be done with a post-1900 POD.

I think your best bet is 1896-1897. During a stint in India, he started self-educating himself by reading classics in his own time. In OTL, he read Gibbon and Macaulay. Maybe have him stumble across Marx and Morris instead.
 
Oh, it's not ASB. One can construct Churchill's background to make him a socialist. It's just it can't be done with a post-1900 POD.

I think your best bet is 1896-1897. During a stint in India, he started self-educating himself by reading classics in his own time. In OTL, he read Gibbon and Macaulay. Maybe have him stumble across Marx and Morris instead.

What comes next? Churchill was in India and in the army generally, in the hopes of seeing some kind of military action that might earn him a medal, garner some attention and provide material for the articles and books he would write so he could live the lifestyle of the rich and famous, and use that as a springboard to get into the House of Commons. As a Conservative. And yes, although Winston would shortly rat to the Liberals, the one thing he never ever wavered on was his detestation of socialists. That, of course, was a primary reason he ended up re-ratting back to the Tories in the twenties. You really think slogging through Marx and Morris is going to be enough to get Churchill to turn his back on everything he believed in from his youth? I am just not seeing it. His personal and political character were already set in stone by this time.
 
What comes next? Churchill was in India and in the army generally, in the hopes of seeing some kind of military action that might earn him a medal, garner some attention and provide material for the articles and books he would write so he could live the lifestyle of the rich and famous, and use that as a springboard to get into the House of Commons. As a Conservative. And yes, although Winston would shortly rat to the Liberals, the one thing he never ever wavered on was his detestation of socialists. That, of course, was a primary reason he ended up re-ratting back to the Tories in the twenties. You really think slogging through Marx and Morris is going to be enough to get Churchill to turn his back on everything he believed in from his youth? I am just not seeing it. His personal and political character were already set in stone by this time.

Perhaps, but he was only in his early 20s at the time, and didn't have much intellectual foundation for his politics (hence him trying to self-educate). Attlee himself only became a socialist in his mid-20s.

I'm not saying it's likely, and I certainly think any POD past 1900 is too late, but at an impressionable age, encountering some nineteenth century socialist thinker might have put him on a different trajectory, at least on economics. His imperialism is another matter.
 
I'm not saying it's likely, and I certainly think any POD past 1900 is too late, but at an impressionable age, encountering some nineteenth century socialist thinker might have put him on a different trajectory, at least on economics. His imperialism is another matter.

Maybe his brand of socialism would be socialism with nationalism mixed, branded something like National Socialism? After all, in the end some communist states did end up with hereditary upper class, so maybe in his ideologue the upper class is justified as it's a result of centuries of selective darwinist breeding.
 
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It was not unknown for Churchill to imagine himself at times a peoples tribune, this is after all the man who was hated by Conservatives everywhere for joining the liberals. In fact, Churchill's own furore into alternate history writing featured a left-wing Benjamin Disraeli and a right-wing Gladstone, so I think he himself might have been open to the idea. This would, however, require a very different world.

Perhaps in a world without an October Revolution Churchill could find himself on the very furthest right of the Labour Party, which is further right than perhaps many of you might imagine, his existence there no more incongruous there than Mosley or any other number of bright sons of the aristocracy was. Remember, there was a whole organised faction of the Labour Party (the National Labour Party) who were openly allied to the Tories during the time of national government and even endorsed Churchill over Attlee in 1945. It's not unimaginable that some alt-version of the OTL National Labour Party might be home to a alt-Churchill.
 
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