In declining health, Churchill resigned as prime minister in 1955, remaining an MP until 1964. Domestically, his government emphasised housebuilding and completed the development of a nuclear weapon (begun by his predecessor). His second term was preoccupied with foreign affairs, especially Anglo-American relations and preservation of what remained of the British Empire with India now no longer part of it. He lost the 1950 election but was returned to office in 1951. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953.
Between his terms as prime minister, he wrote several books recounting his experience during the war. Amid the developing Cold War with the Soviet Union, he publicly warned of an " iron curtain" of Soviet influence in Europe and promoted European unity. After the Conservatives' defeat in the 1945 general election, he became Leader of the Opposition. Churchill formed a national government and oversaw British involvement in the Allied war effort against the Axis powers, resulting in victory in 1945. In May 1940, he became prime minister, succeeding Neville Chamberlain. At the outbreak of the Second World War he was re-appointed First Lord of the Admiralty. Out of government during his so-called " wilderness years" in the 1930s, Churchill took the lead in calling for British rearmament to counter the growing threat of militarism in Nazi Germany. After two years out of Parliament, he served as Chancellor of the Exchequer in Stanley Baldwin's Conservative government, returning the pound sterling in 1925 to the gold standard at its pre-war parity, a move widely seen as creating deflationary pressure and depressing the UK economy. In 1917, he returned to government under David Lloyd George and served successively as Minister of Munitions, Secretary of State for War, Secretary of State for Air, and Secretary of State for the Colonies, overseeing the Anglo-Irish Treaty and British foreign policy in the Middle East. He resigned in November 1915 and joined the Royal Scots Fusiliers on the Western Front for six months. As First Lord of the Admiralty during the First World War, he oversaw the Gallipoli campaign but, after it proved a disaster, he was demoted to Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Asquith's Liberal government, Churchill served as President of the Board of Trade and Home Secretary, championing prison reform and workers' social security. Elected a Conservative MP in 1900, he defected to the Liberals in 1904. He joined the British Army in 1895 and saw action in British India, the Mahdist War (also known as or Anglo-Sudan War), and the Second Boer War, later gaining fame as a war correspondent and writing books about his campaigns.
Of mixed English and American parentage, Churchill was born in Oxfordshire into the wealthy, aristocratic Spencer family. He was a member of the Liberal Party from 1904 to 1924. Ideologically an adherent to economic liberalism and imperialism, he was for most of his career a member of the Conservative Party, which he led from 1940 to 1955. Apart from two years between 19, he was a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1900 to 1964 and represented a total of five constituencies. Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965) was a British statesman, soldier, and writer who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom twice, from 1940 to 1945 during the Second World War, and again from 1951 to 1955.
0 kommentar(er)
