Gray Robert Brown

Churchill and his party were decisively defeated in 1945 and the Labour Party under Clement Attlee was given a mandate to change British society.

Christie shows us a conservative party at a crossroads, deeply uncertain as to the road to take.

The typical equation of political power with high social caste and economic ascendancy no longer holds.

I think that perfectly sums up the context of the book.

But actually, for me also, I think it ties in with the central metaphor.

I think it's...

the rose or the yew tree.

I think it's this or that.

I think it's we are at a crossroads.

And we can't know, but I'm sure it would have been quite hard for Christie as a conservative voter and a supporter of Churchill to see the country repay him for his perceived heroism with an electoral defeat.

It's something that a lot of people are wrangling with at this time.

Certainly more than Labour today.

Exactly.

It's so fascinating that we have this stiff upper lip perception and we have these stereotypes of history that go, you know, but actually people voted for potentially colossal change straight after colossal change.

You know, that flies in the face of all these tired old things that we trot out about, you know, war was instability and people liked crime during war because it was stability within the instability and you knew that the culprit would be captured and all those things that people always say and this defies that actually.

Yes.

And yeah, you're very right to say that.

I'm glad you said that, that I think, you know, we know Christie was a conservative voter.

We are certainly not conservative voters here on The Swing and Christie's.

But also, I think it's important to say that what that meant then throughout Christie's life versus what that means today.