Clement Richard Attlee, 1st Earl Attlee, KG, OM, CH, PC, FRS (3 January 1883 – 8 October 1967) served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1945 to 1951. He was MP for Walthamstow West from 1950 to 1956.

The future 1st Earl Attlee of Walthamstow was born in Putney, the seventh of eight children. His father was a solicitor, who could afford to send him to Northaw School, Haileybury and University College, Oxford, where he graduated with a Second Class Honours BA in Modern History in 1904. Attlee was called to the Bar in 1906.

From 1906 to 1909, Attlee worked as manager of Haileybury House, a club for working-class boys in Limehouse in the East End of London run by his old school. Prior to this, his political views had been Conservative. However, he was shocked by the poverty and deprivation he saw while working with slum children. He was apparently further influenced by reading John Ruskin and William Morris. He came to think that private charity would never be sufficient to alleviate poverty, and only income redistribution by the state would have any serious effect. This caused him to convert to socialism. He joined the Independent Labour Party in 1908, and became active in London local politics.

In 1909 he worked briefly as secretary for the Fabian, Beatrice Webb, and from 1909 to 1910 he worked as secretary for Toynbee Hall. In 1911 became an 'official explainer', touring the country to explain David Lloyd George's 1911 National Insurance Act. He spent the summer of that year touring Essex and Somerset on a bicycle, explaining the Act at public meetings.

He became a lecturer at the London School of Economics in 1912, but promptly applied for a Commission in August 1914 on the outbreak of World War I. During World War I, Attlee reached the rank of captain and served with the South Lancashire Regiment at Gallipoli. He was the last-but-one man to be evacuated from Suvla Bay (the last being General F.S. Maude). He later served in Iraq, where he was badly wounded after being hit in the leg by shrapnel from an exploding shell while attacking enemy trenches at El Hannah during the disasterous Kut campaign.

He became mayor of Stepney in 1919 and was elected as Labour MP for Limehouse in 1922. He used the title "Major Attlee" in the 1920s. With a private income from his parents he was able to become a full-time politician.

Attlee held junior office in the first Labour government in 1924. Between 1927 and 1929 he served on the Simon Commission on India. In the second Labour government (1929 – 31) he replaced Oswald Mosley as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in 1930, and the following year he became Postmaster-General. When the minority government collapsed in 1931, and Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald went off to lead the National Government, Attlee regarded MacDonald's act as a betrayal.

Attlee gained from the devastation of the Labour Party in the 1931 general election. Just fifty Labour MPs were returned and only a handful had any ministerial experience. He was elected deputy leader. When the leader George Lansbury resigned shortly before the 1935 election, Attlee was elected as an interim leader. In the new parliament over 150 Labour MPs were returned and in a leadership election Attlee beat Lord Mandelson's grandfather, the more fancied Herbert Morrison.

He was leader of the Labour Party from 1935 to 1955, the longest spell in the party's history. He became Deputy Prime Minister under Winston Churchill in the wartime coalition government, before leading the Labour Party to a landslide election victory over Churchill's Conservative Party at the 1945 general election. He was the first Labour Prime Minister to serve a full Parliamentary term and the first to have a majority in Parliament. As Prime Minister, Attlee kept his talented colleagues together by acting as a broker between different factions and delegated responsibility to key ministers.

The massive majority in the House of Commons ensured the speedy passage of legislation including nationalization of the Bank of England, railways, coal, gas, electricity, and steel. Altogether, the Attlee government brought about fifty per cent of the economy into public ownership. Other measures extended welfare provision and established the National Health Service. The government also speeded up the end of the empire whereby India, Pakistan, Burma, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Jordan, and Israel obtained their independence with varying degrees of instability as a result. The government had to cope with severe economic difficulties consequent on the shift to a peacetime economy and the ending of American lend-lease. It also began the production of Britain's atomic bomb, planning for which had commenced in 1940.

At the February 1950 election, Labour polled the highest popular vote any party had ever polled, even more than in 1945. There was however a swing to the Conservatives of 3.3%. and the overall majority was down to five, because many of its votes went to build up massive majorities in safe Labour seats. A redistribution of seats had taken place during the Parliament which transferred huge blocks of Labour votes from marginal seats to safe seats and probably lost Labour about 30 MPs. Attlee himself now sat as MP for Walthamstow West.

Attlee was forced to go to the country again in October 1951, against the background of a bitter cabinet division between Hugh Gaitskell and Aneurin Bevan over NHS charges for teeth and spectacles. Labour polled more votes than the Conservatives but had fewer seats; Churchill, the MP for neighbouring Wanstead and Woodford, had an overall majority of 17. Attlee retired from the Commons and was elevated to the peerage to take his seat in the House of Lords as Earl Attlee of Walthamstow and Viscount Prestwood on 16 December 1955. He died in 1967.