Kit Kowol, 'Grieving for England: mourning and conservatism in Britain after 1945'

Therapists, counsellors, and other practitioners reported high levels of anxiety and despair among their clients in the aftermath of the Brexit vote. Jay Watts of The Guardian even went so far as to describe a post- referendum ‘mental health crisis’. 

    While the feelings of malaise that accompanied Brexit are of course new, the link between electoral defeats and emotional distress are not. This paper examines a particularly acute example: Winston Churchill’s landslide defeat at the post-war 1945 general election. Examining the hundreds of letters that were sent to Churchill and his wife after his defeat from Conservative MPs, activists, and voters, I argue that Conservatives experienced profound feelings of grief at the result—grief that stemmed from the belief that not only had the election been lost but the nation itself. Going on, the paper demonstrates that this was a grief that many Conservatives could not express as a result of the restrained emotional regime surrounding mourning which, ironically, they had done much to construct. The paper concludes with the suggestion that this tension between feelings of grief and the inability to express them had profound consequences for post-war British politics.