Hugh Gaitskell's death caused a seismic shock in the Labor Party, for he alone was responsible for bringing Labor to the point where it could be seriously reckoned as a potential alternative government. When he succeeded Clement Attlee as opposition leader in 1955, he inherited a party rent by dissension and choked by the dogma and tradition of class warfare. But in his seven years of leadership, he had largely healed Labor's divisive internal lesions, trimmed away many of its stifling old Socialist doctrines, and so successfully imprinted his modern ideas on the...
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