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Patient Wife. Reith enjoyed a moment of "jubilation" when Churchill was defeated in the 1945 general elections. But postwar gratifications, other than those that came from the understanding of his patient wife Muriel, were few. As Reith saw it, the vagaries of history as well as the stupidities of men seemed bent on frustrating him. Hoping that he would be appointed Viceroy of India so that he could demonstrate his ability to run something really big, Reith was crestfallen when in 1947 Lord Mountbatten was sent to manage Britain's evacuation of India: "So that is the job I most wanted on earth gone for good."
Reith extended his Swiftian disdain for humanity to himself. The saddest and most redeeming entry in his ill-tempered chronicles is Reith's admission: "I have always known that I had a horrid character and disposition. And now I am querulous and embittered and small and shrunken and can't see even near the horizon. Believing nothing and without faith or hope, [I am] stifled and strangling and submerged by the pettiness of my own preoccupations."