Clement Richard Attlee, 1st Earl Attlee, KG, OM, CH, PC (3 January 1883 - 8 October 1967) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1945 to 1951. The Labour Party under Attlee won a landslide election victory over Winston Churchill immediately after Churchill had led Britain through World War II. He was the first Labour Prime Minister to serve a full Parliamentary term and the first to have a majority in Parliament.

The government he led put in place the post-war consensus, based upon the assumption that full employment would be maintained by Keynesian policies, and that a greatly enlarged system of social services would be created -- aspirations that had been outlined in the wartime Beveridge Report. Within this context, his government undertook the nationalisation of major industries and public utilities as well as the creation of the National Health Service. After initial Conservative opposition, this settlement, generally known as the post-war consensus was by and large accepted by all parties until Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party in the 1970s.

His government also presided over the decolonisation of a large part of the British Empire, in which India and the countries that are now Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Pakistan obtained independence.

In 2004, he was voted as the greatest British prime minister of the 20th century in a poll of professors organised by MORI.