Voters also harboured doubts over Churchill's ability to lead the country on the domestic front. The writer and soldier Anthony Burgess remarked that Churchill, who then often wore a colonel's uniform, was not nearly as popular with soldiers at the front as with officers and civilians. Burgess noted that Churchill often smoked cigars in front of soldiers who had not had a decent cigarette in days. In addition to the poor Conservative general election strategy, Churchill went so far as to accuse Attlee of seeking to behave as a dictator, despite Attlee's service as part of Churchill's war cabinet. In the most famous incident of the campaign, Churchill's first election broadcast on 4 June backfired dramatically and memorably. Denouncing his former coalition partners, he declared that Labour "would have to fall back on some form of a Gestapo" to impose socialism on Britain. Attlee responded the next night by ironically thanking the prime minister for demonstrating to the people the difference between "Churchill the great wartime leader" and "Churchill the peacetime politician" and argued the case for public control of industry. Another blow to the Conservative campaign was the memory of the 1930s policy of appeasement, which had been conducted by Churchill's Conservative predecessors, Neville Chamberlain and Stanley Baldwin, but had been widely discredited for allowing Adolf Hitler's Germany to become too powerful. Labour had strongly advocated appeasement until 1938, but the interwar period had been dominated by Conservatives. With the exception of two brief minority Labour governments in 1924 and 1929–1931, the Conservatives had been in power for all of the interwar period. As a result, the Conservatives were generally blamed for the era's mistakes: appeasement, inflation and the unemployment of the Great Depression. Many voters felt that although the First World War had been won, the peace that followed had been lost. Results |} Votes summary Seats summary Transfers of seats All comparisons are with the winning party in the 1935 election; the aim is to provide a comparison with the previous general election. This list includes seats where the incumbent was standing down and therefore there was no possibility of a particular person being defeated. In some cases the sitting MP had changed to the gaining party. Such circumstances are marked with a *. In other circumstances the gaining party had won a by-election in the intervening years, and then retained the seat in 1945. Such circumstances