After the Conservatives' defeat in the 1945 general election, he became Leader of the Opposition. Churchill formed a national government and oversaw British involvement in the Allied war effort against the Axis powers, resulting in victory in 1945. In May 1940, he became Prime Minister, replacing Neville Chamberlain. At the outbreak of the Second World War he was re-appointed First Lord of the Admiralty. Out of government during his so-called "wilderness years" in the 1930s, Churchill took the lead in calling for British rearmament to counter the growing threat of militarism in Nazi Germany. After two years out of Parliament, he served as Chancellor of the Exchequer in Stanley Baldwin's Conservative government, returning the pound sterling in 1925 to the gold standard at its pre-war parity, a move widely seen as creating deflationary pressure and depressing the UK economy. In 1917, he returned to government under David Lloyd George and served successively as Minister of Munitions, Secretary of State for War, Secretary of State for Air, and Secretary of State for the Colonies, overseeing the Anglo-Irish Treaty and British foreign policy in the Middle East. He resigned in November 1915 and joined the Royal Scots Fusiliers on the Western Front for six months. As First Lord of the Admiralty during the First World War, he oversaw the Gallipoli Campaign but, after it proved a disaster, he was demoted to Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Asquith's Liberal government, Churchill served as President of the Board of Trade and Home Secretary, championing prison reform and workers' social security. Elected a Conservative MP in 1900, he defected to the Liberals in 1904. He joined the British Army in 1895 and saw action in British India, the Anglo-Sudan War, and the Second Boer War, gaining fame as a war correspondent and writing books about his campaigns. Of mixed English and American parentage, Churchill was born in Oxfordshire to a wealthy, aristocratic family. He was a member of the Liberal Party from 1904 to 1924. Ideologically an economic liberal and imperialist, he was for most of his career a member of the Conservative Party, which he led from 1940 to 1955. Apart from two years between 19, he was a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1900 to 1964 and represented a total of five constituencies. Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, (30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965) was a British statesman, soldier, and writer who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945, during the Second World War, and again from 1951 to 1955.
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