Eighty years ago this week Mussolini has his son-in-law shot

 

The first "Bevin boys" conscripted into work in the coal mines had just started training, when the Mineworkers' Federation admitted that it was pulling back from its earlier demand for full state control of the mines. But it would not accept management regaining the right to suspend miners for "indiscipline."

The government's Conservative candidate lost by only 221 votes the Skipton by-election to the Common Wealth party. The anti-government vote had been split by an "independent Labour" candidate who polled 3,000 votes. This was Common Wealth's second by-election win. Common Wealth's idealistic and ill-defined programme was far less a factor than war-weariness and public resentment at the lack of effective political debate.

The economist Sir William Beveridge kept up the pressure on the government to implement his programme for a welfare state. He said abolition of want was the first priority in peace: want was waste of human capital; we could not afford it.

The new German puppet regime in Italy showed its claws. Count Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law and the ex-foreign minister was sentenced to death along with other members of the Fascist Grand Council for voting to depose the Duce. Rachele Mussolini, the Duce's wife,  who loathed the golf-playing frequenter of nightclubs approved. The sentences were executed the following day. Ciano's son wrote a memoir called "When Grandpa Had Daddy Shot".

With the Red Army crossing the border into Poland, the Soviet government denounced the Riga Treaty that had set the border in 1921, declaring that the plebiscite it had organized in 1939 expressed the true will of the people.  The chief concern for the British was that the Polish government-in-exile would not protest too vocifeously.