Eighty years ago this week Stalin launches his power grab in liberated territories

The Soviets made their first move  in imposing their rule on areas that they had liberated from the Germans. They recognised the Polish National Committee (known as the Lublin Poles after the corner of Poland held by the Red Army where they were notionally based) as the national government. The committee consisted of docile Communists and was no more than a puppet of Moscow. The Polish government-in-exile in London declared publicly that the Committee was unknown to anyone in Poland.

Discontent with the government found a new outlet in a futile debate over an old (and accidental) procedural omission. The wartime Fire Service regulations had not received proper Parliamentary approval and the Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, was forced to apologise. There was no suggestion that  the regulations themselves had ben used for oppressive or otherwise unacceptable purposes, but the de facto freedom of the coalition government to legislate as it chose was increasingly unpopular.

Princess Elizabeth became a Counsellor of State, competent to exercise Royal authority in the absence or incapacity of her father, the King. The office had been created in 1936 but the statute had to be modified by act of Parliament to admit the Princess to the office. It was the first formal recognition of her autonomous status; under the law of the day she was only heir presumptive to the throne as a brother or half-brother would have displaced her had one been born.

The former Governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman, was raised to the peerage after being finally nudged into retirement. For more than two decades he had dominated the British financial world, imposing ultra-rigorous monetary policy with disastrous consequences through the Great Slump, and championing the appeasement of Nazi Germany.