Elections and governments in 20th & 21st century Britain |
Election & result | Prime Minister | Other events; comments |
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1895 Lord Salisbury (Conservative) 25 June | Last prime minister in House of Lords (see notes) |
1900 (28 Sept - 24 Oct) Conservative |
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1901 Edward VII (22 Jan) |
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1902 Arthur Balfour (Conservative) 12 July |
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1905 Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (Liberal) 5 Dec | Balfour resigns and Campbell-Bannerman becomes PM before election (see notes) |
1906 (12 Jan - 7 Feb) Liberal |
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1908 Herbert Henry Asquith (Liberal) 7 April |
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1910 (14 Jan - 9 Feb): split Con - Lib, Irish Nationalists hold balance |
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1910 George V (6 May) |
1910 (2 - 19 Dec): similar result |
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1911 Parliament Act (House of Lords loses power of veto; term reduced from 7 to 5 years) |
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1914 1st WW begins |
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1915 Herbert Henry Asquith (Coalition) 25 May | Limited coalition |
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1916 David Lloyd George (Coalition) 7 Dec | Much greater Conservative participation; Liberals become divided |
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1918 Armistice (end 1st WW); 1918 universal male suffrage and votes for some women |
1918 (14 Dec) Coalition |
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Coalition is continued into peacetime |
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1922 Irish Free State separates from UK |
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1922 Andrew Bonar Law (Conservative) 23 Oct | Conservatives withdraw from Coalition; party government resumes |
1922 (15 Nov) Conservative |
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1923 Stanley Baldwin (Conservative) 22 May |
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1923 (6 Dec) split Cons - Lab - Lib |
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1924 J. Ramsay MacDonald (Labour) 22 Jan | First Labour government. Con. held more seats than Lab. but Liberals give support to Lab. |
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1924 (29 Oct) Conservative | 1924 Stanley Baldwin (Conservative) 4 Nov |
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1928 universal suffrage (equal votes for women) |
1929 (30 May) Labour (minority) |
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1929 J. Ramsay MacDonald (Labour) 5 June |
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1931 J. Ramsay MacDonald (National Government) 24 Aug | To deal with economic crisis, National Coalition of Cons, some Lab, and some Lib formed: other Lab & Lib oppose |
1931 (27 Oct) National |
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1935 Stanley Baldwin (National) 7 June |
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1935 (14 Nov) National |
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1936 Edward VIII (20 Jan); Abdication crisis |
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1936 George VI (12 Dec) | ||
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1937 Neville Chamberlain (National) 28 May |
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1939 2nd WW begins |
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1940 Winston Churchill (Coalition) 10 May | All-party war coalition |
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1945 Caretaker / Conservative (see notes) (Churchill) 23 May | 1945 end of 2nd WW in Europe; Labour withdraws from coalition and demands election |
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1945 (5 July) (results 26 July, see notes) Labour | 1945 Clement Attlee (Labour) 26 July |
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1945 end of 2nd WW in Pacific | ||
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1947 Indian independence |
1950 (23 Feb) Labour |
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1951 (25 Oct) Conservative | 1951 Sir Winston Churchill (Conservative) 26 Oct |
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1952 Elizabeth II (6 Feb) |
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1955 Sir Anthony Eden (Conservative) 6 April |
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1955 (26 May) Conservative |
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1956 Suez crisis |
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1957 Harold Macmillan (Conservative) 10 Jan |
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1959 (8 Oct) Conservative |
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1963 Lord Home (Conservative) (19 Oct) [23 Oct = Sir Alec Douglas-Home (see notes)] |
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1964 (15 Oct) Labour | 1964 Harold Wilson (Labour) 16 Oct |
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1966 (31 March) Labour |
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1970 (18 June) Conservative | 1970 Edward Heath (Conservative) 19 June |
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1972 Northern Ireland: direct rule |
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1973 Britain enters EEC |
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1974 (28 Feb) Labour (minority) | 1974 Harold Wilson (Labour) 4 March |
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1974 (10 Oct) Labour |
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1976 James Callaghan (Labour) 5 April | Due to by-elections, a minority govt. |
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1979 (3 May) Conservative | 1979 Margaret Thatcher (Conservative) 4 May |
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1982 Falklands War |
1983 (9 June) Conservative |
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1987 (11 June) Conservative |
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1990 John Major (Conservative) 28 Nov |
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1992 (9 April) Conservative |
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1997 (1 May) Labour | 1997 Tony Blair (Labour) 2 May |
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1998 "Good Friday Agreement": Northern
Ireland Assembly established
1999 Scottish and Welsh devolved govt 1999 House of Lords Act (hereditary peers excluded) |
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[21st century]
2001 (7 June) Labour |
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2001 Sept. 11th attacks in New York and Washington
2003 start of Iraq war |
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2005 (5 May) Labour |
2006 Government of Wales Act (further devolution) |
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2007 Gordon Brown (Labour) 27 June
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2010 (6 May) no overall majority, Cons. largest party | ||
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2010 David Cameron (Conservative - Liberal Democrat coalition) 11 May | ||
2011 Fixed-term Parliaments Act
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2015 (7 May) Conservative majority | 2015 David Cameron (Conservative) 8 May (see notes) |
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2016 Brexit referendum (23 June)
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2016 Theresa May (Conservative) 13 July |
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2017 (8 June) no overall majority, Cons. largest party | Government reliant on support of Democratic Unionist Party
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2019 Boris Johnson (Conservative) 24 July |
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2019 (12 Dec) Conservative majority |
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2020 Britain leaves the European Union |
2022 Fixed-Term Parliaments Act repealed | ||
2022 Liz Truss (Conservative) 6 September | ||
2022 Charles III (8 Sept) | ||
2022 Rishi Sunak (Conservative) 25 October | ||
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2024 (4 July) Labour majority | 2024 Sir Keir Starmer (Labour) 5 July | |
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Sources for dates: Peter Clarke, Hope and Glory: Britain 1900-1990 (London: Penguin, 1996); Alan Sked & Chris Cook, Post-War Britain: A Political History (London: Penguin, 1990); Encyclopaedia Britannica (Britannica 2001 Standard Edition CD-ROM, 1994-2000); Northern Ireland Assembly website; Welsh Assembly website.
In the British parliamentary system the spacing of elections is not fixed. Parliament has a maximum term, which since 1911 has been five years (before that it was seven years). However, elections are frequently called at times short of this, when the government considers it appropriate. Unlike in some other parliamentary states (such as New Zealand), it is regarded as legitimate in Britain to call early elections simply for the government's own political advantage, as happened for example in 2017. The Fixed Term Parliaments Act 2011, passed by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition, provided that elections would in general be fixed at every fifth year. The cynical view of the Act's motivation is that it was designed to stabilize the coalition by preventing either party provoking a new election at a time suitable to itself. In practice, the Act proved relatively easy to circumvent. In 2017 Theresa May successfully called an election using the Act's provision that the Commons could vote for an early election by a two-thirds majority, and in 2019 parliament simply passed a special one-off Act providing that an election was to be held on a specified day. The Fixed Term Parliaments Act was repealed in 2022.
The average term of parliament since 1900 is a little less than four years. The average is distorted by the parliaments of 1900–1918 and 1935–45, which were extended by an agreement during the two World Wars to defer elections. Excluding these gives an average of abut three years six months. However, the median is about four years. There have been three parliaments lasting less than a year: 1910, 1923–24, and 1974. The shortest was in 1974, when there were elections both in February and October. At the other extreme, since the five-year limit there have been four parliaments which have gone to the full five years: 1959–64, 1992–97, 2005–10, and 2010–15. Despite the failure of the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, five year terms seem to be shifting, without much public notice, from an outside limit to an expected length.
Calculating the length of term of prime ministers is a bit more complicated. A prime minister, unlike an American president, does not have a "term" coinciding with elections, and a term in office is normally reckoned from appointment to resignation. Thus Harold Wilson was prime minister twice, but won four elections (1964, 1966, 1974, 1974 — he lost the 1970 election). However, cases where a prime minister forms a new and different government, as with MacDonald in 1931, may be considered the start of a new term, as this typically involves a new invitation by the Queen, and this has been used for the table above, for clarity (see notes above). On this basis, the average length of a premiership from 1902 to 2022 has been about 3 years 9 months. This counts, for example, David Cameron's two governments separately. The median is lower, at 3 years 1 month. In terms of the total time in office for each prime minister, the average is 5 years 2 months.
The longest serving prime minister in this period was Margaret Thatcher, at 11 years 6 months, in a single term. The shortest serving was Andrew Bonar Law, at 7 months, until in 2022 Liz Truss set a new record of 49 days (50 days if you count both the day of appointment and the day of leaving office) This made her, in fact, the short-serving British prime minister in the three-hundred-year history of the office.* She was the last of Queen Elizabeth II's fifteen (British) prime ministers, appointed only two days before the Queen's death.
Since the start of the twentieth century, four prime ministers have held office at non-sequential times: Stanley Baldwin (1923–4, 1924–9, 1935–7) Ramsay MacDonald (1924, 1929–35), Winston Churchill (1940–45, 1951–55), and Harold Wilson (1964–70, 1974–6).
* The office of prime minister was not clearly defined in its earlier period, and there are a few cases where someone may be considered to have held the office for a very short period. However Liz Truss certainly holds the record for indisputably holding the office.
|--1901 |
2000--| |
Key:
Note the more complicated party history of the first half of the century, as compared to the two-party dominance of the second half.
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2024------|| |
Key:
Copyright © 2003 B. S. Bennett
Last updated 5 July 2024