From the bitter battle of 1832 to the poll that cemented the two-party system: 7 elections that rocked Britain

The 1832 election played out in the aftermath of a bitter battle to get parliamentary reform enshrined in law. The Whig politician Earl Grey won a general election in 1831, but struggled to pass his Reform Bill in the face of the hostility of Tory forces in the House of Lords. After the Duke of Wellington, a fierce opponent of change, failed
to form a replacement Tory ministry, and following riots throughout the land, the bill passed in 1832.

Grey’s government capitalised by calling an election, with polling taking place from December 1832 to January 1833. The Whigs benefited from the newly expanded franchise, winning two-thirds of the seats.

Despite this crushing defeat, the Tories were soon back in power. But, under the leadership of Robert Peel, they increasingly called themselves ‘Conservatives’ instead of ‘Tories’, signifying a shift from an intransigent defence of privilege to an increased willingness to accept incremental change. The ancien régime had died and a new form of conservatism rose from its ashes.

1880: The clash of two Victorian titans

The epic quality of the 1880 election derived not merely from the scale of the Liberal victory, but from the fact that it pitted two political behemoths against one another. The surprise twist came when WE Gladstone won the premiership in spite of the fact that he wasn’t even the leader of his own party.

The ‘Grand Old Man’, as Gladstone was known, had already been prime minister once. But after being bested by Disraeli’s Conservatives in an 1874 landslide, he had gone into retirement – or so he said. Two years later he returned to centre stage, working up popular outrage against the government’s alleged indifference to the Ottomanmassacre of Christians in Bulgaria. Then, in 1879–80, he made a series of speeches that electrified the nation, casting himself as the prosecuting attorney with Disraeli as the hapless defendant.

Gladstone took the traditional themes of peace, retrenchment and reform and added an anti-imperialist spin. Disraeli focused on the integrity of the empire, opposition to Irish home rule, and the need to maintain Britain’s supremacy in Europe. But Gladstone’s attacks on Disraeli carried the day, and the Liberals secured more than 50 per cent of the vote.

Queen Victoria much preferred that one of the party’s official leaders, Lords Granville and Hartington, take the keys to No 10. But, Gladstone noted, these men “unitedly advised the Sovereign that it was most for the public advantage to send for me”. It was an astonishing personal triumph.

1906: The Liberals smash Conservative dominance

Denominational religious instruction. ‘Imperial Preference’. Indentured Chinese labour in South Africa. These questions from the run-up to the 1906 general election might seem like the obscure concerns of a forgotten era. But they were Edwardian hot-button issues.

The Conservative and Unionist party had dominated parliament for 20 years but – with Britons vexed by controversies surrounding education, trade policy, and the contested aftermath of the second Boer War – the ideological climate favoured Sir Henry Campbell- Bannerman’s Liberals.

At the end of 1905, Conservative prime minister AJ Balfour resigned, hoping that the Liberals would lack the unity to form a new government and that he would be recalled.

The gamble failed. Campbell-Bannerman was indeed able to form a government and called an election for the new year. Having done a secret deal with

the nascent Labour party to minimise electoral competition between them, the Liberals won a thumping 397 seats and ejected swathes of Conservative MPs, including Balfour himself.

But Campbell-Bannerman’s triumph had its limits. The new government was battered by controversy over women’s suffrage, Ireland, and the House of Lords. Historians still debate whether the First World War initiated the Liberal party’s near-terminal decline, or merely accelerated it.

1923: Labour’s shock ascent to power

After the tumult of the First World War, many voters craved a return to normality, and by the end of 1922 this seemed to finally have arrived. With Stanley Baldwin occupying No 10 Downing Street the following year at the head of a large Conservative majority, calmer seas seemed to lie ahead. Then, in the autumn of 1923, Baldwin stunned the political world by calling a snap election.

Baldwin made his shock move because he believed the introduction of tariffs was necessary to deal with mass unemployment. His predecessor, Andrew Bonar Law, had promised not to implement tariffs without a further appeal to the electorate, and Baldwin said he felt “honour-bound to ask the people to release us from this pledge”.

Calmer seas seemed to lie ahead. Then Baldwin stunned the world by calling a snap election

The move was an own goal. Lloyd George and HH Asquith, the leaders of separate Liberal factions, now reunited to combat the threat to free trade. The Labour party – which had existed for barely 20 years – also gained new wind.

When the votes were counted, the Conservatives were still the largest party in the Commons, but they had lost their majority. This made Asquith’s Liberals the kingmakers, and they cleared the way for the ascent to power of the first Labour government, under Ramsay MacDonald, which took office early in 1924. That administration would be out of power by the end of year, but Britain’s political landscape had shifted for good.

1931: The poll that cemented the two-party system

In political terms, the 1920s were a roller-coaster journey. The 1931 election was held in the shadow of dire economic conditions, and must have seemed like another twist in the dizzying ride. But the results themselves created a form of stability – one that gave birth to the enduring Labour-Conservative two-party system.

The second Labour government had taken office in 1929 shortly before the Wall Street crash. Two summers later, with the financial crisis threatening to get out of control, the cabinet split over the issue of cuts to unemployment benefit. Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald planned to resign. His colleagues were astonished when they learned that he had been persuaded to stay at No 10, leading a ‘National Government’ in coalition with Conservative and Liberal leaders.

Though MacDonald had genuinely intended this arrangement to be temporary, his new Tory allies quickly persuaded him to call a general election. He won a staggering, if Pyrrhic, victory.

It brought about humiliation for the Labour party, which won only about 50 seats. But, as the economist John Maynard Keynes pointed out, Labour was now the only significant body of opposition to the National Government, and it was therefore inevitable that it would be called upon to form a government one day. He was right, though he couldn’t have known that this would only happen once a further world war had intervened.

As John Maynard Keynes pointed out, Labour was now the only significant body of opposition to the National Government

1945: Churchill gets “the order of the boot”

The 1945 election is widely seen as one of the greatest upsets of all time. Winston Churchill was given “the Order of the Boot” (as he put it) in favour of Labour’s competent but uncharismatic Clement Attlee. The scale of the socialist victory astounded people, even though some pundits had predicted a minority Labour government or a Lib-Lab coalition. Yet there were many powerful factors that had made a Conservative defeat almost inevitable.

Churchill’s suggestion that a Labour government would have to operate ‘some form of Gestapo’ was an own goal

Probably the least of these were Churchill’s own tactical mistakes. His suggestion that a Labour government would have to operate “some form of Gestapo” was an avoidable gaffe. But his decision to emphasise his war leadership skills was logical at a time when the conflict with Japan was still ongoing.

Nevertheless, Labour’s positive message of social and economic reform evoked the spirit of hope at a time when few people wanted to buckle down for more blood, toil and sweat.

Attlee proved an effective campaigner, assisted by big hitters such as Ernest Bevin and Herbert Morrison. We don’t know how many voters actually read Labour’s punchy but detailed manifesto, but its title, Let Us Face the Future, conveyed exactly the message that so many of them wanted to hear.

1979: Thatcher rides the tide of history

Standing on the steps of 10 Downing Street on 4 May 1979, the freshly elected Margaret Thatcher quoted St Francis of Assisi: “Where there is discord, may we bring harmony.” Coming from a famously combative figure, this was a surprising choice of words. But many voters longed for normality after the ‘Winter of Discontent’ that had rocked the previous government. Thatcher wanted to make industrial unrest a thing of the past by re-engineering the economy on free-market lines.

She had needed a lot of luck and grit to get to that point. Many Conservative MPs were still loyal to Edward Heath, the relatively moderate leader she had pushed out in 1975. In fact, Thatcher was personally less popular than the Labour prime minister, ‘Sunny Jim’ Callaghan. But when the moment came, the tide of history was on her side.

As Callaghan remarked to an aide towards the end of the campaign: “There are times, perhaps once every 30 years, when there is a sea-change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or what you do. [...] I suspect there is now such a sea-change – and it is for Mrs Thatcher.”

Richard Toye is professor of history at the University of Exeter