Under his leadership, the UK committed to meeting the UN target of 0. During his time as Prime Minister, he would oversee three national referendums.
The first in , asked whether the traditional method of electing MPs should be changed. The second in , asked whether Scotland should be an independent country. Cameron campaigned for Scotland to remain part of the UK, which he won. Following this defeat, he resigned as prime minister and leader of the Conservative Party.
Just one month later, seeking to strengthen her hand in Brexit negotiations May called a snap election. The result of the election was a hung parliament, the number of Conservative seats had fallen from to During her premiership unemployment in the UK fell to record lows.
After having draft versions of her EU withdrawal agreement rejected by parliament on three occasions, May resigned. Conservative Alexander Boris Johnson — Following the resignation of Theresa May, Johnson was elected leader of the Conservative Party and appointed prime minister. With no working majority in parliament and with many members of his own party opposing his hardline Brexit stance, Johnson was forced to call yet another UK general election.
Related articles. Lord Liverpool. Duke of Wellington. Lloyd George. Next article. Earl of Wilmington — Suffering poor health for most of his time as Prime Minister, he died in office. Henry Pelham — During his time in the post he oversaw the the British involvement in the War of the Austrian Succession in , the Jacobite Rising and the adoption of the Gregorian calender. George Grenville — The introduction of the Stamp Act of imposed a direct tax on the British colonies and plantations in America, one of the sparks that would help ignite the American War of Independence.
Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquess of Rockingham — Bowing to public pressure from disaffected American colonists and British manufacturers, the unenforceable Stamp Act was repealed. Augustus Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Grafton — Assumed the top job after Pitt fell ill, his short time in charge mainly involved attempting to restore friendly relations with the American colonies.
Henry Addington, 1st Viscount Sidmouth — Although the Treaty of Amiens in temporarily halted the hostilities between the French Republic and Great Britain, the uneasy truce ended in May when Britain again declared war on France.
William Pitt the Younger — With the renewed outbreak of war with France, Pitt was returned to office. William Cavendish-Bentinck, 3rd Duke of Portland — Although aged and in poor health, Portland assumed the top job for the second time. Spencer Perceval — With economic depression and Luddite agitation at home, and the threat of Napoleon in Europe, his administration was divided and repressive. George Canning — To date the shortest serving Prime Minister, Canning died suddenly from pneumonia, barely 5 months after assuming office.
Fredrick John Robinson, Viscount Goderich — Lacking support to hold together the frail coalition of Canningite Tories and aristocratic Whigs, he resigned after less than 5 months in office. Arthur Welleslley, 1st Duke of Wellington — The second Irish-born Prime Minister and second veteran general, perhaps more famous as a soldier of the Napoleonic Wars than a politician. Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey — Famous for the blend of tea named after him, his political achievements included the Great Reform Act of , which started the process of electoral change that we recognise today.
Sir Robert Peel 2nd Baronet — Returning to office for the second time, Peel introduced important employment laws that banned women and children from working underground in mines, in addition The Factory Act of limited the hours of work for children and women.
Edward Smith Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby — Considered by many to be the father of the modern Conservative party, his government collapsed when the budget of his Chancellor, Benjamin Disraeli, was rejected by the house. Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston — Returning to office for the second time, his ministry was dominated by the American Civil War and the resulting suffering caused by the Lancashire Cotton Famine. Lord John Russell, 1st Earl Russell — Returning to office for the second time, after the untimely death of Palmerston.
Edward Smith Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby — Returning to office for the third and final time, his Reform Act of doubled the number of adult males that could vote in England and Wales.
Benjamin Disraeli — Just 10 years after the barriers to Jews entering Parliament had been removed, Britain has its first, and so far only, Jewish Prime Minister. William Ewart Gladstone — Gladstone led the greatest reforming administrations of the 19th century. Benjamin Disraeli, the Earl of Beaconsfield — Returning to office for the second time at the age of 70, his policies introduced a large amount of social legislation, including providing housing for the poor and greatly improved sanitation.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury — Salisbury became leader of the Conservative party following the death of Disraeli in , he reluctantly became Prime Minister and formed a minority government. Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury — With the split in the Liberal Party, Salisbury attempted to contain the Irish problem by a combination of firm government and reform. Herbert Henry Asquith — In order to gain maximum support for the ongoing war Asquith formed a coalition government.
David Lloyd George — The only Prime Minister to have spoken Welsh as his first language, Lloyd George accepted an invitation to form a government following the resignation of his fellow Liberal, Asquith. Andrew Bonar Law — After Lloyd George had been removed from office by the Conservative members of his cabinet, the king invited the Canadian-born Bonar Law to form a new government. Stanley Baldwin — Just a few months into office and much to the surprise of all around him, Baldwin called an early general election on the issue of protectionist trade tariffs.
Stanley Baldwin — In his second term in office, Baldwin was responsible for several notable social achievements including extending the right to vote to women aged over Ramsey MacDonald — With his Labour government divided on how to resolve an economic crisis that included the doubling of unemployment levels; MacDonald resigned but was reappointed at the head of a national coalition government with support from the Conservative and Liberal parties.
This move cost him the support of his own party and he once again resigned. From to one or the other was Chancellor of the Exchequer which personal factor incidentally much increased the status of what had until then been a rather unimportant office , and from to one or the other was Prime Minister.
The duel between them made a fascinating human and political contrast. Given his background, and given England, Disraeli's career was heroic in its own way.
Flippant, cynical, realistic or opportunistic according to taste, Disraeli was contemptuous of the intensely devout and earnest Gladstone, high-minded or self-righteous according to taste. The scorn was repaid in kind. In Disraeli's first, brief spell as Chancellor came to an abrupt end when -- in that golden age of parliamentary government when party allegiances were fluid and votes could be swayed by argument -- Gladstone rose in the Commons at A.
Without question Gladstone proved himself the better Chancellor when he held the post under Lord Aberdeen, Lord Palmerston, and Lord Russell -- in fact, one of the greatest of all custodians of the public purse, as the sonorous phrase used to go. By the time Gladstone became Prime Minister, in , the Liberal Party had been born out of a coalition of Whigs, Peelites, and radicals, and Gladstone was by then indeed a Liberal, a believer in "peace, economy and reform.
His colleague Sir Charles Dilke spoke sourly of his "Scotch toadyism to the aristocracy," and he certainly spent much time touring ducal country houses.
But those tours ended in the last years of his life, by which time he had become "the People's William," venerated by humble cottagers and laborers and execrated by the "upper ten thousand.
There are parallels here with Franklin D. Roosevelt, a later "class traitor" who inspired loathing among the rich. In Gladstone's private secretary, Edward Hamilton, described dinner with the Cavendish Bentincks:. The hatred may have been a little misplaced, since Gladstone was no radical either. Although he had become a great popular orator, addressing vast audiences on the stump, he was ill at ease in the new industrial cities, and once insisted, "I am an out-and-out inequalitarian.
IN his thirties Gladstone had presciently written to his wife, "Ireland, Ireland! That cloud in the west, that coming storm, the vehicle of God's retribution. If Ireland had impinged upon him, it was as a reproach to England's reputation abroad. For a man with such a keen sense of righteousness, who lectured reactionary foreign statesmen like Felix Schwarzenberg, of Austria, about the misrule of subject peoples, it was galling to have Ireland thrown back as a tu quoque , rather as moralizing Americans who wanted to denounce European colonialism or communist dictatorship used to be reminded of Jim Crow and the lynch mob.
It was not Gladstone but Disraeli who had sardonically but succinctly summed up the Irish question in a Commons speech of If he didn't acknowledge their inspiration, Gladstone belatedly took those words to heart and tried to act on them when he became Prime Minister.
In he disestablished the Protestant Church of Ireland, and the following year he began to deal with the wretched system of land tenure that lay beneath so much Irish misery. Tentative and not very successful at first, his legislation commenced the slow process by which the old landlord class was eased out of Ireland. After electoral defeat in Gladstone wanted to withdraw from politics, or claimed that he did.
As always, he was inscrutable and unfathomable in his motives. Despite his keen intelligence, his self-knowledge was clouded by the belief that he was guided by a higher power. His religious conviction was total, not to say suffocating -- on losing an election he sententiously consoled himself, "But One ever sitteth above" -- and, as is often the case with men who think themselves so guided, he could give to others the impression of deviousness or even unscrupulousness.
Whatever he had really intended, he sprang back into political life in over the "Bulgarian Horrors. Gladstone dashed off a ferociously eloquent pamphlet: "Let the Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible manner, namely by carrying off themselves.
Not everyone was enraptured. Gladstone sent a complimentary copy to the Prime Minister, which provoked from Lord Beaconsfield, as Disraeli had just become, one of his cruelest wisecracks: Gladstone's pamphlet was "of all the Bulgarian horrors perhaps the greatest. By Gladstone had once more swept to electoral victory, to the rage of the Queen.
Others but herself may submit to his democratic rule but not the Queen. Gladstone's second government was much less happy than his first, and began to unravel almost before it began. The artificial coalition of patrician Whigs and plebeian radicals could in any case not have been held together forever, but Gladstone's ineptitude in personal relations didn't help.
It was quite a feat, as Jenkins says, to drive the Whig Lord Hartington and the radical Joseph Chamberlain out of the party and into each other's arms. IN contrast to his first, Gladstone's second government was beset by difficulties, few of which showed him at his best.
Gladstonian Liberalism was -- or should have been -- inimical to imperialism, but the British Empire was expanding under its own momentum, and Gladstone was landed with problems from South Africa to Afghanistan. He gravely damaged his reputation among pacifists and anti-imperialists by his attack on Egypt in , and was then execrated from the other side by jingoes which sense of the word had just been coined when the adventurer General Charles George Gordon was sent to the Sudan and was killed at Khartoum before he could be rescued from a predicament of his own making.
One startling aspect of that story was Gladstone's heavy personal investment in Egyptian stock. It looks on the face of it "a clear case of improper financial interest,"Jenkins writes. By modern standards and with modern press attention, without even intrusive investigation.
With all those woes it isn't surprising that Gladstone's second government was so barren of creative achievement -- with all those and with Ireland, the question that infected politics and then shattered the Liberal Party less than thirty years after its birth.
Into the s Gladstone still suffered from the prevailing English delusion that Irish grievances could be cured by kindness, and that there was nothing to them but religious or economic discontent. This belief was dented by continuing agrarian violence, and by the swelling number of Irish Home Rulers returned to Parliament, now under the formidable leadership of Charles Stewart Parnell.
Each central decade of Gladstone's career had a dominating personal relationship: partnership, rivalry, or something between. It was Peel in the s, Aberdeen in the s, Palmerston in the s, and Disraeli in the s. In the s it was Parnell. He first mastered the arts of filibustering and parliamentary obstruction and then, with "the eighty-six of 'eighty-six" -- the solid, disciplined phalanx of Irish Nationalist MPs who entered the Commons that year -- was able to exert real power.
They were returned to Parliament thanks partly to Gladstone's Third Reform Bill of , which greatly extended the franchise and for the first time treated Ireland and Great Britain on equal terms, thus increasing the Irish electorate by percent. Irish votes brought down Gladstone's second government in June of , to be replaced by the Conservatives under Lord Salisbury. By now Gladstone had at last made up his mind that Home Rule was necessary. He was intellectually and morally convinced, as Peel had been over the Corn Laws.
He saw that Irish resistance and the English reaction to it were "corrupting the whole polity," in Jenkins's words: "the maintenance of the liberal state was incompatible with holding within its centralized grip a large disaffected community of settled mind. He hoped that Home Rule might even be carried by the Tories, the "wrong" party taking a historically essential step, for which there had been precedents in England in his lifetime -- Catholic emancipation in , repeal of the Corn Laws in He served two separate terms, and has the dubious merit of being the British leader who first introduced income tax to the nation — a much needed revenue injection following costly conflicts like the American War of Independence.
It was during his premiership that the Acts of Union came into force, uniting the Kingdom of Great Britain with the Kingdom of Ireland. Pitt also played an integral role in bringing Britain into a fresh European alliance against Napoleon, but the stresses of power took their toll — he died aged just 46, during his second term as Prime Minister.
Read more about: Battles Napoleon: flawed hero or power-mad tyrant? The man who shaped the office of Prime Minister remains the person who served in that role the longest. Sir Robert Walpole began his premiership in , and carried on for almost 21 years. Walpole himself famously said 'I unequivocally deny that I am sole and prime minister'. However, Walpole was undoubtedly a pioneeringly powerful figure, cultivating close relations with the new Hanoverian monarchy. An important part of his legacy is 10 Downing Street — he was offered the house as a private residence by George II, but insisted it being given to those who serve as the First Lord of the Treasury.
Which, for quite some time now, means the Prime Minister. The seven longest-serving British Prime Ministers. Most Recent.
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