I can ruin the government's plan!
Though I'm not too hard,
The sight of my card,
Makes me some kind of Superman.
You don't get me I'm part of the union,
You don't get me I'm part of the union,
Till the day I die, till the day I die!"
"
British politics since the end of World War II in Europe. Useful for understanding post-war history, relevant literature and hopefully, providing you with a good laugh.
We begin on 8 May 1945, Victory in Europe Day (V.E. Day). The current British monarch is King George VI, who has been on the throne since his older brother's abdication in 1936. Germany has signed the documents of surrender, ending World War II in Europe (Japan will keep fighting until August 1945; yes, this does mean that the term "post-war politics" is not strictly accurate, but given Britain's relatively minor involvement in the fight against Japan as opposed to the fight against Germany, most historians agree that the period generally begins following the end of the war in Europe). There's a massive party.
Once the hangovers have cleared up, however, everyone realises two things. Firstly, now that the war is over the National Government — the coalition formed from both Conservative and Labour front-benchers to maintain a united government during the war — isn't actually needed any more.
Secondly, there hasn't actually been an election since 1935note .
Accordingly, a general election is called for June 1945, and the leader of the caretaker government until then is...
Winston Churchill (May-June 1945) [Conservative]
The Bulldog himself. The man who saved Britain, and possibly the world, from sinking into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister and protracted by the lights of a perverted science (though if we're being entirely honest, the Americans, Soviets and Empire/Commonwealth —among others— helped a little). However, this doesn't actually mean he has a mandate to govern. Churchill has never led his party through an election, any policy platforms from the last election are decidedly out of date, and Churchill hasn't really had the time or inclination to any meaningful policy platform of his own except for "beat Hitler". And Hitler's been beat.
So Churchill doesn't really have time or authority to do anything except campaign for why he keep his current job. Given the whole "saved Britain" thing, most of his campaign — and what little he can do — mainly revolves around foreign policy, and specifically on getting Britain ready for what Churchill suspected was very likely to be the next war: pursuing a hardline stance against the USSR. note It was around this time he coined the phrase "Iron Curtain" to describe the wall of separation between Eastern and Western Europe, one that would take on a quite literal form later down the line with the highly militarized East German border. However, the war's still been won, Churchill was the iconic rallying figure practically synonymous with the British war effort, and these being the days before opinion polls were actually done properly, everyone expected Churchill to win easily.
Boy, did they get the shock of their lives. The British showed their gratitude to Churchill by kicking him out of office (he didn't help his case by claiming that Labour would need a Gestapo to run the new socialist state). It turns out that while Churchill turned out to be just what was needed to fight the war, people were a lot more wary of him as a peacetime leader. It didn't help that he never actually won an election to become Prime Minister in the first place, and outside of his prescient warnings about the Nazis had never exactly been a politician people trusted to begin with (there were many valid reasons beyond his opposition to appeasement, often overlooked in the hagiography he has received post-war, why he was a political outsider for much of the 1920s and 1930s). Plus, in general, the Conservatives had taken a lot of political damage since the days of the Depression in the 1930s, and a lot of voters were still skeptical of their economic record; they might plausibly have been voted out sooner had, well, that whole "world war" thing not kicked off and forced everyone to reprioritise.
And speaking of that whole "world war" thing; the official pre-war policy of appeasement towards Nazi Germany pursued by the Conservatives had aged worse than month-old milk in the sun. This particular one, of course, wasn't Churchill's doing, but plenty of the MPs who had supported it were part of the majority which allowed him to govern. So the voters living in bombed-out streets whose relatives had died or found themselves missing limbs thanks to fighting the Germans in the war that appeasement was supposed to have prevented weren't inclined to make the distinction.
And so, not for the last time in British post-war politics, what everyone assumed was going to happen and what actually did happen turned out to be two very, very different things. Labour won in a landslide, forming its first majority government. In came...
Clement Attlee (1945-1951) [Labour].
As Prime Ministers go, Atlee wasn't all that charismatic (hence the title — supposedly one of Churchill's many memorable criticisms of the mannote ), but since the politics of the time was a lot less media- and image-focussed, it didn't really matter back then. Especially since what he lacked in personal charm, Atlee more than made up for in organisational and management acuity, to the point that today he is generally regarded as one of Britain's most successful Prime Ministers. His government was responsible for the National Health Service, British Railways and very much other nationalisation. He created what became known as "the post-war consensus" of high public spending and national ownership. Britain also began the steps to becoming one of the Five Nukes under Attlee.
The period had somewhat of an argument going on between the right and left of Labour. It wouldn't be the end of it. It's a bit too complex and potentially divisive to go into in any great depth here, but basically it's between those who want Labour to be more of a centre-left leaning party which introduces democratic-socialist ideas as part the existing social structure (i.e. still accepting that things like capitalism, the monarchy, the Honours system etc. are overall okay and have a place in British society), and those who want Labour to be an overtly leftist / socialist party which outright replaces the existing social structure with an overtly socialist one (i.e. getting rid of capitalism, the monarchy, the Honours system etc.). The debate can get heated at the best of times, but at a time where the Soviet Union — i.e. the world's most powerful communist state and primary exporter of communist / leftist / socialist ideals such as those the British Left were pretty keen on — was shaping up to be the new Cold War enemy, things were particularly touchy.
The beginning of decolonisation and the end of the British Empire began here as well, in large part because war-ravaged Britain simply couldn't afford the upkeep. Although it was a long and lengthy process, the death knell was well and truly rung by India, previously the jewel of the Empire, achieving independence in 1947.
Labour won again in 1950, but narrowly. Attlee went to the country again in 1951. Due to the vagaries of FPTPnote , Labour just won the popular vote, but the Conservatives got a majority of seats. This led to the return of...
Winston Churchill (1951-1955) [Conservative]
So Winston came back. He didn't really do that much due to his ill health. What he did do generally wasn't very well-received or popular, with the possible exception of finally getting rid of the last bits of wartime rationing in 1954—nearly a full decade after the end of the war. This added more evidence to the common view that he was a better wartime leader than a peacetime leader. During this term, King George VI died, and Elizabeth II came to the throne. Get used to her; she'll be sticking around for quite a while. Churchill stepped down in 1955, leading to...
Sir Anthony Eden (1955-1957) [Conservative]
Churchill's wartime Foreign Secretary, as Prime Minister Eden is remembered for primarily one thing — Suez. Quite simply, the British, French and Israeli governments came up with the Protocols of Sèvres, an agreement in which Israel would invade Egypt and then Britain and France would come in on the grounds of separating the two parties. In reality, they all wanted to kick out Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, who'd nationalised the Suez Canal.
It went wrong. Very, very wrong. The Americans were very unhappy, the invasion was roundly condemned by the United Nations, and the USSR threatened to intervene. When it came out (because the Israelis didn't destroy their copies of the Protocols) that Eden knew what was going on, he had to leave. In came...
Harold Macmillan (1957-1963) [Conservative]
The last Prime Minister to be born during the reign of Queen Victoria. Harold's first name was actually Maurice. Dubbed "Supermac" by the press as an insult, it became an endearing part of the man, who became rather popular.
Macmillan won the 1959 election in a landslide and later declared "You've never had it so good". In general, he had a point; by this point the economy was humming along, overall living standards were improving, Britain had pulled itself out of its post-war doldrums, and generally things were looking pretty sweet. Britain also became a nuclear power in late 1957.
Macmillan also played a not-insignificant role in the career of comedian and satirist Peter Cook, whose impressions of him became a key part of Beyond the Fringe. They were one of the first examples of political impersonation in comedy and became legendarily scandalous (though by the standards of modern political comedy they read as fairly tame today). Reportedly, at one performance when Macmillan himself was in the theatre Cook went off-script and began attacking him directly.
Macmillan was also keen for Britain to enter the European Economic Community, an early precursor to what is now The European Union. Britain had initially opted out when the community was formed in 1957, but despite enjoying good relations with the United States on a national and personal level (Macmillan famously got along very well with President John F. Kennedy, and acted as something of a mentor to the younger world leader), he was wary of over-dependency, was interested in developing more of a detente with the Soviet Union as opposed to the prevailing attitude of confrontation, and so sought closer relations with Europe as a counterbalance. Unfortunately for Macmillan, his efforts to join were thwarted by French President Charles de Gaulle, who distrusted Britain's close relationship with the US and feared that Britain's entry would reduce France's influence. While Macmillan was unsuccessful this time around, this was the origins of a rather... contentious debate with the Conservative Party about Britain's place within Europe. Spoiler alert: this may come up again.
He's also famous for the Profumo scandal which, although not involving him directly, arguably dealt a pretty fatal blow to the Conservative government. In 1963, John Profumo, Secretary of State for War, had an affair with Christine Keeler, a showgirl. She was also sleeping with Captain Yevgeny Ivanov, a naval attaché in the Soviet Embassy — and a spy (like all attachés in the Soviet Embassy). While no secrets ended up in the Soviet Union (despite the efforts of Ivanov and Stephen Ward, the latter of whom was actually working for MI5), Profumo had to resign. Ward ended up being charged with living off immoral earnings and killed himself on the last day of his trial. Ivanov's wife left him.
Speaking of adultery, for what it's worth Macmillan's own wife had been having an open affair with another Conservative politician, Robert Boothby, since 1929. Macmillan knew, and although the two never divorced they lived largely separate lives out of the public eye.
Shortly after the Profumo affair, Macmillan resigned on health grounds. The Conservative Party at the time chose its leaders via something called "the magic circle", in which the bigwigs had a chat and chose a person. The two front-runners were Rab Butler and Quintin Hogg. After a lot of public argument (involving, among other things, Supermac actively blocking Rab Butler's succession), a compromise candidate was found...
Alec Douglas-Home, (1963-64) [Conservative]
You've probably never heard of this guy. Don't worry, most British people haven't either. Douglas-Home (pronounced Hume) spent just under a year as Prime Minister. A Lord when he was appointed (as the Earl of Home), he forfeited his Peerage to stand in a by-election (by this point, governing from the House of Lords was seen as awkward). A law was written and passed pretty much specifically to allow Douglas-Home to do this. He also had a head like a skull. If you're wondering why we brought that up, it's because those two facts are probably the most significant about his whole premiership, since he was really just biding time for the Tories until the election had to be called. The Tories narrowly lost and we got...
Harold Wilson (1964-1970) [Labour]
Wilson was the first media PM. He was famous for smoking a pipe during his television appearances (remember, this was before the smoking ban). There's a Viking named after him in Asterix.
Under Wilson, The '60s fully kicked into gear and The Vietnam War entered its next phase. Wilson, rather wisely, kept Britain out of the war militarily, although offered occasional rhetorical support. The Troubles started in Northern Ireland and England won The World Cup. Wise to the popular mood, he had The Beatles honoured (although John Lennon eventually returned his medals due to UK "support" for the Vietnam War). He is alleged to have said, when asked why Britain did not publicly condemn U.S. action in Vietnam, that "you do not kick your creditors in the balls" (the UK was still heavily in debt from WWII, and indeed did not pay off the last of the war loans until 2006). He also began the process of sending British troops into Northern Ireland to try and resolve the Troubles, which ended up working about as well as you'd expect.
In 1966, Wilson and Labour won in a landslide. In 1970, it looked like they were going to win again, so Wilson went to the country. Then three things happened. First, England was knocked out of the World Cup. Second, there was an unexpectedly bad balance of payments report. Third, there was a guy called Enoch Powell. How racist Powell was is a matter for debate. A former member of the Conservative Shadow Cabinet, he'd been very publicly sacked after the "Rivers of Blood" speech claiming that uncontrolled immigration would lead to Britain being changed dramatically (the far-right today claims he was right) and quoting a letter from a woman who was apparently the only white woman in her street, who would face prosecution under the new Race Relations Act for refusing to let rooms in her house to West Indian immigrants. His views on immigration (then primarily from The Commonwealth) probably brought a lot of voters to the Conservative side in 1970.
- Racism in the media and elections was considerably more prevalent than it is today. Remember, it took about 20 years longer for "blacking-up" to cycle out of UK fiction, and Peter Griffiths had actually won the Smethwick constituency in 1964 with the unofficial campaign slogan "If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour".
It's also been suggested that pirate radio may have influenced the vote. Wilson's Government had outlawed offshore broadcasting in 1967, but a new station called Radio North Sea International began broadcasting in February 1970. Its signal was jammed by order of the Government, and in protest it began encouraging its listeners to vote Conservative in the upcoming election, the first in which the voting age had been lowered to 18.\\
In any event, the Conservatives won a surprise victory, and into Downing Street went...
Edward "Ted" Heath (1970-1974) [Conservative]
Ted Heath had become leader of his party after Douglas-Home had brought about the election of a leader after the 1964 defeat. He was the first Conservative leader to be elected by the members of the party rather than just a room full of bigwigs deciding who was going to be in charge. He was responsible for Britain's entry into the European Economic Community (now The European Union), and had Douglas-Home as his Foreign Secretary.
Overall, though, Heath's time was marked by turbulence. The Troubles entered a bloody period following the "Bloody Sunday" massacre in 1972, the suspension of the Northern Ireland parliament and direct rule from Britain. Economically, things weren't so good either; unemployment and inflation were rising, and several miner's strikes, coupled with the 1973 oil crisis, led to the institution of the Three-Day Week, during which electricity could only be commercially consumed on three days of the week in order to preserve coal stocks.
Due to the fact that he was a prominent public figure who never married and was the most recent bachelor to become Prime Ministernote , rumours about Heath's private life have circulated for years, mostly revolving around the possibility that he was a closeted homosexual. While many of these rumours, if true, are harmless enough, they began taking a much darker tone around August 2015, after police announced that they were investigating claims of Heath's involvement in child sexual abuse cases as part of various investigations launched following the Jimmy Savile scandal. At time of writing, no concrete evidence to tie Heath into any wrongdoing has been revealed.
Troubled by both the unions and his own party, and finding it increasingly difficult to govern a fractious and divided nation, in 1974 he finally decided to ask the country to decide "who ruled Britain". The answer was "Not you, mate," which led to the return of...
Harold Wilson (1974-1976) [Labour]
After Ted Heath's failure to form a government following the 1974 election, Harold Wilson came back into power. He didn't do an awful lot, frankly, though he did deploy the British Army to "sort out" the Troubles. Which worked a treat, obviously. The most interesting thing about this period was the part where the CIA thought he was a KGB spy and MI5 may well have cooked up a plot to get rid of him and replace him with Lord Mountbatten. He did give the British a referendum on the continued membership of the European Community in which the yes vote prevailed by 2 to 1. Which resolved that particular issue once and for all.
Harold Wilson suddenly announced on 16th March 1976 that he was retiring as Prime Minister (he would remain in Parliament until 1983). It's speculated that one of the reasons was the discovery of the early onset of the Alzheimer's Disease which would take his life along with cancer in 1995. After a short leadership contest, Wilson was replaced in April 1976 by...
James "Jim" Callaghan (1976-1979) [Labour]
Callaghan's short time in office didn't go terribly well. He strung along the Conservatives by seeming to promise an election; then, in September 1978 announced his decision against it. Adding insult to injury, he proceeded to sing "Waiting at the Church" in the style of music-hall star Marie Lloyd. In the House of Commons. During a debate. It is considered that he thoroughly deserved the "Winter of Discontent" that followed (even if the rest of the nation didn't), a period of economic depression that forced him to actually call an election, via a vote of no-confidence in the Commons.
Callaghan was also responsible for ordering the Trident ballistic missile system from the Americans (the warheads and subs would be British).
Which brings us to possibly one of the most well-known — and certainly one of the most divisive — figures of modern British history...
Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990) [Conservative]
Notorious for her iron control over her cabinet, Margaret Thatcher was Britain's first and, until 2016, only female Prime Minister. She's famous for far more than that, including her radical free-market economic policies (Thatcher was a direct inspiration on Reagan) and reforms as well as her conservative social views. She curbed the trade unions, abolished many of Britain's inefficient nationalised industries (including coal mining and steel) and sold off many of the others, as well as introducing the "Right to Buy", in which the 85% of Brits who lived in state provided housing were given the chance to buy their dwelling for a knock-down price, an offer taken up by tens of millions of people. It has also been argued that, by moving the Conservative Party to the right on immigration, she helped wreck the rising support for far-right movements such as the National Front which had plagued the 1970s.
She brought The '80s to Britain — big business, yuppie culture and the Nouveau Riche flourished under her premiership. In the very end, her own party turned on her in protest at some of her policies and she was forced to resign, though most agreed in November 1990 that she had left the nation and its balance sheet in a much better state than she had found it in May 1979. Her government had overseen a rise in the wealth of the average person, but also high and sustained unemployment; a doubling in the rate of poverty, which by the time Labour came to power would be the highest in Europe and extensive damage to the National Health Service.
Her premiership remains one of the most remembered and discussed in British history. Everyone seems to range from "utter worship" to "sheer frothing rage". Around the world she is seen as a great woman for, along with her great friend Ronald Reagan, having pressured the Communist side in the cold war to the brink of collapse.note
As she is (at time of writing) the longest-serving Prime Minister of the post-war era, there were a number of notable events of the Thatcher premiership that make this a particularly interesting time, and which warrant further mention.
A short but controversial military conflict between Britain and Argentina over the Falkland Islands. You can find more detail here, but to quickly sum up:
The Falkland Islands, Islas Malvinas to the Argentines, located in the South Atlantic, had been a subject of dispute between the UK and Argentina for a while (it's a long story partly involving the international equivalent of squatters' rights). Partly in order to save money, the UK planned to withdraw the warship it kept on station as a deterrent to the Argentine junta.
This was, unintentionally, a "come and take it, it's yours" message to them. Needing to divert attention from poor economic performance at home, the junta invaded the place. The (entirely British) local population offered token resistance and then surrendered as they didn't actually stand a chance.
Not many people had heard of the place, but these were British rocks and something had to be done. The British sent a naval task force. While that was on its way, the RAF worked on an operation that became much better known via a recent book called Vulcan 607.
In the BLACK BUCK missions, the ageing Avro Vulcans, using multiple Handley Page Victor tankers (who refuelled each other as well), carried out bombing raids that wouldn't be exceeded in range until the Gulf War. The first of these, which very nearly had to be aborted, rendered Port Stanley airfield largely inoperable, diverted a Mirage fighter squadron to defend the mainland and so cut the Argentines' strike power considerably.
The war really got started with the sinking of the ARA General Belgrano, an Argentine cruiser by the submarine HMS Conqueror, the only nuclear submarine to have ever sunk a ship in a real war. This was pretty controversial at the time (the ship was outside a declared exclusion zone amd was steaming away from the Falklands when attacked), but the attack was perfectly legal, the Argentines had been informed in advance that any of their ships were now targets, and the cruiser had earlier been actively trying to draw the Task Force into a pincer attack, which had been called off due to bad weather. The fact that 323 deaths occurred and the war was escalated considerably meant many weren't convinced, especially when the log book of HMS Conqueror mysteriously disappeared soon afterwards. Militarily, it also worked — the Argentine Navy retreated to its territorial waters and played not much more part in the war.
The Argentines, however, had another weapon up their sleeves. They only had five of them that could be launched from a plane (the surface versions were on the ships, which were out of the way) to begin with — if they'd had more, things might have been different. The name of the missile would enter the English vocabulary.
Exocet.
This French built anti-shipping missile, launched by French Super Etendard strike fighters, would sink HMS Sheffield on its own and a merchant ship, Atlantic Conveyor (it was aimed at another ship, which decoyed it with chaff — the missile went on and hit the Conveyor). A surface launched version fired from a truck damaged HMS Glamorgan as well.
The Argentines mostly used conventional iron bombs to attack ships and got a few that way. One reason why they didn't get more was the Sea Harrier.
This aircraft, capable of taking off and landing vertically, had the ability, by using its thrusters, to turn very quickly. Due to the RAF's great training, the Argentines' woeful training, the Mirages and Skyhawks operating at the limits of their range and the AIM-9L Sidewinder, 21 Argentine aircraft were shot down by them in air-to-air combat for no losses to the British. Six Sea Harriers were lost to ground fire, but they took out a lot of aircraft on the ground. The Royal Navy's ships got a few too.
- The Falkland Islands have featured in some media, being the inspiration for the film of Whoops Apocalypse and featuring in a few movies and TV dramas. The Falklands Play wasn't actually made until 2002 (in truncated form), possibly because it was seen as too pro-government. The Argentines have made a few movies on the subject- it had a bigger impact on them- but there's nothing especially famous abroad. About the closest is a joking reference in an episode of The Simpsons, used to date a Krusty rerun.
- Naturally, this also had an impact on the English-Argentine football relationship — "The Hand of God" was scored against England and Maradona stated it was revenge for the war.
- The war is also responsible for the most infamous headline in history — The Sun and "GOTCHA!" on the Belgrano.
Following Callaghan's defeat, he stood down as Labour leader and was replaced by left-winger Michael Foot. Foot wasn't a brilliant leader, but he had an even bigger problem — the rise of Militant. Militant was a Trotskyist entryist group who had been working within the Labour Party over a long period with the intention of winning labour party members over to Marxism. While they'd been doing so since at least the mid-1970s, by the early 1980s they'd gain some serious influence within the Labour Party, winning control of the Labour Party youth wing, Labour Party Young Socialists.
In the 1983 election, Michael Foot put forward a very left-wing election manifesto. This manifesto promised to abolish the House of Lords (with no replacement), eject US missiles from the UK and cancel Trident (ergo, the nuclear disarmament of Britain) and leave the EEC. Then-Shadow Education Secretary Neil Kinnock's comments about soldiers dying in the Falklands to prove Thatcher was tough really didn't help. Gerald Kaufman, a moderate Labour MP (and author of a rather good, if dated, book on how to be a minister) declared it "the longest suicide note in history".
He was apparently right. Labour lost by about 15% of the vote, lost 3 million votes from 1979, got only 27.9% of the vote and almost came third to the Alliance. Disenchanted by the way Labour was going, four high-profile figures, all former Cabinet Ministers, known as the "Gang of Four" (Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers) had resigned very publicly and formed their own party — the Social Democratic Party (SDP). They attracted around 30 sitting members, allied with the Liberals in the Alliance and later merged with them to form the Liberal Democratic Party. (Though not after a very bitter breakup between the "mergerites" and the "Owenites").
Meanwhile, in London, Labour gained control of the Greater London Council. There was then an internal coup in the Labour Group (exactly as the Conservatives had predicted), which meant that a newt breeder by the name of Ken Livingstone become Leader of the Council. Red Ken put the fire in firebrand. Highly left-wing, he put up a statue of Nelson Mandela (who was still in prison and viewed by the Conservatives as a terrorist), declared London a nuclear-free zone, and placed a board showing London's unemployment level on the side of County Hall (opposite the Houses of Parliament on the other side of the river). He did practically everything he could to annoy Thatcher. The Conservatives, after their 1983 landslide, proceeded to abolish the GLC and the other (Labour-controlled) metropolitan councils, and sold off County Hall, which now hosts the London Aquarium, among other things.
In Liverpool, the Labour Party had won control of the council, with most councillors being Militant members. In order to keep their election promises the Miltant Council decided to refuse to comply with central government instructions on local rates and set an illegal budget in opposition to cuts. The whole thing ended after the council was told in August 1985 that it would no longer be able to pay the wages of its workers due to lack of a central government grant or a budget and they proceeded to issue notices to all 30,000 of them that they might lose their jobs in ninety days time, as a means of increasing public pressure. It backfired spectacularly. While not redundancy notices, the difference was irrelevant to the workers and the media.
Kinnock had become leader after the 1983 election and was not happy to see his party almost get electorally killed. After the Liverpool debacle, he famously denounced Militant in that year's Conference speech.
- I'll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with far fetched resolutions. They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that, out-dated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council - a Labour council! - hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers.
Militant eventually dissolved in 1991 after Ted Grant, one of the key figures in Militant, was expelled for his opposition to abandoning work in the Labour party, leading the remnants reforming as Militant Labour. Most of the remaining Militant figures in the Labour Party left, and any influence they might have continued to have was decisively ended by both the fall of the Soviet Union, which for a time discredited most Marxist movements of the kind Militant represented, and the rise of Tony Blair and "New Labour" (more on which later).
The 1984 Miners' Strike — and the events both leading up to and stemming from it — is one of the main reasons why Margaret Thatcher is still widely hated, particularly in the North of England.
First, a bit of background; the Conservative Party and the British coal industry were not the best of friends. Coal was a nationalized and subsidized industry up till this point, and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) was, if not the most powerful union in the country, then certainly one of the most. An earlier strike in 1974 was widely blamed for bringing down Edward Heath's government. Most of the mines, not coincidentally, were based in Labour country — Wales and Oop North. Furthermore, most coal mines ran at a loss, and the government wanted to scrap the unprofitable ones and focus on the ones that were making money. As such, Thatcher appointed Ian MacGregor as head of the National Coal Board (which managed the industry for the government) — MacGregor had previously been in charge of British Steel, and had overseen massive cuts in jobs in the British steel industry. The message seemed pretty clear.
However, the miners themselves didn't like the idea of being turfed out of their jobs, and eventually, as pit closures started to be announced, the head of the NUM, one Arthur Scargill, announced a national strike. This soon proved problematic, largely because a ballot hadn't been held among the union members; attitudes to the strike ranged across the miners from passionate to lukewarm to resistant, and some miners (and related workers) didn't end up going on strike, thus earning a reputation as 'scabs' when they tried to cross the pickets to go to work. The strikes were marred by violence, not just between picketers and strike-breakers, but between strikers and the police, sent by the government to ensure the picketers didn't prevent those who wanted to from crossing the pickets. In order to ensure that local police weren't influenced by their feelings of support for their fellow locals, police units were shipped in from across the country. This created a lot of tension which eventually culminated in plenty of dust-ups between miners and police; in particular, 'The Battle of Orgreave', a particularly violent confrontation between police and picketers. Fatalities started being recorded, including a rather murky incident wherein a taxi driver was killed by a block of concrete dropped by strikers while driving a strike-breaker to a pit; the government blamed the strikers, the strikers blamed forces trying to discredit the strikers, but on the whole public opinion started to cool towards the strike rapidly. However, while the striking miners didn't always conduct themselves like angels, it should be noted that the conduct of the police has come under a lot of retroactive criticism since then, with many of the measures they took to ensure strike-breakers could work and strike protests were quelled being considered unnecessarily provocative and violent.
Speaking of people being 'discredited', however, a lot of conspiracy theories started to be raised about what was going on behind the scenes. As mentioned above, the British far-left had been gaining a lot of power in the eighties, and this included the unions — there were plenty of donations to the NUM coming in from Soviet and Soviet-influenced bodies, and Scargill was variously accused of being a Soviet agent, diverting these funds for his own use, and so forth. This was helped by the fact that the very powerful tabloid media was very much anti-strike and thus used up a lot of ink printing these rumours. Scargill retaliated with accusations that the government was running a smear campaign and that MI5 were running counter-subversive operations, including bugging union leaders phones, infiltrating the union with moles, police intimidation and arrest of strikers on political grounds, soldiers disguised as police sent to break up pickets, and so forth. For what it's worth, a head of MI5 later came out and admitted that counter-subversive measures were used, but maintained that it was not to the degree Scargill claimed. A real atmosphere of class warfare began to brew.
Ultimately, though, it came down to money — specifically, the miners didn't have enough of it. Since there was no ballot, the strike was considered illegal, meaning that strikers didn't get benefits for missing work, and the union didn't have enough to support them during the strike — a big deal, considering how poor some of these areas were and how much the local economies depended on the mines being active. Gradually, public opinion turned against them, morale plummeted, strikers started going back to work. Just under a year after the strike was called, it was ended, and the miners went back to work.
But not for much longer. Emboldened by their victory, the government started ruthlessly culling the industry, closing pits all over the country — including in areas they'd promised not to, something which caused a lot of betrayed feelings. This spilled into related industries, such as steel and the railways. Local economies were gutted, unemployment in the North skyrocketed, and the region began to languish under a miserable period of poverty that, for some areas, has only recently begun to turn around. When the dust settled, the British coal, steel and manufacturing industries were a shadow of their former selves, Thatcher earned a permanent reputation in the area for being indifferent to both unemployment and the North of England, and even today there's plenty in those areas who will never vote Conservative as a result. In Scotland, the Conservative Party was considered extinct for almost thirty years.
Many people outside the region will probably know the Miners' Strike mainly through the movie / musical Billy Elliot, in which a striker's son discovers his love of dance against the background of the strike. Hence the section name.
It's also alluded to in an old Warhammer Fantasy module named "The Tragedy of McDeath", where the evil overseer Een MacWrecker and his orc bodyguards are starving out rebellious dwarf miners led by Arka Zargul.
Thatcher's first government also coincided with a spike in Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union after a brief cooling-off period in the 1970s, which in turn coincided with Ronald Reagan becoming the President of the United States and, initially at least, something of a Cold War sabre-rattler. Reagan and Thatcher were close allies, and soon became closely associated in the public eye. It was a time of cold war paranoia, fear and tension, and it seemed like nuclear war was going to break out any minute.
Also, after World War II, many old RAF bases were loaned out to the Americans as part of Britain's commitment to NATO, to ensure that the American military had a presence in Europe if necessary. This included being furnished with American nuclear weapons. Among these was RAF Greenham Common, which saw firstly American bombers and then, in the 1980s, cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads. Greenham Common was the first site in Britain to be issued with them.
These two facts are linked.
As a result in the spike of Cold War tensions and the increased fear and threat of nuclear war, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) — which had been around since the 1950s, but had seen a drop-off in interest and membership since the 1960s (as Vietnam had occupied more attention), began to see it's membership rise again. Between 1979 and 1984, it spiked from 4000 to 10000 — and one of the key points of contention with official government policy was American nuclear missiles being deployed to Britain — this was seen to make Britain a greater target in the event of a potential nuclear strike from the Soviet Union. In fact, the organisation was a key promoter of 'unilateralism', which in this case essentially meant the complete termination of Britain's entry into the NATO defense pact and total abolishing of all nuclear weapons from Britain. As such, the CND began to campaign publicly and prominently, with mass demonstrations in London and other cities about nuclear weapons.
In September 1981, a 'peace camp' — the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp — was established outside RAF Greenham Common as a form of permanent non-violent protest against the weapons housed within. This commonly took the form of blockades to prevent anything from entering / leaving and human chains around the base. Although it had been around for a while by this point, it became particularly notable when on April 1st 1983, 70,000 protestors formed a 14-mile long human chain between Greenham Common, Aldermaston (site of a prominent atomic weapons facility) and Burghfield (site of a weapons factory). Greenham Common began to inspire more peace camps around other military bases, and while most of these other camps were mixed-gender, the all-female nature of the first one meant that the female protestors at least came to be known as 'the Women of Greenham Common'; they were generally associated in the common mind's eye as various combinations of feminists (usually quite hardcore), hippies, lesbians, pagans and various other left-wing female stereotypes. Contrary to popular belief, men were permitted into the camp (or at least certain sections of the camp; the Green Camp didn't permit any men whatsoever), but they were usually discouraged from staying for too long, by various methods (some of them less-than-pleasant).
Naturally, there were plenty of people not very happy at all this — the political establishment for one, the American military for another, and various other conservative-leaning types for a third. There were many incidents of people trying to break into these bases by cutting the wire fences surrounding them, and many more accusations of peace camps being infiltrated by moles sent by the police, American military, MI5 or 'Special Branch' to try and discredit the movement by stirring up trouble. The Greenham Common protestors were often evicted, but usually set the camp up again soon after. More or less, though, things were peaceful.
Over how effective they ultimately were: most of these camps didn't last very long. The Cold War tensions of the early eighties began to warm when Mikhail Gorbachev took over the Soviet Union in the mid-eighties, which began to loosen the appeal; the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s saw concerns about the nuclear threat diminish, and CND gradually lost influence. It's still around (often protesting the Iraq War and Afghanistan), but isn't as influential as it used to be. The Greenham Common camp, however, lasted until 2000 - nine years after the last nukes had been removed from the base it was located by. There's a memorial there now.
Right, so, where were we? Oh, yes, after some backroom politics revolving around Britain's role in what would become the European Union (which might come up again...) Maggie's been kicked out, which brings us to...
John Major (1990-1997) [Conservative]
Nicknamed "the Grey Man" for his utter mediocrity, John Major somewhat unbelievably managed to win the 1992 election. It was all downhill from thereon, however, as the Conservative Party soon became enveloped in a myriad sex and financial scandals, mainly remembered for coinciding with his "back to basics" campaign which seemed focused on conservative morality (Sadly, the greatest sex scandal of them all — and affair between Major himself and fellow MP Edwina Currie — went unrevealed until 2002.) Under Major, Britain was involved in the Gulf War (although Thatcher had started the process) and the economic crisis of Black Wednesday.
Despite the popular view, Major was not a total waste of space. For one thing, he did most of the work that lead to the end of The Troubles, ended the institutional Conservative Europhobia (although whether this was his intention, or the effect of pro-europeans, like Michael Heseltine and particularly his chancellor Ken Clarke, exerting power over their fairly ineffectual leader is unclear), and started an economic boom that lasted for over 16 years. While later re-evaluations of him have seen him cast as a respected elder statesman, at the time, even he probably wasn't that surprised when Britain finally had enough of the Conservatives, however, bringing us to...
Tony Blair (1997-2007) [Labour]
Tony Blair became the leader of the Labour Party in 1994 after the sudden death of previous leader John Smith. In defiance of almost a century's worth of political ideology, he immediately sought to push the party towards the political centre in a post-Soviet environment that made the socialism seen with Militant Labour publicly untenable in what would soon become known, with typical soundbite-friendly media awareness that would characterise Labour (and indeed British) politics at the beginning of the 21st century, as "New Labour". It worked wonders; when the party won a landslide election in 1997, he was perceived as a new start for Britain after eighteen years of Conservative rule. The era of "Cool Britannia" had begun.
By the time he eventually resigned in 2007, however, he was regarded by many as a slimy war criminal who should be on trial at the Hague. Why? Well, the Iraq War, mainly. The cash-for-honours scandal which plagued the last year or two of his premiership didn't help, but it was Iraq and his perceived lies about "Weapons of Mass Destruction" that did it, mostly.
Tony Blair was actually involved in four wars during this period. Two of them, Kosovo and intervention in Sierra Leone, were rather popular and regarded as humanitarian causes. Iraq and Afghanistan... less so. One of the biggest blows to Blair's credibility came when Dr. David Kelly, the man who blew the whistle on the fictitious WMDs that turned out not to be there despite being the main justification for going into Iraq, was found to have committed suicide in suspicious circumstances. Since his body was found in woodland near his home, 'being found in the woods' has come to act as a shorthand for any kind of dodgy, possibly government-involved suspicious death in Britain.
The cash-for-honours scandal further compounded Blair's notoriety in making him the first serving British Prime Minister to be questioned by the police regarding a criminal matter (as a witness, it must be stressed, not as a suspect in any criminal activity — but it nevertheless didn't help his credibility much at the time).
Rather unexpectedly, Blair turned out to be devoutly religious and converted to Roman Catholicism after leaving office. His faith, though with clear precedent in British Christian Socialism, did little to please many of critics on the largely secular left. On the other hand, advising the Pope that the Catholic Church should show more acceptance for homosexual relationships hasn't exactly won him any friends from the religious right either. Later satire of Blair often worked in the image of him as a would-be Messianic leader.
While his foreign policy legacy has been decisively overshadowed by Iraq, domestically Blair's reputation is more contested. His supporters argue him to be something along the lines of a British Lyndon Johnson, arguing that his involvement in an unpopular war overshadowed a genuinely progressive set of reforms that left Britain better. Among other things, he brought in same-sex civil partnerships, kept economic growth going for a nearly a decade and did more than any other Prime Minister to bring peace to Northern Ireland. His government saw the introduction of the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments, a minimum wage, the Freedom of Information act and Human Rights acts, noticeable improvements in education and brought the NHS back to being a first-rate health service. However, his ideas of reforming and "modernising" public services proved to be rather heavily contested, and fueled frequent accusations that he was a sellout and pointlessly hostile to Labour's traditional support base.
In keeping with the latter point, his detractors have a rather different view on Blair's domestic policies. It's argued that most of the groundwork for the treaty in Northern Ireland was in fact set up by John Major but took place at a time which allowed Blair to take the credit. Rather than strengthening commitments to social justice and equality, Blair is accused of establishing the privatization of the NHS as an official Labour policy resulting in decreased quality of care for all, heavily supporting severely decreased civil liberties to the point where Britain teetered on the edge of becoming a real-life Oceania, and massively screwing over students by increasing education fees. And the air of corruption still looms large over Blair's legacy; the cash-for-honours controversy leads to the conclusion that donating to his party would get you a permanent seat in the House of Lords, corruptly allowing anyone to buy a say on democracy regardless of background. For his detractors, all of these things (combined with Iraq and Afghanistan, of course) lead to Blair being considered one of the worst Prime Ministers in Britain's history.
To say that Blair is a controversial figure, then, is an understatement. His well-timed — some would say conveniently-timed — departure from the office in 2007, about a year before the Global Financial Crisis (which he arguably had a very prominent role in creating), meant that his legacy received a temporary shot in the arm, however, and that the brunt of the backlash for his time in office would be borne by his successor...
Gordon Brown (2007-2010) [Labour]
After thirteen years waiting in the wings and cultivating an increasingly terrible relationship with Tony Blair, Gordon Brown became Prime Minister. However, if anything was learned from John Major and Jim Callaghan, it's that the British aren't fond of Prime Ministers who've not won an election (with one exception on this particular page, but then winning the Second World War goes a long way). Most of his early acts have been reacting to the global stage and undoing everything that had been put in place by Tony Blair. Having a reputation built on a strong economy (he was the Chancellor Of The Exchequer under Blair) isn't such a good thing when said economy starts to collapse around your ears, especially when, at the same time, you have to deal with a bitter reaction to appalling tales of MPs abusing lax rules on claiming expenses for personal gain note .
Brown's lasting legacy is an even greater British distrust of their own politicians and the political system, highly controversial levels of spending resulting in a monstrously huge budget deficit (his own Chief Secretary of the Treasury, on leaving office, left as a note to his successor saying simply "Dear Chief Secretary. There is no money left. Best of luck."). He will perhaps be most fondly remembered for his complete lack of charisma, unsettlingly forced smile and calling a Labour voter a bigot in his car while his mic was still on, shortly after having a conversation with her which to everyone else seemed to have gone fine. On the other hand, Brown's efforts in the early days of the financial crisis, particularly his organization of the emergency G20 summit, did win some praise in the international press. In any case, although the election was close, Labour couldn't scrape together enough seats to form a majority, which brings us to...
David Cameron (2010-2016) [Coalition (2010-2015) / Conservative (2015-2016)]
After the second hung parliament since World War II, David Cameron of the Conservatives formed a coalition government with Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats as deputy prime minister. Gordon Brown resigned as leader of the Labour Party, recommending the Queen ask Cameron to form a government. Cameron's government quickly scrapped controversial legislation such as the fourth runway at Heathrow being built and the biometric ID card scheme. Public opinion remains divided on the coalition, with many Lib Dem voters unhappy (Opinion polls show Lib Dem support had just about halved a few months after the election). Coalition government being virtually unknown in Westminster Politics (the devolved administrations have more experience with it however), both the Tories and the Lib Dems had to struggle with the intractable in their own parties. Some Conservatives believed that they would have been better off forming a minority government and a significant proportion of Lib Dems are unhappy with their party propping up a Conservative government. However, hysterical predictions that the coalition would not last for 6 months and might even lead to the collapse of the country proved unfounded (and in hindsight may provoke more than a few rueful chuckles, given the... turbulent state of affairs Britain has found herself facing since 2016 following the election of a single-party to government. More on that later, though).
Nevertheless, this government saw several threats to its stability, most notable the Scottish independence referendum and the rise of UKIP - a Eurosceptic party led by the charismatic Nigel Farage. The former saw all three major British parties - the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats unite to try to persuade Scotland to stay in the United Kingdom, which they did 55-45. The latter saw some Conservative MPs wanting to leave the European Union as well, and with immigration still being a hot-button issue leading up the the 2015 general election, this led to one of the more interesting elections in modern times.
Before the 2015 election, Cameron promised a referendum on the UK's membership of the EU in an attempt to attract voters from the increasingly popular UKIP and to appease naysayers in his own party. This made many voters in Scotland angry, as during the independence referendum, one of the biggest reasons given to stay part of the UK was continued membership of the EU, which wouldn't have been guaranteed if they'd left. Because of this, support for the SNP, who orchestrated the independence referendum, skyrocketed, decimating the Labour vote in Scotland, and a bacon sandwich led to many losses elsewhere. The fact that the Lib Dems supported a rise in tuition fees meant that they also lost a lot of their student support, despite promising to scrap them in their 2010 General Election manifestonote . The result, a Conservative majority - just barely. The new majority government meant that the Conservatives didn't have to compromise on their plans anymore - especially as Labour and the Lib Dems leaders had both resigned and the parties were in the process of electing new ones. So naturally, everything went pear shaped. Rumours of sex acts with a dead pignote and outrage at several new policies set the tone for Cameron's new term in the lead up to the referendum.
The most important part of Cameron's time in office is also one of the biggest events in recent UK political history, so deserves its own folder.
As Cameron had promised, a referendum was announced on the UK's membership of the EU. MPs from all parties joined groups campaigning for one side or the other. The Remainers had Cameron, Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, Home Secretary Theresa May, who seemed to stay out of much of the campaigning, new Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who didn't seem too enthusiastic about remaining, having been a eurosceptic for most of his career as well as the majority of other MPs. What the Brexiteers lacked in numbers, they made up for with charisma, rhetoric and a slogan on a bus. Nigel Farage, the leader of UKIP, was keen to show his hand, but many other campaigners seemed to ignore him, largely as he wasn't an MP (having failed in attempts to get elected on at least half a dozen occasions), and despite his claims UKIP was never really that popular a Party in any particular area - support was widespread, and not insignificant, but fragile (mainly being disaffected Tories and Labour voters) and not concentrated anywhere. Other key Brexiteers included Boris Johnson, a former grudging ally of Cameron (the two famously had a rivalry that went back to their school days at Eton) who was expected to campaign to Remain. While he had built his career as a flamboyant columnist decrying supposed regulatory tyranny and absurdity by Brussels, during his time as Mayor of London he had recast himself as a socially liberal internationalist, he declared rather late that he supported the leave vote - infamously, he apparently wrote a column declaring his support to Remain and one declaring his support for Leave, and then opted for the one he thought might get him power. Michael Gove, a member of the cabinet was another prominent Brexiteer in the cabinet and was largely seen as Boris's right-hand man. His remark that "I think the people in this country have had enough of experts, with organizations from acronyms, saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong" became one of the most misquoted lines in British politics. Come referendum day and the Brexit campaign had largely given up hope, saying that they wouldn't give up the fight, especially as it was expected to be close.
The next day however, it was revealed that the leave vote had narrowly won the referendum 52-48. While many were happy with this result, many people were worried about the loss of rights and other problems. Over 4 million so-called "Remoaners" signed a petition for another referendum, saying that the vote was too close to have such a change. A petition somewhat ironically started the week before the referendum by a leave voter worried that the issue would be put to rest. Ironically Farage had earlier said a 52-48% vote would be too close and be unfinished business, though changed his tune after winning.
Farage took much of the credit, and continues to claim that the people knew exactly what they were voting for, despite wildly divergent accounts, Farage said it would mean leaving the single market while the more popular Boris said during the campaign they would be able to stay in (subsequently he has pursued a hard Brexit outside of the Single Market). Farage even admitted the famous 350 million a week claim Boris put on a bus was a lie, though still claimed his side had won fairly.
In the aftermath of the referendum, Cameron resigned as Prime Minister, saying that it was improper of him to lead Brexit negotiations as a Remainer, later that year resigning as an MP altogether. You would expect, then, that the Brexiteers would take this opportunity to shape the country, especially Johnson, who many expected to be the next PM. Instead, Gove unexpectedly announced his candidacy for leader of the Tories, seen by many as stabbing Johnson, who later declined to run, in the back. Due to his many people suspect Boris and Gove supported the Leave Campaign in order to become PM. Other runners included Stephen Crabb, who was quizzed on his past with an anti-LGBT advocacy group; Liam Fox, who was previously at the centre of an expenses scandal, Theresa May, a remainer, and Andrea Leadsom, a backbencher. In the final round, between Leadsom and May, Leadsom withdrew, largely due to the huge amount of backlash she'd received from the press due to her further-right-wing-than-normal views and her profession that she was more suited than May as she was a mothernote . This meant that the new PM was Theresa May.
Cameron's time in office will likely be remembered for his mistakes in calling for a referendum, and the Piggate scandal rather than what he actually achieved, which includes the legalisation of same-sex marriage in the UK.
Theresa May (2016-2017) [Conservative] / (2017-2019) [Coalition]
Theresa May took up the mantle left by Cameron and started to prepare for the UK to leave the EU. Among the cuts from her cabinet were her former rival Gove. She faced off many challenges at the start of her time in Number 10. People questioned the legitimacy of her election to Prime Minister, as she had won by default after her rival withdrew and she had not won a general election - claims she herself had levied against Brown when he was Prime Minister. She denied calls for a general election or a new referendum, saying the people had spoken and she should just get on with the job.
She delayed triggering Article 50, which starts the process to leave the EU until March 2017, after several challenges trying to delay it. In April, she then called for a general election, breaking her earlier promise that she wouldn't call one. This was possibly because Labour were having problems with a very unpopular leader, Jeremy Corbyn, whose socialist ideals weren't shared by many of his MPs, and she hoped to gain a strong majority to weaken both the very hard-line Brexiters in her own party and the few remainers left by gaining more centre-ground support. Given that some polls suggested that the Conservatives had a 20-point lead over the opposition, almost everyone expected a comfortable-to-landslide Conservative majority.
Boy, was almost everyone in for a shock.
Instead, things started to go off-script. May herself proved to be surprisingly ineffectual as a campaigner; her campaign buzzwords "strong and stable" were widely mocked, her refusal to appear to televised debates made her appear aloof, and accusations of tensions between campaign staff and May's inner circle of advisors became widely circulated. Matters were not helped by what can only be described as an utter fiasco of a manifesto (let us simply say that when one of the centrepieces of your proposed policy becomes widely known as the "dementia tax", something has probably gone badly wrong somewhere), and some brazen attempts at backtracking from said manifesto while equally brazenly trying to pretend they weren't backtracking didn't exactly live up to the "strong and stable" promise. The attempts to bring back fox-hunting did not help either.
The Conservatives began to increasingly look arrogant, out of touch and as if they were taking victory for granted instead of trying to earn it (or, depending on what conspiracy theories you tend to believe, as if they were deliberately trying to lose so that the Opposition would have to deal with the difficult fallout from Brexit, allowing the Conservatives to later sweep back into power by criticising them for not getting a good enough deal for Britain). Furthermore, many people were worried about the increasingly hardline approach that the government was proposing to take regarding Brexit; in addition to the almost half of the country that had voted for "Remain" to begin with, even some "Leave" supporters were wary about such proposals as leaving the single market and the customs union entirely. Jeremy Corbyn was also proving to be a much better and more popular campaigner than he'd been given credit for even by his own party (or at least was able to effectively capitalise on May's weaknesses), and his social democratic proposals and pre-New Labour policies proved quite popular with the young (who, it should also be noted, had overwhelmingly voted against Brexit as well).
And as if all that wasn't enough, the final weeks of the campaign were also marred with two terrorist attacks on British soil within a week of each other (one at a concert by Ariana Grande in Manchester, the other at London Bridge), which were themselves the second and third attacks on British soil that yearnote . This brought the issue of security into the campaign, which might have been expected to give an advantage to the sitting government... except that in addition to being Prime Minister, Theresa May had also been Home Secretary (i.e. in charge of British policing and security) since 2010, and had presided over significant cuts to the British police services. This made some question whether she and the Conservatives had in fact made Britain a safer country.\\
All of the above, fairly or otherwise, worked to erode the Conservative lead in the polls, leading to questions about whether the Conservatives would even win the election outright or whether the country would experience a hung parliament. While a Conservative victory was still widely predicted and assumed, and polls predicting a hung parliament dismissed as outliers, these questions had been unthinkable when the election was announced, thus demonstrating just how much the wheels had come off for the Conservatives. Finally, on June 8 2017, the country delivered its verdict, leading to...
A hung parliament.
Although gaining the most seats in the house, the Conservative Party was unable to gain a parliamentary majority. Although able to form a government due to a political deal with the ten MPs from the Democratic Unionist Partynote , May's gambit had decisively backfired. The agreement to send 1.5 billion pounds in funding to Northern Ireland in exchange for the DUP's support was widely criticised, being seen as a bribe that would disturb the balance of power, especially as the Conservatives were notoriously stingy in claiming there was no available money to the NHS.
Nevertheless, May was able to limp through another year and a half of an increasingly bitter, divisive political environment until eventually, after much negotiation (and numerous complaints that May's idea of "negotiation" seemed to be "shut up and agree with me!"), negotiations between the British government and the EU scraped together a withdrawal agreement that would see Britain finally exit the European Union on March 29, 2019. So, tough though it was, Brexit was finally sorted, right?
Haha. Good one. No.
There were many reasons why the Withdrawal Agreement was unpopular with all sides, Remainer and Leaver alike. Leavers argued that it conceded too much to Brussels and meant that Britain would be, to all intents and purposes, still a part of the EU but without any say over the rules they were expected to follow, and that the whole point of Brexit (according to them) was to establish British sovereignty — up to and including, if you believed the hardliners, leaving with no deal at all). Remainers argued something similar, but their main point was that, if Britain was going to be staying in the EU in all but name, then they might as well forget about the massive economic hit that Brexit would cause and just cancel Brexit entirely.
All of that, however, could possibly have been dealt with. But then we come to Northern Ireland.
You see, one of the key factors that had caused tension during the Troubles was the "hard border" between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland which was heavily policed by British soldiers in order to prevent shipments of weapons to the IRA from sympathisers in the Republic, and from IRA operatives to slip into the Republic. This, of course, made it very difficult for people with friends, family and legitimate business on both sides (as was, naturally, very common) to cross, which only increased the tension and resentment. So, one of the key factors of the peace agreement that led to the end of the Troubles was the removal of the hard border, allowing people on both sides to move freely.
Of course, the main — possibly only — reason this was possible was because both Ireland and Britain were members of the EU, and so were part of the customs union and free trade agreements that meant that a hard border was unnecessary, and even impractical. However, if one of the parties — say, the United Kingdom — were to leave the EU, these agreements would no longer apply, and a hard border would need to be imposed in order to negotiate the different customs environments.
You may see the problem here.
So, as part of the Withdrawal Agreement, a "backstop" had been negotiated which would, if necessary, essentially keep Northern Ireland economically as part of the EU in order to maintain the open border, and thus the peace agreement. This, however, would also mean that a new border would essentially be erected between Northern Ireland and the mainland UK (those customs checks have to be done somewhere). This was incredibly unpopular with, among others, the MPs of the Democratic Unionist Party... whose entire existence is built around making sure that Northern Ireland is unambiguously part of the United Kingdom. And upon whom, you'll remember, Theresa May depends on to form a government.
All of this means that before the Withdrawal Agreement was brought to Parliament, there was uproar, outcry, calls to renegotiate with Brussels, stern warnings from Brussels that they had no intention of negotiating further, and challenges to May's leadership which she was only able to survive by the skin of her teeth (and, likely, the fact that no one else even remotely sane wanted her job at that point). And so when the Withdrawal Agreement was finally brought to Parliament — mere months before Britain was expected to leave — it was voted down in the largest defeat ever faced by a bill put to parliament by a UK government.
So, that's that, then, right? It's been defeated, there's an end to it.
Haha. You're funny. No.
Because, after a few weeks of 'negotiations', May brought the agreement before Parliament again, this time mere days before Britain would otherwise have to crash out of the EU with no deal, something that almost everyone agreed would be a massive economic disaster for the country.
And it was voted down. Again. This time in the fourth largest defeat ever faced by a bill put to parliament by a UK government.
Not that this stopped May. There were plans to bring it to Parliament a third time, which were stopped by a procedural rule that stated that, because the proposed legislation hadn't been sufficiently amended to meet Parliament's objections, it couldn't be brought forward again. Eventually, with no other options than a no deal — which Parliament had symbolically rejected with a vote — rapid shuttle negotiation between the EU and the UK led to a short extension (till April 12) and then a longer one (till October 31) so that Britain could find a way out of unprecedented political gridlock and figure out exactly what it was going to about this whole Brexit situation.
Meanwhile, throughout all of this May's authority had all but disintegrated. Her cabinet had seen an unprecedented amount of resignations from senior and junior ministers, all citing her handling of Brexit as a key reason, and Parliament was more divided and gridlocked than it had been in generations, even centuries. There were protests in the streets, calls for a new referendum, and an increasingly ugly public mood, none of which was inclined to view May favourably. She was seen as intransigent, unwilling to negotiate, incapable of flexibility, putting her loyalty towards the Conservative party and her desire to keep a small minority of fanatical hardline Brexiters satisfied over the rest of the country, and delusionally trying to act as if she was a Prime Minister in charge of a powerful majority who could bend Parliament to her will rather than the leader of a weak minority government. Brexit had paralysed the nation and her government, and her only response was to keep doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. And yet, thanks to a failed leadership challenge in December 2018 which meant that she couldn't be challenged again due to Conservative Party rules, May wasn't going anywhere.
Something had to give. And eventually, on May 24 2019, it did.
After ongoing negotiations with the Labour Party had led to public statements that May was apparently willing to concede on a second referendum, one more cabinet resignation in protest led to renewed calls for May's own resignation. This time, however, they stuck. Although it looked like May was planning to cling on for a little while longer, it turned out that this was just one straw too many. After negotiations with party leadership, May announced to the British public that she intended to resign as Prime Minister effective from June 7 2019. It was someone else's turn to handle Brexit.
What seemed like most of the parliamentary Conservative Party entered the ensuing race to succeed May, but eventually Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt were the two candidates who were put to the membership. In a rather surprising landslide, Johnson, who had been May's Foreign Secretary and whose main contribution to the ongoing Brexit negotiations were to snipe behind her back (and just as often to her face) that her agreements didn't separate Britain from the EU nearly enough, won the Conservative party vote despite Hunt burying him in the TV debate.
Boris Johnson (2019) [Coalition] / (2019-2022) [Conserative]
And so in comes Boris Johnson. A rather colorful figure, born to British diplomats in New York City, Johnson had previously served as MP and as Mayor of London. He's a hard one to pin down, ranging from Obfuscating Stupidity to just plain stupidity, slovenly to shrewd, at times prone to near-crippling gaffes in public and at others nearly invisible, surprisingly liberal to hardcore conservative in his views, a stern law-and-order politician who freely admits to use of cocaine and having a child (or possibly more - it's a Running Gag that Boris refuses to admit how many children he has) out of wedlock in his past. The general consensus, so far as there is one, is that he's much smarter than he pretends to be, not quite as smart as he thinks he is, lazy in every aspect of government business that doesn't involve campaigning, and ideologically consistent only in his chronic self-interest. He was, on taking the position, the first unmarried Prime Minister in nearly nearly fifty years. But one thing that he is most well known for, and the one issue that has propelled him to the premiership, is that his is one of the loudest voices in support of Brexit in the entire nation.
On the October 28th 2019, after dealing with Brexit issues almost exclusively for almost the entire first year of his tenure, Johnson was finally able to get his proposal for a new election through Parliament. Parliament dissolved soon after and began gearing up for a very abbreviated campaign season. There were a few missteps on Johnson's part, including a refusal to participate in news interviews on topics such as climate change and other issues, preferring a laser focus on Brexit and nothing else. The Conservatives' main slogan for the election was Get Brexit Done, a promise to get Brexit done quickly if Johnson's Party got a majority, boasting of his 'oven-ready' Brexit deal.
His Party ran an extensive smear campaign the Labour Party and their leader Jeremy Corbyn, accusing them of antisemitism based on comments Corbyn had made earlier in his career. However, even though Labour did genuinely have something of a problem in this regard, this was seen as hypocritical considering the Tories' record of Islamophobia and Boris Johnson's record of making racist statements, including antisemitism. However, thanks to the effectiveness of the Tory campaign and the utterly ineffectual nature of the Labour one, the smears stuck. Speaking of that campaign, much time was spent in the Labour camp debating what their Brexit message should be. Should they try for a new referendum? Try to block it on legal grounds? Get a Brexit extension passed and renegotiate the withdrawal package? Not even the party leadership knew for sure, and even an internal party caucus vote showed its members split in all directions, showing the public that even if they won the majority, Labour had no idea what they would do with it. This was not helped by the perception that large chunks of the Labour left, from which Corbyn drew most of his support, prized ideological purity over potentially winning power and tended to blame the parliamentary party and the 'MSM' (mainstream media) for Corbyn's failings as a campaigner and leader. While these were both deflection tactics, there is an element of truth to them: Corbyn, having spent the entirety of his leadership making repeated attempts to include and co-operate with opposing factions and individuals within his party, was faced with an increasingly mutinous parliamentary party that had never liked him to begin with, had already tried to oust him once, and was now at daggers drawn. Likewise, while Corbyn made disastrous campaigning decisions(such as refusing to answer whether he would use the UK's Nuclear Deterrent and failing to say how he would vote in a second Brexit referendum) a number of the tabloids and some of the broadsheets did carry out an extensive disinformation campaign (though it was not as universal as was claimed). He was also, by comparison with the energetic, optimistic, and charismatic Boris, an ineffective campaigner.
The Conservatives were helped by Nigel Farage, leader of the Brexit party. He had offered to the Conservatives to not run Brexit party members in traditional Labour districts so as not to split the right-leaning vote in exchange for the Brexit party being allowed into a coalition government. This was seen in the public as a somewhat antidemocratic maneuver, a means of gaming the system. It was made even less popular when US President Donald Trump, a very unpopular figure in Britain even among the right, openly pushed for Johnson to accept that deal. Farage upped the ante, threatening to go back on his offer and run members in as many districts as he could, which would have split the vote and possibly allowed for a Labour victory. But even if he agreed on the merits, Johnson wasn't about to take action when it would appear to the public that he was doing so on an American's orders and so he turned him down. His bluff called, Farage backed down on his demands while still aligning his candidates in the Conservative's favor.
Altogether, though, in terms of campaigning, Labour did almost everything wrong and the Conservatives did a few things right. The Conservatives finally secured their largest majority since 1987, with many Labour constituencies in the North, the so-called 'Red Wall' which had voted Labour for approximately a century, voting for them due to a belief that Brexit could be delivered and improve the country. Farage's machinations on Trump's orders may have helped secure a few seats, but the resulting majority was so great that it didn't end up mattering. This also effectively ended Jeremy Corbyn's career as leader of the opposition; for all the controversies, the ideological in-fighting and the debates about whether or not Corbyn was or wasn't subject to fair treatment by his party and the media, the loss of the Red Wall was such an electoral disaster that had Jesus Christ himself been leader of the Labour Party under such circumstances he'd have had to go as well. Boris in his acceptance speech bragged of his stonking majority and vowed Brexit would be done early next year. The following week he at once put no-deal back on the negotiating table despite his boasts of a great deal and to keep two MPs who lost their seats in his Cabinet appointed them Lords.
He didn't have long to sit on his laurels, though. No sooner was the ink on the treaty dry before the UK, and the rest of the world, were laid low by COVID-19, a respiratory virus that emerged in rural China in early 2020 and spread across the world with warp speed in a matter of weeks. Britain's nationalized health care system made it well suited for the kind of swift response needed to combat the virus, and once the scope of the threat became clear, Johnson's government did move quickly... but only after it became aware, which was on something of a delay. Boris took a great deal of flack when he advocated for 'herd immunity', a kind of population-wide phased exposure plan, wherein there would be a national quarantine, but with certain groups being allowed to conduct normal business at certain times, with the expectation that many would be exposed to the virus, but not in such numbers that it would overwhelm the health services, all with the idea that over time, a majority of the population would be exposed, immunised, and there would be no need for a complete national shutdown.
Much time was spent putting this plan into action against the advice of medical professionals who said that even under optimal conditions, unintended spreading beyond what would be accounted for would results in deaths in the six figures, possibly several hundred thousand. Quite simply, the herd immunity plan would only work if everybody in the country were educated on it, were on board, held to it completely, enforcement was absolute, and nothing went wrong. But there wasn't time for everybody to be educated, not everybody would be on board with it, mistakes would be made, enforcement couldn't be guaranteed to be complete, all of which would mean that almost anything could go wrong. Finally, Johnson was made to back down in favor of a more traditional approach.
It didn't help much that he himself came down with the virus.
He became infected in late March 2020, and though he wasn't severely affected to the point of it being life-threatening (though he was put on a respirator), he did develop complications that would lead to him remaining in hospital for several weeks.
But even besides all that, Johnson (and by extension) the government has been steadily losing popularity throughout the pandemic. For one thing, his chief of staff Dominic Cummings was caught driving while infected with Covid-19 along with his (also-infected) wife and their child two-hundred and fifty miles to his parents' house so the kid could be babysat. This was very much against the regulations at the time (which said to seek local authority help in this situation), but rather than fire the architect of both the Leave campaign and his recent election victory, Johnson and his ministers tried to bend over backwards to justify his by then widely hated chief of staff's rule-breaking, while Cummings himself refused to apologise. In contrast, when the Scottish Chief Medical Officer broke lockdown rules by driving a mere 25 miles to check on her holiday home (while otherwise not infected with Covid-19), she was persuaded to resign by Nicola Sturgeon within days.
Aside from that, there has been an ever-increasing impression that when it comes to handling the pandemic recovery, Johnson and his government have been listening more to the financial complaints of Conservative Party donors and industry lobbyists rather than medical professionals, as Johnson has tried to rush ahead with removing lockdown restrictions in England earlier than many professionals believe to be sensible. While the government argued to the hilt that international comparisons are pointless, the sheer stark difference between the UK death toll and the likes of Germany simply cannot be explained away by statistics alone. Whether this will all actually come back to bite Johnson, or whether it will simply be airbrushed out, remains to be seen.
On November 5th the country was forced to go back into lockdown, despite Government claims that they would be sending people back to work. Meanwhile the chaotic approach to Brexit has continued to foster controversy, when the Government claimed that they would be breaking to break international law, in a "specific and limited way", by introducing an Internal Market Bill to grant new domestic powers to the British government to circumvent certain international treaty obligations to the EU as set out in the Northern Ireland protocol of the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement. This proved very controversial, with the EU threatening to take the British Government to court over this. The Bill has been seen as a power grab by the UK Government, reversing devolution and even preventing judicial review. All 5 living previous Prime Ministers criticised this, the oldest of them, Conservative John Major, who has been on record as calling Brexit the worst foreign policy decision of his lifetime, claimed this would completely break international trust in the country. Despite this the UK Government has refused to see anything wrong with this.
Meanwhile Britain continued to be badly affected by the Covid-19 situation, with Britain being one of the world's worst-hit countries, with the highest death toll in Europe note . Despite Boris Johnson regularly boasting of a world-beating system Covid continued to badly affect the country, with another full lockdown being announced early in 2021. On January 26th it was officially announced that the death toll in the UK had passed 100,000. All the while, the government was very politely but very effectively boxed into several corners over its handling of child food poverty, with several scandals over school meals - essentially, a lot of working parents relied on school breakfast clubs and school lunches to help feed their children (a reveal which in turn shone an uncomplimentary light on poverty in general), and the government initially refused to feed them while schools were out for Covid.
This campaign was led by the then 22 year old Manchester United and England forward, Marcus Rashford, who proved to be an extremely adept campaigner, thanks to being likeable, authentic, articulate, and utterly devoid of either controversy or apparent interest in getting involved in politics itself. In his initial campaign and its later phases (when lunches supplied by government contract proved to be... less than adequate), he drew heavily and quite pointedly on his own experiences with his mother working three jobs to feed him and his siblings. This meant that rather than being seen as an out of touch activist entertainer who should stay in his lane, he was instead seen as a grounded, well-informed, and likeable working class lad with a solid work ethic imparted by a hard-working parent earnestly intent on giving back to the community and standing his ground against an out of touch government devoid of compassion and, after a steady build-up of dodgy contracts to connected donors, relatives, and acquaintances, reeking faintly of corruption.
Rashford's popularity soared, and the government was forced into several very public U-Turns and the faintly bizarre position of a sitting Prime Minister having serious policy discussions with a young footballer, with said footballer being generally perceived as by far the better informed party. note
Following what was, to general surprise, an extremely effective and internationally admired vaccine roll-out, Boris got a significant 'vaccine bump' of popularity, which he used to demolish another brick in Labour's 'Red Wall' of Northern seats, taking Hartlepool (which had been a Labour safe seat since its creation in 1974) by a landslide in May. However, as Spring turned to Summer, uncomfortable questions started being asked about the distribution of government contracts during the pandemic, adding to a persistent aura of corruption and 'jobs for the boys', and the Delta variant of Covid began to hit, delaying the much anticipated unlocking to increasingly vocal displeasure from the Conservative backbenches, and pointed questions about how long it took to put India on the Red List, which in turn fed into the absurdities of the government's Green-Amber-Red list for countries - as many asked, "so are they safe to visit or not?"
Meanwhile, a vengeful Dominic Cummings returned, brandishing a lot of embarrassing and revealing Whatsapp and email exchanges (notably one where Johnson referred to Health Secretary Matt Hancock as "fucking hopeless", leading to further questions about the handling of the early stages of the Covid pandemic. Add to that a shock by-election defeat in Amersham & Chesham, a seat in the Tory 'Blue Wall' across southern England that had, like Hartlepool, been created in 1974, and, like Hartlepool, had voted for one party ever since, but was left vacant due to the demise of the local MP. It had provided a 16,000 seat Tory majority in 2019, but to everyone's surprise, the Liberal Democrats took it in a 25% swing, gaining an 8,000 seat majority, leading to a lot of soul-searching and worried noises from southern Tories who felt a) the focus on the Midlands and North had left Blue Wall voters feeling neglecting (just as the Red Wall had by Labour's focus on the south...), b) that a lot of Middle Class voters, the traditional Tory backbone, plain didn't like Boris.
Adding salt to the wound, John Bercow, former Speaker of the House of Commons, very publicly defected to the Labour party after savaging Johnson's government in a newspaper column. While Tory sentiment was "you're welcome to him" (as Speaker, the outspoken and sharp-tongued Bercow did not endear himself to his former colleagues, very publicly smacking down several Conservative Prime Ministers), the symbolism of the move, given Bercow's reputation as a defender of institutions and Boris' as the opposite, is notable. Further causing trouble was that the following week footage leaked of the Health Secretary Matt Hancock kissing an aide in his office at a time when social distancing rules had still been in force. Though Hancock initially apologised, which Boris Johnson said he was satisfied by, the fallout of it led to Hancock resigning the following day. Johnson appointed the former Chancellor, Sajid Javid, to Hancock's role.
Things continued to worsen in late 2021 due to a very publicised case of a former Cabinet member Owen Paterson being involved in a major corruption scandal. He was found guilty and the Commons Select Committee on Standards recommended a 30 days suspension from Parliament... but the event ended up becoming a much bigger story due to the Tories trying to overturn the standards to protect Paterson's job. They attempted to set up a new committee to investigate the disciplinary process, but this gained condemnation from Parties across the House. Rather embarrassingly the following day the Government were forced into a U-Turn even though their motion for a new Committee had passed in a close vote, with Owen Paterson resigning anyway.
Adding to this was a similar fumble regarding several boozy Christmas parties at Downing Street the previous year, when lockdown rules prohibited households mixing, with the Prime Minister's spokeswoman Allegra Stratton caught laughing on camera about it. While it's not the first time members of this government have been caught taking a somewhat relaxed attitude to COVID restrictions, this particular scandal — subsequently dubbed "Partygate" — has seemed to stick, perhaps because the British public, often subject to increasingly harsh COVID restrictions, is getting a bit sick of the equally increasing perception that the government seems to feel that such rules only apply to the little people. Matters weren't helped that one of the parties was reported to have occurred on the eve of the funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh; images of the Queen at her husband's coffin, stoically obeying the same social distancing regulations that her subjects had been forced to follow, at the same time that members of her government were apparently partying it up and blatantly flouting the law didn't put the public in a mood to laugh the affair off. While no government ministers have yet been proven to be involved, the Conservative candidate for Mayor of London was, among others - and Boris tried to deny all knowledge when at least one took place in 10 Downing Street itself. While Stratton tearfully resigned, the unimpressed perception was that she was merely a sacrifice to protect Boris. The shambles around the response to the Omicron variant of Covid failed to impress either.
The fallout from all of this led to Paterson's formerly safe seat of North Shropshire (held by the Tories since its creation in 1832), passing to the Liberal Democrats in the seventh largest swing in by-election history. Significantly, unlike Amersham & Chesham, North Shropshire was not a commuter belt constituency with embedded local issues to work on - instead, it was deeply rural, with a 60% Leave vote (the Lib Dems, of course, having positioned themselves as the Remain party). As one Tory MP said in exasperation, if they couldn't keep that seat, what could they keep. Given the sheer scale of this disaster, the implications, the fact that a similar swing half that size would wipe out nearly 60 Tory seats across southern England and Wales, including power players like Raab and Gove, and that the main cited issue in North Shropshire was Boris, it is unsurprising that the knives are out. Senior backbenchers, including associates of the powerful 1922 Committee, have been openly stating that if Boris makes one more mistake like this, he's out. Whether that holds, or Boris repeats his previous defiance of political gravity, would remain to be seen...
Soon enough, the Tories and by extension, Boris himself, would get hit particularly hard. First of all, a police investigation into Partygate ultimately concluded that the law had been broken during the Downing Street Parties. Indeed, Boris himself received a fine by the Metropolitan Police along with a string of others, including the Chancellor. This should have been the end for Johnson, but instead of bowing out, he decided to stay at the wheel in spite of the protests from some of his own government and the Opposition in the wake of the 2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine. Many supporters of Johnson stated that now was not the right time for a leadership change in the wake of Putin's War, but critics likewise pointed to Neville Chamberlain resigning during the Second World War.
All of the above would play a big role in the 2022 Local Elections in May, in which the Tories were devastated. They lost nearly 500 councillors across the country and lost control of 11 councils, with the lion's share being split between Labour and the Lib Dems, the latter in particular having an especially great election by taking half the seats. Not long after this, the long awaited Sue Grey Report was finally published, which only further compounded things and flat out all but confirmed once again that Boris had indeed been to some of the events at Downing Street, despite the PM himself stressing that he thought at the time they were within the rules and again, despite protests, wanted to keep working as the Prime Minster. Naturally, not many were impressed with this.
With these latest blows, Tory backbenchers finally had enough, and the threshold was finally cleared in June for a no-confidence vote in Johnson's leadership. Ultimately, despite everything, Boris won the vote by 211 to 148. Boris and his supporters, especially amongst the Cabinet, celebrated this victory. However, this was ignoring the fact that over a third of his government had no confidence in him at all at around 41%, which was actually worse than Theresa May's no-confidence vote. Given that May was gone within twelve months after that, many suspected that this would mean that Johnson's days were now numbered. And yet despite this, Johnson insisted on keeping up with the job. All of this only added to a feeling that Johnson didn't care about the concerns of the public or his own party, and more about keeping his job. A sentiment that may have been shared with his publicly supportive Cabinet.
Little more than a couple of weeks later, as a cost of living crisis became increasingly unbearable on top of railway strikes not seen since the 70's, the Tories would be dealt another crippling blow with two simultaneous by-elections. One in Wakefield, and the other in Tiverton and Honiton. Both of which were Tory held. Wakefield had been a Labour seat within the red wall that got taken by the Tories during the 2019 Election, and was swiped back by Labour with an 18% swing. Tiverton and Honiton on the other hand would be an even more devastating loss. Like North Shropshire before it, it was a deeply rural, pro-leave area of the country that had consistently voted Conservative. Tellingly, the Lib Dems once again took the seat with a massive 30% swing. Whilst perhaps not as massive as the North Shropshire by-election, the Conservative majority was considered to be the largest one ever wiped out by a by-election result. All of this seemed to indicate that if the Tories wouldn't get rid of Boris, then the Public might very well do so in their stead.
Then towards the end of the month the Deputy Chief Whip Chris Pincher was forced to resign due to groping allegations. The scandal ended up growing even bigger when it turned out Boris Johnson had been made aware of previous instances of misconduct by Pincher before appointing him, despite his claims otherwise - and the reveal was made not by a political rival, but in a letter by distinguished career civil servant Lord McDonald, a former diplomat who had defied the usually eccentric reputation of the Foreign Office to be as boringly uncontroversial as possible. The fallout of this led to the Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak and the Health Secretary Sajid Javid resigning within minutes of each other, followed by several others. While the official reasons tended to be along the lines of principle driven exits, a common thread was utter exasperation and anger at a lack of clear policy direction from Downing Street and being forced to repeat whatever story Number 10 came up with for the scandal of the week, a story that would often change mid-interview, making them look like fools in front of the country. They were followed by a whole range of resignations, surpassing the previous largest amount of Ministerial resignations in a day since 1932, with over 40 Ministers and aides resigning in the space of 24 hours.
And yet despite all this, Boris has stated he'll still keep going with being the Prime Minster, even calling a resignation "crazy". Finally, after yet more resignations and an Education Secretary (the third in as many days) resigning after only 36 hours in the job, on the 7th July 2022, barely 2.5 years after winning the largest majority since 1987, Johnson announced he would resign as Conservative Leader but stay on as PM till the conference in Autumn. However, with powerful Deputy PM Dominic Raab ruling himself out of the leadership contest and thereby implicitly opening the door to taking over as a caretaker PM, and Labour threatening a vote of no confidence in the government to force a general election of Boris wasn't evicted immediately, the Tory party moved to elect a new Leader - and thereby, a new Prime Minister - by early September, with multiple candidates having launched their pitches before Boris even resigned, with the perception being that it's going to boil down to Rishi Sunak, former Chancellor, vs the best of the rest.
In a quite competitive race it ended up going down to Rishi Sunak and the current Foreign Secretary Liz Truss. The result was be announced on the 5th of September. Though Sunak was more popular with the MPs, much of the Party membership disliked him as his resignation had helped force Johnson's resignation, while Truss had remained loyal. Truss ultimately won the contest and the following day was appointed as Prime Minister.
As so much of Johnson's early tenure as PM was taken up by the Brexit issue, a separate folder is set aside for his involvement in that matter.
Johnson also went to the Queen requesting that she "prorogue" Parliament; essentially, that she suspend parliamentary business until the new government could develop a legislative agenda which would then be announced with a "Queen's Speech" that would open a new session of parliament. While not in and of itself an uncommon procedure — every new government and parliamentary session often has something similar happen — several factors made this both unusual and incredibly controversial. Firstly, Johnson was asking for parliament to be prorogued for five weeks, the longest such occurrence since the Second World War. Secondly, this would mean that Johnson would only formally face parliament for a week before the sessions would be closed (having become Prime Minister during a break in parliamentary business). And thirdly, the length of the proroguing also meant that parliament would essentially be unable to sit again until two weeks before October 31st (which, you'll remember, is the extended date given for Britain to formally leave the European Union), thus meaning that if parliament had any objections to the government's deal — or lack thereof — they would have very little time to do anything about it before Britain crashed out with no deal. Fourthly, if Parliament objected to this by calling a vote of no confidence in Johnson, he would get to set the date of an election — and could theoretically set the date for after October 31st, meaning that Britain could theoretically crash out of the EU during the election campaign.
People were not happy about this. While itself a legal constitutional technique, it was beginning to look like Johnson — who was the head of a minority coalition government, who had staffed his cabinet with hardcore Brexiters, who had only gained his position through the votes of a very small section of the population, and had not put his government's policy on Brexit or anything to the electorate — was aiming to force an unpopular no deal on the British public as a fait accompli. And even less favourably-inclined observers noted that it was also a suspiciously authoritarian measure on top of that, as if Johnson was aiming to challenge the sovereignty of parliament. There were spontaneous protests in the streets of British cities, the hashtag "#StopTheCoup" began to circulate, and commentators began to make ominous noises about the collapse of British democracy.
Meanwhile, the other parties were not so interested in standing idly by. The House composition hasn't changed since May's tenure. And as has been said above, the Conservative government is one in coalition with the DUP, whose main purpose is in promoting unionship between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom, which would be ruined by a no-deal Brexit without the 'backstop' in place. Jeremy Corbyn, Labour party leader, has shown willingness to call for a vote of no confidence, hoping to woo the DUP into standing with Labour to form a caretaker government that would immediately call for a general election and, presumably, a new Brexit referendum.
In the leadup to the very first Brexit-related vote of Johnson's tenure, which was, in fact, the very first Parliamentary vote of his tenure, period, the issue at stake was Parliament wishing to vote to give itself the power to dictate the date and terms of Brexit, as opposed to the PM unilaterally doing so. Johnson attempted to sway the vote within his party with unexpected grace and aplomb, wooing skeptical party members with the logic of his proposed Brexit strategy and- just kidding, he told any Conservative MP that anyone voting against the government would be stripped of party status and unable to stand as a Conservative in upcoming elections note. This availed him not, as nearly thirty Conservatives crossed the benches to vote against the government and gave Parliament the ability to seek another Brexit extension. To make matters worse, following a series of special elections dating back to May's tenure, the Conservative coalition governing majority was reduced to a single vote. During the aforementioned vote, a Conservative MP stood and crossed the benches to symbolically and (as a simultaneous press release showed) legally join the Liberal Democrats, singlehandedly creating the first minority government in over forty years.
True to his word, Johnson withdrew the whip from the rebel Conservatives. This meant that, almost at a single stroke, his government went from a majority of... well, zero, to minus figures. And it didn't help the optics that some of the MPs kicked out of the party included Ken Clarke, the "Father of the House"note and a well-respected party elder statesman who had been a senior Cabinet minister under Thatcher, Major and Cameron; Philip Hammond, the previous Chancellor of the Exchequer under Theresa May; and Sir Nicholas Soames, who was none other than the grandson of Winston Churchill.
So, to sum up: Johnson had forced the closure of parliament, been accused of launching a coup and trying to set himself up as an authoritarian dictator, was the subject of large public protests, had lost his first votes in parliament note had lost control of the Brexit process to Parliament, kicked Winston Churchill's grandson out of the Conservative Party and had seen his majority go from one to negative figures. And to add insult to injury, his efforts to goad the Opposition into immediately calling for a vote of no-confidence and an election, which he could use to win a majority by attacking parliament, came to nothing as the Opposition refused to take the bait.
And did we mention that all of the above paragraph only took place within one week?
On September 24, 2019, the UK Supreme Court ruled that Johnson's proroguing of Parliament was illegal, based on the idea that it was not done with legitimate purpose, but to deprive Parliament of executing its constitutional role. 'Unprecedented' is a term that gets thrown around a lot, but in Britain's centuries-old political system with constantly evolving Constitutional mores and standards, with power shifting back and forth between the Monarch, the Lords, the Commons, and combinations thereof in a relatively organic fashion, but the act of the Supreme Court slapping down the PM for exercising a heretofore legitimate act of power for illegitimate reasons is, for lack of a better term, unprecedented. Because of this ruling, the proroguing of Parliament that had been in effect for the previous couple weeks had been ruled illegal and that the current session would be considered to have continued uninterrupted. Parliament would continue normal business the following day.
Finally, it all came to a rather anticlimactic end. After finally persuading Parliament to hold new elections, the country decided that, whatever the merits for or against, that they'd had enough of all the arguments and just wanted to get it over with. In an election dominated by Brexit-related arguments, the Conservatives came away with a large majority for the first time in nearly twenty years. Votes for a European Union withdrawal based on the existing negotiated packages were immediately scheduled and passed. Many of the lingering issues, such as the Northern Ireland border situation, trade deals, and other logistical hurdles were pushed down the line to be renegotiated with the goal of being resolved by December 2020, though these discussions will take place between a United Kingdom and the European Union as separate entities than as an "internal" negotiation. On January 31, 2020, nearly four years after the initial referendum that started it all, the United Kingdom withdrew as a member of the European Union.
Liz Truss (2022) [Conservative]
Appointed as the result of a Conservative party caucus following Boris Johnson's resignation, Liz Truss became the fifteenth and final Prime Minister to take office during the seventy-year reign of Queen Elizabeth II, who passed away less than two days after Truss took office.
This may go down as one of the worst omens for a British Prime Minister in history.
While the Queen's passing and the ascension of King Charles III cemented Truss's place in history for better or worsenote , unfortunately for her any honeymoon period Truss may have hoped for was short-lived. Once the ceremonies had faded and the nation emerged from mourning, it quickly became apparent that Truss had inherited a series of problems from Johnson, and her attempts to solve them... well, the phrase "went down like a cup of cold sick" springs to mind.
Truss quickly provoked controversy by scrapping the cap on Banker's bonuses and engaging in a series of tax cuts, with claims that she was keeping to trickle-down economics; this resulted in the value of the Pound falling to its lowest level since 1985, prompting fears of a major economic recession. The Economist witheringly observed that she had retained control of her government for seven days, not counting the disruption over the Queen's death; "that is the lifespan of a lettuce." The end result was that her Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, was sacked after only 38 days and replaced with Jeremy Hunt (who had once run for party leadership/the office of Prime Minister against Boris Johnson). Hunt promptly began reversing most of Truss's policies to date.
So, not off to a smashing start, then.
The swift trashing of almost all of Truss' economic plan by Hunt and her plummeting popularity figures (not to mention the British economy), followed by the 'resignation' of hard right-wing Home Secretary Suella Braverman (who was replaced by more centrist Grant Shapps) quickly led to the accusation that Truss was PM in name only and Hunt was holding the puppet strings. This, in turn, led to the swift dissolving of any authority Truss might have been able to claim, with the question quickly moving from "will she go" to "when will she go", along with the swift additions of "how will she go" and "Jesus, at this rate will she even last until Halloween?"
About the only thing going for Truss was the Conservative Party's desire for some semblance of order and unity; after the bloody skirmish to replace Boris Johnson, the party had no enthusiasm for yet another disorderly leadership contest, nor were they particularly keen to go to a General Election when the polls suggested nothing less than an utter wipeout. And either way, there was no obvious candidate to replace her. However, perhaps unsurprisingly the Labour Party both smelled blood in the water and wasn't especially in the mood to help the Conservative Party stay in power, especially since the country seemed to be falling apart around their ears. So on October 19th 2022, they introduced a motion to ban fracking.
What's that? "That hardly sounds like a big deal"? Oh, did we mention that Truss had campaigned for the leadership partly on a pledge to lift the government moratorium on fracking, despite this going against the 2019 Conservative election manifesto? Meaning that there was a significant amount of potential votes of support of the ban within the Conservatives, and that if it passed it would be a major defeat for Truss on a personal and political level?
As it happened, the motion was defeated, but it didn't matter; it was interpreted more as a test of MP confidence in the government, and when viewed through that lens the government lost. Disastrously. The real story was the fact that the process of getting enough pro-government votes to strike it down can be generously described as, in the words of the memetically gobsmacked ITV news anchor Tom Bradby, "total absolute abject chaos". Dissenting MPs reportedly had to be physically forced into place in order to vote against the motion, and two government whips announced their resignation only to reverse position and announce that they weren't resigning mere hours later. There were claims that Truss herself was compelled to chase one of said whips through the corridors of parliament to try and convince her otherwise. And even if you didn't believe those stories, what couldn't be denied was that MPs were absolutely livid with Truss and were not shy about holding back; as with another widely-spread memetic moment with long-serving backbench Conservative MP Charles Walker, in which to the amazement of yet another flabbergasted journalist he made absolutely no attempt at concealing how utterly pissed off with Liz Truss and anyone who had supported her he was.
It should probably go without saying that, in the British parliamentary system, you're not supposed to win votes by physically manhandling members to vote for you; when things are going well and you're on top of the message MPs from your party probably shouldn't be holding interviews about you and your government in which phrases like "pitiful", "a shambles and a disgrace" and "I'm sick of absolutely talentless people" keep popping up; and the Prime Minister is supposed to be able to exert authority without having to recreate a Benny Hill sketch. Clearly any meaningful support for Liz Truss's government had utterly evaporated. Finally, amid calls for a new general election, on October 20th Liz Truss stood outside 10 Downing Street and announced that she was resigning as Prime Minister, with a replacement to be elected by the party within a week. She had served only 44 days in office by the time she made her announcement and 48 by the time her replacement was chosen, making it entirely possible that it's taken you longer to read this summary of her administration than the administration lasted. She will thus go down in history for a third reason: the shortest serving British Prime Minister ever (and this isn't just one of those "in the modern era" things, we do mean ever; the next shortest, George Canning, lasted 119 days in 1827 before dying of a sudden illness).
And adding insult to injury, yes - per a live-feed from The Daily Star, she was, in fact, outlasted by a lettuce.
Rishi Sunak (2022-present) [Conservative]
After Truss' quick rise and much quicker fall, the Conservative Party descended into its traditional factional squabbling - much to the subdued glee of the Labour Party, which happily pointed out how the Tories' first priority seemed to be less 'what is right for the country', more 'what will make sure we're still employed'. It, and the other opposition parties, also made loud noises about a General Election. While they were never going to get one because the prospect was a near-certain Tory wipe-out, it made for good politics, and shone a light on the decidedly undemocratic means by which the Tories were appointing Prime Ministers and petty politicking going on behind the scenes. And frankly, politics aside they had a point; even setting aside the fact that 2022 had seen three different British Prime Ministers, it's worth remembering that the last Conservative Prime Minister to start and complete a full elected term without being replaced at some point was David Cameron back in the (comparatively) halcyon days of 2010-2015.
This time, it didn't even get to the notoriously reactionary membership, which represents approximately 0.3% of the British population. Instead, the powerful 1922 Committee set out revised rules for a leadership contest, requiring any prospective candidate to gain the support of at least 100 MPs out of the 357 in Parliament. This was widely seen as an attempt to keep out Boris Johnson, who remained very interested in his old job and very popular with the Conservative Party membership - meaning that he would almost certainly become PM once more if it went to a vote of the members.
If it was, it succeeded, with Johnson never outright declaring his candidacy, but returning to Britain from his holidays to test the waters and ultimately deciding the day before the votes were counted that he wasn't actually interested. While his supporters claimed he had over 100 votes, the general estimate was closer to 60, and the results were a lot of very quick and embarrassing U-Turns, with powerful Conservatives such as Nadhim Zahawi (who had played a key role in forcing Johnson from office) publishing Op-Eds in traditional Tory broadsheets like the Daily Telegraph about how it was time for 'Boris 2.0', then tweeting support for Rishi Sunak half an hour later.
The third competitor, Penny Mordaunt, was estimated to have had about thirty supporters as a proposed compromise candidate between Sunak and Johnson, and also bowed out when it became apparent she wouldn't have a chance.
As a result, Sunak was unopposed, having rapidly acquired approximately 130 votes. The fact that he had been proven spectacularly right in his scathing assessment of Truss' "fairytale economics" and perception as a steady hand on the economic tiller did his standing wonders, as well as the fact that there was no real challenge from anyone other than Johnson - whose challenge was light, cautious, and thoroughly squelched by all but his most loyal supporters. As a result, Sunak was quickly crowned Prime Minister with relatively little disruption, to renewed demands for a new General Election from the opposition parties and mass relief from the Conservatives. In the process, he became the first non-white British Prime Minister, the first of any minority background since Benjamin Disraeli stepped down in 1880 (Disraeli was Jewish, but converted to Christianity as a child when his father renounced Judaism), and at 42, the youngest since Lord Liverpool took the post in 1812. His rise from MP to PM in 7 years is the fastest on record.
However, Sunak's in-tray is a full one, with a full-blown cost of living crisis, an incipient recession, a chronically weak pound, and an energy crisis all on the agenda, along with the war in Ukraine. Add to that the Labour Party's ascendance in the polls, pointed questions about his financial affairs (after his wife's non-dom tax status, the reveal that as Chancellor he had a US Green Card, and the fact that he's the first PM to be richer than the monarch), the loss of the famed Conservative reputation for economic credibility, and calls for an election from an exasperated public (with barely two years before the next one is due to be called), it remains to be seen how long 'Dishy Rishi' will be in office for...
Indeed, right out of the gate, Sunak would end up with one of the biggest challenges since the 70's. A huge wave of newfound strikes and industrial action. Whilst Johnson and Truss both had the shadow of rail strikes over their respective governments, the cost of living crisis had caused the strike action to escalate. Not only did rail workers expand their strikes up into Christmas and the New Year, other sectors also proceeded to join them. Initially this was from other transport sectors - including air and sea ports - but it had slowly, then rapidly snowballed into the postal service, barristers and teachers, all demanding an increase in pay in line with rate of inflation.
But all of those would be overshadowed by the strikes from nurses and ambulence crews, at a period of time where the NHS would be under the most strain, again under the concerns of pay, especially after the slap in the face most nurses got with their 'pay raise' during the pandemic. This would spark fears that people wouldn't be able to recieve urgent care, even among those who supported the strikes. Something the Government would have had to step in and strike a deal for.
Haha haha haha - No.
The Conservatives instead actually insisted that the wages were fair, and refused to even come to the table. Naturally, the NHS staff went on strike in response, only escalating fears of a repeat of the Winter of Discontent from the 1970s. And despite this, the Conservatives only doubled down on this, bringing more strikes to the fore over Christmas and into 2023. And throughout all of this, Sunak was suspciously silent, keeping a low profile in spite of all the above problems. Making matters yet worse, it turned out that the public had not entirely forgotten Partygate, and neither had Whitehall or, indeed, the Tory-dominated Privileges Committee, which investigated Boris Johnson for misleading the Commons - something that if proven in a report would lead to a recommendation of a 10 day plus suspension, in turn sufficient to trigger a recall petition in Johnson's constituency, potentially leading to a by-election in a comparatively liberal constituency in London, where Tories are an endangered species and Johnson is incredibly unpopular.
Johnson promptly resigned before the report could be publicly released, unleashing a savage broadside at the Committee and at Sunak in a 1000 word resignation letter where he painted himself as the victim of a coup by a small cabal, vowing to battle on and once more raising the spectre of Conservative in-fighting. He was followed in his resignation by two former Ministers in his Government. There was also controversy over his honours list and what deal he had worked out with Sunak. While the Conservatives clung onto Johnson's constituency by a handful of votes based on the local issue of the ULEZ (Ultra-Low Emission Zone, an amped up variant on London's Congestion Charge for larger, older vehicles), more previously ultra-safe seats fell in by-elections. Worse still, Home Secretary Suella Braverman (restored as part of a pact by Sunak to keep some of the support from the far right of the party) kept pushing the agenda of hard-right of the Conservative party, claiming that homelessness for those homeless who had tents was a lifestyle choice and savaging the police for not cracking down on perfectly legal pro-Palestinian protests. This is widely perceived as positioning herself for a leadership bid in opposition, while also leaving Sunak - who had relied upon her support to take office - looking increasingly weak as he did nothing. The last, however, was the final straw, with Braverman finally being sacked (again), leading to the most astonishing political story of all.
The return of David Cameron.
Foreign Secretary James Cleverly was moved sideways into the Home Secretary position in the midst of a cabinet reshuffle, leading a vacancy, filled by Cameron - who had left Parliament seven years ago, and was hurriedly elevated to the House of Lords as Baron Cameron in order to become Foreign Secretary. The logic of the move, especially given that in the Brexit Referendum, Cameron was responsible for what some have considered to be the biggest foreign policy blunder by a British PM since Suez, is somewhat puzzling - though it may have something to do with an attempt to regain support from Blue Wall Tories alienated by Braverman's antics. Whatever the reason, the opposition parties pounced on the news with absolute glee - and while the initial response from both foreign governments and Foreign Office officials has been broadly positive (perhaps because an even remotely competent Foreign Minister with an actual interest in Foreign Affairs is such an endangered species in British politics that even Cameron compares favourably), there is no reason to say that it won't ultimately backfire. Combined with Labour's lead in the polls, only time will tell if the Conservatives will survive to remain a significant force...
And if all of that was not enough, yet another racism scandal engulfed the party, with major donor Frank Hester (of c. £10 million - a lot in British politics) being caught on record observing that black Independent (former Labour) MP Diane Abbott made him want to shoot her and hate all black women. The opposition parties predictably savaged this, while Downing Street hemmed and hawed and tried to figure out how to both condemn this (which they did, eventually, and reluctantly) and keep the money. With this, the rising threat of far-right challengers Reform UK, over 60 experienced M Ps stepping down, and polling figures stubbornly showing a Labour lead of between 20 and 25 points - and not down to any particular enthusiasm for Labour, but because the general public have decided they're just that sick of the Tories. Projections suggest a historic wipeout of as low as 113 seats, and while this would be bad enough (even in the Blair landslide of 1997, the Tories held over 150 seats), worst case projections suggest an unheard of reduction to 42 seats. As one MP said frankly, off the record, "we're stuffed." All things told, it is not surprised that in March 2024, Sunak's position became more and more tenuous, and the knives started being sharpened as the Tories started once again indulging in one of their favourite habits - plotting regicide. In this case, to find a leader who could at least diminish the margin of defeat. While no clear rival has emerged, despite the usual rumours of the Return of the Boris and the vague possibility of Penny Mordaunt as a compromise candidate, it's rapidly becoming a question of who'll get Sunak first - the public, or his own party...
- George VI (1936-1952): Took the throne following his brother Edward VIII's abdication in 1936note , and subsequently ended up on the throne during World War II. Considering he was the "spare" who wasn't supposed to become King, was incredibly shy and reserved, and infamously had a stammer that could stop a clock, everyone largely agrees that George VI ended up doing a pretty good job all things being equal (and in total fairness, he'd more-or-less got the stammer well under control by the time the period this page follows kicked off), and thanks to his reputation for selfless devotion to duty, especially during the war, he was widely beloved by his subjects. He died suddenly after spending the latter years of his reign battling lung cancer; his heavy smoking habit certainly didn't help, but it's widely believed that the stress of suddenly becoming King following the Abdication Crisis significantly shortened his life.
- Elizabeth II (1952-2022): She took the throne in 1952 at the age of 25 following her father's sudden death, and subsequently went on to be the longest reigning British monarch ever, the longest-serving female head of state, and second-longest reigning monarch in recorded world historynote . She was subsequently on the throne throughout most of the events recounted on this page; to put it in perspective, of the eighteen prime ministers discussed here at time of writing, prior to Rishi Sunak the only one who was not in office for at least some part of her reign was Clement Attleenote . As such, there's far too much to discuss about her here, but there is a very good chance that, at time of writing, almost all of the people reading these words had never known another British monarch before her passing. While opinion on the Royal Family became a lot less deferential over the years since her father passed, popular opinion generally tends to view Elizabeth herself favourably in that she's widely viewed as having inherited her father's stoic devotion to her duties. She passed away September 8th 2022 after a short illness, at which point she was succeeded by...
- Charles III (2022-present): The longest-serving heir apparent to the British Crown, the longest-serving Prince of Wales and, upon his ascension to the throne, the oldest King in British history, Charles III has not at time of writing had much time to do anything of note, but he inherited a kingdom that was probably the most divided it had ever been in decades if not centuries, with the aftershocks of Brexit continuing to strain the nation at the seams and rumblings of independence coming from Scotland, Northern Ireland and even Wales, not helped by a terrible cost of living crisis and worries of the British economy going into a recession later that year. Not helping matters is that he himself is generally less popular than his mother was during her reign, due in large part to the messy end of his marriage with Princess Diana and his relationship with and subsequent marriage to his Queen-Consort, Camilla Parker-Bowlesnote . That said, he does also have a reputation for being outspoken about his views and opinions on subjects ranging from environmentalism (a subject on which he is regarded as increasingly prescient) to homeopathy to architecture, some of which have endeared him to the British public less than others. Acknowledging this, he has wryly admitted that as King, he can't be anywhere near as outspoken as he previously was. Time will tell how he does at the job, but one thing is for sure; he's been waiting long enough for it...
