No Britain is not Ungovernable

"No British PM has completed a term in office since 2015, despite two of those PMs being elected with landslide majorities. The country is essentially ungovernable - at least under the existing system of governance."

I see this statement repeated a lot but is it actually logical?  Let's take a moment to look at how many coalitions and completed terms in office there have actually been...

Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury won a landslide Conservative General Election Victory in 1900 after winning the Second Boer War.  Despite not really needing them at this point the Conservatives remained in a Unionist coalition with the Liberal Unionist party who were a splinter group from the Liberal Party who disagreed with Campbell-Bannerman & Co on the issue of Irish Home Rule.  Keeping the coalition together however took it's tool on Lord Salisbury who's enormous weight caused him breathing difficulties.  Following the death of his wife he took early retirement in 1902 handing over to Arthur Balfour mid way though his final ministry.

From then on until the next General Election in 1905 Balfour's government ripped itself apart over the issue of Free Trade.  Various ghosts of the Boer War also haunted the government as dirty secrets like the use of concentration camps and the importation of "Chinese coolie slave labour" into South Africa started to leak from Africa into the British home public domain.  Liberal leader Campbell-Bannerman exploited these failures highly effectively to humiliate Balfour who then resigned in a huff.  

However to his surprise George V then invited Campbell-Bannerman to form a minority government and Campbell-Bannerman and the Liberals were swept back into power at the following General Election in February 1906.  During this period the Liberal party had various pacts with the Labour Party which had now increased their seats to 29.  Campbell-Bannerman had been 69 in 1906 and after a series of heart attacks in 1908 resigned in favour of the younger Henry Herbert Asquith.

Although the Asquith government went on until the middle of World War One an extra General Election was called almost purely on the issue of Lords Reform and the Parliament Act which removed the Lords' then total veto on any legislation it didn't like.  There was also a lot of heated debate and violence over the issue of votes for women.  However, Asquith and the Suffragettes came to an agreement to suspend their terrorist campaign for the duration of WWI in return for enfranchisement thereafter.  

Asquith's government - by the end a coalition - eventually fell apart over a range of issues mostly relating to the so far unsuccessful conduct of WWI and rebellion in Ireland.  He was effectively undermined by David Lloyd-George who ran a wartime coalition after 1916.

After winning the war in 1918 Liveral Lloyd-George and the "National Government" fought the post war general election, standing on the following platform:

Trial of the exiled Kaiser Wilhelm II;

Punishment of those guilty of atrocities;

Fullest indemnity from Germany;

Britain for the British, socially and industrially;

Rehabilitation of those broken in the war; and

A happier country for all.

The Conservatives and Liberals remained in coalition after World War One despite the fact that the Conservatives could have easily formed a government without the Liberals at all such was Lloyd-George's cult of personality.  

However the happier country did not quite emerge and eventually the government fell apart over a combination of Irish Home Rule issues, financial crises and the long forgotten Chanak crisis.  This event is historically interesting as it led to the formation of the Conservative's 1922 Committee and a conscious decision to go for absolute majorities at General Elections rather than form coalitions.  It's hard to remember now 100 years later but the idea of single party governments really didn't seem that important until this point ... Perhaps it came about because the expansion of Suffrage to women and the neutering of the House of Lords changed the landscape.

Andrew Bonar Law won a landslide at the following general election but had to resign almost immediately due to contracting throat cancer.  His ministry lasted only 210 days.  It was the 3rd shortest Premiership in history but has now been relegated to the 4th thanks to the contribution of Liz Truss.  He resigned in May 1923 and was dead by December.  He was buried in Westminster Abbey.  Asquith quipped they were laying the Tomb of the Unknown Prime Minister next to the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior.  Even the Tombstone reads ironically "Sometime Prime Minister".

Stanley Baldwin took over the stonking majority but Bonar Law had tied the hands of his successor by giving a Manifesto pledge that there would be no change in Tariff policy without a General Election.  Baldwin felt if he breached this pledge the government would fall apart so he called another General Election on the issue which he lost to Ramsay McDonald and Labour.

By 1923 Labour had reduced the Liberals to 3rd party status but they were still reliant on them to form a government.  McDonald's first ministry fell apart within 9 months.  It was brought down by an argument about Britain and the Bolshevik relations and the publication of the Zinoviev letter by the Daily Mail which destroyed the government.  The letter was eventually revealed to be a forgery when 2 days before the General Election Grigory Zinoviev himself announced it was bollocks but it was too late to save the Labour government.  The letter is believed to have been manufactured by MI5 and multiple investigations by multiple governments who have spend years trying to get to the bottom of the matter have achieved little more than producing reports that are incomplete for "National Security Reasons".

In the meantime Stanley Baldwin became Prime Minister again with a large majority and he served a full term but he unexpectedly lost the "Flapper Election" of 1929. Baldwin had lowered the voting age for eligible women from 30 to 21 and they rewarded his government by handing it it's cards and returning a McDonald led Labour/Liberal coalition.  Labour won 288 seats, the Conservatives 260 and Liberals 59.  

However, the extreme stress on British economy caused by the fallout from the Wall Street Crash was so sever that the Labour and Liberals parties decided they couldn't solve it on their own and they formed a "National Government" with the Conservatives in the hope of spreading the blame for the necessary unpopular choices required to resolve matters as widely as possible with McDonald as it's symbolic head.  

McDonald eventually developed a number of serious health problems and resigned in 1935 in favour of Baldwin.  He died two years later reviled by Labour activists as a traitor.  In the 1935 General Election the National Government won 430 seats (386 of these were Conservative). Labour had now bailed on the National Government and their seats were reduced to 154.

Baldwin however now felt he was getting on a bit and resigned following the coronation of George VI.  Baldwin announced on 27 May 1937 that he would resign the next day. He gave MPs a pay rise, the Leader of the Opposition a salary and told Chamberlain "you're it".  And with that the National Government dematerialised for a Conservative one.  There was no need for a pretence anymore. 

However following his disastrous appeasement policy resulting in the invasion of the whole of Europe by the Nazis Chamberlain was soon ousted by a wartime coalition of all three major parties headed by Winston Churchill installed in 1940.

In 1945 of course Attlee won his outright victory and Labour served a full term.  At the 1950 election however his majority was reduced to 5 and by 1951 he had called and lost another election to Winston Churchill.  Churchill's 1950s government although a majority one was not a great success.  Churchill was old and very ill and both George VI and Elizabeth II suggested retirement in favour of Eden. Eden however had his own health problems and so every time Churchill prepared to hand over, Eden would be taken ill himself resulting in a bizarre game of musical hospital beds.  Eventually Churchill suffered a massive stroke in 1953 but staggered on till 1955 by concealing this from the public and hiding out at Chartwell.  Eden eventually took over in 1957 but his government was soon sunk by the Suez crisis and his own ill heath leaving Harold MacMillan to take over.

Harold MacMillan managed to turn the economy around largely by eschewing the recommendation of many for a diet of austerity economics and won a landslide full term in 1959 under the slogan "Life's Better Under the Conservatives".  However he didn't serve a full term due to his ailing health, a declining economy and the Profumo scandal, controversially handing over the Alec Douglas-Home from his hospital bed. 

Hereditary peer Alec then had to resign from the Lords and do an Andy Burnham within two weeks to get into the Commons.  He lasted just under a year before being defeated at the 1963 General Election by Harold Wilson.

Wilson won the 1964 election with a majority of 4 and had to call another in 1966.  This time he got a majority of 96 which lasted him a full term until 1970. 

Unexpected and in defiance of opinion Edward Heath won the 1970 election with a majority government but didn't serve a full term due to the Miners Strike / Three Day Week economic crisis which he decided to conclude by calling a General Election on the question of "Who Governs Britain?"

The answer from the country in April 1974 was dunno.  Heath faces with a hung Parliament tried to do a deal with the Liberals but couldn't get it over the line.  Wilson went into coalition with them instead but has to call another generation election in October which returned a Labour government with a majority of three.  Wilson resigned in 1976 unable to cope with the stress, drinking a lot of Brandy during the day and suffering from early Alzheimer's disease symptoms.  By this time Labour was a minority government and Jim Callaghan struggled through several pacts with smaller parties, IMF loans and economic disasters until eventually losing the resultant General Election to Margaret Thatcher in 1979.

Margaret Thatcher was the first Prime Minister to serve more than one full term as a Majority Government leader since 1900.  Her first government had a majority of 43.  Mrs Thatcher's job approval rating fell to 23% by December 1980 resulting in her famous "The Lady's not for Turning" speech. But the economy turned round and 1983 she increased her majority to 144 as the Labour party slid into factional infighting over the Union Block Vote, Nuclear Disarmament and other issues.  This was the peak of Margret Thatcher's popularity.  In 1987 Neil Kinnock started to turn the tide, reducing her majority to 102.  The Lawson inflationary boom bubble burst and Mrs Thatcher tried to introduce her disastrous Poll Tax policy.  After an infamous riot and splits over European foreign policy she was ousted by her backbenchers and replaced with the grey man that was John Major in 1990.

By traversing the country on a soap box John Major was able to win the 1992 general election with a majority of 21.  However this melted away with by-election losses and a plot was launched to oust him by his backbenchers which he defeated.  The Major government staggered on to the last possible moment in 1997 reliant on supply and demand agreements for it's last few months.

Tony Blair's 1997 government had a majority of a 179 and had a not very radical economic programme of "prudence with a purpose" as the country tried to recover from the fallout of the Conservatives joining and then crashing out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism on Black Wednesday.  The 2001 election produced a slightly reduced majority of 166.  Following the start of the disastrous illegal Iraq war in 2003 however the next election in 2005 resulted in a reduction of the Labour Majority to 66.  Gordon Brown then ousted Tony Blair in 2007 and following the 2008 financial crash Labour lost power in 2010.

David Cameron then ran a coalition government with Nick Clegg until 2015.  Although David Cameron won an outright majority of 4 in 2015 it was by promising a Referendum on the EU which he lost.  He was replaced afterwards by Theresa May who despite leading a technical majority government couldn't implement her vision for Brexit so called another election in 2017 which left her with a minority government.  She was ousted by Boris Johnson who was forced to call another election in 2019 which won the Tories a majority of 35 to "get Brexit done".  Boris was ouster in 2022 over the partygate scandal with his replacement Liz Truss lasting only 50 days before having to resign due to her "mini budget".  Her replacement Rishi Sunak called a General Election in May 2024 rather than carry on to the bitter end.  He was replaced by Keir Starmer's Labour Government which had a majority at the start of 174 before...

Anyway the point is that very few Prime Ministers serve a whole term in office, let alone two.  There are only two who served two full sequential terms.  They are Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.  They are in the pattern of the last 126 years statistical outliers.  If you look at the financial statistics they both represent periods of unexpected financial prosperity which Britain was doing so well it could actually runs a small surplus rather than a deficit.  Thatcher and Blair also came to power younger and didn't have the age related health issues of some earlier Prime Ministers.  This is not the UK becoming ungovernable.  It is just the UK returning to normal...