1997 United Kingdom general election in the context of "Landslide victory"

Theresa Mary May, Baroness May of Maidenhead (/təˈriːzə/; née Brasier; born 1 October 1956), is a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Conservative Party from 2016 to 2019. She previously served as Home Secretary from 2010 to 2016. She was Member of Parliament (MP) for Maidenhead from 1997 to 2024, and has been a member of the House of Lords since August 2024. May was the second female British prime minister, after Margaret Thatcher, and the first woman to have held two of the Great Offices of State. May is a one-nation conservative.

May grew up in Oxfordshire and attended St Hugh's College, Oxford. After graduating in 1977, she worked at the Bank of England and the Association for Payment Clearing Services. She also served as a councillor on Merton London Borough Council. After two unsuccessful attempts to be elected to the House of Commons, she was elected MP for Maidenhead at the 1997 general election. From 1999 to 2010, May held several roles in shadow cabinets and was Chairman of the Conservative Party from 2002 to 2003. Following the formation of the coalition government after the 2010 general election, May was appointed home secretary and minister for women and equalities, giving up the latter role in 2012. Reappointed after the Conservatives won the 2015 general election, she became the longest-serving home secretary in more than 60 years. During her tenure as home secretary, she pursued reform of the Police Federation, implemented a harder line on drugs policy and further restricted immigration. She oversaw the introduction of elected police and crime commissioners, the deportation of Abu Qatada and the creation of the College of Policing and the National Crime Agency. Although she supported the Remain campaign, May supported Brexit following the outcome of the 2016 referendum. She was elected and appointed prime minister unopposed, succeeding David Cameron.

Kenneth Robert Livingstone (born 17 June 1945) is an English politician who served as the Leader of the Greater London Council (GLC) from 1981 until the council was abolished in 1986, and as the first mayor of London from the creation of the office in 2000 until 2008. He also served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Brent East from 1987 to 2001. He is a former member of the Labour Party, ideologically identifying as a socialist.

Born in Lambeth, South London, to a working-class family, Livingstone joined Labour in 1968 and was elected to represent Norwood at the GLC in 1973, Hackney North and Stoke Newington in 1977, and Paddington in 1981. That year, Labour representatives on the GLC elected him as the council's leader. Attempting to reduce London Underground fares, his plans were challenged in court and declared unlawful; more successful were his schemes to benefit women and several minority groups, despite stiff opposition. The mainstream press gave him the moniker "Red Ken" in reference to his socialist beliefs and criticised him for supporting republicanism, LGBT rights, and a United Ireland. Livingstone was a vocal opponent of the Conservative Party government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, which in 1986 abolished the GLC. Elected as MP for Brent East in 1987, he became closely associated with anti-racist campaigns. He attempted to stand for the position of Labour Party leader following Neil Kinnock's resignation in 1992, but failed to get enough nominations. Livingstone became a vocal critic of Tony Blair's New Labour project that pushed the party closer to the political centre and won the 1997 general election.

Maidenhead is a constituency in Berkshire represented in the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom by Joshua Reynolds, a Liberal Democrat, since 2024. Following its creation at the 1997 general election, the seat was held for twenty-seven years by Conservative Member of Parliament Theresa May, who served as Home Secretary from 2010 to 2016 and as Prime Minister from 2016 to 2019.

Prior to the 2024 general election, it was considered a safe seat for the Conservative Party.

Sir Anthony Charles Lynton Blair (born 6 May 1953) is a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007. He was Leader of the Opposition from 1994 to 1997 and held various shadow cabinet posts from 1987 to 1994. Blair was Member of Parliament (MP) for Sedgefield from 1983 to 2007, and was special envoy of the Quartet on the Middle East from 2007 to 2015. He is the second-longest-serving prime minister in post-war British history after Margaret Thatcher, the longest-serving Labour politician to have held the office, and the first and only person to date to lead the party to three consecutive general election victories. Blair founded the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change in 2016, and currently serves as its Executive Chairman.

Blair attended the independent school Fettes College, studied law at St John's College, Oxford, and qualified as a barrister. He became involved in the Labour Party and was elected to the House of Commons in 1983 for the Sedgefield constituency in County Durham. As a backbencher, Blair supported moving the party to the political centre of British politics. He was appointed to Neil Kinnock's shadow cabinet in 1988 and was appointed shadow home secretary by John Smith in 1992. Following Smith's death in 1994, Blair won a leadership election to succeed him. As leader, Blair began a historic rebranding of the party, which became known as "New Labour". Blair became the youngest prime minister of the 20th century after his party won a landslide victory of 418 seats (the largest in its history) in the 1997 general election, bringing an end to 18 years in the opposition. It was the first victory for the Labour Party in nearly 23 years, the last one being in October 1974.

The 1906 United Kingdom general election was held from 12 January to 8 February 1906. The Liberals under Henry Campbell-Bannerman won a landslide victory against a bewildered Conservative Party, in which its leader, Arthur Balfour, lost his seat; the party won the lowest number of seats it ever had in its history, a nadir unsurpassed until 2024. This particular landslide is now ranked alongside the 1924, 1931, 1945, 1983, 1997, 2001, and 2024 general elections as one of the largest landslide election victories.

The Labour Representation Committee was far more successful than at the 1900 general election and after the election would be renamed the Labour Party with 29 MPs and Keir Hardie as leader. The Irish Parliamentary Party, led by John Redmond, achieved its seats with a relatively low number of votes, as 73 candidates stood unopposed. This election was a landslide defeat for the Conservative Party and their Liberal Unionist allies, with the primary reason given by historians being the party's weakness after its split over the issue of free trade (Joseph Chamberlain had resigned from government in September 1903 in order to campaign for Tariff Reform, which would allow "preferential tariffs"). Many working-class people at the time saw this as a threat to the price of food, hence the debate was nicknamed "Big Loaf, Little Loaf". The Liberals' landslide victory of 125 seats over all other parties led to the passing of social legislation known as the Liberal reforms.

The 2001 United Kingdom general election was held on Thursday 7 June 2001, four years after the previous election on 1 May 1997, to elect 659 members to the House of Commons. The governing Labour Party led by Prime Minister Tony Blair was re-elected to serve a second term in government with another landslide victory with a 166-seat majority, returning 412 members of Parliament versus 418 from the previous election, a net loss of six seats, although with a significantly lower turnout than before—59.4%, compared to 71.6% at the previous election.

The reform of the House of Lords, the upper house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, has been a topic of discussion in UK politics for more than a century. Multiple governments have attempted reform, beginning with the introduction of the Parliament Act 1911 by the incumbent Liberal Government. When the Labour Party came to power in the 1997 general election, the Blair government passed the House of Lords Act 1999. On 7 November 2001 the government undertook a public consultation. This helped to create a public debate on the issue of Lords reform, with 1,101 consultation responses and multiple debates in Parliament and the media. However, no consensus on the future of the upper chamber emerged.

All three of the main parties promised to take action on Lords reform in the 2010 general election, and following it the Coalition Agreement included a promise to "establish a committee to bring forward proposals for a wholly or mainly elected upper chamber on the basis of proportional representation". Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg introduced the House of Lords Reform Bill 2012 on 27 June 2012 which built on proposals published on 17 May 2011. However, this Bill was abandoned by the Government on 6 August 2012 following opposition from within the Conservative Party. A successful attempt to pursue minor reform of the House was made on 14 May 2014 when the House of Lords Reform Act 2014 gained Royal Assent.

The 2019 United Kingdom general election was held on Thursday 12 December 2019, with 47,074,800 registered voters entitled to vote to elect 650 Members of Parliament (MPs) to the House of Commons. The governing Conservative Party, led by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, won a landslide victory with a majority of 80 seats, a net gain of 48, on 43.6 per cent of the popular vote, the highest percentage for any party since the 1979 general election, though with a narrower popular vote margin than that achieved by the Labour Party over the Conservatives at the 1997 general election. This was the second national election to be held in 2019 in the United Kingdom, the first being the 2019 European Parliament election.

After it lost its parliamentary majority at the 2017 general election, the Conservative Party governed in minority with the support of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). The prime minister, Theresa May, resigned in July 2019 after repeatedly failing to pass her Brexit withdrawal agreement in parliament. Johnson succeeded her as the leader of the Conservative Party and as prime minister in July 2019. Johnson could not persuade Parliament to approve a revised withdrawal agreement by the end of October, and chose to call a snap election, which the House of Commons supported under the Early Parliamentary General Election Act 2019. Opinion polls showed a firm lead for the Conservatives against the opposition Labour Party throughout the campaign.

James Gordon Brown (born 20 February 1951) is a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Labour Party from 2007 to 2010. Previously, he was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1997 to 2007 under Tony Blair. Brown was Member of Parliament (MP) for Dunfermline East from 1983 to 2005 and for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath from 2005 to 2015. He has served as United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education since 2012, and he was appointed as World Health Organization Ambassador for Global Health Financing in 2021.

A doctoral graduate, Brown studied history at the University of Edinburgh. He spent his early career as a lecturer at a further education college and as a television journalist. Brown was elected to the House of Commons at the 1983 general election as the MP for Dunfermline East. He was appointed to Neil Kinnock's shadow cabinet in 1989 and was named Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer by John Smith in 1992. Following Labour's victory in the 1997 general election, Brown was appointed as chancellor, becoming the longest-serving in modern history. Brown's time as chancellor was marked by major reform of Britain's monetary and fiscal policy architecture, transferring interest rate setting to the Bank of England, extending the powers of the Treasury to cover much domestic policy, and transferring banking supervision to the Financial Services Authority. Brown presided over the longest period of economic growth in British history. He outlined five economic tests, which resisted the UK adopting the euro. Controversial moves included the abolition of advance corporation tax (ACT) relief in his first budget, the sale of UK gold reserves from 1999 to 2002, and the removal in his final budget of the 10% starting rate of income tax that he had introduced in the 1999 budget.