1979-1990: Margaret Thatcher (Conservative)
Birmingham Northfield By-election 1982
Tony Blair (Labour): 36.4%
Roger Gale (Conservative): 35.5%
Stephen Ridley (Liberal): 26.1%
Ian Anderson (National Front): 0.9%
Peter Sheppard (Communist): 0.8%
Ronald Taylor (People's Progressive Party): 0.2%
Bill Boaks (Democratic Monarchist, Public Safety, White Resident): 0.1%
1990-1992: Nigel Lawson (Conservative) Coalition with James Molyneaux (UUP)
Tony Blair was elected as leader of the Labour Party in a contest against Bryan Gould, with support from John Smith, who would go on to be his first Chancellor. Labour began to reform, but the major changes were the recession, sleeze, Maastricht and the IRA making the Conservatives suddenly very unpopular.
1992-1997: Tony Blair (Labour) Coalition with Paddy Ashdown (Liberal) and David Owen (SDP)
With David Owen as Foreign Secretary and Paddy Ashdown in the Home Office, Blair's first government was often criticised for having given up too much to the Alliance. Beyond this, Blair's early time in office is synonymous with Cool Britannia - The Millennium Dome was began in Hull and would run simultaneously with successful Olympic bid in Manchester. Section 28 was repealed. STV was adopted for EU elections and later for the Scottish Assembly. The Spice Girls and Cool Britannia was omnipresent and Britain even won Eurovision in 1996.
Meanwhile there were problems - The Alliance collapsed over Europe and other divisions, peace talks in Northern Ireland stalled, the Welsh devolution referendum failed and took Blair's ambitious plans for constitutional reform with it. The Spice Girls movie was not very good.
1997-2001: Michael Portillo (Conservative)
Labour came out of the 1997 election in the odd position of having increased their vote share and seat numbers, as the Alliance went from 41 seats down to six Liberal and three SDP. However, the Conservatives mustered a small and unhappy majority. 1997 was a good election to lose and no leader would have done well with it. The dot-com bubble burst, Victoria Adams left the Spice Girls, the 2001 Foot and Mouth outbreak ruined livelihoods, Princess Diana died, the early days of rail privatisation were terrible, the process of putting together the Millennium Festival and Games was excruciating and expensive.
There were good things too - the Millennium Festival and Olympics were a major success, ruined only by the fact that Portillo had spent most of the last three years blaming Blair for them. Even so, the year of good feelings gave him enough of a boost to consider an early election.
2001-2006: Tony Blair (Labour)
Blair was re-elected on a wave of Millennial optimism but then, in June 2001, everything changed when terrorists attacked the World Trade Centre. Blair put Britain on the front lines in Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003) and Iran (2006) and many of his legislative decisions; from the establishment of a Ministry of Homeland Security to new policing powers to introducing ID cards were done in the service of that.
Some decisions were less clearly motivated by the war - Lords Reform went through. 66.6% of Lords would be elected, annually and for ten year terms. The elections would be based on an electoral college of one third general election results, one third popular vote, and one third MPs. It was widely considered to be a terrible system but it passed.
This was the era when Cool Britannia got its second wind. Victoria Adams' new album
Vicky Adams made it to number one worldwide and had a big Union Jack on the cover, British TV shows like The Office and Little Britain were popular - Graham Linehan made it in Hollywood. It was a more cynical and less PC age, reflected by a more cynical and less PC Blair.
2006-2009: Iain Duncan Smith (Conservative) Coalition with Richard Kilroy-Silk (SDP) and Iain Paisley (DUP)
Labour's majority vanished in 2006 - the votes actually went to RESPECT and the Greens - RESPECT managed three seats, with Salma Yaqoob taking one in Birmingham, Tony Blairs own back yard. The Greens only had one victory, in Cambridge. The Liberals under Charles Kennedy surged on an anti-war platform. However, the primary beneficiary were the Tories, Labour was divided on the correct response - David Miliband was the early front runner but as the tides of war started to turn against the Coalition in Iraq pro-peace candidate Jeremy Corbyn took the upper hand.
In a term where foreign policy dominated, the government also offered an in-out referendum on EU membership, which was technically also a ratification vote on the Treaty of Lisbon. A shambolic campaign for remain won just 42% of the vote and saw deep divisions appear between the Liberal anti-war centre and the populist left. Despite a clear majority, actually leaving the EU proved hard to accomplish on a majority of two.
Iain Duncan Smith responded with surprising bellicosity, threatening suspensions and an early election if parliament refused to ratify his exit deal in a time when the world economy was in chaos. 32 of his own MPs crossed the floor, and while nobody wanted an election, nobody wanted to supprt a government set up by any of the existing parties. This led to a surprising proposal.
2009-2011: Tony Blair (Independent); Coalition with Ed Miliband (Labour), David Miliband (The Independent Group), Charles Kennedy (Liberal), Naomi Long (AllianceNI), Margo MacDonald (SNP), Leanne Wood (Plaid Cymru)
The events of March 2009 were some of the most dramatic in UK political History. On the 1st, four Labour MPs including Blair resigned from the party to form the Independent Group. By the 3rd they'd formed a new party group with the Remain Conservatives. By the 8th The Independent Group had a proposal to form a government with the Liberals. The 15th saw over half the Labour Party threatening to quit the party if Corbyn refused to go into an emergency Brexit-Credit Crisis Coalition. Corbyn resigned on the 18th and on the 25th the Conservative government was overthrown. On Thursday 20th March Tony Blair once again kissed hands with the queen and entered Downing Street to the words "a new dawn has broken, has it not?"
The response was immediate and extreme. London brimmed over with pro-Exit protestors, mingling unhappily with anti-austerity protestors in a movement that created strange bedfellows and terrible results. The movements never really went away, nor were the parties involved ever really forgiven. But the government was able to pass legislation, often relying on the Conservatives to push for a strict and unyielding form of austerity. Labour left the arrangement in late 2009, the SNP and Plaid Cymru left in 2010 after Scotland obtained a parliament and Wales got an Assembly of its own. However the government survived by sheer virtue of nobody else wanting the job until a general election had to be called.
2011-2020: Boris Johnson (Conservative)
Blair was defeated in a landslide as the country went into a new, more optimistic, world. "Brexit" as it had come to be known, was completed in 2012, and in 2014 England was given its own parliament. The economy improved slowly but in Boris' first term ruthless austerity was still the name of the game - the post office was privatised, the National Identity Office privatised, councils were encouraged to sell off social housing stock, the average cost of a degree rose from £8k to £14k and college loan arrangements became more strict.
After a second landslide in 2015 the situation improved - plans for high speed rail were created and investment in hydraulic fracking and nuclear power bought more money to the country. One year degrees allowed people to qualify quickly and cheaply, in 2016 England created the institution of same sex civil partnerships and the Conservatives stole one of Labour's more popular policies. Even the Middle Eastern War seemed to be going better. In 2016 a general ceasefire saw an attempt at power sharing between coalition allies and The New Caliphate. Meanwhile, culturally, Cool Britannia saw a minor resurgence as Twee Britannia with The Great British Bake Off popular worldwide, Victoria Adams taking over Good Morning Britain and a popular film trilogy based on The Archers.
Blair stood down as MP in 2012 and was elected the the House of Lords in 2016. He was not a quiet Lord and frequently appeared in the news, but focused most of his attention on his conversion to Catholicism and his charitable foundation dedicated to working for peace globally.
Boris' third term in 2019 promised more of the same, but muted by a smaller majority. The only fly in the ointment was a resumption of hostilities in the Middle East and a series of lobbying and sex scandals that nobody really cared about. Then the pandemic happened. Boris Johnson's gradual rightward turn had bought him under the influence of what would come to be viewed as the anti-lockdown faction within the party, while the Tory's much maligned centre chafed under familiar strains. The eight week lockdown in May-July only served to annoy Boris' supporters. Letters started to fly to the 1922 Committee
2020-2022: Tony Blair (Independent); Coalition with Rory Stewart (Conservative), Andy Burnham (Labour), Kate Hoey (SDP), Nick Clegg (Liberal)
Once again, a Conservative leader was ousted by a palace coup, and with him went two dozen MPs, enough to cost the Conservatives their majority and once again they sought a leader from outside of the party. In August. With the death toll already at 100,000 and another wave on the way, a national crisis government was formed under a neutral figure. The country's social distancing regime became draconian, with full lockdowns in August-November 2020, January-April 2021, and August-September 2021. Vaccine passports were tied to the National ID Database and new police powers helped the government track down COVID breaches. Schools were closed from August 2020 to November 2021.
The heroic effort made by all parties kept a death toll that had been expected to reach 300,000 down to 150,000. But it exhausted and bankrupt the country. And notably, the anti-COVID measures were used most strongly against the wave of protests - the "Western Spring" of anti-racist, pro-LGBT, environmentalist, feminist protest that shook the western world, missed Britain almost entirely.
Culturally, that had its impact on the country. Megan Markle and Harry were forced to move to America, Graham Linehan and Morrissey channelled an increasing amount of money into the UK's burgeoning anti-LGBT scene which took inspiration from how anti-trans anti-vax anti-feminist hostility had pushed Trump into power in 2020, Julian Assange made the leap from tech journalism to
Top Gear.
By 2022, with all variants of COVID were controlled and the whole population vaccinated, Tony Blair resigned and called for new elections. The Hero of Britain, the man who had defined the country for four decades, finally retired from public life. Probably.