List of Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom

The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is the head of Government of the United Kingdom and chairs Cabinet meetings. There is no specific date when the office of Prime Minister first appeared, as the role was not created but evolved over a period of time. The term was used in the House of Commons in 1805, it was certainly in Parliamentary use by the 1880s, and in 1905 the post of Prime Minister was officially given recognition in the order of precedence. Modern historians generally consider Sir Robert Walpole, who led the government of Great Britain for twenty-one years from 1721 to 1742, to be the first Prime Minister; he is also the longest serving Prime Minister of the country.

Due to the gradual evolution of the post of Prime Minister, the title is applied to early Prime Ministers only retrospectively; this has sometimes given rise to academic dispute. William Pulteney, 1st Earl of Bath and James Waldegrave, 2nd Earl Waldegrave are both sometimes listed as Prime Ministers. Bath was invited to form a ministry following the resignation of Henry Pelham in 1746, as was Waldegrave in 1757 following the dismissal of William Pitt the Elder (the dominant figure of the first Devonshire Ministry). Neither was able to command sufficient Parliamentary support to form a government; Bath stepped down after two days, and Waldegrave after four. Modern academic consensus does not consider either man to have held the office of Prime Minister, and they are not listed.

Prime minister

A prime minister is the most senior minister of cabinet in the executive branch of government, often in a parliamentary or semi-presidential system. In many systems, the prime minister selects and may dismiss other members of the cabinet, and allocates posts to members within the government. In most systems, the prime minister is the presiding member and chairman of the cabinet. In a minority of systems, notably in semi-presidential systems of government, a prime minister is the official who is appointed to manage the civil service and execute the directives of the head of state.

In parliamentary systems fashioned after the Westminster system, the prime minister is the presiding and actual head of government and head of the executive branch. In such systems, the head of state or the head of state's official representative (i.e. the monarch, president, or governor-general) usually holds a largely ceremonial position, although often with reserve powers.

The prime minister is often, but not always, a member of parliament and is expected with other ministers to ensure the passage of bills through the legislature. In some monarchies the monarch may also exercise executive powers (known as the royal prerogative) that are constitutionally vested in the crown and may be exercised without the approval of parliament.

Tony Blair

Anthony Charles Lynton Blair (born 6 May 1953) is a British Labour Party politician, who served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2007. He now runs a consultancy business and performs charitable work. Blair was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Sedgefield from 1983 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007. Blair led Labour to a landslide victory in the 1997 general election, winning 418 seats, the most the party has ever held. The party went on to win two more elections under his leadership: in 2001, in which it won another landslide victory, and in 2005, with a reduced majority.

Blair was elected Labour Party leader in the leadership election of July 1994, following the sudden death of his predecessor, John Smith. Under Blair's leadership, the party used the phrase "New Labour" to distance it from previous Labour policies and its opposition to the traditional conception of socialism. Blair declared support for a new conception that he referred to as "social-ism", involving politics that recognised individuals as socially interdependent, and advocated social justice, cohesion, equal worth of each citizen, and equal opportunity. Critics of Blair denounced him for having the Labour Party abandon genuine socialism and accepting capitalism. Supporters, including the party's public opinion pollster Philip Gould, stated that after four consecutive general election defeats, Labour had to demonstrate that it had made a decisive break from its left-wing past, in order to win again.