1959 UK Election Map: Three Terms In… And The Tories INCREASE Their Majority

The map above shows the results of the 1959 UK General Election. The number of seats won out of 630 by the major parties (and % vote share) were as follows:

Conservatives: 365. Leader and Prime Minister: Harold MacMillan
Labour: 258. Leader: Hugh Gaitskell
Liberal: 6. Leader: Jo Grimond

Notable things about the 1959 election include:

• This is the only time in history a party in its third term in government has managed to increase the number of seats it has.
• Even more amazingly, this came on the heels of the Suez Crisis, which is widely considered Britain’s biggest foreign policy disaster since the Second World War.
• This was the first election where Labour began a domination of Scotland that would last until the 2014 independence referendum.
• This was the first election night to be covered not just by the BBC, but also ITV.
• Margaret Thatcher was elected for the first time in Finchley. She would go on to play a rather interesting role in the years to come…

Other Elections:

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