Category: People Key figures: Margaret Thatcher (Prime Minister, Conservative leader), Neil Kinnock (Labour leader), David Steel (Liberal leader), David Owen (SDP leader), Diane Abbott, Paul Boateng, Bernie Grant (first Black MPs elected)
On June 11, 1987, the United Kingdom held a general election in which the Conservative Party, led by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, secured a third consecutive landslide victory. The Conservatives won 376 of 650 seats with 42.2 percent of the popular vote (13.76 million votes), giving them a parliamentary majority of 102 seats. Labour, led by Neil Kinnock, won 229 seats with 30.8 percent of the vote (10.03 million votes). The SDP–Liberal Alliance, led jointly by David Steel and David Owen, won 22 seats with 22.6 percent of the vote (7.34 million votes) — a vote share disproportionately punished by the first-past-the-post electoral system.
Thatcher became the first British Prime Minister since the Earl of Liverpool (who held office from 1812 to 1827) to lead a party to three consecutive electoral victories, and the only Prime Minister in the twentieth century to achieve three consecutive terms. Britannica describes her as “the most renowned British political leader since Winston Churchill” by this point in her career.
The Conservative campaign emphasized the party’s economic record: unemployment had fallen below three million for the first time since 1981, inflation stood at four percent, and the economy had grown through several years of expansion following the deep recession of 1980–81. The party promised continued lower taxation and a robust defense policy at the height of the Cold War — the INF Treaty with the Soviet Union would be signed just six months later, in December 1987. Labour under Kinnock campaigned on unemployment, National Health Service waiting times, and proposals to reverse Thatcher’s privatization program, but the party was still recovering from the ideological battles and electoral catastrophe of 1983.
The 1987 election also produced a historic milestone in British parliamentary representation: Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington), Paul Boateng (Brent South), Bernie Grant (Tottenham), and Keith Vaz (Leicester East) became the first Black and Asian MPs elected to the House of Commons since 1929, marking a significant step in British political diversity.
Thatcher’s third term proved her most turbulent. The government introduced the Community Charge — universally known as the “poll tax” — which replaced the rates system for local government funding with a flat per-person levy regardless of income. First introduced in Scotland in 1989 and England and Wales in 1990, the poll tax triggered widespread protests and the first large-scale riots in London since the 1980s. Thatcher simultaneously adopted an increasingly hostile stance toward European integration, resisting proposals for a single European currency and deeper political union, a position that divided her Cabinet. These pressures led to the resignation of Deputy Prime Minister Geoffrey Howe in November 1990 and a leadership challenge by Michael Heseltine; Thatcher resigned on November 28, 1990, after failing to win the first ballot outright, and was succeeded as Prime Minister by John Major.
The 1987 general election victory cemented Thatcher’s place as the dominant political figure of post-war Britain. Her three consecutive terms — 1979 to 1990 — constituted the longest continuous period of single-party government in Britain since Lord Salisbury’s era, and her reshaping of British political economy — through privatization, trade union reform, and deregulation — defined the parameters of British policy debate for decades afterward. The Labour Party’s defeat in 1987 accelerated its modernization process; the slow transformation that began under Kinnock and continued under John Smith ultimately produced Tony Blair’s “New Labour” and the party’s landslide victory in 1997.
The 1987 election also illustrated a structural tension in British democracy: the Alliance’s 22.6 percent vote share yielded only 22 seats (3.4 percent of the Commons), a disparity that fueled the campaign for electoral reform that persisted into the twenty-first century. Internationally, the Conservative victory assured Western allies — particularly the Reagan administration — of continued British commitment to NATO and the Cold War alliance at a moment when superpower arms negotiations were reaching a critical juncture.