At that time in Manchester, Arthur Balfour was a Conservative MP representing the district, as well as Prime Minister, and the two met during one of Balfour's electoral campaigns.

Balfour had been becoming increasingly unpopular as Leader of the Conservative Party since the 1906 general election ; tariff reformers saw his leadership as the reason for their electoral losses, and the " free fooders " had been alienated by Balfour's attempts to tame the zeal of the tariff reform faction.

In the 1900 general election, Hamilton stood successfully as Unionist candidate for Londonderry City, and three years later he became Treasurer of the Household, a post he held until the fall of Balfour's Conservative administration in 1905.

Cecil was a younger son of Balfour's predecessor as Conservative Leader, the Marquess of Salisbury.

He also claimed Balfour's Conservative Party would abolish the old pension.

A notable achievement of Balfour's government was the establishment of the Committee on Imperial Defence.

By 1905 relatively few Unionist MPs were still free traders ( the young Winston Churchill crossed over to the Liberals in 1904 when threatened with deselection at Oldham ), but Balfour's long balancing act had drained his authority within the government.

An early attempt to score a debating triumph over the government, made in Balfour's usual abstruse, theoretical style, saw Campbell-Bannerman respond with: " Enough of this foolery ," to the delight of his supporters in the House.

Arthur Balfour's refusal to recommend an earldom for Curzon in 1905 was repeated by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, the Liberal Prime Minister, who formed his government the day after Curzon returned to England.

This ultimately resulted in a damaging rift within Balfour's Conservative-Unionist coalition government, contributing to its defeat in the 1906 elections.

In Lord Salisbury's later ministries, as member for Croydon ( 1895 – 1906 ), he was President of the Board of Trade ( 1895 – 1900 ) and Home Secretary ( 1900 – 1902 ); and when Sir Michael Hicks-Beach retired in 1902, he became Chancellor of the Exchequer in Balfour's cabinet.

As Mr Balfour's boat was about to set sail, he promised her £ 30 a month until she came back to Ceylon.

The sunken parterre garden design, with its convincingly Jacobean central fountain, designed by Robert Shekelton Balfour ( 1869 – 1942 ), is of 1894 ; Balfour's dated design is conserved in the library of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

Under Balfour's care the Royal Botanic Garden was enlarged and improved and a palm-house, arboretum, and teaching accommodation were built.

Chamberlain himself was less concerned, assuring Balfour's Private Secretary in February 1902 that ' I have my own work to do and ... I shall be quite willing to serve under Balfour.

Publicly, Chamberlain claimed that Balfour's stance was the precursor to a fuller policy of Imperial Preference.

After the Unionists had failed to win an electoral mandate at either of the General Elections of 1910 ( despite softening the Tariff Reform policy with Balfour's promise of a referendum on food taxes ), the Unionist peers split to allow the Parliament Act to pass the House of Lords, in order to prevent a mass-creation of new Liberal peers by the new King, George V. The exhausted Balfour resigned as party leader after the crisis, and was succeeded in late 1911 by Andrew Bonar Law.

Balfour's service as Foreign Secretary was most notable for the issuance of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, a letter to Lord Rothschild promising the Jews a " national home " in Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire.

Balfour's reputation was now such that other universities became anxious to secure his services, and he was invited to succeed Professor George Rolleston at Oxford and Sir Wyville Thomson at Edinburgh.

He was the greatest lawyer of his day, and part-author at least of Balfour's Practicks, the earliest text-book of Scottish law, not published, however, till 1754.

Of Balfour's appointment to Asquith's cabinet in 1916, Lord Rosebery, who had been Prime Minister in 1894 – 95, said that having an ex-premier in the cabinet was " a fleeting and dangerous luxury ".

One of these children was H. O. Arnold-Forster, a Liberal Unionist member of parliament, who eventually became a member of Balfour's cabinet.

One of these children was Hugh Oakeley Arnold-Forster, a Liberal Unionist member of parliament, who eventually became a member of Balfour's cabinet.

Austen's appointment was largely a compromise solution to the bitter division of the two Unionist heavyweights, which threatened to split the coalition between supporters of Chamberlain's Imperial Tariff campaign and Balfour's more cautious advocacy of protectionism.

In this role, he was instrumental in the Unionist leader Arthur Balfour's plans to obstruct Liberal policies through the Unionist majority in the upper house.

When, in 2007, the Glenelg Tramline was extended from Victoria Square along King William Street and North Terrace past the Adelaide Railway Station, the Balfour's pie-cart was forced to close.

In 1903 he entered Balfour's cabinet as President of the Board of Agriculture and was sworn of the Privy Council the same year.

By the end of the decade she was considered to be one of Britain's leading screen actresses along with Balfour, and was described by critics as Balfour's only serious rival.

" It's Raining Men " is a song written by Paul Jabara and Paul Shaffer in 1979 originally for Dave Balfour's album Stars ( it was eventually discarded ), and originally recorded by The Weather Girls in 1982.

From 1895 to 1902 he was a member of Lord Salisbury's and Arthur Balfour's Unionist ministries as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.

Chamberlain ignored this and intensified his campaign in November 1905, resulting directly in Balfour's resignation on 4 December.

Balfour's skill for steady administration did much to dispel his reputation as a political lightweight.

With Balfour's agreement, Chamberlain resigned from the Cabinet in late 1903 to stump the country in favour of Tariff Reform.

At the same time, Balfour tried to balance the two factions by accepting the resignation of three free-trading ministers, including Chancellor Ritchie, but the almost simultaneous resignation of the free-trader Duke of Devonshire ( who as Lord Hartington had been the Liberal Unionist leader of the 1880s ) left Balfour's Cabinet looking weak.

Numerous pieces of legislation were vetoed or altered by amendments between 1906 and 1909, leading David Lloyd George to remark that the Lords had become " not the watchdog of the Constitution, but Mr. Balfour's poodle.

Begbie wrote as one who disagreed strongly with Balfour's political views, but even his one-sided criticisms do not entirely conceal another facet of Balfour's personality, his shyness and diffidence.

A course of lectures on embryology, delivered by Sir Michael Foster in 1871, turned Balfour's attention to animal morphology.

Some of Balfour's men charged so far into the Royalist position that they menaced the princes ' escort and briefly overran the Royalist artillery before withdrawing.

After the fall of the Conservative government to Labour in 1997, she served as Shadow Health Secretary between 1998 and 1999 and later as Shadow Home Secretary between 1999 and 2001 under William Hague.

" If the remainder of the Conservative Party could muster the electoral support necessary to form a government, then Disraeli was now guaranteed high office.

Lord Palmerston's government collapsed in 1858 amid public fallout over the Orsini affair and Derby took office at the head of a purely ' Conservative ' administration.

This act was unpopular with the right wing of the Conservative Party, most notably Lord Cranborne ( later the Marquess of Salisbury ), who resigned from the government and spoke against the bill, accusing Disraeli of " a political betrayal which has no parallel in our Parliamentary annals.

While they had yet to become electable as a government, they underlined their growing reputation as a worthwhile alternative to Labour and Conservative, offering plenty of debate in parliament and not just representing a protest vote.

After a brief Conservative interlude ( during which the Second Reform Act was passed by agreement between the parties ), Gladstone won a huge victory at the 1868 election and formed the first Liberal government.

Lloyd George still claimed to be leading a Liberal government, but he was increasingly under the influence of the rejuvenated Conservative party.

Lloyd George offered a degree of support to the Labour government in the hope of winning concessions, including a degree of electoral reform to introduce the alternative vote, but this support was to prove bitterly divisive as the Liberals increasingly divided between those seeking to gain what Liberal goals they could achieve, those who preferred a Conservative government to a Labour one and vice-versa.

Grimond also sought an intellectual revival of the party, seeking to position it as a non-socialist radical alternative to the Conservative government of the day.

In the February 1974 general election the Conservative government of Edward Heath won a plurality of votes cast, but the Labour Party gained a plurality of seats due to the Ulster Unionist MPs refusing to support the Conservatives after the Northern Ireland Sunningdale Agreement.

In the 2010 General Election, the Conservative Party won more seats than any other, but not enough to form a majority government.

A number of political scandals in the 1980s and 1990s created the impression of what was described in the British press as " sleaze ": a perception that the then Conservative government was associated with political corruption and hypocrisy.

British Steel was privatised in 1988 by the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher.

The Thatcher Conservative government declined to introduce amending legislation to make good the defect in the ' two year rule '.

Devlin punched Reginald Maudling, the Secretary of State for the Home Department in the Conservative government, when he made a statement to Parliament on the events of Bloody Sunday stating that the British Army had fired only in self-defence.

He was also the first person to hold the office of Deputy Prime Minister, under Winston Churchill in the wartime coalition government, before leading the Labour Party to a landslide election victory over Churchill's Conservative Party in 1945.

Attlee's government faced constant hostility from Conservative sections of society, including the Conservative press.

This was largely blamed on post-war austerity denting Labour's appeal to wealthier voters who felt they would be more prosperous under a Conservative government.

Bolívar's supporters, who later formed the nucleus of the Conservative Party, sought strong centralized government, alliance with the Roman Catholic Church, and a limited franchise.

A military coup in 1953 toppled the right-wing government of Conservative Laureano Gómez and brought General Gustavo Rojas to power.

The United Kingdom also operates a formal coalition cabinet between the Conservative and the Liberal Democrat parties, but this is unusual because the UK normally has a majority government.

During the 2008 Canadian parliamentary dispute, two of Canada's opposition parties signed an agreement to form what would become the country's second coalition government since Confederation if the minority Conservative government was defeated on a vote of non-confidence ; unseating Stephen Harper as Prime Minister.