Despite gaining 9 seats the Tories lost 8 behind them to the Liberals Democrats and one even to Labour.

Plaid Cymru gained and lost a seat to Labour respectively.

Following success as the successor to the Whig party, the party's share of the popular vote plummeted after the First World War as it lost votes to the new Labour party and fractured into groups such as the National and Coalition Liberals.

At the 1945 general election, Sinclair and many of his colleagues lost their seats to both Conservatives and Labour, and the party returned just 12 MPs to Westminster.

In 1957 this total fell to five when one of the Liberal MPs died and the subsequent by-election was lost to the Labour Party, which selected the former Liberal Deputy Leader Lady Megan Lloyd George as its own candidate.

At the time of the SDP's creation, Owen and Rodgers were sitting Labour Members of Parliament ( MPs ); Jenkins had left Parliament in 1977 to serve as President of the European Commission, while Williams had lost her seat in the 1979 general election.

The election was a disaster for the Labour Party, which lost over 200 seats.

Labour lost the general election of 1951 to Churchill's renewed Conservatives, despite polling more votes than in the 1945 election and more votes nationwide than the Conservative party.

( Ernest Bevin had died shortly before Labour lost office.

Apart from this, when no party has had a majority, minority governments normally have been formed with one or more opposition parties agreeing to vote for the legislation governments need to function, as the Labour government of James Callaghan formed a coalition with the Liberals in 1977 when it lost its narrow majority gained at the October 1974 election.

Towards the end of the essay, he wrote: " I do not mean I have lost all faith in the Labour Party.

By this time the " New " Labour Party was seen as a reformed and fresh alternative under the leadership of Tony Blair, and after eighteen years in office the Conservatives lost the 1997 general election in one of the worst electoral defeats since the Great Reform Act of 1832.

Few then were surprised when Major's Conservatives lost the 1 May 1997 general election to Tony Blair's " New Labour ", although the immense scale of the defeat was not as widely predicted: in 1987 and 1992 the Conservatives had polled better than had been suggested by the opinion polls, but in 1997 this was no longer the case.

Such speculation increased after Labour lost the 1983 Bermondsey by-election, in which Peter Tatchell was its candidate, standing against a Tory, a Liberal ( eventual winner Simon Hughes ) and the right wing John O ' Grady, who had declared himself the " real " Labour candidate and fought an openly homophobic campaign against Tatchell.

Foot's Labour Party lost to the Conservatives in a landslide – a result which had been widely predicted by the opinion polls since the previous summer.

Foot took a back seat in Labour politics after 1983 and retired from the House of Commons at the 1992 general election, when Labour lost to the Tories ( now led by John Major ) for the fourth election in succession, but remained politically active.

In early 1987, Labour lost a by-election in Greenwich to the Social Democratic Party's Rosie Barnes.

Labour won extra seats in Scotland, Wales and Northern England, but lost ground particularly in Southern England and London, where the Tories still dominated.

After Labour unexpectedly lost power in 1970 Jenkins was appointed Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer by Harold Wilson.

He lost his seat to Joe Hendron of the Social Democratic and Labour Party ( SDLP ) in the 1992 general election, regaining it at the following 1997 election.

However, Powell lost his seat in the election by 731 votes to the Social Democratic and Labour Party's Eddie McGrady, mainly due to demographic and boundary changes that resulted in there being many more Irish Nationalists in the constituency than before.

Labour lost 40 seats, but held on to 151.

After the Labour Party lost the general election later that year, he was made chairman of Bevan's ' Keep Left ' group, but shortly thereafter he distanced himself from Bevan.

Since the 1951 general election, the party system has been dominated by the personalist Antigua Labour Party ( ALP ), dominated by the Bird family, particularly Prime Ministers Vere and Lester Bird.

In the British general election the following year, Michael Howard promised to work towards having the prohibition removed if the Conservative Party gained a majority of seats in the House of Commons, but the election was won by Blair's Labour Party.

In the 1920s, the Labour Party permanently replaced the Liberals as the largest opponent of the Conservative Party in British politics, and the Liberals went into decline, which culminated in their winning as few as 6 seats at general elections during the 1950s.

In the 1918 general election Lloyd George, " the Man Who Won the War ", led his coalition into another khaki election, and won a sweeping victory over the Asquithian Liberals and the newly emerging Labour Party.

The party gained ground in the 1923 general election but ominously made most of its gains from Conservatives whilst losing ground to Labour – a sign of the party's direction for many years to come.

Share of the vote received by Conservatives ( blue ), Whigs / Liberals / Liberal Democrats ( orange ), Labour ( red ) and others ( grey ) in general elections since 1832.

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 October 1974 general election the Liberals slipped back slightly and the Labour government won a wafer-thin majority.

However, they were later overtaken in the polls by the Conservatives and at the 1983 general election the Conservatives triumphed by a landslide, with Labour once again forming the opposition, while the SDP-Liberal Alliance came close to Labour in terms of votes ( a share of more than 25 %) although it only had 23 MPs compared to Labour's 209.

On 6 May 1997, following the 1997 general election which brought a Labour government to power for the first time since 1979, it was announced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, that the Bank of England would be granted operational independence over monetary policy.

* In March 2006 it emerged that the Labour party had borrowed millions of pounds in 2005 to help fund their general election campaign.

With a general election looming, the Parliamentary Labour Party then appointed Attlee as interim leader, on the understanding that a leadership election would be held after the general election.

Attlee led Labour through the 1935 general election, which saw the party stage a partial recovery from its disastrous performance in 1931.

The success of the Attlee Government's welfare legislation in reducing poverty was such that, in the general election of 1950, according to Kevin Jefferys, " Labour propaganda could make much of the claim that social security had eradicated the most abject destitution of the 1930s ".

Following the general election of 1950, the Labour party experienced a greatly reduced parliamentary majority, a mere five seats compared to the triple-digit majority of five years previous, despite an increase in the popular vote ( possible because of the first-past-the-post voting system ).

However, in the run-up to the 1997 general election, Labour opposition Tony Blair was in talks with Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown about forming a coalition government if Labour failed to win a majority at the election ; however there was never any need for a coalition to be formed as Labour won the election by a landslide.

The 2010 general election resulted in a hung parliament ( Britain's first for 36 years ), following which the Conservatives ( led by David Cameron ), which had won the largest number of seats, formed a coalition with the Liberal Democrats in order to gain a parliamentary majority, ending 13 years of Labour government.

He first entered the House of Commons in the general election of 1966, as the Labour MP for Aberdeen South, at the age of 28.