2007 United Kingdom general election (The More Things Change)

The 2007 United Kingdom general election was held on Thursday, 25 October 2007, with 45,597,461 registered voters entitled to vote to elect members to the House of Commons. The election took place in 650 constituencies across the United Kingdom under the first-past-the-post system. None of the parties achieved the 326 seats needed for an overall majority. The Conservative Party, led by David Cameron, won the largest number of votes and seats, but still fell 22 seats short. This resulted in a hung parliament where no party was able to command a majority in the House of Commons. This was only the second general election since the Second World War to return a hung parliament, the first being the February 1974 election, however unlike then the potential for such an outcome had been anticipated, and subsequently the politicians and the country as a whole was much better prepared for the constitutional process that would follow such a result. The coalition government that was subsequently formed was the first coalition in British history to eventuate directly from an election outcome. The hung parliament came about in spite of the Conservatives managing both a higher vote total and higher share of the vote than the previous Labour government had done in 2005, when it secured a comfortable majority.

Coalition talks began immediately between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, and lasted for eight days. There was an aborted attempt to put together a Labour/Liberal Democrat coalition (although other smaller parties would have been required to make up the 21 seats they lacked for a majority). To facilitate this, Gordon Brown announced on the evening of Monday 29 October that he would resign as Leader of the Labour Party. Realising that a deal between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats was imminent, on Friday 2 November Brown announced his resignation as Prime Minister, marking the end of 10 years of Labour government