In the general election held on 30 May 1929, the Labour Party – led by Ramsay MacDonald – won the most seats in the House of Commons for the first time in its history. The contest represented a significant milestone for the Labour Party, appearing to confirm its position as the main progressive alternative to the Conservatives.

The poll was the first to be held under conditions of universal suffrage, following the passage of the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928. The landmark act lowered the voting age for women from 30 to 21, adding five million new voters to the electoral roll.

As a result, some contemporaries referred to the 1929 campaign as the “Flapper Election”.

MacDonald had previously served as prime minister, Labour’s first, from January to November 1924 in a short-lived minority administration propped up by the Liberal Party. The second MacDonald administration took office on the eve of a global economic crisis and without the political protection of a secure majority.

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The election was fought against a backdrop of high unemployment (at just over 10%) and industrial strife. The 1926 General Strike still lingered in the thoughts of voters. In these circumstances, the Conservative campaign – fought under the slogan “Safety First” – has been described as misjudged.

Stanley Baldwin, the incumbent prime minister, addressed the nation on several occasions during the General Strike. In one such broadcast, Baldwin insisted that he would not “surrender the safety and the security of the British constitution”.

He added: “Cannot you trust me to ensure a square deal and to ensure even justice between man and man?”

In this way, the Conservatives pursued a highly personalised campaign centred on Baldwin’s leadership. “You trusted me before and I ask you to trust me again”, the prime minister told voters in his final address of the election.

Labour’s platform accused Baldwin of having “provoked the industrial unrest that led to the General Strike, for which the government was mainly responsible.”

The party also made a direct “appeal to the women”, emphasising that “the burden of social injustice and economic exploitation fails with special severity on women, and that women are very seriously affected by unemployment, low wages, bad housing, and by any restriction of the necessary public expenditure on education and on the health and welfare of mothers and children.”

Contemporary reporting reasoned that the extension of the franchise would play into Labour’s hands.

In addition, MacDonald’s party sought to capitalise on its position as the principal opposition, arguing that the “Liberal Party, as its leaders admit, can be no more than a small minority in the new parliament.”

The Labour manifesto declared: “The electors who desire to save the country from the disaster of continued Tory rule must therefore vote for Labour candidates.”

The Conservatives also made a concerted effort to squeeze the Liberal vote.

Such attacks recognised the relative recovery of the Liberal Party under David Lloyd George’s leadership.

At the 1924 election, the Liberals had suffered a severe collapse from 118 seats to just 40. Notably, the 1924 campaign was H. H. Asquith’s last as Liberal leader. After losing his seat, the former prime minister – Lloyd George’s longstanding rival – accepted a peerage as 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith.

Lloyd George was described as the “most aggressive and positive” of the party leaders during the 1929 election campaign. The Liberals campaigned on a bold, Keynesian programme of public works to tackle unemployment, entitled We Can Conquer Unemployment.

This platform, based on the proposals of its Yellow Book (1928), contrasted sharply with Baldwin’s somewhat uninspiring “Safety First” slogan.

However, the extent of the Liberal revival in 1929 was considerably more limited than many of its leading figures had anticipated. The party won 59 seats and 23.6% of the vote. (It would mark the last time when a third party polled more than one-fifth of the popular vote until 1983.) Labour emerged as the largest party with 287 seats on 33.3% of the vote. The Conservatives under Baldwin secured 260 seats on 38.1%.

As such, the 1929 election resulted in a hung parliament.

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Baldwin resigned as prime minister on 4 June, and MacDonald accepted the king’s invitation to form his second minority Labour government the following day.

Margaret Bondfield was appointed minister of labour in the new administration, becoming both the first female cabinet minister and the first woman to be sworn of the privy council.

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The Liberals held the balance of power in the House of Commons, and tentatively agreed to prop up a minority Labour administration.

On 13 June, Lloyd George told a meeting of Liberal parliamentarians that the “mandate of the government would end as soon as it failed to pursue a Liberal policy.” He clarified that his party’s attitude to the government would “be influenced by the line which it took up on the question of electoral reform.”

Lloyd George, who served as prime minister from 1916 to 1922, had come to regard a more equitable distribution of seats as necessary to any broader Liberal recovery since leaving office. Reflecting in 1925, he told C.P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian: “Someone ought to have come to me in 1918 [during the passage of the Representation of the People Act] and gone into the whole matter. I was not converted then. I could have carried it then when I was prime minister. I am afraid it is too late now.”

In 1929, under the first past the post (FPTP) electoral system, it reportedly took 89,850 votes to elect a Liberal, but only 33,845 votes to elect a Conservative and 28,906 votes to elect a Labour MP.

The king’s speech on 2 July included a declaration that the MacDonald government would “institute an examination of the experiences of the election so that the working of the law relating to parliamentary elections may be brought into conformity with the new conditions.”

However, several Liberal MPs – led by former home secretary John Simon – opposed the Liberal Party’s support for the minority Labour government. (Simon subsequently resigned the Liberal whip and sat as an independent over Labour’s proposal to introduce a new land tax.)

MacDonald, meanwhile, appealed to the commons to act as a “council of state”.

In his inaugural speech of the parliament, the prime minister declared: “I wonder how far it is possible, without in any way abandoning any of our party positions, without in any way surrendering any item of our party principles, to consider ourselves more as a council of state and less as arrived regiments facing each other in battle.”

He called on MPs to put “our ideas into a common pool”, from which parliament could draw “legislation and administration that will be of substantial benefit to the nation as a whole.”

These comments have been taken as an early hint of MacDonald’s preparedness to consider cross-party schemes.

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The second MacDonald ministry moved to increase unemployment pay and respond to the conditions that precipitated the 1926 general strike. The Housing Act of 1930 obliged local councils to clear all remaining slum housing, providing further subsidies to re-house inhabitants. The move led to the building of 700,000 new homes.

The government’s survival from 1929 to 1931 – sustained by Liberal support – came at the cost of the Representation of the People (No. 2) Bill, which proposed the introduction of the alternative vote for elections to the House of Commons.

Addressing the commons at the Representation of the People (No. 2) Bill’s second reading, J.R. Clynes, the home secretary, argued that “our system has been good, but good must give way to better, and this bill, we believe, proposes a still better system along the line of advance in democratic franchise.”

Clynes said the alternative vote would “prevent the election of a candidate against the wishes of the constituency”.

Simon Hoare, speaking from the Conservative frontbench, dismissed the bill as a product of Lib-Lab machination. “In order to get his majorities in the House of Commons he must have 50 votes from below the gangway”, Hoare said, “and in order to have those 50 votes from below the gangway he must introduce a measure of electoral reform.”

Winston Churchill, a Conservative MP since 1924, mocked the alternative vote as “the worst of all possible plans”.

He declared: “It is the stupidest, the least scientific and the most unreal that the government have embodied in their bill. The decision of 100 or more constituencies, perhaps 200, is to be determined by the most worthless votes given for the most worthless candidates.”

The bill ultimately secured its third reading in the House of Commons on 2 June 1931, by 278 votes to 228.

However, MacDonald’s soon government split, fatally, over a proposed package of austerity measures. The report of the May Committee on National Expenditure, published July 1931, recommended drastic cuts to public spending, including a significant cut to unemployment benefit, to balance the budget.

With the government paralysed, unable to steer Britain through the Great Depression, MacDonald travelled to Buckingham Palace on 24 August 1931 to tender his resignation to King George V.

The usual procedure would have seen the king accept MacDonald’s resignation and send for Baldwin as leader of the opposition. But in a crucial, constitutionally innovative intervention, George V persuaded MacDonald to stay on as prime minister. He was urged to construct and lead a cross-party government in the national interest, tasked with steering the country through the financial emergency.

The new, smaller emergency cabinet announced on 25 August was composed of 10 members. It featured MacDonald and three other senior Labourites, alongside four Conservatives and two Liberals.

Herbert Samuel, acting leader of the Liberal Party at the time, became home secretary. Lloyd George was absent from the political frontline due to a serious prostate operation. But the former prime minister offered his support to the new National Government.

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The Labour Party denounced MacDonald’s effective defection as an act of betrayal. The first Labour prime minister, who first stood for the party at the 1895 election, was excoriated as a traitor and expelled by his erstwhile comrades. But the crisis also shattered the Liberal Party, which eventually split into three factions over support for the administration and the adoption of protectionist trade policies.

The October 1931 general election produced a crushing landslide victory for the National Government, campaigning for a so-called “Doctor’s mandate” to rescue Britain from the Great Depression. The coalition captured two-thirds of the votes cast and won 554 (90.1%) of the 615 available commons seats.

MacDonald, the first Labour prime minister, bore witness to the near-total destruction of the party he had led into power. Over 200 Labour MPs who lost their seats.