Historical rankings of Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom from his second term only. In 2013, a group of academic staff and students at Royal Holloway, University of London, conducted a postal survey of British Members of Parliament, asking them to evaluate the success of post-war British prime ministers. Some 158 MPs replied to the survey, a response rate of 24%. The respondents included 69 Conservatives, 67 Labour MPs, 14 Liberal Democrats and 8 MPs from other parties. The survey used the same question employed in the 2004 and 2010 University of Leeds studies: MPs were asked how successful or unsuccessful they considered each Prime Minister to have been
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Lord and not the Prime Minister. Despite the reluctance to legally recognise the Premiership, ambivalence toward it waned in the 1780s. During the first 20 years of his reign, George III (1760–1820) tried to be his own "prime minister" by controlling policy from outside the Cabinet, appointing and dismissing ministers, meeting privately with individual ministers, and giving them instructions. These practices caused confusion and dissension in Cabinet meetings; King George's experiment in personal rule was generally a failure. After the failure of Lord North's ministry (1770–1782) in March 1782 due to Britain's defeat in the American Revolutionary War and the