The 1983 election, the first in the recreated East seat, was a landslide victory for Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives following retention of the Falkland Islands in the Falklands War. Bristol East returned a Conservative MP, as Jonathan Sayeed defeated Tony Benn, the outgoing MP for Bristol South East and the leader of a large faction on the left-wing of the Labour Party. In 1992 Labour's Jean Corston gained the seat from Sayeed, which has been retained by Labour candidates at each subsequent general election, the Conservatives coming second, except in 2005, when the Liberal Democrats did so. The 2015 result gave the seat the 42nd-smallest majority of Labour's 232 seats by percentage of majority; however, in 2017, incumbent MP Kerry McCarthy more than tripled her majority, winning the largest share of the vote in the seat's history and by the biggest margin since 1997.