Historical rankings of Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom

The Times constructed a poll for the first time of all British prime ministers in the lead-up to the 2010 general election. Before this there were two polls in 1999 and 2000, carried out by BBC Radio 4 and the British Politics Group; both consulted only a relatively small number of experts. A wider-reaching poll was conducted in 2004 by the University of Leeds and Ipsos MORI. All rankings involved only prime ministers from the 20th and 21st centuries, with no coverage for the other 31 pre-20th century prime ministers.

In 2010, the University of Leeds and Woodnewton Associates carried out a survey of 106 academics who specialised in British politics or British history, to rank the performance of all 12 prime ministers who served between 1945 and 2010. Churchill's ranking was thus determined from his second term only.

In 2004, the University of Leeds and Ipsos Mori conducted an online survey of 258 academics who specialised in 20th-century British history and/or politics. There were 139 replies to the survey, a return rate of 54% — by far the most extensive survey done so far. The respondents were asked, among other historical questions, to rate all the 20th-century British Prime Ministers in terms of their success and asking them to assess the key characteristics of successful PMs.

Respondents were asked to indicate on a scale of 0 to 10 how successful or unsuccessful they considered each PM to have been in office (with 0 being highly unsuccessful and 10 highly successful). A mean of the scores could then be calculated and a league table based on the mean scores.

The five Labour Prime Ministers were, on average, judged to have been the most successful, with a mean of 6.0 (median of 5.9). The three Liberal PMs averaged 5.8 (median of 6.2) and the twelve Conservative PMs 4.8 (median of 4.1).

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 postwar 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 using a 0 to 10 scale, where 0 meant highly unsuccessful and 10 meant highly successful.

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