# Who is the best British prime minister of all time?

> Fifty-odd people have held the job and the shortlist barely moves. Reformers, war leaders, and one who beat Napoleon before he ever took office.

*By YPB Team · Published August 18, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/who-is-the-best-british-prime-minister-of-all-time*

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## Current results (3 votes)

1. **Clement Attlee** — 66.67% (2 votes · score 1000/1000)
   Beat Churchill in 1945 and built the NHS, the welfare state and a nationalised industrial base.
2. **Winston Churchill** — 0% (0 votes · score 750/1000)
   Prime minister twice, 1940–45 and 1951–55, and the only one to win a Nobel Prize in Literature.
3. **Earl Grey** — 33.33% (1 votes · score 591/1000)
   Carried the 1832 Reform Act and abolition of slavery in the British Empire — and got a tea named after him.
4. **William Gladstone** — 0% (0 votes · score 577/1000)
   Liberal giant who held the office four separate times across three decades.
5. **Robert Peel** — 0% (0 votes · score 577/1000)
   Founded the modern police force and split his own party to repeal the Corn Laws.
6. **Harold Wilson** — 0% (0 votes · score 577/1000)
   Won four elections, founded the Open University and kept Britain out of Vietnam.
7. **Margaret Thatcher** — 0% (0 votes · score 500/1000)
   Britain's first woman prime minister and its longest-serving of the 20th century.
8. **David Lloyd George** — 0% (0 votes · score 500/1000)
   Ran Britain through the last two years of the First World War and introduced the old-age pension.
9. **Robert Walpole** — 0% (0 votes · score 300/1000)
   Generally counted the first prime minister, and still the longest-serving at nearly 21 years.
10. **Harold Macmillan** — 0% (0 votes · score 300/1000)
   Presided over the late-1950s boom and told voters they had never had it so good.
11. **Tony Blair** — 0% (0 votes · score 167/1000)
   Won three consecutive general elections, a Labour record, before Iraq redefined his reputation.
12. **The Younger Pitt** — 0% (0 votes · score 167/1000)
   Prime minister at 24 and for nineteen years, through the wars with revolutionary France.
13. **Benjamin Disraeli** — 0% (0 votes · score 167/1000)
   Novelist turned premier who bought into the Suez Canal and made Victoria Empress of India.
14. **Duke of Wellington** — 0% (0 votes · score 167/1000)
   The only prime minister who had already beaten Napoleon before taking the job.

Tags: politics, british, leaders