On 26 October 1951, Winston Churchill kissed hands at Buckingham Palace and became prime minister for the second time, six years after the Labour landslide of 1945 had removed him. The Conservatives had won the general election held the previous day with 321 seats against Labour's 295, a majority of seventeen. Churchill was seventy-seven and had had a mild stroke two years earlier. He went to the Palace by car.
The election had been called by Attlee on the failure of his own arithmetic. Labour's majority from 1950 was six, and the government had been unable to carry on through a period of illness and resignations, including those of Bevin and Cripps, and a split over rearmament costs that had led Aneurin Bevan, Harold Wilson and John Freeman to resign from the cabinet in April 1951.
The campaign was about the cost of living and about the mixed economy. Labour defended full employment, the National Health Service and nationalisation; the Conservatives, under the Industrial Charter of 1947, had accepted the welfare state and the mixed economy in principle and argued about efficiency and about controls. Rationing, which had continued after the war, was the most immediate grievance, and the Conservatives promised to end it.
Churchill's second term was not a domestic one. Rationing ended in 1954, housing targets were met, and the government gave up most economic planning, but Churchill's attention was on foreign affairs: trying to arrange a summit with the new Soviet leadership after Stalin's death in 1953, managing the relationship with Eisenhower's Washington, dealing with the Korean War armistice of 1953, and handling the crisis over Mossadegh and Iranian oil. He had a severe stroke in June 1953 which was concealed from the public. He resigned in April 1955 and was succeeded by Anthony Eden, who had waited fifteen years. The return lasted three and a half years. It was mostly foreign policy.
The majority was 17. He resigned in 1955.