The quiz covers the prime ministers in office since 1826. One card per person.
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Photo credits
- Portraits come from Wikimedia Commons and gov.uk. The photographers are:
- Prime Minister's Office (Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer) · OGL 3
- Lauren Hurley / No 10 Downing Street (David Cameron) · OGL 3
- Ben Shread (Boris Johnson) · OGL 3
- Cabinet Office (Gordon Brown) · OGL 3
- Roger Harris (Theresa May) · CC BY 3.0
- Pavel Golovkin (Tony Blair) · CC BY 4.0
- Allan Warren (Edward Heath) · CC BY-SA 3.0
- Dutch National Archives / Anefo (Anthony Eden) · CC BY-SA 3.0 NL
- The other 31 portraits are in the public domain.
Rules & what counts
British Prime Ministers Quiz — Rules & What Counts
Two hundred years of Downing Street, one face at a time. This quiz shows a portrait of every British prime minister in office since 1826 — from the Earl of Liverpool to the present day — and you type the names.
The grid has 41 cards, one per PERSON rather than per premiership. Victorian politics traded the office back and forth for decades — Gladstone alone served four separate terms — so each card lists every term its holder served.
Everyone lands Churchill, Thatcher and the moderns. The run-killers are the Victorian earls and viscounts: a wall of side-whiskered faces that history filed under titles rather than names.
How to play
- Just start typing — answers are checked on every keystroke, no submit button. A correct name flips its card instantly.
- Surnames are enough: "blair" works. Peerage PMs accept the title or the person's real name — "Palmerston" and "Henry John Temple" both solve the same card, and the "Lord X" form counts too.
- Each card wears the PM's party up front as a hint. Solving the card reveals the name and the years in office.
- Spelling is lenient — capitals, hyphens and accents are ignored — and common misspellings such as "Atlee", "Callahan" and "Disreali" are accepted, along with nicknames like "Iron Lady", "Supermac" and "BoJo".
- The timer starts on your first keystroke and counts up. Give Up ends the run and shows every portrait you missed; progress autosaves along the way.
What counts in this quiz
- Every person who held the office of prime minister at any point since 1826 — 41 people. The Earl of Liverpool opens the set: his term began in 1812, but he was still in office in 1826.
- One card per person. A PM with several separate terms (Gladstone, Baldwin, Derby, Churchill, Wilson) has one card that lists them all.
- Portraits are freely licensed: public-domain paintings and photographs for the historical PMs, and official Open Government Licence portraits for the recent ones. The photographers are credited under the grid.
- The party badge shows the party each PM led in office: Tory, Whig, Peelite, Conservative, Liberal or Labour.
What's not included — and why
- PMs whose service ended before 1826 are not here — no Pitt the Younger, no Walpole. The quiz covers the last 200 years.
- Deputy prime ministers and acting stand-ins have no card. Only people appointed prime minister count.
- Monarchs are not prime ministers, so no king or queen appears.
Good to know
- Gladstone became prime minister four separate times and left office for the last time at 84 — still the record for both.
- Liz Truss holds the other record: 49 days, the shortest premiership in British history.
- Bonar Law is the only prime minister born outside the British Isles — in New Brunswick, Canada. Historians call him "the unknown prime minister".
- The Duke of Wellington beat Napoleon at Waterloo before taking office — and served again for three caretaker weeks in 1834 while Peel raced back from Rome.
- The Marquess of Salisbury was the last prime minister to govern from the House of Lords, leaving office in 1902.
- Earl Grey, prime minister 1830–1834, abolished slavery across most of the Empire, reformed Parliament — and is remembered almost entirely for a bergamot tea.