After 1951 there were thirteen years of uninterrupted Conservative rule under four successive Conservative Prime Ministers: Winston Churchill (1951-5), Anthony Eden (1955-7), Harold Macmillan (1957-63) and Alexander Douglas-Home (1963-4). The party won three successive general elections, a record exceeded in the twentieth century only after 1979. It is, therefore, not surprising that the period 1951-64 is often known as the 'Conservative decade'. Within this timescale there were two general trends. Between 1951 and 1960 Conservative domination was complete, while from 1961 to 1964 the governments of Macmillan and Douglas-Home came under increasing pressure, the latter eventually falling to a revived Labour party under the leadership of Wilson.
During the 1950s the Conservatives won the highest proportion of the popular vote since the 1930s, when the collapse of the Liberals and the crisis of Labour had enabled them to reach artificial heights. After coming to power in 1951 they were remarkably consistent. In 1955 they won 49.7 per cent of the vote and 344 seats, in 1959 49.4 per cent of the vote and 365 seats (see Figure 10). On each occasion they scored comfortable majorities. The overall trend of support for the Conservatives had been sharply upwards; since their fiasco at the end of the war they grew in strength over four successive elections. In 1945 they had been 180 seats behind Labour; by 1950 the deficit had dropped to 17; in 1951 they converted this into an overall majority of 17, which was increased in 1955 to a majority of 58 and in 1959 to one of 100. This record was due to a combination of Conservative strengths and Labour weaknesses.