Eden ministry
Government of the United Kingdom
In April 1955, following the resignation of Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, then-Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, was invited to form government as he took over as Leader of the Conservative Party.
Eden then shortly asked Queen Elizabeth II to dissolve Parliament and call a general election for 26 May. Winning a majority of 60 seats, he would later resign the office on 10 January 1957.
History
Formation
In April 1955, Sir Anthony Eden succeeded Sir Winston Churchill as Leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and finally reached the post he had coveted for so long. The original composition of Eden's cabinet was remarkable for the fact that ten out of the original eighteen members were Old Etonians: Eden, Salisbury, Crookshank, Macmillan, Home, Stuart, Thorneycroft, Heathcoat Amory, Sandys and Peake were all educated at Eton College.
He initially retained Rab Butler, with whom he did not get along, as Chancellor of the Exchequer. At the first cabinet reshuffle in December 1955, Eden demoted him to Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Commons. Eden was succeeded as foreign secretary by future prime minister Harold Macmillan, who, however, only held this post until December of the same year, when he replaced Butler as Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Selwyn Lloyd gained his first cabinet post when he succeeded Macmillan as minister of defence in April 1955, and again replaced Macmillan as foreign secretary in December of that year. Another future prime minister, Alec Douglas-Home, entered the cabinet as Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations in 1955.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Eden ministry” as government of the United Kingdom. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as government of the United Kingdom. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7724526. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1955 and 1957.
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This entry incorporates text from “Eden ministry” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.