British Politics Trivia
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50 free British Politics trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
British politics runs on rules nobody wrote down. A new Speaker has to be hauled to the chair. One MP is held at Buckingham Palace while the monarch is in Parliament. A minister may drink at the despatch box on exactly one day a year. Most of it is tradition rather than law, which is why it makes such good trivia. These 50 questions cover the machinery rather than the personalities: how the Commons and the Lords actually work, the officers who keep them running, the State Opening, Downing Street and the Treasury, the civil service, the Supreme Court, devolution to Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast, how elections and referendums are run, and the firsts that changed who could sit in Parliament at all. Every question carries a clue you can reason from, and every answer comes with the detail that makes it stick. Use it for a pub round, a politics classroom, or to find out how much of Westminster you have absorbed without ever meaning to.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01On which Commons occasion may the minister speaking drink alcohol, otherwise forbidden in the chamber?
The Budget
The Budget is the one speech a Chancellor may deliver with a drink in hand: Geoffrey Howe chose gin and tonic and Gladstone sherry with a beaten egg, but Gordon Brown broke the habit with mineral water.
Q 02In 1938 the Woolsack, the seat of whoever presides over the Lords, was found to be stuffed with what?
Horsehair
Horsehair filled the seat meant to symbolise England's medieval wool trade, so the Woolsack was re-stuffed with a blend of wool from the British Isles and the Commonwealth.
Q 03At the State Opening of Parliament, an MP is held 'hostage' to guarantee whose safe return?
The sovereign
The sovereign. The hostage, usually a government whip who holds the post of Vice-Chamberlain of the Household, waits at Buckingham Palace and is released once the monarch is safely back.
Q 04What official title was given to Larry, Downing Street's cat since 2011?
Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office
Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office is Larry's title; recruited from Battersea Dogs & Cats Home under David Cameron, he has stayed put ever since and outlasted prime minister after prime minister.
Q 05The parliamentary 'whip' who keeps MPs voting with their party borrows the title from a role in which pursuit?
Hunting with hounds
Hunting with hounds gave Parliament the 'whipper-in', the huntsman's assistant who drives straying hounds back into the pack; an MP who defies the party line can still 'lose the whip' and be cast out of it.
Q 06Which monarch was the last to refuse Royal Assent to a bill, vetoing the Scottish Militia Bill in 1708?
Queen Anne
Queen Anne withheld assent on her ministers' advice: a French invasion fleet was reported sailing for Scotland, and they feared the new militia would prove disloyal. No monarch has refused a bill since.
Q 07What do MPs ceremonially do to a newly elected Speaker of the Commons?
Drag them to the chair
They drag them to the chair. The show of reluctance is said to recall the days when the Speaker had to carry the Commons' opinions to a monarch who might not welcome them.
Q 08Which British political nickname began as an Irish word for outlaws who robbed English settlers?
Tory
Tory comes from the Irish for a pursuer and meant a bandit; around 1680 it was hurled at those who backed the Catholic Duke of York's right to the throne, and the insult stuck to the Conservatives.
Q 09What delayed the declaration of the July 1945 general election result until three weeks after polling day?
Votes from troops overseas
Votes from troops overseas had to be shipped home and counted. Churchill left the Potsdam Conference to hear the result on 26 July and never went back: Attlee returned in his place as prime minister.
Q 10Who in November 2014 became the first woman to serve as First Minister of Scotland, succeeding Alex Salmond?
Nicola Sturgeon
Nicola Sturgeon had been Alex Salmond's deputy for a decade, and she was elected SNP leader unopposed after he resigned over the lost independence referendum.
Q 11Since 1935, every UK general election has been held on which day of the week?
Thursday
Thursday is a convention, not a law. One common explanation is that it was market day in many towns, so voters were heading in anyway and could call at the polling station on the way.
Q 12Which territory outside the UK voted in the 2016 EU referendum, backing Remain by 96%?
Gibraltar
Gibraltar was the only overseas territory inside the EU, so it had a vote, and 95.9% chose Remain. It left anyway: Leave won 51.9% across the UK, and David Cameron announced his resignation the next morning.
Q 13In 1988 the Liberal Party merged with which breakaway from Labour?
Social Democratic Party
Q 21Who in July 2024 became the first woman to serve as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the office's 800-year history?
Rachel Reeves
Rachel Reeves marked the change inside 11 Downing Street: she took down a portrait of the former Chancellor Nigel Lawson and hung one of Ellen Wilkinson, the Labour minister who marched with the Jarrow unemployed.
Q 22Sterling crashed out of which currency system on Black Wednesday in 1992, under Chancellor Norman Lamont?
The Exchange Rate Mechanism
The Exchange Rate Mechanism tied the pound to a band it could not hold once traders sold sterling faster than the Bank could buy it; Lamont raised rates to 12% before quitting the system that evening.
Q 23Who won Brighton Pavilion in 2010 to become the Green Party's first ever MP?
The Social Democratic Party had fought two general elections in alliance with the Liberals; the merged party was launched as the Social and Liberal Democrats and became the Liberal Democrats a year later.
Q 14Sinn Féin MPs stand for Westminster but never take their Commons seats, because doing so would require what?
Swearing allegiance to the King
Swearing allegiance to the King is required of every MP, and the party also rejects Westminster's jurisdiction in Northern Ireland, so its members stay away under a policy called abstentionism.
Q 15Who in 1919 became the first woman to sit in the Commons, winning her husband's former seat of Plymouth Sutton?
Nancy Astor
Nancy Astor, American-born, took over the seat when her husband Waldorf went up to the Lords; Constance Markievicz had been elected a year earlier but never took her seat.
Q 16Which former Tiller Girl dancer and Labour MP was elected the first woman Speaker of the Commons in 1992?
Betty Boothroyd
Betty Boothroyd beat a candidate from the governing party even though its MPs held the majority, then broke with centuries of custom by declining to wear the Speaker's wig.
Q 17Before the Supreme Court opened in 2009, the UK's most senior appeal judges were known collectively as what?
The Law Lords
The Law Lords, formally the Lords of Appeal in Ordinary, heard final appeals as a committee of the upper house; in October 2009 they became the first Supreme Court justices, ending Parliament's centuries as a court.
Q 18Which Supreme Court President announced the unanimous 2019 ruling that the prorogation of Parliament was unlawful?
Brenda Hale
Brenda Hale read out the eleven justices' verdict wearing a large spider brooch, and within days the brooch was being printed on T-shirts sold in aid of a homelessness charity.
Q 19Before adopting the name Senedd in May 2020, the Welsh legislature had been officially known as what?
National Assembly for Wales
National Assembly for Wales was the title from 1999, when the body could not pass laws of its own; the new name was chosen to reflect a full parliament with law-making powers and the ability to vary taxes.
Q 20What did Republic of Ireland voters amend on 22 May 1998, as Northern Ireland endorsed the Good Friday Agreement?
Their constitution
Their constitution. The Nineteenth Amendment let Ireland be bound by the Agreement and rewrite Articles 2 and 3, which had claimed the whole island as national territory; north and south voted on the same day.
Caroline Lucas
Caroline Lucas held the seat until 2024. In 2013, while its MP, she was arrested at an anti-fracking protest in the Sussex village of Balcombe, and a court later cleared her of every charge.
Q 24Who won the first election for Mayor of London in 2000, running as an independent after losing Labour's selection?
Ken Livingstone
Ken Livingstone had led the Greater London Council until Margaret Thatcher's government abolished it in 1986, and he opened his victory speech: 'As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted 14 years ago.'
Q 25Who in 1987 became the first Black woman elected to the House of Commons?
Diane Abbott
Diane Abbott won Hackney North and Stoke Newington on the night Bernie Grant, Paul Boateng and Keith Vaz were also elected; Boateng ended his victory speech, 'Today Brent South, tomorrow Soweto!'
Q 26The House of Lords Act 1999 removed all but 92 of which members?
Hereditary peers
Hereditary peers. The 92 stayed under a compromise meant to be temporary, their vacancies filled by by-elections in which only hereditary peers could stand, and the arrangement lasted until a 2026 Act removed the last of them.
Q 27Enric Miralles, the architect of the Scottish Parliament building at Holyrood, came from which country?
Spain
Spain's Enric Miralles died in 2000 before the building opened in 2004, three years late and at an estimated £414 million against early estimates of £10m to £40m.
Q 28What happens to Northern Ireland's deputy First Minister when the First Minister resigns?
They also lose office
They also lose office automatically, because the two posts are a joint office: when Paul Givan quit in 2022, Michelle O'Neill ceased to be deputy First Minister the same day.
Q 29The 2011 referendum offering which system in place of first-past-the-post was rejected by 67.9% of voters?
The Alternative Vote
The Alternative Vote, which lets voters rank candidates in order, was the referendum the Liberal Democrats won as their price for joining David Cameron's coalition, only for voters to reject it by more than two to one.
Q 30The Daily Mail branded the 1928 plan to let women vote at 21 a vote for whom?
Flappers
Flappers. The paper's campaign against the 'flapper vote' failed, and the 1929 general election, the first in which women in their twenties could vote, went down as the Flapper Election.