Parliament, which consists of the House of Lords and the elected House of Commons, was convened on Tuesday 15 May 1979 at the Palace of Westminster by Queen Elizabeth II.

[1] It was the election from which Margaret Thatcher, the incumbent Conservative Party leader became Prime Minister, the first female head of government in the United Kingdom and Europe.

These representative diagrams show the composition of the parties in the 1979 general election.

This is not the official seating plan of the House of Commons, which has five rows of benches on each side, with the government party to the right of the speaker and opposition parties to the left, but with room for only around two-thirds of MPs to sit at any one time.

Two seats were vacant when Parliament was dissolved preparatory to the 1983 general election: