British Conservative Leaders

A comprehensively updated new edition of the essential guide to the qualities and vulnerabilities of political leaders.

As the party that has won wars, reversed recessions and held prime ministerial power more times than any other, the Conservatives have played an undoubtedly crucial role in the shaping of contemporary British society. And yet the leaders who have stood at its helm – from Sir Robert Peel to Rishi Sunak, via Benjamin Disraeli, Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher – have steered the party vessel with enormously varying degrees of success, particularly latterly, when the short but destructive tenures of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss did much to damage the party’s reputation for competence.

With the widening of the franchise, revolutionary changes to social values and the growing ubiquity of the media, the requirements, techniques and goals of Conservative leadership since the party’s nineteenth-century factional breakaway have been forced to evolve almost beyond recognition – and not all its leaders have managed to keep up.

This comprehensive and enlightening book considers the attributes and achievements of each leader in the context of their respective time and diplomatic landscape, offering a compelling analytical framework by which they may be judged, alongside detailed personal biographies from some of the country’s foremost political critics, and exclusive interviews with former leaders themselves.