British Conservative Leaders - Charles Clarke, Toby S. James, Tim Bale, Patrick Diamond

As the party that has held power more times than any other, the Conservatives have played a crucial role in the shaping of British society. And yet the leaders who have stood at its helm - from Sir Robert Peel to Rishi Sunak, via 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. 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 - now fully updated with chapters on all Conservative leaders up to Rishi Sunak and an assessment of the party's leadership in relation to Brexit - 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, it also provides detailed personal biographies from some of the country's foremost political critics and exclusive interviews with former leaders themselves. An indispensable contribution to the study of party leadership, British Conservative Leaders is the essential guide to understanding British political history and governance.