Political Leadership and Prime Ministerial Failure: A Guided Tour of the Recent Past

Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak, and the Question of Whether the Conservative Party Was Unlucky or the Author of Its Own Misfortunes

Five Prime Ministers in Eight Years: A Rate of Turnover That Suggests Structural Issues

Between 2016 and 2024, the United Kingdom had six Prime Ministers. David Cameron resigned the morning after the Brexit referendum result. Theresa May survived two years of Brexit parliamentary warfare before her party ended her tenure. Boris Johnson resigned under sustained pressure from his own Cabinet and MPs. Liz Truss lasted forty-five days before the bond markets and her own parliamentary party collaborated on her removal. Rishi Sunak served for approximately two years before losing the 2024 election by the widest margin in Conservative history. Keir Starmer took office in July 2024.

The question of whether this represents an unusually unlucky period for British political leadership, a systemic failure in how leaders are selected and supported, or the logical consequence of governing a country through three consecutive existential crises — Brexit, a pandemic, and an energy price shock — without adequate institutional resilience, is a question that political scientists and Conservative Party members are currently answering differently.

David Cameron: The Man Who Called a Referendum and Did Not Expect to Lose It

David Cameron’s legacy is dominated by the 2016 Brexit referendum — a decision he made for party management reasons and lost for reasons that his campaign strategists are still documenting. The Bloomberg speech of 2013, the renegotiation that produced less than promised, the campaign that underestimated Leave’s ground operation and overestimated Project Fear’s persuasiveness, and the morning-after resignation that left his successor to implement a policy he had campaigned against — this is the sequence that history will primarily record.

Before Brexit, Cameron had significant achievements: the 2010-2015 coalition, which passed meaningful legislation and maintained parliamentary confidence for a full term; same-sex marriage, delivered against significant backbench resistance; the deficit reduction programme, effective in fiscal terms if contested in social ones; and a modernisation of the Conservative Party that made it electable after three consecutive defeats. These achievements are now primarily noted as context for the larger failure. Cameron’s post-resignation decision to lobby government ministers on behalf of Greensill Capital, and his subsequent appointment as Foreign Secretary by Sunak, completed a reputational trajectory that his Bloomberg speech set in motion.

Theresa May: Endurance as a Governing Strategy

Theresa May inherited an impossible brief — implementing a referendum result that Parliament had not voted for, whose content was unspecified, and which her own party could not agree on — and pursued it with a combination of extraordinary personal endurance and a negotiating strategy that produced a Withdrawal Agreement rejected three times by the largest margins in parliamentary history. Her “Brexit means Brexit” formulation — cited as vacuous at the time — proved to be a reasonably accurate description of what she knew about Brexit’s content in July 2016, which was the same amount as everyone else.

May’s failures were real: the “hostile environment” immigration policy that produced the Windrush scandal, the 2017 election campaign that squandered a twenty-point poll lead through a manifesto that included a social care policy — the “dementia tax” — announced without adequate preparation and withdrawn under pressure within days, and the inability to find a Brexit deal that could command a Commons majority. Her endurance — surviving confidence votes, Cabinet resignations, and three Withdrawal Agreement defeats — was genuinely remarkable. It did not, in the end, produce a result.

Boris Johnson: The Mandate That Consumed Itself

Boris Johnson won the 2019 election with an 80-seat majority on the slogan “Get Brexit Done” and a personal brand of jovial chaos that the electorate found more reassuring than alarming. The majority was real. The policy agenda behind it was less clearly specified. Johnson’s government’s defining achievement — the Vaccines rollout of 2020-21 — was a genuine public health success and a genuine administrative achievement, delivered through a combination of public investment, vaccine task force efficiency, and the UK’s exit from EU procurement arrangements that proved, on this occasion, advantageous.

The subsequent collapse — from the Owen Paterson standards scandal through Partygate to a cascade of Cabinet resignations in July 2022 — was the consequence of a governing culture that treated rules as advisory rather than mandatory and a leadership style that required constant novelty rather than sustained delivery. The Sue Gray report documented a No. 10 culture in which gatherings occurred during lockdown with the knowledge of senior figures, alcohol was consumed in quantities requiring a dedicated wine fridge, and the culture of rule-following expected of citizens was not consistently modelled by the people who made the rules. Johnson resigned in July 2022, citing a loss of parliamentary support that had become impossible to ignore rather than the substantive ethical concerns that had produced it.

Truss and Sunak: The Correction and Its Limitations

Liz Truss’s forty-five days represent the most compressed political failure in modern British history — a government that identified its economic policy, implemented it, watched the consequences unfold, abandoned it, and resigned before the parliamentary term had reached its second month. The mini-budget’s unfunded tax cuts produced a gilt market crisis, sterling weakness, and mortgage rate rises that took months to reverse and years to forgive. The political cost was a Conservative Party that had destroyed its reputation for economic competence — historically its central electoral asset — in the space of a fortnight.

Rishi Sunak’s government — orderly, technocratic, fiscally responsible — spent two years attempting to demonstrate that the Conservative Party had returned to seriousness. The electorate, when consulted in July 2024, decided that seriousness arrived too late and with insufficient explanation of where the previous fourteen years had gone. The Conservatives lost 251 seats on their worst vote share since 1906. Sunak resigned the leadership that evening.

The Conservative Party is now in opposition for the first time since 2010, engaged in the leadership contest and ideological reckoning that follows a catastrophic defeat. The questions being asked — what the party believes, who it represents, how it addresses the record of recent years — are questions that defeat concentrates the mind on with a clarity that victory never produces. The answers are, as yet, inconclusive.

Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!

The UK had six Prime Ministers between 2016 and 2024: Cameron (resigned after Brexit referendum), May (resigned after three Withdrawal Agreement defeats), Johnson (resigned amid ethics scandals), Truss (resigned after forty-five days following a gilt market crisis), Sunak (lost 2024 election), and Starmer (took office July 2024). The 2024 general election produced a Labour majority of 174 seats on 34% of the vote, the Conservatives winning 121 seats on 24% — their worst result since 1906. Kemi Badenoch was elected Conservative leader in November 2024. The succession of Conservative leadership crises between 2019 and 2024 has prompted academic and political debate about the adequacy of the party’s internal leadership selection and accountability mechanisms.

Alan Nafzger

Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]