Just over a century ago, the Oxford historian Keith Feiling wrote, ‘The history of the Tory party is the history of England.’ Since then, the Conservatives have been in power, on their own or with others, for sixty-eight of those 102 years. Struggles to gain and retain the leadership of the party have always been at the heart of Tory politics, but with more frequency and frenzy of late. After the Brexit referendum in 2016, the Conservative Party went through five prime ministers in six years, and is now on its sixth leader in a decade. By 2024, a near-permanent leadership crisis had left the party, in the eyes of most voters, ‘unfit to govern’.

Lee David Evans’s new book, Coro-nations and Defenestrations: Choosing (and Losing) Tory Leaders, is a concise and well-researched survey of the rise and fall of every Conservative leader since 1911, when Andrew Bonar Law replaced Arthur Balfour, who lost three general elections in a row. More an extended essay than a work of political science, it brings two classic histories of Tory leadership crises – Nigel Fisher’s The Tory Leaders: Their Struggle for Power (1977) and Robert Shepherd’s The Power Brokers: The Tory Party and Its Leaders (1991) – up to date for a modern audience and it does so in a pleasing, entertaining way.

Some of the leadership crises that Evans portrays are dramatic and vivid – like the chaotic void left by the resignation of Harold Macmillan in October 1963 and the fight to the political death between Margaret Thatcher and Michael Heseltine in November 1990 – even if he does not always