Conservative Party Leaders

Who was the most successful Conservative party leader of all time? And who was the worst? If we were to just count general election victories Margaret Thatcher comes top with three victories. But does this tell the whole story?

The University of East Anglia, Queen Mary University of London and the Political Studies Association Political Leadership group are hosting an event to address these questions. The project will involve leading biographers and experts on each of the Conservative party leaders speaking at an event held at the Queen Mary’s London Campus in Mile End on 5th December 2014. Contributions from these talks will then form part of an edited collection with a leading publisher.

To kick-off the discussion Toby James will give an introductory talk setting out a framework for evaluating leaders based on academic work recently published in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations. This suggests that we can assess leaders by looking at how successful they were in winning office, or moving their party towards the goal of winning of office during their tenure. It also suggests that it is helpful to think about five key tasks that leaders need to achieve to win elections: developing a winning electoral strategy, a sense of governing competence amongst the electorate, party management, winning the battle of ideas on key policy issues and constitutional management. The Rt. Hon Charles Clarke has undertaken a simple statistical analysis of general election performance of the Conservative leaders since Arthur Balfour and he will present the conclusions in the form of a ‘league table’.

The author of the biography of each Conservative leader to have fought a general election will then present their analysis.