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Sunak at 10: The Last Conservative Prime Minister
'The leading authority on our contemporary prime ministers' Dominic Grieve, Guardian
After almost a decade and a half of Tory rule, the 2024 General Election saw the Conservatives suffer their worst-ever they received 7.14 million fewer votes than in 2019; 23.7 per cent is their lowest ever vote share; and their current 121 MP contingent is their smallest since 1832. Meanwhile, the rise of Reform threatens the party's very existence.
How did it all go wrong so quickly, following Boris Johnson's record-setting win in 2019?
From taking office amidst the cost of living and energy supply crises and the panic caused by Liz Truss's disastrous mini-budget, through the agenda-dominating Ukraine and Gaza wars and the Rwanda Asylum Plan, to the stunning 2023 local election results, Sunak at 10 is the definitive and jaw-dropping window into Rishi Sunak's premiership.
After almost a decade and a half of Tory rule, the 2024 General Election saw the Conservatives suffer their worst-ever they received 7.14 million fewer votes than in 2019; 23.7 per cent is their lowest ever vote share; and their current 121 MP contingent is their smallest since 1832. Meanwhile, the rise of Reform threatens the party's very existence.
How did it all go wrong so quickly, following Boris Johnson's record-setting win in 2019?
From taking office amidst the cost of living and energy supply crises and the panic caused by Liz Truss's disastrous mini-budget, through the agenda-dominating Ukraine and Gaza wars and the Rwanda Asylum Plan, to the stunning 2023 local election results, Sunak at 10 is the definitive and jaw-dropping window into Rishi Sunak's premiership.
- GenresPoliticsNonfiction
624 pages, Hardcover
First published August 27, 2026
About the author
Anthony Seldon
90 books88 followersSir Anthony Francis Seldon, FRSA, FRHistS, FKC, is a British educator and contemporary historian. He was the 13th Master (headmaster) of Wellington College, one of Britain's co-educational independent boarding schools. In 2009, he set up The Wellington Academy, the first state school to carry the name of its founding independent school. He was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham from 2015 to 2020. Seldon was knighted in the 2014 Birthday Honours for services to education and modern political history.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
August 30, 2026
Another fantastic instalment in this contemporary history series, and one which presents a balanced picture of Sunak. What comes through more than anything is that simply working hard and being a ‘good’ person is not enough to make a difference in politics.
Sunak comes across like May and Starmer, a fundamentally decent person, but simply not a good enough politician to make serious change. He also was a victim of circumstance, and was unlucky in his two predecessors. More broadly, it is also a comprehensive picture of Tory sleaze and how much the party had lost its way after 14 years in power.
As always, this was a well-sourced and definitive account of Sunak’s time in Downing Street, although it remains too early to tell whether he will be judged more favourably by history than his contemporaries.
Sunak comes across like May and Starmer, a fundamentally decent person, but simply not a good enough politician to make serious change. He also was a victim of circumstance, and was unlucky in his two predecessors. More broadly, it is also a comprehensive picture of Tory sleaze and how much the party had lost its way after 14 years in power.
As always, this was a well-sourced and definitive account of Sunak’s time in Downing Street, although it remains too early to tell whether he will be judged more favourably by history than his contemporaries.
October 25, 2026
https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/sunak-at-10-the-last-conservative-prime-minister-by-anthony-seldon-and-tom-egerton/
I enjoyed Seldon’s co-written demolition of Boris Johnson’s premiership, and also his similar hatchet job on Liz Truss (with reservations), so thought that I would give this a try too. Rishi Sunak was dragged rather unwillingly into the role of Prime Minister, not actually confirming to family and supporters that he wanted the job until the morning of 22 October 2022, two days after Truss had resigned and two days before he was elected leader of the Conservatives.
In fairness, he took the job very seriously once he got it, but Seldon and Egerton keep coming back to the rushed startup as a key problem for the Sunak administration. They treat it as a combination of unavoidable circumstance and Truss’ (entirely understandable) desire to get out of the door quickly once she had been shown it. However I think this was Sunak’s first serious mistake (of many); he had the same information as the rest of us, and could see that Truss’s government spent half of its duration on life support, and should have been prepared.
There are over 600 pages in the book, which I think is more than the subject deserves. I got it really to see if Seldon’s Truss book’s weird claims that she had inspired the Windsor Framework (which she actually detests) were given any further support, but apart from an unsupported throwaway remark or two, they are not. The account of the Windsor Framework is forensic but limited; it concentrates almost entirely on the palace politics at the Downing Street and Westminster end, with some small space for the local dynamics in Northern Ireland and even less for the, er, EU, and gives little indication that the authors actually understand the substance of the problem. This is not especially fair on their own sources, Sunak’s advisors, who clearly had a very good understanding of Northern Ireland.
That said, I agree with the authors that the Windsor Framework is one of Sunak’s (few) real achievements as Prime Minister, and more importantly that it’s difficult to see any of the alternative Tory leaders having achieved it. Johnson and Truss were already committed to blowing up the relationship with the EU rather than enforce the Protocol that Johnson himself had negotiated. I cannot really see Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove or Penny Mordaunt (the other alternative Tory leaders in 2022, had Sunak not been available or not lasted) having either the necessary brains or the necessary character for it either. (See here for a sympathetic portrait of Mordaunt by Iain Dale, not that it matters now.)
Seldon and Egerton also see Sunak’s support of Ukraine as one of his key achievements. Myself, I think that any of the alternative leaders – Hunt, Gove, Mordaunt – would have followed exactly the same policy as Sunak on Ukraine, as indeed Johnson, Truss and Starmer actually did, and Burnham is doing, and it’s very difficult to point to one thing Sunak did that they would not have done.
The other big story of the book is the migration issue. One of Sunak’s (many, entirely avoidable) mistakes was to choose “Stop the boats” as one of his five key pledges, as unpacked by Rachel Cunliffe in August 2023. It was unachievable and he must have known that it was unachievable. Admittedly Sunak had a difficult legacy – Johnson had taken a strong line rhetorically against migration but in fact had facilitated it by his actual policies, so Sunak started with a in-built credibility problem.
There was then a tension between the performatively vicious side of the party (Braverman and Jenrick, both of whom have since joined Reform) and those who actually cared about not breaking the law (less vocal but as it turned out more influential). Even Seldon and Egerton, who generally boost Sunak, admit that he failed on this one, though they don’t follow through to speculate on what could have constituted success. There seems to have been no reflection on what a results-based policy would look like (and there still hasn’t been),
Sunak’s decision to go for a July election is excused by most (but not all) of those around him as the least worst of three bad options, the other two being May and November. I tend to agree. The particular consideration I hadn’t realised was that he (or rather his key advisers) hoped to outflank Nigel Farage, who was personally not ready for an election, and whose initial response (before his sponsors thought better of it) was that he would sit this one out. It was a rational choice on Sunak’s part, though it did not really work.
There is some half-hearted analysis of the extent to which Sunak was to blame for the disastrous election result. But really it came down to the destruction of their own party’s credibility in government by Johnson and Truss, which gives rise to the book’s sub-title asking if Sunak will turn out to have been the last prime minister from the Conservative Party; the precedent of the Canadian Progressive Conservatives in the 1990s is mentioned (they were outflanked by a more right-wing party, called Reform, which they later merged with). Sunak bears some but not much blame for Johnson’s failures, and none for Truss’s. (Unless you think that he did not try hard enough to defeat her in the summer leadership election, but it’s clear that he lost because Tory members preferred a white woman to an Asian man.)
For the Conservatives to win in 2024 would have required not only the steady leadership that Sunak was able to provide, but an external shock of the kind that Donald Trump provided to the Canadian Liberals in early 2025, or an implosion of the Labour Party bigger than 1983 or 2019. Whatever the wider impact of Tory policies on biodiversity may have been, Sunak is not really to blame for the shortage of black swans.
Still, looking at the polls I was interested to note that the Conservatives started the campaign at an average of 23.5% and actually got 23.7% in the election, while Labour fell from a 45% average to 33.7%. The big gainers were of course Reform (from 9% to 14.3%) and the Lib Dems (from 10% to 12.2%). Sunak deserves credit for stemming the drain of votes from his own party. Awful as the 2024 result was, it could (and maybe should!) have been even worse.
In general I hesitate to recommend this book. It is too closely concerned with the kitchen politics of 10 Downing Street while being rather hazy on the big policy picture in the most important issues, and a bit too uncritically rooted in its own sources (interviews with Sunak’s team, and the Chief Whip’s published memoirs). But it’s a compelling insider account of the slow-motion car crash that was the Sunak government, and gets you inside the heads of the driver and his crew.
I enjoyed Seldon’s co-written demolition of Boris Johnson’s premiership, and also his similar hatchet job on Liz Truss (with reservations), so thought that I would give this a try too. Rishi Sunak was dragged rather unwillingly into the role of Prime Minister, not actually confirming to family and supporters that he wanted the job until the morning of 22 October 2022, two days after Truss had resigned and two days before he was elected leader of the Conservatives.
In fairness, he took the job very seriously once he got it, but Seldon and Egerton keep coming back to the rushed startup as a key problem for the Sunak administration. They treat it as a combination of unavoidable circumstance and Truss’ (entirely understandable) desire to get out of the door quickly once she had been shown it. However I think this was Sunak’s first serious mistake (of many); he had the same information as the rest of us, and could see that Truss’s government spent half of its duration on life support, and should have been prepared.
There are over 600 pages in the book, which I think is more than the subject deserves. I got it really to see if Seldon’s Truss book’s weird claims that she had inspired the Windsor Framework (which she actually detests) were given any further support, but apart from an unsupported throwaway remark or two, they are not. The account of the Windsor Framework is forensic but limited; it concentrates almost entirely on the palace politics at the Downing Street and Westminster end, with some small space for the local dynamics in Northern Ireland and even less for the, er, EU, and gives little indication that the authors actually understand the substance of the problem. This is not especially fair on their own sources, Sunak’s advisors, who clearly had a very good understanding of Northern Ireland.
That said, I agree with the authors that the Windsor Framework is one of Sunak’s (few) real achievements as Prime Minister, and more importantly that it’s difficult to see any of the alternative Tory leaders having achieved it. Johnson and Truss were already committed to blowing up the relationship with the EU rather than enforce the Protocol that Johnson himself had negotiated. I cannot really see Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove or Penny Mordaunt (the other alternative Tory leaders in 2022, had Sunak not been available or not lasted) having either the necessary brains or the necessary character for it either. (See here for a sympathetic portrait of Mordaunt by Iain Dale, not that it matters now.)
Seldon and Egerton also see Sunak’s support of Ukraine as one of his key achievements. Myself, I think that any of the alternative leaders – Hunt, Gove, Mordaunt – would have followed exactly the same policy as Sunak on Ukraine, as indeed Johnson, Truss and Starmer actually did, and Burnham is doing, and it’s very difficult to point to one thing Sunak did that they would not have done.
The other big story of the book is the migration issue. One of Sunak’s (many, entirely avoidable) mistakes was to choose “Stop the boats” as one of his five key pledges, as unpacked by Rachel Cunliffe in August 2023. It was unachievable and he must have known that it was unachievable. Admittedly Sunak had a difficult legacy – Johnson had taken a strong line rhetorically against migration but in fact had facilitated it by his actual policies, so Sunak started with a in-built credibility problem.
There was then a tension between the performatively vicious side of the party (Braverman and Jenrick, both of whom have since joined Reform) and those who actually cared about not breaking the law (less vocal but as it turned out more influential). Even Seldon and Egerton, who generally boost Sunak, admit that he failed on this one, though they don’t follow through to speculate on what could have constituted success. There seems to have been no reflection on what a results-based policy would look like (and there still hasn’t been),
Sunak’s decision to go for a July election is excused by most (but not all) of those around him as the least worst of three bad options, the other two being May and November. I tend to agree. The particular consideration I hadn’t realised was that he (or rather his key advisers) hoped to outflank Nigel Farage, who was personally not ready for an election, and whose initial response (before his sponsors thought better of it) was that he would sit this one out. It was a rational choice on Sunak’s part, though it did not really work.
There is some half-hearted analysis of the extent to which Sunak was to blame for the disastrous election result. But really it came down to the destruction of their own party’s credibility in government by Johnson and Truss, which gives rise to the book’s sub-title asking if Sunak will turn out to have been the last prime minister from the Conservative Party; the precedent of the Canadian Progressive Conservatives in the 1990s is mentioned (they were outflanked by a more right-wing party, called Reform, which they later merged with). Sunak bears some but not much blame for Johnson’s failures, and none for Truss’s. (Unless you think that he did not try hard enough to defeat her in the summer leadership election, but it’s clear that he lost because Tory members preferred a white woman to an Asian man.)
For the Conservatives to win in 2024 would have required not only the steady leadership that Sunak was able to provide, but an external shock of the kind that Donald Trump provided to the Canadian Liberals in early 2025, or an implosion of the Labour Party bigger than 1983 or 2019. Whatever the wider impact of Tory policies on biodiversity may have been, Sunak is not really to blame for the shortage of black swans.
Still, looking at the polls I was interested to note that the Conservatives started the campaign at an average of 23.5% and actually got 23.7% in the election, while Labour fell from a 45% average to 33.7%. The big gainers were of course Reform (from 9% to 14.3%) and the Lib Dems (from 10% to 12.2%). Sunak deserves credit for stemming the drain of votes from his own party. Awful as the 2024 result was, it could (and maybe should!) have been even worse.
In general I hesitate to recommend this book. It is too closely concerned with the kitchen politics of 10 Downing Street while being rather hazy on the big policy picture in the most important issues, and a bit too uncritically rooted in its own sources (interviews with Sunak’s team, and the Chief Whip’s published memoirs). But it’s a compelling insider account of the slow-motion car crash that was the Sunak government, and gets you inside the heads of the driver and his crew.
October 20, 2026
Another excellent account in the series that began (in this form) with David Cameron. Sunak comes out of it well: fiercely intelligent, hard working, thoroughly decent and well liked on the world stage. His misfortune, of course, was to move into 10 Downing Street at the end of a long Tory reign when the party was fractious and weary, and to have to deal with the chaotic legacy of Brexit, Covid and the administrations of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Not to mention Gaza, Ukraine and a slew of other challenges.
October 5, 2026
Latest in this excellent series. (I've read the Johnson and Truss 'at 10' books and one day might get round to the earlier ones). Very long and detailed but I skimmed through it quite fast. Surprised at how much I had already forgotten. Before reading it, I thought Sunak was always predestined to lose the 2024 election no matter what he did in office. This book confirmed me in that view.
September 13, 2026
The last book of its kind, perhaps? Although Sunak's successor at 10 has already been replaced, it is unlikely that the authorship will pen a Labour set of books (just a prediction).
September 30, 2026
This was a great book. I enjoyed reading it.
October 19, 2026
A strong entry in Seldon's long running series about the UK's prime ministers. This one loses a star for me because of the writer's obvious personal biases slipping into the text. I read these for their insight, not the author's opinion on Dominic Raab.
September 5, 2026
as uniformly fantastic as the rest of this series. if you're interested in the subject in any form, you should read this book. it's as simple as that. read the rest too. there simply is no equal in political writing, with the possible exception of caro's writing about lbj
September 9, 2026
This book looks at the 620ish day Prime Ministership of Rishi Sunak, and gosh darn if it wasn’t an irritating read.
Anthony Seldon is writing (in collaboration with others) recent history books about Prime Ministers. They are invariably published shortly after the person leaves office. Given the recent turnover, it must be getting to be a pretty challenging task. This book is about Rishi Sunak, who was in office from late 2022 to mid-2024.
This book is a fairly chronological book. There’s some biographical detail, but the vast majority of the book looks at the time around his premiership. The book tries to assess whether Sunak was prepared for the job (he’d not been in politics all that long, didn’t have a “grand vision”, and was having to rush into office, given how Truss’s premiership had gone), and how he managed the position, once there. This includes his party management, given his party were fractious.
It’s a depressing read. The party seemed barely manageable, with the right wing looking for unobtainable levels of ideological purity, and expecting everyone else to go along. Boris Johnson, and his acolytes, didn’t help, undermining Sunak at every turn.
So all in all, it might be too soon to have produced this book, but it was informative.
Anthony Seldon is writing (in collaboration with others) recent history books about Prime Ministers. They are invariably published shortly after the person leaves office. Given the recent turnover, it must be getting to be a pretty challenging task. This book is about Rishi Sunak, who was in office from late 2022 to mid-2024.
This book is a fairly chronological book. There’s some biographical detail, but the vast majority of the book looks at the time around his premiership. The book tries to assess whether Sunak was prepared for the job (he’d not been in politics all that long, didn’t have a “grand vision”, and was having to rush into office, given how Truss’s premiership had gone), and how he managed the position, once there. This includes his party management, given his party were fractious.
It’s a depressing read. The party seemed barely manageable, with the right wing looking for unobtainable levels of ideological purity, and expecting everyone else to go along. Boris Johnson, and his acolytes, didn’t help, undermining Sunak at every turn.
So all in all, it might be too soon to have produced this book, but it was informative.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews