Sunak at 10: The Last Conservative Prime Minister

by Anthony Seldon, Tom Egerton, Unknown Author

'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.

624 pages, Hardcover

First published August 27, 2026

About the author

Sir 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.

Reviews

[Jacob Stelling]

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.

[Jim Bowen]

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.

[Duncan Maccoll]

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).

[Tom J]

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