The House Opinion Article | The Professor Will See You Now: Defenestration

Illustration by Tracy Worrall

4 min read10 min

Whenever there’s discussion of a potential leadership challenge – which in the last decade has meant most of the time – you cannot move for explainers in the media about how it all works: the various stages, the nomination thresholds, the details of the franchise. No complaints from me; explaining this stuff is good for trade.

The need for explanation is made more urgent by some of the rules being in almost constant flux. Reading a fascinating new study of the history of Conservative leadership contests, Coronations and Defenestrations by Lee Evans, it is striking how the party has changed its rules after almost every contest. To take just one example from the book: since 1965, the number of nominees a Conservative candidate has needed to stand for the leadership has varied from two to 100 MPs. Labour is just as bad.

I have spent a worryingly large amount of my life memorising and understanding these rules, but increasingly I wonder whether I should have bothered. Because it is also striking how many leadership contests, especially those involving incumbents, don’t run neatly along the tramlines set by the rules. Take, for example, the one we have just had. There was, in the end, no formal challenge to Keir Starmer; he resigned in the face of political reality and Andy Burnham replaced him in an unopposed election. Not a single vote was cast. The same was true in 2022 for Rishi Sunak. Squint and we could be back in the 1950s.

Indeed, the last six mid-term changes in prime minister have come about when the incumbent has seen the writing on the wall rather than because any formal leadership process has been initiated. Both Theresa May and Boris Johnson even successfully survived formal votes of no confidence from their MPs, only to jump ship pretty soon afterwards.

Evans refers to the immunity from challenge these votes supposedly gave as a “paper shield”.

The last Conservative Party leader to be voted out of the leadership was Iain Duncan Smith in 2003; the last one in government was Margaret Thatcher in 1990, and even she announced her resignation mid-contest.

It’s almost always more about raw political power than anything else

For Labour, I think you can make a case that the last comparable example would be JR Clynes, over a century ago, and it’s never happened to a Labour PM.

This isn’t to say that any of these contests went against the rules (parties have processes for what happens when a leader resigns and when there is just one candidate). Nor is it to say that the rules don’t matter: they are obviously there in the background, helping to structure the pressure the leader is under, and explaining why sometimes people jump before being pushed. But still, surveying the downfall of prime ministers, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that it’s almost always more about raw political power than anything else. 

Another example: in January, the (then) PM was powerful enough to block the (current) PM from standing in a by-election. By May, and following some terrible election results, suddenly he wasn’t – with all the consequences that followed. Once it became clear (to many) that he couldn’t stay on, so his power drained away.

Measuring power has been causing headaches for political scientists ever since Robert Dahl’s The Concept of Power in 1957 and his famous definition that “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do”. Since then, both its definition and its correct measurement have been much argued over. Yet just because it’s tricky to pin down doesn’t mean we shouldn’t realise its importance – and that it trumps the rule book every time.

Postscript: I was at university with someone who, when they first encountered Dahl, wondered (unfortunately out loud) how he’d managed to produce such a detailed study of the political process in New Haven, Connecticut and write all those children’s books. He never lived that down. 

Further reading: L D Evans, Coronations and Defenestrations (2026); R Dahl, The concept of power, Behavioural Science (1957)