When Rishi Sunak became the leader of the Conservative Party last October, he was the fifth Tory leader since Sunak himself entered Westminster for the first time in 2015. During the last Conservative stint in government, there were just two party leaders in the whole period between 1979 and 1997, Margaret Thatcher and John Major.

As this record of turbulence at the top would suggest, the past few years have been something of a rollercoaster ride for the Conservatives. In 2015, David Cameron secured the party its first Westminster majority since 1992, but he had to resign as prime minister barely twelve months later after a reckless gamble on the Brexit referendum of June 2016 backfired disastrously.

Cameron’s successor Theresa May was hoping to ride the Brexit tiger to a landslide victory in a snap election the following year but ended up losing the majority she had inherited. As May sought fruitlessly to negotiate a Brexit deal that could satisfy the different factions at Westminster, it seemed as if the crisis might cause irreparable harm to her party.