The most striking thing about the answers is how American they were, with half of the candidates naming US presidents. Former Lieutenant Colonel of the British Army Tom Tugendhat picked a fellow military man turned politician, Dwight Eisenhower. Mel Stride plumped for John F. Kennedy and invoked his call to do things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard”. And James Cleverly opted for Margaret Thatcher’s transatlantic partner at the end of the Cold War, the sunny and optimistic Ronald Reagan.

Along with its Atlanticism, the other obvious feature of the honour roll was its recency. Politicians labelled “Tories” can be dated back to the 17th century, yet all of the named heroes were alive within living memory. Of those who offered British politicians, Priti Patel chose — without hesitation — Thatcher. Robert Jenrick said the same, adding her ideological guru, Keith Joseph, and most dynamic Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, for good measure. Only one candidate gave a British answer that caused eyebrows to rise (and Wikipedia pages to be searched), but it didn’t demur much from the theme. Kemi Badenoch plucked Airey Neave, the former leadership campaign manager for Thatcher and Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, who was assassinated in 1979.

As aspiring leaders of the world’s most successful political party, the exaltation of so many American Presidents — more than British prime ministers, of which the Conservatives can claim 22 since the Great Reform Act — is a surprise. It’s also unlikely to be fruitful. Developments in the conservative traditions on both sides of the Atlantic, which have often interacted or been in one another’s slipstream, have led them to very different places. British and American conservatisms just don’t sound like songs from the same hymnbook anymore — and when they have, most recently in the libertarianism of Liz Truss, it hasn’t ended well for the Tories.

Harking back to the Thatcher years, as three of the candidates did, is a more promising path for the next Conservative leader. Britain’s first female prime minister won three elections on the bounce, two of them with three-figure majorities, and reshaped Britain more decisively than any prime minister since Clement Attlee. But the Tory tradition is much older than the 50 years since Thatcher became leader of the party — and much richer, too. If Conservatives limit themselves to drawing inspiration from the Thatcher years — or worse, the myths that have grown up around them — they will only be scratching the surface of their party’s history and its canon of “heroes”. Instead, they should look further back. But to whom?

After the worst election result in their history, the Tories need a hero of reinvention. And as such, the next party leader could do far worse than put Benjamin Disraeli on the hero’s pedestal. In so many senses an outsider (he was descended from Jewish immigrants from Italy), Disraeli climbed the greasy pole through a process of personal and political reinvention. He transformed himself into a beacon of Victorian Britain — an Anglican, friend of the Queen, and cheerleader for the Empire — and remade the Tory Party in his own design. By the time he died in 1881, Disraeli had set the Conservatives on the path to dominate the next century of British politics.

The test of any reinvention, though, will be success at the ballot box. Here, aspiring leaders could draw upon the record of another Tory icon, Winston Churchill. On the face of it, Churchill is an unlikely hero of electoral recovery. The man widely labelled the “Greatest Briton” for his wartime efforts never won the popular vote in a general election. But after the Conservatives were reduced to 197 seats in the 1945 election, he kept buggering on as leader of the opposition. Five years later the Tories gained 90 seats and were on the brink of returning to power. No other post-war Conservative leader would make as many gains in a single election until David Cameron in 2010.

Yet if the party is to have any hope of returning to power, the next Tory leader will need to double Churchill’s success and then some. Once again, then, they will need to build a strong shadow cabinet and give its members the chance to shine. Churchill’s top team represented a broad range of Tory thinking and talent, and featured two future election-winning prime ministers.

Few, in Churchill’s team, were as able as Rab Butler, whose efforts in the 1945-51 parliaments made him a hero of the party rebuild. As head of Conservative research and policy, Butler re-established the intellectual foundations of the Conservative offer. He set about attracting the best and brightest on the centre-right to engage with the party, educated the grassroots about political issues of the day and created a comprehensive new agenda to take the Conservative Party into the second half of the 20th century.

Butler’s great insight was to recognise that the new context in which the Tory Party would have to survive and thrive was wholly different from the country it had governed before the war. To follow his lead today would be to avoid redeploying the playbooks of the Eighties or the 2000s, but to look with fresh eyes at the challenges of the 2020s. This is a much harder task. It requires analysing the mistakes the party made in office and the challenges it failed to confront. But, as Butler knew, this tougher road is the one back to office.

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Then, as now, homebuilding and homeownership were high on the agenda. And here, the present crop of aspiring leaders could find inspiration from the largely forgotten Noel Skelton. A Scottish Unionist MP and icon to many young Tories in the early 20th century, Skelton pioneered the concept of “property-owning democracy” in conservative thought. In The Spectator in 1923, he called for Conservatives to set out a vision for the country as “master of its own life, made four-square and secure and able therefore to withstand the shrill and angry gales which, in the new era’s uneasy dawn, sweep across the world”. He was very much addressing the challenges of the interwar years, but his ideas have had a permanent resonance in Tory politics, especially in a country that today has too much precarity, too little home ownership, and too few people who feel they have something worth conserving.

What Skelton set out in the pages of a magazine, Conservative politicians refined and helped make a reality later in the century. Chief among the stars of this story is Harold Macmillan — a hero of delivery. In 1951, Churchill asked Macmillan to “build the houses for the people”, warning it would “make or mar” his political career. His job was, as many Conservative leadership candidates claim to recognise, to deliver on what the party said it would do. It said it would build 300,000 homes a year; and he did so. Even Thatcher, whose own views weren’t always aligned with her predecessor, praised his record: “He didn’t say ‘no, this can’t be done or this will be blocked by the civil service’. He did overcome. He dominated his civil servants — they didn’t dominate him.”

If the Conservative Party wants to dominate again, its next leader must dig deep within the conservative tradition — to Thatcher, yes, but on to Macmillan, Butler, Churchill, Skelton, Disraeli and scores more, as well. A party as old and successful as the Conservatives can find ample inspiration for its future in the heroes of its past. It just has to look for it.

The 14th Earl of Home emerged as leader in autumn 1963 after one of the most contentious leadership selections in Conservative history. The process even forced him to rebrand, becoming Sir Alec Douglas-Home when compelled by democratic mores to disclaim his hereditary title. His party was divided, behind in the polls, and widely expected to lose the next election. The circumstances were unpropitious, and on first inspection Douglas-Home doesn’t offer an encouraging role model for Sunak. When voters had their say on his leadership in the 1964 election, he was ejected from office in favour of Harold Wilson. But in his short time at the helm, Douglas-Home managed to turn a widely forecast electoral blowout for the Conservatives into one of the closest contests of the century. When all the votes were counted, Labour led the Conservatives by just 0.7%, earning them an overall majority of just four seats.

Douglas-Home’s turnaround mission began by restoring stability and decency to a government rocked by scandal. Throughout the spring and summer of 1963, rumours swirled around Westminster about War Secretary John Profumo’s affair with the showgirl Christine Keeler, who’d also had a fling with a Soviet Naval attaché. Both decency and national defence were said to be under threat by the actions of a government minister. Profumo strenuously denied the allegations in Parliament — a straightforward lie — and was ultimately forced to resign, but only after his lapse in judgement exposed a government that appeared to have lost its moral compass. Douglas-Home was one of the few senior ministers who managed to stay aloof from the sordid affair, preserving his reputation and enabling his appointment as prime minister to signal a clear turning of the page.

Sunak’s premiership began in much the same spirit. On the steps of Downing Street one year ago, he told the country that his “government will have integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level”. It was a promise that things would change after two Tory premierships were prematurely felled — one by scandal, the second by a mini-budget that called the government’s economic credibility into question. Sunak, the former chancellor known for his hard work and teetotalism, was well placed to signal change at the top. But as is now clear, change alone isn’t enough for the public to look at the Conservatives with fresh eyes.

Like Douglas-Home before him, Sunak also needs to find ways to get the better of a revitalised Labour party. The Tories’ opponent six decades ago was the wily and accusatory Harold Wilson. From the moment Douglas-Home walked through the door of No. 10 Wilson pounced on his aristocratic status, alleging that he had won the leadership thanks to his “family and hereditary connections” in an affront to the meritocratic spirit of the age. Against Wilson’s class politics, Douglas-Home fired back that while he may have been the 14th Earl of Home, “Mr Wilson, when you come to think of it, is the 14th Mr Wilson”. His pithy line, combined with his decent and earnest approach to politics, helped make Labour’s attacks look both unfair and ineffective.

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Keir Starmer has been borrowing from the Wilson playbook in his attacks on Sunak. Whilst insisting that he is “very relaxed about people being rich and getting rich”, a tactic borrowed from another Labour leader, Starmer has consistently chided Sunak for his personal wealth. Yet Sunak is no landed aristocrat. His story — the migrants’ son who went on to lead his country — is self-evidently one of ambition realised in a meritocratic country. But Labour clearly sees the Sunak family’s success, and that of the family he married into, as one of his principal weaknesses. Douglas-Home repudiated Wilson by tapping into the country’s sense that what someone does, not what they’re born with, should determine how you judge them. Sunak would do well to turn his own story back on Labour, emphasising how his life shows a Britain where hard work and determination pays off — a message Labour will not want to oppose.

While Douglas-Home’s approach earned him the right to be heard among an electorate that had grown weary of his party, it wasn’t enough to win the election. Two key failings denied him another term. Firstly, Douglas-Home failed to heal his party after his bumpy ascent to the top of British politics. When Prime Minister Harold Macmillan announced his resignation in October 1963, there were no clear rules for the selection of the new prime minister. The decision would ultimately lie with the Queen, who would take her advice from Macmillan. Over the course of 10 days, senior Conservatives jostled in unprecedented and chaotic scenes to earn themselves the Queen’s commission. Douglas-Home stayed above the fray, refusing to comment on the leadership and even briefly ruling himself out of contention before he emerged as the choice of Macmillan and senior Tories.

The appointment of a peer crushed the ambitions and bruised the egos of many Conservatives, especially those in the Commons. Two senior MPs, Iain Macleod and Enoch Powell, were so outraged that they refused to serve in Douglas-Home’s government. Macleod went on to write a denunciation for The Spectator of the “magic circle” that had put Douglas-Home in office, while Powell vented his fury through anonymous articles in The Times, attacking the government’s policies and direction. Douglas-Home later said that their election year antics cost the Tories at the polls.

While Sunak’s elevation to the premiership followed a process with clear and predetermined rules, that hasn’t prevented a small number of MPs and activists from echoing allegations of illegitimacy from 60 years ago. Perhaps this was inevitable after the rapid turnaround of Conservative leaders left supporters of Johnson and Truss disgruntled and unexpectedly on the backbenches. Sunak has built a big-tent cabinet, including senior names from both former administrations. But the warning from Douglas-Home’s experience is that it only takes a small number of malcontents for a party to look divided. With the benchmark so low, it will take an almighty display of political skill from Sunak to keep his party’s divisions contained as polling day approaches.

Douglas-Home’s second big mistake concerned policy, specifically the abolition of the Resale Price Maintenance (RPM). Under the antiquated RPM, shops had to sell branded products at the price recommended by the manufacturer. With its removal, they could compete on price. So far, so good — for the consumer. The problem for Douglas-Home was that those in the firing line were an essential part of the Tory voting coalition: small business owners and shopkeepers. Fearing they would be undercut by major stores and driven out of business, they revolted. It was, according to Ian Gilmour, “Sir Alec’s Poll Tax”.

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One motivation for the policy was the pursuit of a legacy, a means of rebutting Labour’s claim that the Conservatives had overseen “13 wasted years”. Six decades on Starmer has been making the same criticism. The challenge for Sunak, who is clearly keen to use the time between now and the next election fruitfully, is to show that his party is still brimming with ideas while recognising what can be achieved in the fifth year of a parliament — and what cannot. By abolishing RPM, Douglas-Home discovered the worst kind of electoral dividing line: one that separated him from his voters. Sunak will be hoping that yesterday’s announcements can bring the two closer together and improve his party’s polling.

One silver lining for Sunak is that, compared to Douglas-Home, he has the benefit of time. Douglas-Home’s premiership ended after just 363 days; Sunak has around another year (longer if he really wants it) before going to the polls. No two elections are the same and the playbook that would have won for Douglas-Home in 1964 won’t be the same for Sunak. But if the Prime Minister can learn the lessons of 60 years ago, he could still deliver a competitive electoral performance, as Douglas-Home did, and possibly even a Conservative victory. If not, Sunak may find that it isn’t just the beginning of his premiership that looks like Douglas-Home’s, but its ending too.