Conservative Party leadership elections have rarely been out of the headlines in recent years. Since David Cameron resigned in 2016 there have been five contests to decide who will lead the United Kingdom’s oldest and most successful political party. Yet for all the familiarity of Tory leadership battles, they are a surprisingly recent phenomenon.

Until the mid-1960s there was no mechanism for the party to choose its leaders. They were expected to ‘emerge’ via unknown and unknowable processes, usually involving party grandees and the monarch. Conservative leaders up until Alec Douglas-Home in 1963 were chosen this way. But the Tories’ traditional ways of working had begun to look out of date in an increasingly meritocratic Britain. After the Conservatives were defeated in the 1964 election, Douglas-Home commissioned a new set of leadership rules which put MPs in the driving seat. Over a series of ballots, MPs would vote for who they wanted to take the helm. Early the following year the rules were adopted and in July 1965, when Douglas-Home resigned as leader, the Conservative Party’s first ever leadership election began.

Three candidates entered the contest. The frontrunner was former chancellor of the exchequer Reginald Maudling. An avuncular man many found it hard to dislike, Maudling paired experience in the Cabinet with popularity among his colleagues. Their question was: did he have the focus and the drive to take on the new Labour government under Harold Wilson? Newspaper mogul Cecil King reflected: ‘Dear Reggie, though very intelligent, does like a good lunch and parties that go on late into the night.’ Maudling did little to dissuade his doubters; in the early months of opposition he took on 13 company directorships that regularly kept him away from Parliament.

While Maudling was away, Edward Heath made hay. At the beginning of the race he was the underdog and only a few years earlier the idea of him taking on the leadership had been absurd. However two developments made him a credible candidate. The first was his appointment, in late 1964, as chairman of the Conservatives’ Advisory Committee on Policy. He set up a vast apparatus for reviewing Conservative policy, including 36 groups made up of shadow ministers, MPs, peers and independent experts, and put himself at the apex of it. It boosted both his profile and his influence over the future direction of the party.

The other, more important, development was the opposition reshuffle in early 1965, which saw Maudling moved over to shadow the foreign secretary. On paper, this gave the former finance spokesperson the ability to boost his credibility on international affairs. But the outgoing Tory leader, Douglas-Home, was a foreign policy expert himself, denying Maudling the usual prominence of the role. What’s more, the biggest battles with the new Labour government were not over foreign affairs but economics, and Heath had moved into Maudling’s former role as shadow chancellor.

Heath was tasked with leading the Tory attack on the 1965 budget. Between April and July, 211 hours of debate over 22 parliamentary days, including six all-night sittings, were devoted to the measures. Heath’s colleagues were awestruck by the effectiveness of his attack and the skill with which he organised his shadow treasury team. A total of 1,200 amendments were tabled and the government was forced to accept almost 100 Conservative amendments without a division. On three votes, Heath managed to coordinate the first government defeats on a Finance Bill in over 40 years. As Heath later acknowledged, his work over these months was vital in the leadership election to come.

Making up the trio of candidates was the outsider in the contest, Enoch Powell. Instead of the racism which defined much of his career, in the mid-1960s Powell was best known for his free market views and ran, in the words of his biographer Simon Heffer, to secure ‘recognition of his and his ideas’ small, but significant, influence in the party’. Powell also had an eye on the future and said he stood to leave a ‘visiting card’ for a subsequent leadership bid.

On 27 July MPs filed into Committee Room 14 of the House of Commons to cast the first ever votes for a Conservative leader. The bookmakers expected a Maudling victory. Maudling agreed and, having cast his own vote, went for lunch. Heath was also confident; his campaign manager had told him he would get 150 votes and lead the pack.

When the chairman of the 1922 Committee, William Anstruther-Gray, announced the results Heath had 150 votes, exactly as predicted; Maudling had 133; and Powell just 15. Heath had won with a majority of the vote, but it was not enough under the party rules which required both an absolute majority and a 15 per cent lead over the nearest rival to win the contest on the first round. A second ballot would be held. Few people, least of all Maudling, wanted that. ‘The Party had spoken … there was not much point in asking people to say the same thing over again.’ He withdrew and, when Heath’s name was the only one put forward in the second round, the contest was over. Heath went on to fight four elections as leader – a record unmatched since.

The rules used in 1965 lasted, with occasional tweaks, for just over three decades. They were used to choose the Conservatives’ first female leader, Margaret Thatcher, as well as her two successors, John Major and William Hague. In 1998 Hague decided that the democratisation that empowered MPs to choose their leader should be taken even further and members should be given a role, too. These rules – in which MPs pick their top two candidates before the final winner is chosen by party members – remain in place today. A quarter of a century later, Hague reflected in 2022: ‘We made an honest attempt to improve how our political system worked that has, despite our best efforts, failed the test of time’ and called for the Conservative leader, as almost six decades ago, to be elected by the party’s MPs alone.

Lee David Evans is the John Ramsden Fellow at the Mile End Institute at Queen Mary, University of London.