Before their 2024 bruising defeat, the Conservative Party had been in power for more than a decade, during which it had to deal with many exogeneous and endogenous crises. Meanwhile, the Conservatives have yet managed to win three general elections, making unprecedented gains in 2019. We argue that communication and leadership were key in establishing power relations and, within the theoretical framework of Seeger and Sellnow’s “crisis narratives” and Boin and t’Hart’s “Public leadership in times of crisis”, we propose to analyse critically the main narratives that Conservative Prime Ministers have dwelt on to secure their hold on power.