<\/p>\n
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is the latest Conservative leader to feel his party\u2019s wrath following a string of resignations from his scandal-plagued government.<\/p>\n
Here are three leaders previously ousted by their fellow Tories:<\/p>\n
\u2013 Margaret Thatcher \u2013<\/p>\n
Britain\u2019s longest-serving prime minister of the 20th century tearfully stepped down in November 1990 after a cabinet revolt.<\/p>\n
She had vowed to fight on after narrowly winning the first round of a leadership ballot, but then accepted that her position had become untenable.<\/p>\n
Although she had won a third term by a landslide in 1987, her introduction of a universal \u201cpoll tax\u201d payable by every adult regardless of income was met with violent opposition.<\/p>\n
She also faced deep opposition within her cabinet for staunchly fighting having closer ties with Europe.<\/p>\n
Her once close ally Geoffrey Howe resigned from the cabinet and launched a scathing attack on her Europe policy in parliament.<\/p>\n
That precipitated the leadership challenge by former defence and environment minister Michael Heseltine, before John Major emerged as the new prime minister in a vote among Tory MPs.<\/p>\n
\u2013 Iain Duncan Smith \u2013<\/p>\n
Duncan Smith, one of a cabal of right-wing eurosceptics dubbed \u201cbastards\u201d by Major, won the Conservative leadership in 2001, replacing William Hague after the party suffered another election defeat to Labour.<\/p>\n
His surprise ascent was helped by Thatcher and her loyalists in parliament.<\/p>\n
But the self-styled \u201cquiet man\u201d of UK politics struggled to hold his own against Labour\u2019s charismatic prime minister, Tony Blair.<\/p>\n
By October 2003, the parliamentary party was despairing of Duncan Smith\u2019s inability to make any headway against Blair, despite huge public opposition to Britain\u2019s involvement in the war in Iraq.<\/p>\n
He lost a confidence vote, becoming the first Tory leader not to fight a general election since Neville Chamberlain, who was accused of appeasing Adolf Hitler in the late 1930s.<\/p>\n
\u2013Theresa May<\/p>\n
Former interior minister Theresa May came to power in July 2016 after Britain\u2019s shock referendum vote to leave the European Union, which prompted then prime minister David Cameron to resign.<\/p>\n
She immediately found herself in charge of negotiating Britain\u2019s exit terms, but her attempts to negotiate a \u201csoft\u201d Brexit were shot down by hardline Brexiteers within the Conservative party.<\/p>\n
May called a snap general election in June 2017 in the hope of strengthening her position against the Brexit rebels and Labour.<\/p>\n
It proved a disastrous bet, with Labour under its far-left leader Jeremy Corbyn making strong inroads and forcing her to turn to hardline, pro-UK unionists in Northern Ireland for parliamentary backing.<\/p>\n
She survived a confidence vote called by Conservative rebels in December 2018.<\/p>\n
But after her Brexit deal was rejected in the House of Commons for a fourth time, by dozens of Conservative rebels, her leadership was mortally weakened.<\/p>\n
She announced in May 2019 that she was stepping down, triggering the leadership race that brought Johnson to power two months later.<\/p>\n
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British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is the latest Conservative leader to feel his party\u2019s wrath following a string of resignations from his scandal-plagued government. Here are three leaders previously ousted by their fellow Tories: \u2013 Margaret Thatcher \u2013 Britain\u2019s longest-serving prime minister of the 20th century tearfully stepped down in November 1990 after a cabinet […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1143614,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[187],"tags":[5827,19949,1068,1865,2267,958,19950],"class_list":["post-1144273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-politics","tag-british","tag-conservative","tag-full","tag-leaders","tag-list","tag-party","tag-toppled"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1144273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1144273"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1144273\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1144273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1144273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1144273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}