The United Kingdom is again in the market for a prime minister just 44 days after elevating the Conservative Party’s Liz Truss. Her term serves as a cautionary tale for leaders who fail to maintain the consent of the governed. 

The U.K. has burned through four leaders since 2010, a landslide year when David Cameron became the first Conservative to unseat a Labor Party government since 1979 — the year that gave us the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, who served until 1990.

Thatcher believed she had enough support to continue in office even longer, only to discover that her cabinet ministers had no appetite for a fight. “You’ll win if you’ve got all guns blazing,” she was thinking, she recalled in a C-SPAN interview, “but my guns wouldn’t blaze.”

Seated behind her desk, she “rocked backwards and thought, ‘Well, this weak lot. I really don’t think I can carry on with them.’” She handed over the reins to her chancellor of the Exchequer, John Major, who completed two decades of Conservative rule.

Today, Ms. Truss’s party also lacks fighters. When she proposed tax cuts and overturning a ban on hydraulic fracking for natural gas — standard policy fare for conservatives — she let the trial balloon float without doing much to tout these policies as steps that made sense for Britain. 

When tax reform sparked outcries from the left, she fired her finance minister, Kwasi Kwarteng, and failed to follow up on winning the fracking vote. Her immediate predecessor, Boris Johnson, also resigned, felled in a scandal over a party thrown in violation of the Covid rules he had imposed on the nation. 

The woman from whom he’d taken over, Theresa May, proved as inept as Mr. Cameron at executing Brexit (her heart wasn’t in it), and also gave up in frustration. The farce has gotten to the point that the Twitter account of the resident cat at No. 10 Downing Street, Larry, announced, “The King has asked me to become prime minister because this nonsense has gone on long enough.”

In a way, it’s the feline temperament that has crippled one prime minister after another. Cats are said to be aloof. They don’t seek approval from the humans they serve, confident that they can go it alone. An elected official, however, cannot disconnect from the public will.

Take tax cuts. The case is manifest that leaving money in the hands of the people leads to economic growth. Likewise, increased supplies of natural gas — hailed as a clean energy by greens not so long ago — would have helped keep Britons from freezing this winter. 

Yet none of this string of prime ministers has showed an aptitude for championing these causes, much less finalizing the Brexit their people voted for eight years ago. One after another, they have fallen into the classic trap that my late boss, the radio host Rush Limbaugh, warned about when addressing the freshman Republican class of 1994. 

“Remember the mistake the Republicans made in 1994,” he said in 2016. “They stopped teaching after they won the House. They assumed everybody had gone conservative, that the whole country had gone conservative.” This is a mistake never made by Thatcher or her partner in economic revival, President Reagan.

Reagan was always teaching and, as a result, in 1993 became the first two-term president to hand over power to his vice president in 150 years and the first to see a member of his party elected to succeed him since President Coolidge in 1928.

The ideas of Reagan — who, like President Lincoln, often told stories to illustrate his policies — had staying power. Generation X grew up enjoying the peace and prosperity of his leadership and, as a result, were the only age group in a recent New York Times poll to express a party preference for Republicans.

Achieving high office is not the end of governing, it’s just the beginning, and a successful leader in a democracy maintains the public’s willingness to support his or her policies, guns blazing. Without that kind of support, the leader is doomed, and the job proves as impossible as herding cats.