When you knock on 29,000 doors and talk as I did to thousands of constituents about the importance of integrity, honesty & accountability in politics as a public service - being elected brings a responsibility to speak out. 

The vast majority of my constituents - whether Conservative voters or not - told me they were concerned that the Conservative Party in Parliament had lost its way and come to look like a cult of feuding idealogues self-indulgently taking the privilege of office for granted at the expense of serious public service in public office.
  
I suspect many were surprised by how strongly I agree. 

So in the last month I have wasted no time making the case that for the Conservative Party to re-earn public trust it first has to show that it has “got the message” and is serious about reform.

Please see my article published today on Conservative Home.

A month ago the electorate unceremoniously threw the Conservative Party out of office. The results and polls show that, unlike in 1997, this was not a generational zeitgeist change. Labour were the beneficiaries a Chernobyl-style meltdown of the Conservative vote.

Labour’s majority is wide but thin with many seats on a low percentage of the vote on low turnouts with small majorities. While Keir Starmer’s focus on a tonal change to “the politics of public service” has resonated, their mandate for the scale of reforms our creaking state needs is fragile. The problem with seeking power as “not being the people in power” is that you quickly become the problem you claimed to solve.

The new Government is fond of saying the country is “broken”. Our country isn’t broken. This country is famously resilient. But public respect for its politics and public administration is dangerously low.

What is broken after 14 years in office is the Conservative Party. On any measure you choose – electoral, financial, administrative, or cultural – the Party is damaged. If we were a company we would have just suffered a massive shareholder revolt, share price, and sales collapse, with customers and investors abandoning us after 8 years of mismanagement and board room chaos. It’s time to face the facts. We are politically bust.

That’s why I and others have been pushing so hard to insist that the process of the Leadership contest is just as important as who stands. Real leaders don’t court popularity. They show moral courage and core competence to earn respect.

Rishi Sunak deserves real credit for restoring a tone of decency, diligence, and integrity to the Government and more so for agreeing to stay on as leader for six months to give us time to find a new leader the right way. It would have been very easy for him to walk away immediately after election night.

If we get the process right and take the next few months to properly confront the tough truths that underpin our meltdown – and ask the millions of voters (and lapsed members) who have abandoned us “Why?”, we can lay the foundations for the reform, rehabilitation, and renewal we need to re-earn the public trust, respect, and authority essential to being an effective Opposition and Government-in-Waiting.

Given the scale of the stubborn and structural economic, administrative, and security challenges our country faces, which the new government will soon realise are not easy to tackle without radical and bold reforms for which it has no mandate, this election result does not mean we are inevitably out for 10-15 years. If we get this right and show the public that we “get it”, that we have heard and understand and respect their disillusionment and are committed to the hard process of rehabilitation, I believe we can quickly restore our broken party and our electoral standing.

Serious reform means a new constitution based on a real commitment to conservative values; a new deal for the members with a return to constituency-based membership with tangible benefits; and a change of the leadership rules so that party members can interview all applicants down to a shortlist from which MPs pick the leader they can work with, and a fundamental reorganisation of our funding, organisation, and governance to make it fit for the 21st Century. A leadership contest without reform will not solve our problem.

The seeds of this approach were sown at the vital meeting of the 1922 Committee convened the other week by Bob Blackman, its new Chair, at which many of us, from all “wings” of the Conservative “Big Tent”, spoke in unanimous agreement that we must avoid the siren voices of a rushed summer leadership contest and instead commit to a serious process of honest review of the state of our party and make the Conference in late September the platform for a leadership contest with a new leader in place by the end of the year.

The country hasn’t abandoned Conservatism. It has abandoned the Conservative Party. It no longer stands for anything more than the pursuit of power for itself without any obvious guiding philosophy or values.

No one can seriously doubt that there is a majority in this country prepared to vote for a party that believes in and stands for once-inspiring values like freedom, choice, enterprise,  responsibility (given and taken), decency, human rights, compassion, and diversity. Of course, there is. The only question is whether enough Conservatives still believe in it enough to rebuild a Party capable of building the broad base of electoral support needed to win a general election.

Despite many successful policies in the last 14 years (from Universal Credit to school reform, tax cuts for the lowest paid to massive life science and innovation economy investment), the unpalatable truth is that the Conservative Party has come to embody much that is profoundly unconservative.

Instead of unleashing insurgent enterprise, choice, and consumer power, we defended monopolistic utilities and crony capitalism in the City.

Instead of championing patient power and service and efficiency and challenging the bloated centralised bureaucracy of the NHS, we made it worse. Instead of embracing an entrepreneurial model of ‘Green Growth’ we backed the ‘Green Big State’ approach to Net Zero by bans, taxes, and massive subsidies.

Instead of overseeing an inspiring programme of building beautiful green New Towns, villages, and urban neighbourhoods properly planned with modern facilities properly integrated with rail and transport links (as, ahem, Margaret Thatcher did via the London Docklands Regeneration Company) we became the party of inflated land price speculation, land bank profiteering and massive commuter housing estate dumping on the outskirts of villages and towns with money going on inflated land prices instead of local infrastructure.

Instead of championing the quiet delivery of an inspiring programme of post-Brexit National Renewal we have screamed daily about Brexit betrayal, left-wing conspiracies, and culture wars with experts and business and indulged in an endless gameshow of political leadership contests with seeming contempt for mainstream voters. That’s not Conservatism – that’s a right-wing version of Corbynism.

The first step is listening to the public again and making their concerns our concerns. Then earning trust by setting out a coherent vision and policy program to address those concerns. The alternative – civil war over the ECHR, pacts with Nigel Farage, an obsession with Brexit and immigration to the exclusion of all else – is many things, but it’s not Conservative. We need to stop pretending it is.

Yes, we need to ask and understand – not assume – why so many previously Conservative voters feel betrayed by us – and why some switched to Reform UK.  But that is not the same thing as blindly aping Farage, which is no recipe for forming a serious Government-in-Waiting.

So bad have things got that it’s common to hear Conservative commentators saying they’d like us to be more like Reform UK. More like a party that has 5 MPs and is considered by 80 per cent of voters to be a dangerous con-trick? Seriously?  Anyone who thinks Reform UK is a model for Conservative renewal needs to take a long walk around the 600 constituencies where they are an irrelevant and divisive distraction.

The Question all the leadership contenders need to be asking at this stage is not “Why am I the right person to lead the Conservative Party?”

It’s “Why is the Conservative Party broken and how do we rebuild it into a force for inspiring Conservative values in the 21st century?”  

 Whoever asks that question will not only win – they’ll deserve to.

Written on July 28th before the riots but published on ConservativeHome on August 6th.