Since ten o’clock last Thursday night the new reality has become all too clear for my party, delivered to us with a brutal blow by the electorate.
To govern is a privilege, not a right. We have too often taken it for granted and that must change.
There is no denying the successes we achieved during our fourteen years in office that we should always be proud of. Delivering Brexit, getting more people into work, giving our children a better start in life through bold education reforms, cutting crime, devolving power to local people, and rescuing the economy and the public finances after thirteen years of Labour government — to name a few.
But in recent years we lost our well-deserved reputation for competence and good government. We were too often preoccupied with infighting. We were too often divided. Our standards slipped and with it went our focus on delivery. That cannot happen again. The British people deserve better.
We must now rediscover that competence to become an effective opposition and give ourselves the best possible chance of returning to government at the next election.
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That means a sensible post-mortem on what went wrong and finding the right path forwards. As we do this we must remember two vital things. Firstly, it cannot descend into bitter infighting and finger pointing. That is exactly how we ended up here.
There is strength in unity, and the Conservative Party has always been at its best when it embraces being a broad church. We lost voters to the left and the right, and we won’t win them all back if we narrow our offer.
Secondly, we cannot delude ourselves that there are always simple answers, either to our problems as a party or the challenges we face as a country. That is what parties that never aspire to the challenge of governing do, and what the Labour Party did — the holes in which we are already starting to see.
We are now His Majesty’s opposition. That means it is incumbent on us that as we find our feet, that we don’t become distracted by navel-gazing instead of holding Keir Starmer and the Labour government to account. As shadow home secretary I am focused on ensuring that their surrendering of our borders is not going unchallenged, and there has been plenty for me to sink my teeth into already.
When they cancelled the Rwanda policy on day one and got rid of our small boats deterrent, what did they tell the experts at the National Crime Agency who said we need a deterrent?
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And did Labour have the courtesy to engage with the Rwandans before they broke off an economic partnership with a Commonwealth country?
When they announced their gimmick of a new border command, did they set out a plan to fire and rehire the British Army captain who already runs our small boats operational command?
When they decided to make 100,000 more illegal immigrants eligible for asylum — did they see the amnesty that the last Labour government granted and think they could get away with another?
To be an effective opposition we need to be a credible opposition. We need to act as players, not as commentators. We should not spend the next five years just pointing at problems or shouting at Labour from the sidelines.
We need to be able to offer our own solutions too, built from our Conservative values of security, prosperity and patriotism. We must do this together, across the whole party: current and former MPs, members, activists and all other supporters, to ensure we get it right.
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We must get our act together. We need to unite in order to deliver. It will take humility and hard work, to recover our reputation for competence and integrity, to rebuild trust in our party, and unite behind a broad platform that will give people a reason to vote Conservative again.
We must do this, for the sake of our party and country, so we can put ourselves in the best possible position to win the next general election and once again deliver for the British people.
