Ladies and gentlemen, my father was a toolmaker.

My mother, by the way, scrubbed floors.

Other people's floors.

They were going to play this absurd game of more working class than that.

Oh, by the way, I was born in a three-bedroom, pebble-dashed house.

Can we just...

I went to grammar school.

I was a scholarship boy.

I did not, however, disgrace my school like Starmer by getting only two Bs and a Cs.

Right.

Enough of the nonsense.

Let's go back to, can I just say, it's vital to recognize Starmer is not very clever.

He's a little bit like a junior Gordon Brown.

Like Gordon Brown, he's very thin-skinned.

Humor, wit, cleverness, fleetness of foot, needling will get that man.

Right.

Now, what has happened?

Well, again, Enunciator said, history.

History, we've been here absolutely before. 50 years ago, can I remind you, was the moment in which Keith Joseph, in 1974, after another great election defeat, the defeat of Edward Heath, said, I have not been a conservative.

I have called myself a conservative.

I've been a member of a conservative government, but I haven't been conservative and that government hasn't done conservative things.

And that is the beginning of Margaret Thatcher's revolution.

That government, that government of Edward Heath, began with all the right resolutions.

Indeed, talking of, as it were, not winning from the center, it began with the sales and declaration of free market economics.

It then, under the pressure of events, immediately collapsed back into Keynesianism, inflation.

The Barber boom was exactly the kind of thing that Rishi Sunak triggered.

Do we know property prices in London, in 1972-3, rose three times?

Inflation on extraordinary scale.

Thatcher recognized that.

Thatcher was taught by Keith Joseph what conservatism was.

The great discovery, for her, of Hayek, the realization that socialism destroys, that it destroys freedom, that it destroys everything that made the West, and particularly Britain, the pioneer country in all of this, great.

And the result of that extraordinary revolution of 50 years ago was Margaret Thatcher and the recovery of the genuine conservatism.

But of course, always with one nation, or as Margaret beautifully described it, no nation conservatives fighting against it.

So we have been here before.

Margaret had to cope with an internal enemy, and I'm sorry I'm using that word.

She was totally unambiguous.

There were those on side and there were those off side.

We have to recognize that.

She also recognized, centrally and absolutely, that you have to undo before you can do.

She repealed trade union legislation.

She repealed nationalization.

She opened up public sector housing.

An incoming Tory government, a real one, will have to do all of those things.

So what our failure has been is that we've forgotten the lessons of Margaret Thatcher.

And what I would like to begin by doing, we're engaged essentially at this stage now in the process of the conversion of the party, its members, who I don't think need much conversion, but more particularly in the conversion actually of our MPs.

They need to be given Margaret Thatcher's Keith Joseph lecture.

It needs to have, because many of them are not very good at reading, it needs actually to have a single series, a simple series of the big statements.

I'm being deadly serious.

This needs to be circulated, right.

Why is it that centrism doesn't work?

It's very simple.

Left is wrong and right is right.

This is not a moral statement.

This is a statement of absolute, observable, testable, historical truth.

Socialism always fails.

Always, always fails.

A sensible, sensibly regulated, intelligently applied free market economics always, always works because it is founded on freedom.

The thing that has created the West is freedom.

If you look at the Labour Party's manifesto, there is simply not a single, single reference to that word freedom in it.

Now, why then has the left won again?

Why has Stormer won?

What happened?

Well, let's just look at it.

We were told again by Nancy Utter not to blame.

I'm sorry, I have to.

If we go back to 2005, to Cameron coming to power as leader of the Tory party, there was this notion that we have to move left, that we have to move in the wrong direction.

That is exactly what happened.

When finally they won, or they didn't win, the coalition came in in 2010, Blair's memoirs were handed round, particularly marked up by Michael Gove with the description, this was the new Machiavelli, this is how we should rule.

And the catastrophe begins there, the absolute disaster and the shame, because we vacated the ground that is properly ours.

What is a Conservative Prime Minister doing?

I am gay.

What is a Conservative Prime Minister doing when he says his greatest achievement is gay marriage?

It is deranged.

What is Theresa May doing when she says that we will actually legislate a binding commitment to net zero?

What is she doing when she talks about burning racial injustices, when we're the most equal society in the West?

We equal, of course, once because we had actual equality under the law, something again that we've forgotten.

Because what that acceptance of what Blair did is exactly as Mark referred to before, it involved the destruction of what Margaret Thatcher realised was what had held Britain's greatness together, which is a unique system of parliamentary government which guaranteed and something quite extraordinary, a continuation between past and present and future, which took its power not from abstract notions of sovereignty, but from the fact that Parliament holds its sovereignty, is sovereign, because it represents everybody.

This idea going back to the very end, to the very beginning of parliamentary history, to the 13th century, in which the judges would rule to some sort of recalcitrant little bot somewhere in Yorkshire who said, no, I will not pay my taxes.

The judges would say simply, yes, you will, because you're bound by Parliament, as everybody in England is present in Parliament, either in person or by his representative.

So the first thing we've got to do, and again, Mark referred to this point brilliantly, we've to educate people.

We've a vast, vast task of educating our MPs and of educating the public.

We've abandoned this.

We've abandoned the public sphere to the left.

We have to reclaim it.

We have to reclaim it with clear language, because what has happened with that abandonment of the idea of Parliament at the centre is we have deliberately removed, and Mark, I think, remembered our conversation quite well, but he left out the central point.

If you marginalise Parliament in decision-taking, you remove the only body that is directly subject to popular scrutiny.

If you have Bank of England setting interest rates, if you have the Supreme Court deciding when Parliament can be dissolved or when it can't, if you had judges determining whether or not we can drill for oil, as the latest extraordinary thing has happened, none of those people are answerable to you.

So, the entire process of government becomes remote, alien.

That is why there was that passionate desire for taking back control with Brexit, but it transpired that Brussels wasn't the person that was tying down the great British people, so supreme in freedom, so supreme in the creativity.

It wasn't Brussels that was tying us down.

It wasn't Brussels that was wrapping us in bonds, if you remember, like the Lilliputians with Gulliver.

It was the quango.

It was the disgracefully politicised civil service.

It was all of that that was doing it, and we did nothing about it.

We connived.

We did not repeal.

The first thing that a serious, incoming Conservative government has to do, quite simply, is to repeal the whole of the legislation of New Labour, the setting up of the Supreme Court, the incorporation of the Human Rights Act, the Equality Act, all have to be repealed, because again, can we get this quite clear?

Human rights sounds lovely and cuddly.

The left has perverted language.

Human rights are not cuddly, because human rights have been perverted.

They're now designed to protect minorities against the majority.

Human rights, this is why Churchill would not have approved.

The left constantly says, this is Churchill's creation.

Churchill created human rights, mistakenly in my view, or created the idea of the European Convention, to protect the individual against the state.

If instead you decide that the purpose of human rights is to protect the minority against the majority, you can only do that by an aggressive state that limits the freedom of the individual, as we see catastrophically with the attempted limits on the freedom of speech.

That absolutely central thing.

We are the creation of freedom of speech.

This is the only reason that this tiny little island invented virtually the whole of modernity.

It is actually a logically sustainable, historically sustainable statement that we invented modernity.

So the left, this is where centrism goes wrong.

All left-wing parties have to move to the center, because they've got to disguise themselves with right-wing policies to be elected.

That is exactly what Starmer has done.

And isn't it a sign of our disgrace that in our folly we abandon the prisons so they can no longer hold prisoners?

We starve the army in favor of what?

In favor of foreign aid so that Labour can now pose as the party of NATO and defense.

This is the disgrace.

And the moment, of course, the right tries to move to the center and adopts left-wing positions, as we've seen in this election.

It is a catastrophe.

However, I think there is hope.

If my analysis is right, that what we have now is a state in which there's a fairly clear divide.

The divide, interestingly enough, which Starmer himself has actually admitted.

Why does Starmer talk so loudly about the public service?

It is.

And why does he also talk so loudly and misleadingly about his father being a toolmaker?

It is, quite simply, because the Labour Party has ceased to be the party of the working class.

It is now the party of a new ruling class.

It's the party of the quangocracy, of the judges, of the civil service, of the public sector trade unions.

In other words, when it fails, which it will fail, because left-wing governments always fail, we will see standing exposed the whole of this machinery, the whole of this machinery that hates one thing, ladies and gentlemen.

It hates the people.

It hates parliament.

It hates democracy for the simple reason it is only the people that have actually proved resistant to the absurd doctrines of woke.

It is only amongst the people that you will find a clear understanding that women do not have a penis, that chaps do not have a cervix.

It is only amongst the people that you will find a clear understanding that once upon a time it was the birthright of an Englishman, and even an Englishwoman, to speak freely.

And from that freedom arose everything that mattered.

So what I would like us to do, then, is to also recognise, because we all need to recognise our failures, Thatcher failed, too.

Thatcher failed because you couldn't do everything at once.

She sorted out the extent to which there had been nationalised industries.

She cut back enormously on trade union rights.

She began to open up public sector housing.

But she left utterly untouched this entire fabric of state institutions.

She left untouched the NHS.

She left untouched the civil service, the universities, the lot.

The future of incoming Conservative government has got to recognise that these are the points of attack.

These are the points at which we have the soft underbelly of those opposite, and we've got to recognise again, it's a proud thing to say, conservatism speaks for the people.

We need to remember that.

We need to be absolutely clear about that.

I will end with a book, which I think I've been constantly referring to it, which describes so many of the problems we face now, 1984.

Those of you who are familiar with 1984 will know who the members of the party are.

The members of the party are exactly whom you would expect.

They are the school teacher, they are the bureaucrat, they are the so-called educated middle class.

And outside, there's a great mass of the pros who continue drinking their beer and leading reasonably free lives.

They're the people we will depend on.

They're the people who voted for reform.

They're the people that we've got to reincorporate in the party, but on a very different basis from Farage, a basis that recognises the history of the country, that recognises the history of the Conservative party, that recognises the history of Parliament and its ability to incorporate and to bind and to do that most wonderful Burkean thing of binding up the generations of past and present and future.

The risk is, ladies and gentlemen, we do not want a right as there is on the other side of the channel, a right which is as radical and as destructive and as dangerous as the left.

We are better than that.

Never let us forget it.