Politics shouldn’t be a last refuge for those who have done nothing else. It should be a duty taken up by people with something to offer.
The zombie Parliament resumes tomorrow. Labour MPs will return from a hot, ill-tempered recess and go through the motions. They’ll pretend to support a Prime Minister they can’t wait to be rid of, and continue giving badly written speeches full of AI slop about a non-existent Government agenda.
This Labour Parliament is the most economically illiterate the country has ever had. It has achieved nothing except make the country even poorer and more divided.
I’m proud of the quality and calibre of Conservative MPs, but we are heavily outnumbered by the 402 Labour MPs, 72 Lib Dems and assortment of Greens, SNP, Plaid Cymru and so on. When they have actually turned up, Reform MPs have voted with Labour for more benefits and more nationalisation.
This is also the most unserious Parliament the country has ever had. Every week the bar is lowered as Labour MPs pursue new ideas to restore Britain to greatness, ranging from supervised tooth brushing in schools to holding a sex toy exhibition.
Too many of the people who’ve entered Parliament recently are simply not up to the job. It’s not just that a large number come to Westminster because they couldn’t get into showbiz. The relentless attacks on social media and the pay compared to business or industry have all made the role less desirable.
Yet how are we to turn our country around without better people?
This is the next step I’m taking as I continue changing the Conservative Party. Our policy agenda has changed. We have dumped the net zero targets bankrupting the UK, and we’re leaving the ECHR so we can finally deport those who come to our country illegally. We’re scrapping taxes like stamp duty and cutting others like business rates and purging the virtue-signalling, performative regulation (woke nonsense) so that we can deliver growth. And there’s more to come.
But even the best policy agenda is not enough. We need great people who understand what the next Parliament will require. In response to Tony Blair this week, Keir Starmer wrote a 3,000-word soup explaining the country is only frustrated because we’re hungry for more of what he’s been serving. Andy Burnham doubled down: forget thin technocratic gruel, he would force-feed us full-on socialism.
Whichever of them is prime minister in 2029, they will leave an economic mess requiring a Herculean war effort to clear up. That is the task the Conservative Party under my leadership is now recruiting for. Economic literacy is key to this. I want men and women who understand that it is not government that creates growth; it is business. That the state should do fewer things but do them well. That economic policy should reward not just effort but risk. We cannot and should not have a zero-risk environment.
They need to be fiscal realists. There are no perfect solutions, only trade-offs. Everything has a cost. There are no free lunches… or free breakfast clubs. This doesn’t mean we’re just recruiting economic analysts. I want MPs who are focused not just on GDP stats but growth that people can see and feel.
But that’s not all. I have overhauled the candidate selection process for Tory MPs to search for the next generation. We need candidates with the five Cs: they must be clever, have charisma, communication skills, conviction and, most importantly, be Conservative.
I will not allow people who do not share our beliefs to use the Conservative Party as a vehicle to further their personal ambitions.
All former MPs will only be re-selected based on these criteria. Many have been barred from coming back and have subsequently defected to Reform. There is no special treatment. We are a new party and we are determined to put right what went wrong on our watch.
It is important that Conservatives provide a clear distinction with Labour. One of these is with our breadth of expertise and the strength and unity of our team. Incredibly, 90 per cent of the new Labour MPs at the last election came from a trade union, charity or public-sector background. Barely a fifth of Labour’s Cabinet has any private-sector experience. In the Shadow Cabinet, three-quarters of us do. That distinction matters.
I am a systems engineer. Engineers are taught to build, solve and deliver. The skills Labour MPs have acquired are not in constructing, but in obstructing, lobbying for more funding, campaigning for more benefits and more red tape. Britain has had too much obstruction. We need people who can get things built and problems fixed. Every serious commentator knows that Britain must start cutting welfare spending to fund defence. But Labour can’t, because it’s not in their DNA.
If we are going to mend our country, we must first mend our politics. That starts by ending the idea that the aim is to make politics a lifelong career, a mindset that incentivises MPs to effectively bribe their constituents to keep their jobs.
Ideally, Parliament should be a spell of public service to put what someone has learnt elsewhere into fixing their country. Serious people who don’t want to destroy our institutions but have the technical brilliance to fix them.
Yes, our vetting is tough, but shouldn’t it be if people want to run the country? Lazy vetting gets you MPs who turn out to have assaulted their girlfriends, as Reform UK has discovered. Their candidate in Makerfield responded approvingly to dirty fantasies about Carol Vorderman online. That’s not what the Conservatives are looking for.
We are recruiting real legislators. Not just those who want to be ministers, but those who want to hold ministers to account and stop bad decisions and bad laws from being made – including when it is your own side making them.
The fundamental failing of this Labour Government is that they came in with no plan and no vision for the country. They have not fixed any problems because they do not have a team able to grip them.
Only the Conservative Party can build a team for the economic war effort. We will need to fix every aspect of our system at once. There will be no kicking decisions into the long grass, only rolling our sleeves up and getting to work.
So this is my call to arms. If you have ever thought about a career in politics but decided it was too risky or you wouldn’t fit in, now is your time.
Business people, teachers, engineers, electricians, builders, creatives. We are looking for people from every walk of life who know how to get stuff done. We need people with courage. In return, I will make politics work for you.
We will allow you to keep your life. We don’t need people on the floor of the House five days a week giving speeches on subjects they barely understand just for a few likes on social media. Politics has become a stage. It needs to be a workshop.
We will reverse the culture that has turned legislators into social workers who are unable to stop the country going bankrupt. MPs should represent their constituents. But Parliament is about the big decisions. The ones that shape the future of our country.
Politics shouldn’t be a last refuge for those who have done nothing else. It should be a duty taken up by people with busy schedules and something to offer.
I know you are out there because I meet you every week. People who grew up in a country that worked, who can see how things have gone wrong in their industry and who desperately want to put things right.
Britain does not lack talent. It lacks a system that draws that talent into public life. Britain needs serious people to steer us through serious times. That’s who the Conservative Party is hiring. Join my team and help us get Britain working again.
