It's lovely to be back in beautiful Berkshire. As you said, I was brought up here, I went to Forest School, had an incredibly happy childhood here. And it is absolutely lovely to be back. I've never been to this golf club before, but Twyford and Wargrave, I haven't visited for some time, wonderful to see them.  

You haven't come here to hear about my childhood… However, I'm going to tell you a little bit of something about my more recent past. And I'm going to lay down a challenge to you, ladies and gentlemen. If you want froth and everything's going to be all right and everything is marvellous and everything is going to go in the right direction, well then you invited the wrong speaker. I'm going to lay down a few home truths, which I hope you find useful and constructive. 

And the part of my more recent career that I want to focus on is, as you said, Madam Chairman, I was the Director General of the Institute of Economic Affairs for 14 years, from 2009 to 2023. For those of you who aren't aware of it—I've spoken to one or two of you who were engaged and active in the IEA way back in the 1970s, I think—but for those of you who haven't heard of it or are unaware of it, the IEA is a think tank. Think of that as a research institute. It comes up with ideas. It's not a political machine, it's an ideas machine. And it provided a great deal of the work that led to the Thatcher revolution, the concept behind it. 

So I became the Director General of the IEA at the tail end of 2009. And if you can think back to that period of time, the long period of Labour government was mercifully coming to an end. And it looked likely that when an election was held, the Conservatives would come to office in some way or another. Obviously, it ended up being in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, not with an outright victory for the Conservatives. But going back to 2009, I was buoyant. I was optimistic. A long period of Labour rule was coming to an end. And I was running a think tank that was putting forward pro-market, low tax, small state ideas, and the Conservative Party was very likely going to return to office. 

Wow, had I fallen on my feet. Now was the time for something like Thatcherism 2.0. I could barely contain my excitement. Indeed, one of my early meetings was to meet David Cameron when he was still leader of the opposition, in which he invited me as the incoming director in and a number of other luminaries from the Institute of Economic Affairs to pick our brains, give him some, you know, blue-sky thinking, 30,000-feet thinking. David Cameron always used to talk in those terms; he didn't just say, 'What do you think?' It was always 'blue-sky thinking' and '30,000-feet thinking.' And I was hugely excited by it. 

And of course, the Conservatives did come to power. Okay, initially in coalition with the Liberal Democrat Party, but then won an outright majority for the party in its own right in 2015, just about clung on in the slightly misjudged election in 2017, and won again in 2019. This is quite a stretch of Conservative government. And I was there with the job of promoting free market, low tax, small state, less red tape ideas. 

And when I left the IEA, which was a little earlier than when the Conservatives left office—I left at the end of December 2023, so almost coterminous with the period that the Conservatives were in power—I thought I needed to do a bit of reflection. Why had I failed so badly? I had been running a free market campaign whilst the Conservatives had been in power continually and I hadn't got really any of my ideas onto the statute books. I look back on that period—okay, there were still a few months to go, and although I didn't wish it, I think all of us in our heart of hearts knew that the Conservatives were going to lose that general election, probably very badly, and indeed we did. 

But I look back on it and really scratch my head, and I felt a little bit ashamed, to be honest. Had I wasted 14 years of my life arguing? Alongside what should on the face of it have been a sympathetic government—I wasn't dealing with Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister or John McDonnell as Chancellor, I was dealing with a Conservative administration. So I thought long and hard before launching this new organisation, well, now a couple of years old, there are some leaflets on the table, called Popular Conservatism, sometimes known as PopCon. 

And my mission was to ask this essay question, partly of myself, but also of the Conservative Party and the wider Conservative movement. Why was it, after 14 years in power, from 2010 to 2024, that the UK had not apparently moved in any Conservative direction whatsoever? Taxes had gone up. Spending had gone up. The amount of national borrowing had gone up. Although somewhat harder to measure, red tape, regulation, and the number of regulators had gone up. 

I'm not saying there were no successes. I think some of the reforms to the education system in the early days were good. And it's also worth saying that there's a defensive posture that you sometimes want to strike: I think only the Conservative Party could have got Brexit done, and on two occasions we stopped a pseudo-communist Jeremy Corbyn from becoming Prime Minister. No mean feat. 

Nevertheless, I invite you to think of the question this way. Supposing some Martian had come down to Britain in 2010, before the Conservatives returned to power, and just taken a snapshot of the UK at that time, collected up all the data—what the prevailing tax rates were, how much public money is being spent, what does the national debt look like, how much freedom do individual men and women have? Just take that snapshot and then return to the planet Mars. And then 14 years later, just as the Conservatives leave office, comes back and takes another snapshot on the day before Keir Starmer became Prime Minister. And just through those two data sets, is asked to judge what sort of government did we have over the last 14 years. 

Because taxes have gone up, indeed, to their highest level since Clement Attlee's post-war socialist government. Fiscal policy has been so slack that it is almost incontinent. Here is a really scary number to deal with: if you look at the national cash debt of three trillion pounds. By the way, it's a lot worse than that because that doesn't include the huge liabilities that we have incurred with regard to public sector pensions, which are not included in that figure. But if you were just to look at our cash debt of £3 trillion, the first £1 trillion of that was chalked up between the year 1694 and 2010. 316 years it took us to chalk up our first one trillion pounds of national debt. 

Now I don't know how many of you remember that period of time, but these were quite tough times for the United Kingdom. We had quite a lot to deal with over those 316 years. We fought World War I and World War II, the Crimean War, the Korean War, the Boer War. We dealt with the Spanish flu. There were cost of living crises, I'm sure, over those 316 years.  

But over those 316 years, we chalked up our first £1 trillion worth of debt. 316 years. The next trillion took us a mere decade. 2010 to 2020. We chalked up as much debt as we did in the previous 316 years under a period of Conservative government. And the third trillion we've added on in nearly the last six years. 

Now I wasn't interested in this essay question because I wanted to throw around blame. My experience at the IEA, when I was dealing with lots of Conservative MPs, researchers, influencers, and journalists, was I typically found they were sympathetic to what I was saying. Taxes needed to go down, regulation was too tight, the government was spending too much money, the welfare state was getting out of control. I mean, some were more sympathetic than others. I mean, frankly, had everyone had the seriousness and the depth of intellectual thought as the Member of Parliament for Wokingham [John Redwood], in my own county, it would have been a bit easier. But nevertheless, those who weren't quite as solid and reliable as John were still broadly of this view. 

So I didn't feel I was finding any hostility—I mean, occasionally, but not much—from within the conservative movement. So why didn't this happen? Why didn't we get taxes down and regulation down and liberalise business? Compare the last period of Conservative government, 14 years, with the Thatcher period of government where huge strides were made. The country was saved and absolutely turned around on the systems. 

So I set up PopCon, this organisation, to ask that question and attempt to answer it. And if you accept my premise that we drifted in a left-wing direction over 14 years of Conservative government, why? 

Now the default, I think rather boring mainstream media response is it's sort of down to the personal frailties of individual prime ministers. You know, that Cameron had to deal with the Liberal Democrats, Theresa May wasn't really on the side, Boris didn't focus on it, Brexit took up too much bandwidth, Liz Truss tried to move too quickly. By that point, Rishi Sunak just needed to stabilise the ship. 

Well, I don't buy that. Although it is definitely true that people in politics have personal priorities, I think something bigger was going on. And I think in broad brush terms, I found it and I can explain why that period of Conservative government was a relative failure. And if you agree with my answer, I think it provides a huge challenge for what the Conservatives have to do, but also a roadmap for when we return to office. 

Essentially, Tony Blair quietly, in an incremental way, changed the way Britain was governed. Nobody really saw it that starkly. I can remember back to the 1997 general election, which was in many ways a bit similar to 2024. It was inevitable that a long period of Conservative rule was ending; I voted Conservative in that election in 1997, but I knew Blair was going to win. And you know what? I wasn't particularly worried. It seemed to me that Tony Blair had broadly embraced Thatcherism, that we weren't going to suddenly have 95% tax rates or the nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy. I wasn't expecting the trade unions to suddenly run Britain again.  

I was relaxed. I was a little bit sad, I would have preferred a Conservative victory, but I wasn't terrified, because the economics of Thatcherism had been accepted across the political spectrum. He was going to lean a little bit to the left within that broad mainstream consensus, but not enormously. 

But what he went about doing, almost unseen, was changing the British constitution and how Britain is governed. And I think there are two stark ways this occurred, which we barely noticed at the time. The power was flowing away from our democratically elected parliament in two big different directions. 

One was to what I call the quangocracy—the quangos, the committees of experts who are supposed to now apparently make policy and determine policy in our interest because we're a bit too dim to work it out ourselves, and we need brilliant technocrats in every area. You don't want a general minister for the environment, no no no no no. You need an expert committee on flood defence who have spent all of their lifetime doing it. Quangos—quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations, expert committees and agencies—ballooned. There are now more than 400 of them. I think at the last count, there were 444 of these groups. Think the Environment Agency, Ofcom, Ofgem, the Arts Council, Natural England, the whole lot, 444. Easy number to remember. I wish it was 666, because that could be a slightly more appropriate number. But they are everywhere. And on a day-to-day basis, they essentially started running things. 

And we have seen it probably most starkly over the period of COVID. To all intents and purposes, we were run by SAGE. We were run by a committee of scientists. Not really by our politicians, but by epidemiologists. Now I'm not saying these people are stupid or have nothing to bring to the table, but nevertheless, we have handed over day-to-day control of policymaking to expert quangos and committees. This is dangerous because to a man with a hammer, every problem is a nail. The job of politics is to balance things off. Now, how can we stop too many people dying of COVID whilst also making sure the economy doesn't tank and that people can go to hospital and get a cancer diagnosis? A range of things to balance off. You want scientists and experts on tap, but not on top, as Winston Churchill was fond of saying. Well, they're on top. Basically, our country on a day-to-day level, in large part, is run by the quangos. 

And this isn't just an affliction of Conservatives. Let me give you a couple of examples from Labour's rule over the last couple of months, which I think have infuriated some of the more sensible people in the other party. I can remember an incident that occurred in November 2023. Now, you might consider this a rather trivial incident, but I think it speaks to how Britain is governed. What occurred here was that in a classroom in some school in Britain—I don't think we've ever identified it, and we probably shouldn't—one nine-year-old schoolboy had accused a classmate of, quote, being a 'retard' and 'smelling like fish.' Not a very nice thing for a nine-year-old boy to say. I would have thought an appropriate punishment of, I don't know, three detentions, a strict speaking to, would have been the right and appropriate response. I'm not in the teaching profession. These things happen in the classroom. What actually occurred? The police were called to deal with a non-crime hate incident in the classroom, to deal with this nine-year-old boy. So the police—again, an autonomous, non-governmental organisation—got involved. 

And understandably the British public wondered what is going on here. I can't approve of this nine-year-old boy's behaviour, but what the hell are the police doing? Now we're getting back in line, but the cops are in the classroom? Well, Bridget Phillipson, God bless her, now the Secretary of State for Education, was asked to appear on a range of television and radio interviews to explain what was happening in the British state education system. And she couldn't explain it at all. She wouldn't explain it.  

Her answer throughout every interview was, 'I cannot comment on operational matters.' Well, what's the point of having a Secretary of State for Education then? What's the point of having a politician whose job is what goes on in British classrooms who can't even comment on this, let alone fix it? 

A rather more serious example, and I'm sorry he's no longer a member of our party, but Robert Jenrick, when he was the Justice Spokesman for the Conservative Party, managed to come across, with lightning quick speed, some guidance issued by another quango called the Sentencing Council. It's down to these people to provide advice about whether sentencing for certain crimes is going right or going wrong, you know, what sort of things are being taken into account. Jenrick came across this and was able to ambush the then Justice Secretary, now the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, over the dispatch box. Because the Sentencing Council, a quango of the great and the good, top lawyers, nearly all left-wing from the judges downwards, they had issued new advice to suggest that your minority ethnic or religious status should essentially be taken into account before any custodial sentence associated with your crime was considered. I mean, embedding two-tiered justice right on the tin. Absolutely advertised straight out. 

Shabana Mahmood—I can't speak directly for her, I'm just observing her immediate reaction—I think, if you look at her reaction in the House of Commons, literally didn't know this guidance had been issued. She seemed genuinely surprised. She certainly didn't defend it. She agreed with Robert Jenrick over the dispatch box that she would write a very firm letter to this quango saying their advice was not good. She did send it. The quango wrote back saying, 'This is none of your business. You are the Justice Secretary. Who the hell do you think you are as a cabinet minister in a democratically elected government? We set the rules around sentences.' Absolutely unbelievable that our democratically elected government is at the mercy of these quangos, 440 of them. 

The second big problem, the second area where we have given away colossal power, again, was not particularly screamed about at the time. Some people did point it out—John Redwood has a book about this, actually. Some people did point it out, but not enough on the Conservative side. Power was given away to the judiciary and the legal system. 

Now I want an independent judiciary and legal system in Britain that decides cases on facts and then imposes appropriate penalties or sentences or whatever it might be. Tragically, this is not the fault of the legal profession or the judges. We have politicised our legal profession. If you wish to affect immigration and asylum policy in Britain, you are now better off trying to become a High Court judge than you are to become a Member of Parliament. Because the Human Rights Act, which embeds into English law our signature on the European Convention of Human Rights, along with the Equality Act, now invites judges to make decisions about who should stay in this country and who shouldn't. And with incredible discretion, the infamous Article 8, it's called, of the European Convention, that people are entitled to a private and family life. 

Now any decent modern historian will tell you that when that was written after the Second World War, its meaning was supposed to be that the Gestapo should not be able to walk into your house. That's what they were trying to get at. What it now means is if your daughter wets the bed, I can't kick you out of the country. If your son has a preference for English-tasting chicken McNuggets rather than foreign-tasting chicken McNuggets, that might not be decisive, but that is the sort of thing the courts should bear in mind.  

We have handed what should be political decisions about who can stay in this country and who can't to our judges. This is insane and unfair on our legal profession. 

And it's not just immigration, ladies and gentlemen. Take a look at the Equality Act, rushed through in the fag-end of the Labour government, but not unravelled by the Conservatives. The Equality Act essentially has in it an economic equation, which you could say is the Marxist Labour theory of value, in that judges are now going to decide what appropriate pay is at local government level. Birmingham City Council is busted for a number of reasons, some of it entirely self-inflicted by a very poorly run left-wing council, but much of it inflicted by a judicial ruling about equal pay—that women who worked as, for example, a teaching assistant needed to be considered equivalent to men who worked in refuse collection. A judge makes this decision. I make no judgment at all about what the correct political decision is. But I'm saying this decision should be political, not judicial. 

We now have a Potemkin parliament, almost, where we go through a ceremony of believing that our politicians and our government are in control, when the big decisions are made by the quangos and the judiciary. And the great failure of the Conservative government was not to unpick this and unravel it, because the system is now loaded against Conservatives. The people who are now on a day-to-day level running the country will, all things equal, pick higher spending, more regulation, more state intervention, and less personal freedom as their default solution to any problem. 

You can perhaps, if you have a strong Conservative government, sometimes swim against that tide. You can occasionally perhaps even score a victory. If this was a football match, however, you would be kicking the ball uphill against a bent ref, bent linesmen, VAR only being applied to you and not the opposition. And although you might score the odd goal, you can expect to lose eight-one. And in rough terms, that would be my reading of the score after 14 years of the Conservatives in office. Very glad it was us, not the other team, because things would have been worse. But we didn't make things more conservative. 

So I think Conservatism and the Conservative Party are now at a crossroads. At various points in this party's history—and let's remind ourselves that it is the most successful political party that democracy has ever seen and has an incredible history of reinventing itself over and over and over again—we now are at a moment in which we need to decide whether we're going to reinvent ourselves again. 

Do we think that the problem in Britain is simply that our politics is not being very well managed by Andy Burnham or Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves? And if only we had Kemi Badenoch and Mel Stride and Chris Philp, everything would come good. Now I'm a fan of those people. I think things would be better under those people than the current administration. But do we really think the issue is one of personnel? Or do we think there is a systemic problem at the moment? 

I don't want to overstate this because Britain isn't on its last legs, but I sometimes wonder whether we are a little bit like East Germany in 1974 or 1975. Sure, you had a preference; I would probably want someone like John Redwood in charge of the potato pricing committee rather than a full-blown Stalinist. But nevertheless, the system is so geared against you that you're playing such a defensive posture. And we have tried to be conservative within what has become a liberal leftist pseudo-socialist system. It needs to be reset. 

This has been done before. 

I mentioned Disraeli at the start of my remarks. So let me wind up. Disraeli said that in a progressive society, and in the true meaning of the word progressive, a society that progresses, change is inevitable. But often in the dictionary of political quotations, the quote ends there. He went on to say, the question is what change are you going to accept and what are you going to reject? And the Conservatives, I think, over time have shown a brilliant capacity to accept some changes and not others. 

Indeed, the Conservative Party itself sort of replaced the Tories with the Tamworth Manifesto in 1834, when Robert Peel accepted the extension of the franchise. Disraeli himself went further in 1867, by further extending the franchise. We can argue about whether the Conservative Party should have accepted the rise of the welfare state in the 1950s. I think Britain would be in a better place if we had not, and gone for a rather different model. 

But then there was another point of reflection in the 1970s. Were we going to break the consensus of economic managerialism or were we going to stick to it? All we really had for previous generations was you had Rab Butler or Hugh Gaitskell running the steel industry, running the coal industry, and Margaret Thatcher smashed that, alongside Keith Joseph. 'No, we're going to change the system.' 

To get back into office, I think, will require the British people to trust us again. That's no small ask. But it will also require something bigger: an imagination about how to fix things when we are back. Because we spent 14 years trying to steer a train that was going in the wrong direction. And if you try to steer a train on rail tracks that's going in the wrong direction, you ain't going to get very far. You can perhaps jam on the brakes, and perhaps we have too many fellow travellers who are more interested in increasing the speed, but nevertheless we need to stop the train. 

This is a huge intellectual challenge and an electoral one for the Conservative Party as well. Vast swathes of voters out there in Britain feel that Britain is broken, that it doesn't work, that it doesn't matter who I vote for, the same nonsense continues. And you know what? They're right. They're right to have that feeling. And those people have drifted off to a different proposition on the right of centre of British politics. If we, if this great party wants to win them back, we are going to have to embrace their analysis. 

The next right of centre government in Britain is going to have to completely reset the constitution and reset the machinery of government. And if you don't do that, all of the things we craft—lower taxes, better enterprise, a better environment for business, sound money, balanced budgets—will not follow. You will not get the system that we are out there to design and we failed to stop. I think Kemi Badenoch and others in the Conservative Party are getting there with that analysis and their proposition. But they can't get there fast enough for my taste. 

Thanks very much for your time and attention. I'll happily take your questions. Thank you.