A speech recorded in Hansard on an unspecified day in the near future

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You have reminded me, Mr Speaker, that for a minister resigning, permission to make a Personal Statement to the House is granted entirely at your discretion and should be of an explanatory nature. With the speech of the Noble Lord, Lord Howe, in mind, I too will keep mine short: to a thousand words. Members opposite will forgive me if the burden of what I have to say is addressed to my own party even if the implications are perhaps of interest to a wider audience.

‘I can no longer serve as a minister in this Cabinet. I have come to doubt I should have accepted office in the first place. I was unsure my party was doing the right thing last year in effectively replacing one prime minister with another without a contest either within our party or at the polls.

‘My reasons for silence then were several. It would have been pointless to call for a contest unless there were colleagues prepared to precipitate it by standing. There were not; and, after hesitating, I decided I should not stand myself. I thought my right honourable friend the Prime Minister might well plan an election shortly after taking office; or that in office he might quickly prove so popular and capable that the case for a mandate fell away.

‘Neither has happened. And in drafting this speech I have tried, Mr Speaker, to find words to convey my meaning without brutality; but I cannot. My right honourable friend is not the right person for the position he holds, and many have lost confidence that he will find, or could recover, the capacity to succeed. Those many include me. It would therefore be wrong for me to continue in his Cabinet.

‘It would be gratuitous to elaborate on why I lacked confidence in a leader unless I had some private or personal explanation to divulge. I have none. I have not found my right honourable friend unpleasant as a colleague and as to his conduct of the government have no tales to tell out of school. Nor do I plan to do so later. The reasons to doubt his capacity for office are entirely public, well known, and shared today — I have to say — by a majority of my right honourable friends and (as the most recent local elections in England and Wales showed) by the public.

‘For many months these doubts have been widely advertised in the media, sometimes in unfairly personal terms. But stripping hyperbole and vituperation aside, a solid core of commentary remains: its burden is that at the very top of my party, and in Downing Street, there is a want of direction, of decisiveness, and of that important art in a political leader: the art of persuasion.

‘When we welcomed my right honourable friend to the leadership of our party and country, we did not expect showy salesmanship. We were prepared to trade his predecessor’s crowd-pleasing qualities for the quieter persuasiveness of a man of depth and determination, and of strong ideas. We let go of a charismatic leader. Unfortunately we did not get, in return, the depth, the resolution or the big national ideas for which we had hoped.

‘I shall say no more that is negative. I shall add that both the Labour party and the country owe my right honourable friend great gratitude for the skill with which he steered the British economy through a decade of successful government, some of that success owing much to his navigation. If it had ended there, he would be rightly and almost universally admired. It should have ended there.

‘Mr Speaker, we on this side of the House are now in a dangerous and exasperating position. Our leadership has lost steam but we have not. We are full of energy and ideas. Meanwhile the principal opposition are getting up steam, and there are two years left before my right honourable friend seems minded to call an election.

‘Before the recent local elections much was said about my party having hit rock bottom already, four years ago, in the seats being contested. After the counts were over, a lot more was said about my party having plunged even lower. The rock proved permeable. Now, it is said, we really have hit rock bottom. I beg my honourable friends to consider whether there is any more reason for confidence now, than before the May elections, that this is the low est we can go. The only way may not be up. Some of my honourable friends underestimate our own capacity, led as we are, to drift lower still and fall into public contempt.

‘At the same time they underestimate the principal opposition’s potential to do better. In the media screams which followed the local elections, we can be forgiven, Sir, for failing to notice that the Conservative party are not hugely loved or admired by the electorate. Much of their success is by default: our default. What might they do if given time and space to find their voice properly? Their leader is a shameless — I’ll rephrase that, Mr Speaker — audacious pickpocket of other politicians’ ideas and sympathies, including many of our ideas and sympathies. That his party’s grasp of these is shallow and their commitment opportunistic needs to be exposed. The task is urgent.

‘Yet a mood of despair grips many in my party. They think that all is lost. I have to tell them that it’s potentially worse than that. All is not lost. There’s more left to lose. We could go lower, much lower; and if we drift on like this, then we shall.

‘But if we could find the voice to defy what the media think is our fate — if we could find the moral passion to defend all that we have achieved in the last 11 years — if we could find the arguments to explain how this solid achievement is threatened by the party opposite — if we could find the energy to challenge the opposition and take an axe to their patter and a blowtorch to their flimsy and illconsidered plans — then, I say to my honourable friends, that this year, this month, this week could mark the low point, from which we did return.

‘We are not, in politics, self-defeatingly idealistic and a new national leader could not be asked to call early an election he or she expected to lose. But they should call it as soon as they judged this wise; and accept that only this could offer the full democratic mandate we need.

‘I said “find the voice”. It would have to be a new voice. In their hearts, which of my honourable friends really doubts that? So I have risen in my place this afternoon, Mr Speaker, to tell my honourable friends — and our party’s activists in the country beyond, and the trades unions too, all of whose sympathies I shall have to enlist, that I have no doubt the voice must change. I believe the new voice could be mine.’