The next Prime Minister's levelling-up plans are what matter - Justine Greening

With leadership campaigns reaching fever pitch, any thought of a quiet summer recess for Conservative MPs seems to be rapidly receding.

This will be the fourth leader of the Conservative Party in six years. It’s an astonishing reversal of fortune for Boris Johnson’s leadership after a landslide victory just two-and-a-half years ago.

At the Conservative Party Conference in October last year, his then Chief Whip, Mark Spencer, even suggested to the BBC’s Political Editor, Laura Kuennsberg, he could remain PM for “20 years”.

It underlines how, in politics, you never quite know what’s coming next.

Nearly a year on and in the second half of this Parliament with a bleak economic outlook for the autumn and winter ahead, whoever wins the battle for Conservative leader will have their work cut out.

So far, the debate has centred around traditional arguments over tax and spend.

The danger is that it comes over as an ideological debate at the very moment when people desperately need practical solutions to day-to- day problems that are rapidly getting worse.

What is weighing on the minds of millions of people across the country today isn’t any ideology behind public finances.

Instead, it relates to two critical issues a new Prime Minister needs to focus on.

Firstly, navigating the country through the immediate, short term – the cost-of-living crisis we are already facing that we know will get worse in the autumn.

Secondly, people want to understand what the plan is for our longer term future.

How will a new Prime Minister deliver on the levelling-up agenda, the way to lift people’s underlying prospects for good?

For the Conservative Party, winning a leadership contest and gaining the support of MPs and activists might well involve harking back to the past days of Margaret Thatcher.

But winning actual elections across a wider country means having answers both to the challenges of today and how we build a better future – it’s fundamentally about looking forwards not backwards.

Thatcher understood that.

She had a message about the future that even I could understand as a 10- year-old girl in Rotherham, watching the evening news.

It was a simple message of opportunity, that if I was willing to study and work hard, she was building a country where I could make something of myself. Levelling up was exactly what I wanted then and it’s what people want now.

So for all today’s would-be Conservative leaders, setting out distinct plans on levelling up is the most important step they can take.

It’s what we all want to see.

People want to know what the plan is to deliver on an agenda that was a major part of how the Conservative Party won such a compelling mandate in 2019 to be in Government today.

The incoming Conservative Prime Minister cannot run a Government that is just firefighting one crisis after another.

They need to hit the ground running with a levelling-up strategy and deliver from day one.

It’s that levelling-up plan that drives structural decisions on tax and spend, not the opposite way round. It’s tax and spend with a purpose – equality of opportunity.

For young people today, levelling up should speak just as strongly to them as it did to me many years ago. Whoever the future leader is, keeping the priorities and challenges faced by younger people must be uppermost in their minds.

We’ve all been affected by Covid, but few generations have been hit quite so systematically as the younger generations in our society.

With schools and education shut down, exams disrupted and time that would have been spent in a wider world learning through friendships and experiences, it is the lives of this generation where Covid risks casting the longest shadow.

It is also a generation that will respond to a message of optimism and hope, a mission to make Britain a fairer place with more opportunities.

And an incoming party leader’s levelling-up plan matters for another reason closer to home. The Conservative Party leadership contest has already seen more than its fair share of negative briefings from various leadership camps against one another. It is a political party already defying political gravity after being in power for 12 years and four general elections, being buffeted by events at home and abroad.

The Conservative Party cannot successfully fight Labour if it is divided.

Whoever wins the leadership contest will need to find a way to bring the party back together. It has always been stronger as a broad church. Levelling up matters for Britain regardless of who is Prime Minister.

But MPs and activists should reflect that levelling up is perhaps the one mission the Conservative Party can collectively unite behind. Delivering levelling up isn’t just about securing Britain’s future, it’s about securing a united Conservative Party’s future ,too. There couldn’t be more at stake.

- Justine Greening is a former Conservative MP who was Minister for Transport, for International Development and for Education.