'This is the speech Theresa May needs to give at the Conservative Party conference'

This is a summary of the speech I would write for the Prime Minister, Theresa May, at Wednesday's Conservative Party conference, writes Bernard Ingham.

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“Ladies and Gentlemen: I have news for you. We are not the nasty party. We never were but, as I said, some thought we were. Now they know better. They have seen the Labour Party at work.

Behind its leader’s facade of a kinder, gentler politics lies intolerance, abuse, manipulation of facts (and students), intimidation, racial prejudice and a deepest red mob ritually paraded by its Momentum mainspring. They are outside this conference hall trying to kid the public that Labour’s is now mainstream politics.

The British people now know where that would take them – into a Marxist dictatorship of the proletariat ruled by a new elite that hates Britain’s glorious past and its current democracy and constitutional monarchy.

Labour, as presently constituted, is not the future. It is not even the past. It is the present nightmare. My responsibility and your responsibility – repeat responsibility – is to stop this nightmare becoming a reality. We must fight as never before to prevent any such fate befalling this country.

Only we can do it.

We are the only substantial party that respects democracy.

We are the only party that will deliver an independent, sovereign and outward- looking Britain. Brexit is what the people willed and it is what they will get.

We are the only party that will practise prudent economics – the only means of securing steadily rising prosperity for all.

We are the only major party that believes in responsible capitalism – manifestly the only system yet invented by man that combines freedom with the steady improvement of the mass of people.

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And we are the only major party that believes in defending Britain against potential enemies, and those of our allies. We do not consort with terrorists.

We are the future. Without us the prospect is only of decline and fall into totalitarian penury and irrelevance.

I confess I have made a poor start in fighting off this menace by calling an election for which we were not ready and which cost us an overall majority. But we live and learn.

Let us now unite in recovering our independence as a nation and securing our future by careful, sensible and listening government.

In short, the fightback starts here. Join me in my resolve to make Great Britain greater yet – a shining example in a dangerous world of a mature and responsive parliamentary democracy.

To achieve this together we have to do a number of things.

First, we must reorganise and gear ourselves up from the grassroots to get over our message in a computerised world.

Perhaps we thought the battle for free markets within a global regulatory framework had been won 30 years ago and we got complacent.

We must wake up to our responsibilities and apply ourselves to the task of protecting our way of life.

Second, we must recognise that, while we are an open party that welcomes debate, we must not put off the people with public disputation.

Third, we must bring a sense of responsibility to international relations which have become difficult. Our motto is peace through strength, including the strength of purpose that is necessary to settle issues peacefully.

Given all this – and an unshakeable belief in the dynamism of our nation once freed of the yoke of the debilitating European Union – there is no limit to what we can achieve.

But we shall have to work for it. Money does not grow on trees. The NHS, education, welfare and public services generally cannot be sustained by opening our borders to all comers or throwing money we do not have at them.

We have to develop better structures and management that deliver; a new drive for excellence and achievement in our schools; and a recognition that we shall have to care better for more elderly people as the years go by.

There is no end to the challenges that confront modern government. But our job is not merely to face up to them but to work out solutions that benefit us all and not just the few.

Never was the nation more in need of a Conservative government dedicated to sovereignty, a free market and rising prosperity.

Well, I recognise that need. I have willingly taken up the challenge. I do not kid you it will all be plain sailing. But I am confident that if we put our backs into it and persevere we shall succeed. Let’s go for it.”

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