I am Labour’s worst nightmare – because they can't portray me as prejudiced.

The endless tossing out of Conservative Party leaders as if they’re just disposable has been one of the things that has damaged the party brand.

People want to see some stability and some certainty. This is not the time for more psychodrama. We need to get serious and I think members are very serious about wanting to pick a leader for the long term, and they are looking very closely at which candidate best represents their views.

Members want somebody who has conviction. They want somebody who has been consistent. They want someone who tells the truth and who champions and fights for conservative values. And I think that I’m the candidate who most represents what they are looking for.

Holding another leadership election would not only be a waste of time and money, it would be disrespectful to the country, to the Members.

We Conservatives face an “existential” threat because of the rise of Reform UK and the resurgence of the Liberal Democrats. We are having our lunch eaten by everybody.

If we lose a chunk of our party to the Lib Dems, they could become the opposition. So in the country, the Reform vote is critical for us to win back, but in Parliament the Lib Dems also pose a significant threat.

The next leader needs to address the threat from both the Left and the Right and must be able to represent the common ground.

Worries about immigration are shared by Lib Dem voters as well as those who backed Reform and the Conservatives, as are the importance of family, personal responsibility and personal freedoms.

Reform UK, which is more popular than the Conservatives among under-35s, has attracted the youth vote because young people like the new thing. We have to be that new, exciting thing again. We have to be the ones who are offering hope.

It is an honour to be compared by some colleagues with Margaret Thatcher, but I need to be my own person. The Party needs a wholesale rethink of its plan to transform the country.

I don’t want anyone to assume that this campaign is all about my personality. It’s why my campaign is not called “Kemi for leader”. It’s called “Renewal 2030”. It’s about the mission.

The mission is to return to traditional conservative values, which in my view have been eroding as successive Tory governments have given too much ground to the left.

Conservatism, for me, is about personal responsibility, a belief in individuals, in families, to have more control and freedom over their lives, rather than the government making all of the decisions for them.

There is a place for government, but government should do the things that only government can do very well, rather than getting involved in everything and doing everything badly.

Only I can offer the sort of change that the Tories need.

The team that I’m putting together will be Labour’s worst nightmare, not just me.

I understand them better than they realise. I know where their weak points are. I know that they do not start with principles, or certainly, they don’t have the same principles that we do.

You look at what they’ve done with VAT on private schools. It’s a tax on aspiration. They don’t believe in aspiration, we do.

They assume that everyone in the country is like them, and that is not the case. You look at what happened on race, where they tried to paint the UK as a racist country, and a lot of people wanted just to just let them get away with it.

I stood firm on that, and I also exposed a lot of their hypocrisy. They want to paint people on the right as being prejudiced, and they know that with me there, they will be unable to make that case convincingly.

Labour are still congratulating themselves for having the first female chancellor, pretending that this is the world’s greatest achievement when we’ve had three women prime ministers in our party, including one before Rachel Reeves was born.

I am sometimes described as Margaret Thatcher's natural heir. But it’s the people who make the comparisons that are interesting.

People who actually knew her. Rocco Forte, who is a great businessman. David Davis. People who knew her make that comparison.

I think it would be presumptuous for me to make that comparison. She is an idol of mine, and I remember growing up when people would make derogatory statements about ‘women can’t do this, women can’t do that’. And you’d just say two words: Margaret Thatcher, and it would shut them up. And I would love to have that effect.

If I could do what she did for this country, turning it around after the socialist nonsense which we had experienced, that would be amazing. It is an honour to be compared to her, but I would never make that comparison. And at the end of the day, I think I need to be my own person, so I admire her, but I am Kemi. I’m a different person.

One of the failings of the past 14 years was allowing a bloated university sector to grow out of all proportion to the economy’s need for graduates, and I want to significantly reduce the number of students and axe pointless degrees.

Since 1990 the number of people graduating from university has risen from 77,000 a year to 750,000, while postgraduates have gone from 31,000 to 493,000 in the same period.

It cannot be right that we are sending people to do degrees where they can’t get jobs. They’re coming out with a lot of debt, and we then wonder why we don’t have people in work.

I could be accused of hypocrisy, having completed an undergraduate degree and a masters degree in engineering, but I also undertook an apprenticeship before university, making me well qualified to make a comparison.

I can’t remember three quarters of my engineering degree. The apprenticeship I still remember, and that influences a lot of my thinking, the practical skills I got from that I use much more than a lot of the theory which I learnt.

The number of graduate jobs that we have are not enough to sustain the number of people going to university.

This higher education blob feeds into other issues, such as immigration, because of the number of visas being granted to foreign students on whose cash universities increasingly rely, but also home ownership, as student debt is affecting young people’s ability to afford their own homes.

Consequently, a much wider rethink of the economy and the structures on which it is built is needed. A fully thought out plan.

We are out for five years. I want us to have a plan that’s going to work in five years time, not a plan that maybe we should have done last year.

I have demonstrated that I’m not playing catch up in showing people who I am. I’m not fattening the pig on market day. I have been working every day to champion conservative values.

And I would love to see many of the former MPs come back. But offering jobs, especially publicly, is disrespectful to the people who are in those jobs at the moment. I am not presumptuous about getting the leadership.