Andrew Mitchell:

The Tories are repeating the mistakes of the past and risk getting similar punishment from voters

Age may not always bring wisdom, but it does lend perspective. I was first elected to the House of Commons in 1987 and in the years since then I’ve lived through, and played a small part in, three events that have traumatised, damaged and nearly broken the Conservative Party.

I was PPS to Margaret Thatcher’s closest friend and ally, John Wakeham, when our party ejected her from office. I learnt then that when a party focuses on itself and not on the country, it loses both respect and trust. I was a government whip during the Maastricht debates, when the Conservative Party turned in on itself while a bemused public looked on. Photographs at the time showed that the experience turned my brown hair grey. I learnt then that when our party cannot compromise on Europe, the country turns to others to resolve those issues.

That led to the third trauma of my time as a Tory MP – the destruction

of the Conservative Parliamentary Party by Tony Blair in 1997. On May 1 that year I was a minister in Her Majesty’s Government. On May 2,

I was unemployed – and about to discover that there is nothing so “ex” as an ex-mp (a realisation that added immensely to my gratitude when I was re-elected in 2001).

Today, I feel the echoes of all three of those events. Our failure to resolve the Brexit question dwarfs everything else in our politics. Our constituents are bewildered that we cannot honour their decision to Leave and turn our attention to their worries about crime, the economy, the NHS and education. And it is not just our constituents who look on in concern. Last week, I met a presidential candidate from an African country where millions have died from disease, starvation and conflict. Putting an arm around my shoulder he said: “What on earth is happening to your poor country?”

This agony will continue unless and until we pass the Withdrawal Agreement – the necessary step to ensuring we leave the EU. But, alas, let no one think that agreeing the Withdrawal Agreement will get us off the hook: we Tories own Brexit. It will take 10 years to resolve and, even if it doesn’t, this failure of British statecraft is sure to be followed by a Chilcot-style inquiry that will ensure this drama is hung round our necks.

Nor is it the fact that the bandwidth of government is consumed by all things European. A distressing air of Tory entitlement has entered our politics, where some ministers appear to forget that we are the servants of the people, not their masters. When the pursuit of individual agendas splinters collective unity, it not only undermines confidence in government, it also inspires cynicism towards our party and encourages people to think we are interested only in our own egos and positions, not the national interest.

Meanwhile, the knives are sharpened for a Prime Minister who, whatever her faults (and I did not support her leadership bid, as I believed we needed someone who had voted to leave), has courageously and with stubborn persistence fought against the odds and in impossible circumstances to do her duty. What will the image of another tearful but brave female prime minister being forced out of Downing Street, pursued by a band of grey-haired, grey-suited Tory men do to our party?

I am also so sad to have been in party meetings where, at the most senior level, the Speaker has been denounced as “biased” and colleagues have been exhorted to undermine him. What has happened to the old-fashioned British respect for the referee? When Mrs Thatcher tried to undermine Mr Speaker Weatherall (and unleashed Norman Tebbit for the task), her MPS told her to stop.

This overarching arrogance is even captured in our approach to the opposition. I am profoundly worried about the consequences if Jeremy Corbyn ever became prime minister and I will do everything I can to prevent that. But we have to respect the fact that he has been chosen, entirely transparently, by the Labour Party as their leader and we must work with that decision within our political system. I listened with disbelief when I heard a junior minister solemnly intoning on national radio that the leader of the opposition “was not a fit person to receive intelligence briefings as he was a threat to national security”. I do not share Mr Corbyn’s views – on anything, I fear – but it is not for any of us to speak of the opposition leader in such a manner. It is for the country to decide.

We were, of course, elected to deliver Brexit. But we were also elected to look after the living standards, prosperity, education, health, housing, old age and security of our constituents. As our support fell off a cliff last week, due to our failure to leave the EU, we should remember our duty to expose the huge danger that a looming Left-wing anti-capitalist Corbyn/mcdonnell government poses to all the open-society, free-market beliefs and ideals we Tories share.

I know that we can do it; it is up to the next generation of potential Tory leaders to show how they will chart that course.