In February 2026, the former head of MI6, Sir Alex Younger, addressed the Conservative Parliamentary Party. When I interviewed him on stage, he started with a warning: once you are in government, there is no time to construct first principles. If you have not worked out how you think before the crises arrive, you end up reacting to them one by one.
This is where the last Conservative governments went wrong, before they went wrong about anything else. We do not intend to make this mistake again. The Right Way is our answer to the challenge the now late Sir Alex Younger posed.
Good government enters office knowing how it thinks. A manifesto full of suggested policies for current, visible problems is not enough. Many problems a government ends up dealing with are not known at the time of the election. What is essential for success is a settled way of approaching the problems nobody predicted, how to recognise trade-offs, what government should do itself, what it should leave alone, and how to decide when circumstances, and indeed the world, change.
That is the purpose of this booklet. It is modelled on The Right Approach, published by the Conservative Party in October 1976, and The Right Approach to the Economy the following year: documents that came before the 1979 manifesto, because the argument had to come before the programme. They set out a diagnosis of what had gone wrong and an approach to governing from which policy could follow. We need to do the same again.
I want to clarify not just what Conservatives propose to do now, but how or why we would decide differently when circumstances change. If someone picks The Right Way up in fifty years’ time, I want them to understand what we believed had gone wrong with Britain, and how we thought government could put it right.
That means being honest about how we got here. If the tone is harsher on Conservative governments, it is not because I believe Labour knows any better – quite the opposite. Labour goes wrong when it follows its principles; we go wrong when we fail to follow ours. The Right Way is not about Labour.
In any case, Britain’s problems did not begin with the 2024 Labour Government. Some began under earlier Labour governments and became worse under Conservative ones. Others arose because assumptions shared across the political spectrum went unchallenged for too long. We promised lower immigration without a strategy for delivering it. Net Zero was legislated for before we had an economically feasible route to get there. We left the European Union without the economic plan that should have gone with it. The path to failure was paved with announcements, targets and good intentions.
You do not have to take my word for how corrosive that habit is. You can watch it happening again, in real time, in Downing Street today.
Andy Burnham became Prime Minister in the summer of 2026 with no serious diagnosis of what had gone wrong with the country. His easy manner may have bought him a short-term honeymoon, but an economic storm is brewing alongside a potentially more dangerous one on national security. Yet we have a Prime Minister whose entire theory of politics comes from doing a job with one particular feature. A mayor becomes popular by deciding how to spend a pot of money someone else has raised. A Prime Minister doesn’t have that luxury. The resident of 10 Downing Street must raise the money, service the debt, control welfare and actually create the conditions in which growth happens. So far, Burnham has offered the country an agenda predicated on a delusion – that government creates growth. His demand for ‘public control’ is a euphemism for more state control, more regulation, more politicians and bureaucrats deciding what individuals, families and firms should decide for themselves. I believe the opposite.
Government doesn’t create growth. People do. Business does. Government must create the conditions for growth and then, more often than not, get out of the way.
Burnham’s argument is not new. It resuscitates a model Britain, usually under Labour administrations, has often tried and seen fail: tax the businesses and people he calls ‘the rich’ harder, nationalise whatever industry is currently out of favour, extend the mythical concept of ‘Manchesterism’ to an entire country.
This is not the narrow debate of two parties squabbling over the same ground, but two genuinely different explanations of what has gone wrong with this country. Burnham’s argument is that enterprise took too much. Ours is that responsibility has been drained away from individuals, families, businesses and communities by a state that grows not because the public wants it but because fewer and fewer things are expected to happen without it. Those two explanations cannot both be right, and the country cannot afford another decade finding out the hard way that Labour’s approach will fail again.
So The Right Way begins further upstream of both. Its first purpose is to reset and reclaim the intellectual foundations of the Conservative Party. Faced with almost any problem, the easy answer is to demand government do something. I want to see proper questions asked first. As an engineer, my training forces me to start with the simple ones: such as what is actually causing the problem? What incentives have previous decisions created? How will people change their behaviour in response? What’s missing? Which costs are visible and which ones aren’t? Is government genuinely the institution best placed to act?
The Right Way’s second purpose is to explain the condition Britain is in, not by cataloguing everything wrong with the country, which would produce a very long book and a not very useful one, but by connecting problems that politics usually treats as separate. Britain’s economic and cultural malaises are not unrelated; they are two sides of the same coin. This is where The Right Way departs significantly from The Right Approach. Economies run on more than tax rates and interest rates. They run on trust, social cohesion, personal responsibility, judgement and well-functioning, efficient institutions. When institutions lose the confidence to exercise judgement, they hide behind process and bureaucratic procedure instead. If people stop trusting one another, every transaction needs more oversight, more regulations, more lawyers, and a diversity and inclusion coordinator to check more boxes.
When the economy stops growing, people become less confident about the future and less trusting of those in charge. They turn to populism, which rarely delivers but increases disappointment, which leads to demands for more intervention, more protection, more attempts to eliminate risk, which in turn stops growth. Breaking that cycle is the challenge of our age.
Which is why this is not a manifesto. Policy is critical but it comes last, not first: principle comes first, then a way of governing, then diagnosis, and then policy. Otherwise, a party simply accumulates random promises with no argument linking them together. The tenets we cover in The Right Way are common sense. Wealth must be created before it can be distributed. Rules need consequences or they will be flouted. A government should be judged on what it achieves, not what it intended. It should be strong enough where only the state can act and restrained where people are better placed to decide for themselves.
If we follow that path, we will get the growth we need. Britain has spent too long assuming that because we were once wealthy, growth comes automatically. We’ve been living off an inheritance built by previous generations. That inheritance is running out. Our country has not lost the capacity to succeed – from talented and industrious people, great universities, formidable businesses to deep capital markets, real scientific and technological strength and institutions that still, mostly, work, we have a lot going for us. The only real question is why we have made success this difficult for ourselves.
The Right Way is an attempt to answer that question, and, more importantly, to work out how we should think about the answer before we are back in government and the challenges and problems are coming at us fast.
The late Sir Alex Younger told us to do that work now.
Click here to download the document…….
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