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I do not envy you. I believe you have taken on the hardest job in Britain. Becoming Prime Minister is difficult enough. Your challenge is even greater. You are trying to persuade a deeply sceptical public that politics can once again improve their lives at a time when trust in politicians has rarely been lower.

You have spoken about rebuilding trust, creating growth that benefits ordinary people and restoring confidence in government. Those ambitions are both admirable and necessary. The question is not whether they are the right objectives. It is whether government can organise itself to achieve them.

When I married my wife, Julia, in 1984, she agreed to do so on one condition: that I abandoned my ambition of entering politics when I turned forty. Looking back, that condition led to the two best decisions of my life: marrying Julia and never becoming a politician.

Instead, I spent the next forty-five years building businesses around the world. I have had the privilege of employing tens of thousands of people, investing billions of pounds and working alongside people from almost every walk of life. Those experiences have changed my political beliefs more profoundly than I could ever have imagined when, as a twenty-year-old, I campaigned enthusiastically for Margaret Thatcher in the 1979 General Election.

If someone had told that twenty-year-old that one day I would be writing an open letter to a Prime Minister offering advice rather than opposition, I would have laughed. Yet half a........

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