Please give a very, very warm round of applause to your host, the deputy political editor of the spectator, James Heald.

Well, good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much for coming tonight. The title are above it tonight is The Tory Dilemma.

Now, as we all know, the Conservative Party is one of the oldest and most electorally successful forces in the Western world.

But in 2024, it has suffered a devastating electoral defeat. And since then, it has suffered from the rise of Reform UK.

Tonight, we're going to be hearing from a range of

different voices, from those urging a merger or agreement of some kind, some kind of negotiation,

to those who are outright opposed arguing that we can't have an agreement of any kind,

and that actually the Conservative Party and Reform are anathema to one another.

We're going to hear from Daniel Hannan,

who's a Conservative peer in the House of Lords, then David Davis, who's a member of the

House Commons, followed by Victoria Atkins, who's the shadow farming minister, and then finally

Paul Goodman, who's also a Conservative peer and former editor of Conservative Home. But please

allow me for now to introduce our four speakers. Welcome them up on stage. So first up, we'll let Lord Hannan speak. So Daniel, I'll give you about three, four minutes to set your case out, and then we'll move forward. Well, James, thank you very much. And ladies and gentlemen, thank you all for coming. It's great that there is so much interest. I's, uh, I can see only one empty seat, which I assume was for Peter Mandelson before he was

vetted. So it's, it's wonderful to see the rest of you here. And it's, it's great to have such a

equipoes, such a, a finally balanced audience. I'm going to argue that the case for an electoral pact, a limited electoral pact where we

concentrate only on the seats that we can win and we don't field candidates in constituencies

where we have no chance is so obvious, is such a no-brainer that if it were not for the human

emotions that get in the way, the optimism bias, the personal

rivalries and the egos, we'd have done it by now. If we were all androids, if we were all like

Mr. Spock in Star Trek, we'd have agreed this long ago, and I'll tell you why. Although our manifestos by the next election,

hours and reforms, will be very similar. In fact, if we came back to this room and we did

another panel and I played a game where I read different passages and you tried to guess which

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