First of all: I agree with you it is a serious threat. I don’t buy people that say Labour is not a serious threat. They have got more professional. I have seen quite a lot of their videos; I think they’re very good. And also I don’t denigrate populism because democracies are fundamentally populist. People vote for what they like.

So we’ve got to be careful about saying that we don’t want to be populist. I mean we want to be popular. And we have to go with the grain of what people are thinking. It sounds to me that what you’re saying about that video does capture the heart of where we need to be as a party. So we need to be talking about how people’s lives are getting better. But PR [successful public relations] follows real progress. So you can’t communicate a message if it isn’t true.

If the economy is sluggish at the next election and the Tories are seen as not having turned things around, we will open ourselves up to losing the next election. It’s not about attacking the opposition: oppositions don’t win elections; governments lose them. So for me its about how do we turbo charge the economy post-Brexit? What bolder things can we do to make sure we are on the right track.

[So] running attack ads on Labour and scaring people, I don’t think will work and I think that was one of our problems in the 2017 election.