These are devastating results for the Liberal Democrats. All of us are completely shell shocked.

All party members must have a say in our future strategy and new leader. I have clear views on what we need to do and am intending to stand for leader.

I am my own person, a conviction politician. I am impatient to tackle injustice.

In my role as minister, I pursued our Liberal agenda, making the case as powerfully as I could for equality for those facing mental ill health challenges and to end the outrageous discrimination within the NHS. I found myself constantly frustrated but was unrelenting in my pursuit of every example of unfair treatment.

My abiding memory is of families of people with learning disability who told me how they felt completely ignored by public and private bodies that exist to protect their interests. I demanded that they were heard by those making these decisions.

As a result we have proposals in a Green Paper for giving new rights to people with learning disability and those with autism and severe and enduring mental health problems.

And I was thrilled that my plan to secure equal rights of access to treatment for people suffering mental ill health became a top manifesto commitment.

Standing up for the powerless and speaking truth to power is at the heart of my passion for Liberalism.

In a world where many of our fellow citizens are powerless and disenfranchised it is critical now that we define more clearly what modern Liberalism means in these terms.

So along with the need to ensure that our public services give power directly to people, we must set out other Liberal priorities. Here are my five key areas for starters. More will follow.

First, we must commit to transform educational attainment for those who have been let down by the system, because it is an outrage that still in today’s Britain, your chances in life are too often determined by the circumstances of your birth.

Second, ending economic unfairness must be a key driver for our party, because the growing gulf between the super rich and everyone else destroys hope and corrupts our social fabric.

Third, we must shift tax from employment income to unearned wealth because this is the fairest and most effective way to promote enterprise, innovation and a dynamic competitive economy.

Fourth, we have to provide real answers for how to protect, sustain and enhance key public services because public provision is the fairest way of meeting the demands that a technologically transforming world will place on our country. For example, just as I argued as a minister, change in the NHS must now be democratically accountable from the bottom up, not imposed by Whitehall. We have tested that approach to destruction.

Fifth, we are a proudly internationalist party and we strongly believe in the UK playing its full part in the EU. But let’s apply the same critical faculties to unaccountable power in the EU as we must do to our own creaking institutions because we should never be happy with the status quo.

Finally, this election has exposed more than ever the outrage of our inadequate electoral system. For about one in four people to vote UKIP, Liberal Democrat or Green but these parties to be represented in Parliament by just 10 MPs is intolerable. We must work with others to break this system.

We need a vibrant leadership campaign, full of ideas, devoid of recrimination, but willing to examine where we went wrong so that we learn the lessons for the future. We have a mountain to climb. But we can again become a strong voice for Liberal Britain. We need an advocate who can communicate our case to the public with passion. I offer myself for that role and ask for your support.

Please visit backnorman.co.uk to support my campaign.

* Norman Lamb is MP for North Norfolk and was Liberal Democrat Minister of State at the Department of Health until May 2015. He now chairs the Science and Technology Select Committee