For me, having become Tory leader after the election disaster of 1997, it has been impossible to read the newspapers of recent days without the haunting memories of those times coming back. So preoccupied had Conservatives become, in the mid-Nineties, with differences of opinion over Europe and calculations about who would be the next leader, that many of us failed to notice that the world outside our ranks was changing.

Like today, we Tories had been in power for some time, with a good economic record overall. It was hard to imagine a party with half the seats in Parliament losing half of them at a stroke. Leadership contenders held dinners for MPs and prepared to inherit the mighty, enduring, election-winning party of Margaret Thatcher.

Once the election came, some of those contenders were no longer even in Parliament. I, one of the surviving half, inherited the leadership, but I was bequeathed a ruin.

While we had been squabbling, the public out in the country had decided to remove us from power and forget us. It took 13 years for me and my three successors to rebuild the ruin, modernise it for a new century and persuade the voters it could be invested with power again.