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At the time, Michael Howard’s 2005 general election campaign was seen as slick and professional. But it was also too right-wing and rather mean-spirited, putting people off rather than turning them towards us. It resulted in another disastrous defeat for the Tories.

I had been responsible for policy coordination, writing the manifesto and acting as one of the party’s principal spokesmen around the country. I saw the campaign close-up. Yet just a few weeks after it was over, I was planning an aggressive leadership campaign in favour of a more modern and liberal Conservative message.

How does all that make sense?

The short answer is that in modern politics the tone and content of a manifesto and a campaign are predominantly set by the party leader. Michael Howard was sure that if we were robust and effective, we could make a fairly traditional Conservative message work. He also felt he had to be true to himself. I was already convinced that we had to change, but I understood Michael’s position. I owed a lot to him, and wanted to help him make his chosen strategy as successful as possible.

The manifesto itself was short and focused, but it was lacking in policy detail. With Michael’s permission I drafted in Michael Gove – who I had helped to persuade out of journalism and into politics, and who was standing in the super-safe Conservative seat of Surrey Heath. We sat in my pokey House of Commons office for several days, dividing the chapters up between us and writing one each before passing what we had done to the other for polishing and improving. We were already friends, and this work brought us closer.

The policies may have been rather workmanlike, but they did actually work. We know this because, while Labour derided our manifesto at the time, they copied and implemented many of its most significant proposals straight after the election. The points system for immigration; the proposals on school discipline. Tony Blair pursued his usual tactic of trashing his opposition, and then coopting any idea that was halfway sensible.

But in modern elections the campaign itself is what matters, and the tone of ours was set not only by Michael Howard, but also by someone I’ve come to admire as one of the great political campaigners: the Australian Lynton Crosby.

Lynton’s hard work is combined with great leadership skills. Twice – in 2005 and 2015 – I’ve seen him build the happiest, most cohesive, most hard-working teams in Conservative Central Office that I have ever known. His strongest weapon is plain common sense. What’s the target? What are your strengths and weaknesses? What are those of your opponents? What, given those things, is the best route to victory? Above all, what’s the plan?

In 2005, Lynton came in at a relatively late stage. His view was that the best chance Michael had to win the election, or at least to deprive Tony Blair of another massive victory, was to focus on some straightforward issues that people cared about, while encouraging them to take out their frustrations with the government by voting for the Conservatives.

The famous poster slogan ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’ fitted with this strategy. It was punchy, and it channelled frustration with Labour. It focused minds on down-to-earth-issues: clean hospitals, more police, ‘It’s time to put a limit on immigration,’ and so on. But the tone reinforced the problem with the Conservative image. It was mean-spirited. Too many people answered the question ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’ with ‘Well, even if I am, I’m not voting for you lot.’

Added to that, in my view the campaigning on immigration went too far. The message wasn’t an unreasonable one. Indeed, I was a strong supporter of immigration control, and had been closely involved in drafting the proposals we put forward. And you could argue that, in the light of what subsequently happened, the decision to make this issue a central one was prescient. But its domination of the early part of our campaign was too much. It felt wrong. It appealed to voters we already had, but made some of those we needed to attract feel uncomfortable – even those who agreed with the policy itself.

The result was the fourth-worst Conservative performance for a hundred years. While we gained thirty-three seats, we only increased our share of the vote by 0.7 per cent, a smaller increase than William Hague had achieved in 2001. Overall, we got fewer votes in 2005 than we did in 1997 – 8.8 million versus 9.6. We won some of our target seats, but even then more than half of those only came to us because of Labour voters switching to the Liberal Democrats, rather than directly from Labour to us.

One other polling figure tells the true story. When people were asked whether a party ‘shares your values’, the Conservatives came off worst, at around 36 per cent, while Labour and the Lib Dems were at around 50 per cent. Maurice Saatchi put it crisply when he said: ‘More anger at the problems of the world we live in is not enough to convince voters that the Conservative Party is fit to solve them.’ The problem went much deeper. We needed to change.

Michael announced that he wouldn’t stand down until there had been a review of the leadership rules. He favoured a system where if more than half of the parliamentary party settled on one candidate, there would not be a vote of the party membership. In the event this proposal went down badly with both the membership and a significant number of MPs, and wasn’t adopted. But the delay in the leadership election that it caused would make all the difference.

If it had taken place sooner after the general election, there can be little doubt that the favourite, David Davis, would have been elected. He had a machine in the parliamentary party, and something of a public profile. There wasn’t an obvious challenger. Before one arose, the contest would have been over.

Instead, the party would wait until just before the party conference in the autumn before candidates’ declarations were made. A formal campaign would then be held during and after the conference, with the results in December.

But before any of this got under way, Michael needed to appoint a new shadow cabinet. He wanted to give newer MPs a chance, and sounded out both George Osborne and me about what jobs we most wanted to do. I was in no doubt: I wanted to be the shadow secretary of state for education. It might not have been seen as one of the ‘big jobs’, but for me it stood out above all others. So much depended on it: the life chances of our young people, the future of our country. Our party’s prospects too rested on the answers we came up with on such policy challenges, and I wanted to be one of the people driving them.

But choosing the education role wasn’t, of course, the most important decision I took after the election.

Slightly to my surprise, and certainly to the surprise of many others, I found myself running for the leadership.

Perhaps for others, deciding to run for such an office comes swiftly, and with few doubts. That is not how it happened for me. Everyone said that I was too young. That I had no ministerial experience. And that I had only been in Parliament for four years. I could be a candidate, maybe a credible candidate, but would I be a credible leader? Would I be part of the party’s problems rather than a solution?

During those pizza evenings in Policy Exchange before the election, one of the things our small group of modernisers had discussed was how we might persuade our future leader to act. But nothing we came up with had seemed convincing. We knew, partly from experience with Michael Howard, that it wouldn’t be enough to persuade a new leader to mouth words about modernisation. We needed someone who really believed in it, and embodied it in the way they talked and acted and felt.

Gradually some of the group began to feel that maybe the answer was to try to capture the leadership rather than merely influence it. We didn’t spend a lot of time on what, at that stage, seemed a little presumptuous and some way off. The moment the election was over, however, it all suddenly seemed more real, and more possible. But was it right?

George’s wife Frances was particularly outspoken. The daughter of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet minister David Howell, she knew the brutality of modern politics, but wasn’t in any doubt. The four of us were having dinner together at our house in North Kensington shortly after the general election when she looked at her husband and me and asked, ‘Well, are you men or are you mice?’

From the moment I really looked at it properly, I thought that I could win. Not because of any special brilliance or powers I possessed; I just saw that all the other potential candidates had flaws that made them eminently beatable.

Ken Clarke had popular appeal, but as the Conservative Party had become a Eurosceptic party, he would find it very hard to win.

Liam Fox, a strong speaker and media performer, was, when you scratched the surface, a pretty unreconstructed Thatcherite. I was fairly sure the party was looking for something else.

That left the favourite, David Davis. He had a great back story, growing up on a council estate, brought up by a single mother and making his own way through business and the Territorial Army to Parliament. He was Conservative aspiration personified. Yet he was another relatively unreconstructed right-winger who would think that the combination of his candidature and another coat of paint would change the party’s fortunes.

I knew this wasn’t the case. Davis wouldn’t be the one to get the Tory car out of the ditch, and I thought the party agreed with me. He had surrounded himself with a rather thuggish crew of former whips from the John Major era, and I rather suspected that a Davis leadership would be like life in a Hobbesian state of nature: ‘nasty, brutish and short’. While he was the front-runner he could win adherents who feared being on the wrong side of him, but the moment people began to suspect he might not win, that fear would go, leaving him a much less formidable candidate.

But I still had doubts. Not so much about getting the job, but about myself and the pressures it would bring, not just on me but also on my family. I was still very young, with much to learn. Could I really do all the different elements of the job? Decisions that would put people’s lives at risk. Coping with the pressure. Prime Minister’s Questions. There were many moments of indecision before the choice was finally made.

My old friend Andrew Feldman played a key role. He told me that I could and should do it. There were also one or two – and it was pretty much one or two – MPs who were similarly convinced. Former SAS officer Andrew Robathan appeared in my office and said that I had to do it. He knew the parliamentary party, and said he was looking at a winning candidate with a winning strategy. Greg Barker, the MP for Bexhill and Battle who had come into the House with me in 2001, was similarly enthusiastic. So was my friend Hugo Swire. Boris was also keen, and generous in coming out for me quite quickly. In a characteristic intervention, he told the newspapers: ‘I hope that David Cameron removes his hat from wherever he has got it, and chucks it firmly in the ring. That hat has got to simultaneously decapitate his competitors and land in the ring.’

Yet in the end it was those closest to me who were the most influential in helping me make up my mind. Most friends were enthusiastic. They could all see that the Tory Party needed a new approach, and they thought I should go for it. The only exception was Michael Gove, who called me one weekend at Dean and pleaded with me not to do it. He was worried about the effect on me, on Samantha and the family. For all the subsequent drama in our relationship, I think he had nothing but the best of intentions in making the call.

My mother and father were nervous. I don’t remember them ever saying ‘Don’t,’ but my dad in particular was not an enthusiast. He was delighted that I was doing the education job, and thought that I should take one thing at a time. But my brother Alex told me to go for it. This meant a lot.

The most important, of course, was Samantha. Just as she had been worried about the effect on our life of me becoming an MP, she was worried about what being leader would mean. She could see why that side of it worried me, but she was also in many ways the ultimate Tory moderniser. It was a crisp spring day in the garden at Dean when she said words to the effect of, ‘What is the point of spending your life in a Tory Party that can’t achieve any of the things that you believe this country needs to do?’ That was what I really needed, and after her words the decision was made. I was running.

To start with, things came together well. George and I met and talked frankly about the situation. He was being encouraged to consider standing, but he thought he was too young, and hadn’t had enough time to develop the sort of story and profile he’d need to succeed as leader if he won. And anyway, his new job as shadow chancellor was a huge challenge. At just thirty-three years old, he was the youngest person in history to hold that role, and he didn’t want to be distracted.

But he did offer to run my campaign. There was no pact, no deal, no agreement about anything, including future jobs; but there was something much stronger. A shared view of the challenge, and an understanding that we would stand together and work together come what may.

The rest of the team was small but professional.

Andrew Feldman was the natural treasurer, and he set about raising the necessary funds, starting with the businessman Phil Harris. My old Carlton boss Michael Green chipped in. We wanted a good range of donors, not to rely too much on any one individual.

Ed Llewellyn, who was working in Sarajevo at the time, took unpaid leave to come and lead my team. Kate Fall, who had worked for Michael Howard, came to work as his deputy. They teamed up with my press officer Gabby Bertin and an events team led by Liz Sugg. All would still be with me when I left Downing Street eleven years later.

Steve Hilton, who had been running his own business after leaving Central Office, and had then gone to Saatchi & Saatchi and M&C Saatchi, would play a key role in working with me to put together the case for change.

Meanwhile, in the House of Commons, I started to sound out MPs. The good news was that the early adopters were just the sort of people I wanted: bright, sane, forward-looking, and popular with other colleagues. The less good news was that there weren’t very many of them. When we first got together in my office in 343 Portcullis House on 13 June there were just fifteen MPs present: Greg Barker, Richard Benyon, John Butterfill, Michael Gove, Boris Johnson, Oliver Letwin, Peter Luff, George Osborne, Andrew Robathan, Hugh Robertson, Nicholas Soames, Hugo Swire, Ed Vaizey, Peter Viggers, and of course me.

We agreed to spend the summer setting out policies and ideas: we could only beat the Davis bandwagon if there was real substance in what we were saying. When it came to parliamentary colleagues, no jobs would be offered, no future roles dangled in front of them as inducements for support. And we would be unfailingly polite and correct. This was a complete contrast to the Davis operation, which used a combination of brutal arm-twisting (‘Support the front-runner or your career is over, matey’) and ludicrous promises (by the end, I heard, he had amassed several chancellors and foreign secretaries).

The early campaign was very heavy going. We couldn’t get more MPs to declare their support. None of the newspapers were backing us. And I was worried that my freshness, a central part of my pitch, might go stale.

The first parliamentary hustings in July didn’t go all that well. The star performer was Liam Fox, who spoke forcefully about the need for change in Europe. And a new issue emerged that was to last throughout the contest – drugs. The MP Mark Pritchard was persuaded (by someone in the Davis camp, we were told) to ask one candidate – Ken Clarke – directly, ‘Have you ever taken class-A drugs?’ Naturally the spotlight fell on the rest of us to answer. I declined to do so, and while many colleagues groaned when the question was asked, there probably was some damage done.

The Daily Mail became quite hysterical about it, publishing a full-page editorial: ‘David Cameron, Drugs and the Truth’. I refused to yield, and declined to answer the question about drug use in the past, saying that ‘Everyone is entitled to a private past.’ My stubbornness won some admirers, and proved that I wouldn’t be pushed around.

On Question Time I answered a question about whether I had ever taken drugs as an MP by saying, truthfully, that I had not, because ‘law-makers shouldn’t be law-breakers’. The more difficult question was whether I had ever done so when I was a special adviser, or between being a special adviser and becoming an MP. I simply didn’t answer it. Frankly, I didn’t want to tell a lie by saying no. Stories began circulating that I had avoided the question because drug use among my friends was commonplace and excessive. This was nonsense. But had I smoked the odd joint with Sam’s friends before being elected? Yes. Not at all frequently, but yes.

All in all, it felt as if the campaign was stuck, and outside our small core there were few who thought we could win. But I knew we had one weapon more powerful than those possessed by any other candidate. A clear, powerful and persuasive political message that I was sure the party was ready for: Change to Win.

This oughtn’t to have seemed as radical as it sounded. After all, the essence of conservatism, and central to the success of the party, is that it adapts. Far from being the ones trashing the Conservative brand and the Conservative Party, we were absolutely convinced that we were the ones who could save them.

Our goal – which became my mantra – was a modern, compassionate Conservative Party. Modern, because we needed to look more like the country we aspired to govern. Compassionate, because our politics was about extending opportunity to those who had the least. And Conservative, because we believed that timeless Conservative principles – strong families, personal responsibility, free enterprise – were as important as ever.

The speech I made that June, effectively starting my leadership bid, included a strident defence of families and marriage. Some saw this as rather an old-fashioned note in an otherwise modernising score. I saw it as essential to building a stronger and more compassionate society.

In August 2005, I delivered a comprehensive speech on the right approach to tackling the rise of Islamist extremist terror. I made the case for tougher security measures, including action to deport hate preachers and potential terrorists, and arguing that, if necessary, we would have to leave the European Convention on Human Rights. But the real point of the speech was to make clear that I believed we were involved in an ideological struggle that could last for a generation or more. There was no point trying to tiptoe around what we were up against.

And then there was Europe. I thought, naïvely perhaps, that I had the right formula. In line with my own beliefs, we would be genuine Eurosceptics. Not arguing for Britain to leave the EU altogether, but arguing consistently and cogently for reform. Integration had gone too far. Brussels was too bureaucratic. Britain needed greater protections. Far from rejecting referendums on future treaties, the public should have its say.

Crucially, we had to get away from the ‘doublespeak’ of the past. Margaret Thatcher had railed against Brussels, yet took the country into the Exchange Rate Mechanism. John Major had attacked the single currency, yet said he wanted Britain at ‘the heart of Europe’. The Conservative government had opposed a referendum on the Maastricht Treaty, yet most ministers privately prayed for the Dutch and Danish populations to reject it when they were given the chance in referendums of their own. So, above all, we needed to be clear and consistent.

To me, it followed logically that the Conservatives couldn’t continue to sit as part of the European People’s Party (EPP) group in the European Parliament. The EPP wanted more integration and more political union; the Conservative Party wanted less of both. Yet William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard had all fudged this issue. In my view we had to act and speak in the same way whether we were in London, Brussels or Strasbourg. Thus my pledge to leave the EPP and establish a new centre-right group.

Some have said that this pledge was made purely for opportunistic reasons – to win the support of Conservative backbenchers. Others that I did not fully believe in what I was doing. I totally reject those criticisms. I was in Conservative Central Office when Margaret Thatcher was persuaded to join the EPP. I thought it was wrong at the time, and I never changed my mind. We agreed with the mainly Christian Democrat parties about many things, but not the future direction of Europe. That should have been a deal-breaker right from the start.

But would leaving the EPP do us harm with our allies? This was a stronger argument, and I suspect it was the one that encouraged my predecessors to pull back from making the full break. But our allies needed to know we were serious about reform. And I was convinced that it would be better for all of us if we were outside the EPP, while cooperating with its members on shared endeavours. This indeed turned out to be the case – we established what rapidly became the third-largest group in the European Parliament after the socialists and the EPP: the European Conservatives and Reformists Group.

Undoubtedly the move helped me win support from Eurosceptic MPs. But many of them had few other options. When it came to Europe, Ken Clarke was already the Antichrist to many. And David Davis was the Maastricht whip who had twisted arms and made MPs vote for a treaty they hated. Meanwhile Liam Fox’s bandwagon had limited momentum. So I didn’t need to make pledges on the EPP to win the leadership, or even to win the votes of the bulk of the most committed Eurosceptics. What I said to those MPs was what I believed – and I delivered the promise that I made in full.

But still there wasn’t enough support. It felt as if there were only two people – David Davis and Ken Clarke – in the race. On one occasion in my office just before summer recess, George said I needed to start thinking about packing it in. He was frank, as always: ‘Look, I don’t think you’re going to win. You’ve had a good run, made some good points, put down some strong markers – why not leave it at that for now?’

But I still thought the contest was wide open. I was more certain than ever that the party needed to change, and that change wasn’t being offered by anyone else. Yet I had a sense that for all my hard work, perhaps I was holding something back. Perhaps I was still trying to temper my radical aims, for fear of scaring too many people off. I knew now that the only way I had a hope of winning was by being true to myself, getting everything out there and going for broke on modernisation.

We had £10,000 left in the kitty, and we would blow it all on the launch, at which we would set out in even clearer terms what was on offer and what was at stake. At least then, even if I lost, I’d have nothing to reproach myself for.

Launch day turned out to be a day that changed my life.

Steve and I spent a lot of time thinking and writing, and then polishing and rewriting, the speech. Steve also spent a lot of time getting the look and feel of the launch right: he wanted it to be as different from the usual Tory leadership launches as it could possibly be. These tended to take place in a House of Commons committee room, or at least in a room that looked like one. They would involve lots of men in suits standing around, sometimes looking faintly deranged and saying ‘Hear, hear’ too loudly whenever their man (and it usually was a man) said something vaguely right-wing.

We picked a date for our launch, but soon found out that it was the same day the Davis camp had chosen. Instead of changing the date, we hoped that the contrast between the launches would demonstrate new versus old, change versus more of the same. And that’s pretty much what happened.

Sure enough, the Davis launch was in an oak-panelled room. Veterans of past Tory leadership elections said that they felt they’d seen and heard it all before.

We rented a bright and open space, with a stage and no lectern. Instead of journalists and MPs we invited friends and supporters. And instead of tea and biscuits it was fruit smoothies and chocolate brownies. Sam asked lots of our friends, some of whom, like her, were pregnant or had recently had babies.

As I stood before the crowd, I felt that this was my chance to say as directly as possible what I wanted to do, and why. I might have been timid at the start of the leadership campaign, but I would be bold when it mattered. Everything had to change. It wasn’t enough just to oppose Labour with more vigour. Nor was it enough to produce even more rad­-ical policies and push them with even more gusto. ‘We can win,’ I told the audience. ‘We can make this country better, but we can only win if we change. That’s the question I’m asking the Conservative Party. Don’t put it off for four years. Go for someone who believes it to the core of their being. Change to win – and we will win.’

In one step I had gone from being the outsider to a real contender. And the stage was set for the party conference in Blackpool in just four days’ time.

The attention of the press, which had died off over the summer, was suddenly intense, and Gabby Bertin went into overdrive fixing interviews and profiles. She was joined by George Eustice, who came highly recommended having worked for the organisation Business for Sterling, which campaigned against the UK joining the euro. He was a gentle, thoughtful strawberry farmer from Cornwall, as keen as the rest of us to see the Conservative Party change. We quickly became good friends.

The week in Blackpool was undoubtedly one of the most exciting of my life. I could feel the momentum. Every day we were winning more support from MPs and candidates. Every party or event we held or at which I spoke saw more and more people turn up.

Standing in the wings of the Winter Gardens waiting to make your speech is an extraordinary feeling. Even back in 2005 the place was crumbling, but it still had some of its old magic. The acoustics were good, the hall was packed, and the audience was close to the stage. The atmosphere and the potential were tangible.

My speech was not as good as the one at the launch, but many more people saw it, as it was carried live on television and reprised on the evening news. What impressed many people was that I delivered it without notes, having memorised it as we drafted it. Watching it now I find it rather wooden, but it worked.

Within a single day, the polls were transformed: support for me surged from 16 to 39 per cent, while for Davis it collapsed from 30 to 14. Between the conference in October and the ballot in December there appeared to be nothing that might shift the dial back in Davis’s favour. And I was going to make sure of it. I resolved to go to as many places as I could, and speak to as many members as possible. For five weeks, life for Liz Sugg and me was spent on the road. Speaking at members’ meetings, sometimes with only a dozen people in the room. McDonald’s drive-throughs for lunch, a cigarette and a glass of wine for dinner at whichever Travelodge we were staying in.

Politically the only events that came near to attaining significance were television encounters. There were my first two TV debates, one on ITV, the other on the BBC. And I think it is fair to say that I lost both of them.

The face-off with Jeremy Paxman was, by contrast, something of a triumph. I enjoyed his books, his humour, and watching the spectator sport of his political interviews. But as an interviewer I thought that most of the time he was a self-indulgent monster. He wasn’t trying to get answers or inform viewers, he was just trying to make his victim look like a crook while he looked like a hero. To reverse Noël Coward’s dictum about television, I thought that Newsnight was a programme for polit­icians to watch rather than to appear on. Not least because hardly anyone actually watched it. I could see absolutely no point in doing an interview with Paxman: it would never be an attempt to examine policies or priorities, just an opportunity for him to show off and try to take me down at the same time.

This infuriated my team. There is nothing a press officer hates more than their boss refusing to do an interview. Eventually they wore me down, and I relented. But I was prepared to turn the tables on Paxman.

In spite of endless promises by the BBC about a neutral venue, the interview was staged at some lush wine emporium. And it soon became clear that the whole thing had been set up to try to make me look like a rich, spoilt child of Bacchus. I was a non-executive director of a company, Urbium, that owned and ran bars and nightclubs. And I should have predicted what was coming.

The first question was, ‘Who or what is a Pink Pussy?’

I paused and gulped. The only ‘Pink Pussy’ I had heard of was the notorious nightclub in Ibiza. In a split second I decided – thank God – that no answer was best.

‘What about a Slippery Nipple?’

Now I knew where he was going: Pink Pussies and Slippery Nipples were both cocktails. He wanted to get stuck into outside interests and the responsibility of drinks companies. But before he had the chance to get going, I decided to unleash my own Paxman-like rant.

‘This is the trouble with these interviews, Jeremy. You come in, sit someone down and treat them like they are some cross between a fake or a hypocrite. You give no time to anyone to answer any of your questions. It does your profession no favours at all, and it’s no good for political discourse.’

That, combined with teasing him about interrupting himself, put Paxman off his stride. He got nothing out of me, and I avoided interviews with him for the next five years. I was happy to leave it at played 1, won 1.

And then the campaign was over.

On 6 December 2005 I made my way to the Royal Academy of Arts on Piccadilly for the announcement of the count. The results were read out at 3 p.m. – and the victory was comprehensive. I had won over twice as many votes as my opponent. I had the mandate. I could get down to work.

I went straight from a celebration party for MPs at the ICA on The Mall to the rather grim green office occupied by the leader of the opposition. By the desk at one end of the room is a pair of double doors leading out to a small balcony. I sat down on the ledge and smoked a cigarette as I thought about the day ahead, which would, dauntingly, feature my first Prime Minister’s Questions.

The team met to discuss the task. We had talked a lot about supporting the government when it did the right thing, so I was fairly sure that I should make a start on education, promising to support Tony Blair in his desire to give schools more independence, particularly if he faced down the union-inspired opposition on his own benches.

I suggested that if he brought up our approach in the past, I would say, ‘Never mind the past, I want to talk about the future. He was the future once.’ George said, ‘Never mind what he says, just say that line – it’s brilliant.’ I did. I had only ever spoken from the despatch box three times in my life. The backbenchers cheered behind me.

First hurdle jumped. Many more hurdles to come.