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Finally with James Cleverly, reporters asked if he stands by his previous assertion that Nigel Farage should have no place in the Tory party, and if so, whether that means they will stay locked out of government because the right will remain split.

The Tory leadership hopeful replies that that analysis is “completely off”, and they need to “make the case to win those voters back”.

“We lost the confidence of voters. We need to regain that credibility.

“We need to have an honest conversation about the relationship between the state, the levels of taxation, the levels of immigration and what we’re going to do about it.”

On the Reform UK leader, Mr Cleverly says: “The lazy idea that somehow cutting a deal with Nigel Farage will make all those problems go away, I think is naive at best and deeply counterproductive at worst.

“We need to make the case, the Conservative case for lower taxes, for more entrepreneurialism, for stronger borders, for strong defence.

“And if we do that, the voters that went off to Reform will come back, as will those who went off to the Lib Dems, the half dozen or so that went off to Labour and the millions that just stayed at home.

“We can and we should win those voters back by being ourselves, not doing some pale imitation of someone else,” he concludes.

Fixing Britain will take a decade, Lammy says

The government has been accused of being too full of doom and gloom of late, painting a very bleak picture of the state of Britain.

But Foreign Secretary David Lammy says the government’s comments about the state of the public finances and public services “reflect the public”.

“We’ve just had a general election. People know that our public services are in a state. They know it’s going to take some heavy lifting. We’ve got this £22bn black hole.

“You do this stuff for the purpose of getting to the sunny uplands of a rebuilt NHS, our schools [in which] our young people… are thriving, our strong position in the world.”

We are in for the “long haul”, and he says it will take “the extent of this parliament and our five-year term and then into hopefully a second term”.