David Thompson is the Conservative candidate for Maidstone and Malling.

During the afternoon of 21 October, I sat at home awaiting my fate. It was a long afternoon. That evening at 7pm, I and two other hopefuls would be facing the members of Maidstone & Malling Conservative Association as part of the first tranche of parliamentary selections.

As those who have been there will know – and as those who aspire to be there should – it is a nerve-wracking process. All of the preparation on the constituency and its issues, the time spent speaking to local members and finding out what they really want from their next candidate, the honing, refining and re-refining of your speech, and the regular need to remind yourself why it is you are doing this, all make for a heady mix of emotions.

In the end it paid off. I was fortunate not only to be selected to represent my home constituency, but also to do so alongside two excellent and highly capable candidates in Matt Boughton and Mario Creatura – both of whom we are sure to hear a lot more from in the future. But now the hard work really begins.

I find myself one of a cadre of new, authentically Conservative candidates being selected up and down the country. Varied in background and experience, but united in purpose, together we represent an end to the trauma of the last difficult few years of government and the General Election of 2024, and come armed with the new ideas that the country so desperately needs to escape its current downward spiral.

Many of us stepped into the workforce in the deep gloom of the last financial crisis, facing wholly uncertain futures. We know what a faltering labour market feels like for those entering it, and what stagnating wages and poor growth can mean, not just for the day-to-day, but for your future too.

We saw the welfare waste of the Blair and Brown years that needed to be cut and has now risen to unprecedented levels under Burnham and Starmer, and know that prioritising social security over national security is not only dangerous – it simply isn’t an option.

And we emerged from an education system that undervalued technical routes, and left both individual students and the taxpayer with an astronomical bill for a higher education system that does not deliver for everyone and over which neither has much control.

Above all, that lived experience means that we know that there is not a minute to lose to do something about it if we want to make Britain a place of aspiration, where public services actually work ,and where we have confidence in our values and our ability to defend them once again. It was those ambitions that I repeated endlessly when I needed a reminder of why I was doing this on that Wednesday evening two weeks ago.

With the solid intellectual foundations of Kemi’s The Right Way booklet and a growing slate of new policies emerging from our September Conference, I have not wasted any time in getting out of the starting blocks and delivering our message to my local residents in Kent. Residents who, against the backdrop of a national government that seemingly lacks the ambition, wherewithal or mandate to do anything, and our Reform-led County Council whose incompetence has seen it lose all credibility, are keen to hear what we have to say.

My excellent association team too, understanding the urgent need to put the country back on the right path, energised with new members and new YCs, and buoyed up by our party finding its authentic voice once again, has been hitting the phones and letterboxes of the constituency hard.

And the message we are delivering is clear:

We are conservatives. We are back. And we have a plan. A plan to fix our economy, to defend our islands, to get people into work and to turn this country around. Come join us.

The people of this country need that plan to be put into action as soon as possible. Our misfiring economy demands it, as do our business owners, entrepreneurs and all those in need of a job to pay the bills. The world around us demands it, so that we are kept safe from the ever more threatening geopolitical weather. And that generation of young people, seeking new skills, dreaming of a decent job and a home from which they build their futures demand it too.

The selections taking place right now and over the course of the coming months are the next step in the work being led by Kemi and the team to once again light the torch of true conservatism. And with my own selection now happily behind me, I and those other authentic, new Conservative candidates up and down the country are raring to go.