Mel Stride has become the fourth Conservative MP to announce they are joining the race for the party’s leadership. Mr Stride, the MP for Central Devon, said he believed he was the right person to “unite the party”. The former work and pensions secretary retained his seat by just 61 votes at the General Election. Report by Covellm. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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00:00I care about the Conservative Party. I think it has a really important role to play politically
00:04and should be in government. But we've had a disastrous election and we need to rebuild.
00:09And I believe that I'm the person best placed to do that. The reason for that is we need
00:13to unite the Parliamentary Party and I think my political positioning and relationships
00:16across the party would see me in a good position to do that. But we also need to drive change,
00:21deep fundamental change in both the organisation of the party and also in terms of its policy
00:26platform. Now I've driven huge generational change at the Department for Work and Pensions,
00:33so changes that will be seeing 400,000 fewer people gain some of these long-term sickness
00:38benefits and indeed the tax cuts that we went to the country with in our manifesto. I'm
00:44not new to big challenges and new reforms and I believe that I can take the party forward.