I fought my first general election in 1955 at the age of 11. I cycled round the polling stations in Ripon collecting teller's slips to check off the vote against our central register.

Twenty years later I was Conservative candidate in the "hopeless" seat of Morpeth in Northumberland - a seat of aluminum smelting, coal mining and working men's clubs where beer with whisky chasers (or was it the other way round?) made canvassing a strain on the bladder and where the Labour vote was weighed rather than counted.

After those twin elections of 1974 - a real baptism of fire - I stood successfully for the European Parliament in 1979 and again in 1984. I have now fought three successful campaigns to become, and remain the MP for Skipton and Ripon.

I don't recite this catalogue to demonstrate that I have a bit of political history. The important point is that in all these elections I was at ease with what the Conservative Party stood for. It was a party which stood for "One Nation" values - social reform and personal opportunity at home and positive engagement in international bodies and peace building abroad.

The Labour Party, for critical periods, stood for neither. at home it remained obsessed with collective action and corporatist policies. Abroad it stood for disengagement through unilateral disarmament and withdrawal from the European Community.

It learned painfully the essential lesson of British politics: however important it is to maintain and nourish your "core" vote you only win power by building out from it into the common ground of politics.

Mrs Thatcher did that because her radicalism appealed to voters wanting more individual opportunity. Mr Blair has done it by accepting the Thatcher Revolution and repudiating the politics of redistribution. This is socialism afloat on a tide of feeling rather than thinking .

If the Conservatives want to be serious contenders for power they have to rebuild a national consensus.

My fear at the moment is that we are doing the opposite: the party's position on Europe is cutting us off from many people who think of themselves as middle-of-the-road voters who have always felt at home in the Conservative Party. These are not just businessmen - though many businessmen tell me that they could not run their companies on the basis of deciding something for 10 years - but professional people and younger voters, who have grown up with the European Union as part of the natural geography of their lives.

I believe that the policy that we will not consider joining a single currency for two Parliaments is not plausible. I think it will marginalise us in debate and enable our opponents to brand us as a party which has become extreme. To let this happen would be tragic: William Hague is anxious to reassert the Party's intellectual dominance of the field of social reform and I endorse that wholeheartedly - as Minister for Urban Registration and Housing it became a field close to my heart.

But because Europe is the one area where he has chosen to set out a categoric line - and that line has undoubtedly moved to the Right - it is inevitable that we shall be judged by it.

If Party members are balloted on the policy I hope that they will be offered a choice, not a take-it-or-leave-it yes or no. I believe the party wants to decide this issue for itself and would like to have the arguments presented to it in a mature and considered way.

I am not a Euro-fanatic. I have worked in Europe as a senior financial journalist, and as a Minister in the Council of Ministers. I belong to the Europe of reality not of myth. I am a pragmatic pro-European who wants to get the best for Britain and believes that we have to keep our options open to do what is best for us when it is best for us.

I do not assume that joining a single currency is inevitable. I shall want to join if it will be in Britain's interest, not as some sort of religious commitment to a European cult.

And I want see the Conservative Party winning elections - local, European and national - on its appeal to all the people faithful to the tradition of Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher and to the legacy of Rab Butler and Iain Macleod.

This is the Party I joined: I want it to remain the Party in which I belong.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.