The hardest job in Britain demands a leader brave enough to admit when he is wrong

I do not envy you. I believe you have taken on the hardest job in Britain. Becoming Prime Minister is difficult enough. Your challenge is even greater. You are trying to persuade a deeply sceptical public that politics can once again improve their lives at a time when trust in politicians has rarely been lower.

You have spoken about rebuilding trust, creating growth that benefits ordinary people and restoring confidence in government. Those ambitions are both admirable and necessary. The question is not whether they are the right objectives. It is whether government can organise itself to achieve them.

When I married my wife, Julia, in 1984, she agreed to do so on one condition: that I abandoned my ambition of entering politics when I turned forty. Looking back, that condition led to the two best decisions of my life: marrying Julia and never becoming a politician.

Instead, I spent the next forty-five years building businesses around the world. I have had the privilege of employing tens of thousands of people, investing billions of pounds and working alongside people from almost every walk of life. Those experiences have changed my political beliefs more profoundly than I could ever have imagined when, as a twenty-year-old, I campaigned enthusiastically for Margaret Thatcher in the 1979 General Election.

If someone had told that twenty-year-old that one day I would be writing an open letter to a Labour Prime Minister offering advice rather than opposition, I would have laughed. Yet half a century in business has taught me that reality is a far better teacher than ideology.

As a young man, I held what could almost be described as a theological belief in free markets. Margaret Thatcher understood something Britain desperately needed to relearn- wealth has to be created before it can be distributed. She deserves enormous credit for restoring Britain’s entrepreneurial spirit.

But creating wealth and creating a fair society are not the same thing.

Markets are the greatest mechanism humanity has ever invented for creating wealth. They reward innovation, enterprise and risk-taking. They do not reward kindness, humility or compassion. Those are choices that society must make for itself.

The economy is not an end in itself. It is the engine that allows us to build the society we want. Equally, compassion without economic growth is simply a promise that cannot be kept.

Business and government are not opponents. They are partners. Business creates jobs, investment and innovation. Government creates the confidence, stability and long-term framework within which business is prepared to invest. Trust between them has steadily eroded over the last decade. Rebuilding that trust may prove to be your most important economic task.

My advice is therefore not about your values. It is about how you pursue them. The most difficult thing I do in business is not persuading people who disagree with me. It is persuading people who agree with me to challenge me. Agreement creates comfort. Challenge creates better decisions.

One lesson has gradually become central to how I try to lead. Values should be unwavering. Methods should never be.

The greatest mistake leaders make is believing that because their objectives are right, their methods must also be right. My own experience of bringing together people from very different political traditions taught me that, once people stop defending ideologies and start solving problems, good ideas come from everywhere.

The difficult part of leadership is creating an environment where intelligent people feel safe enough - and confident enough - to tell you that you are wrong. Some of the best decisions I have ever made began with an argument that exposed a flaw in my own thinking.

Leadership has an unfortunate habit of insulating people from reality. As power grows, disagreement becomes less frequent. Honest criticism is replaced by reassurance. Leaders begin hearing what they want to hear instead of what they need to hear.

Politics is no different. Build a government that shares your values but constantly challenges your methods. Recruit people not because they think like you, but because they care about the same destination while seeing a different route to get there. Borrow ideas from business, charities, entrepreneurs, academics, local government and, yes, from your political opponents. The people whose lives you are trying to improve do not care where the solution comes from. They care whether it works.

The greatest lesson I have learnt in fifty years is that certainty is usually the enemy of progress. Almost every major mistake I have made began with believing I was right. Almost every major success began with discovering that I was wrong about something important.

That requires humility. It also requires courage. You have an opportunity that very few Prime Ministers are ever given. Not simply to hold office, but to redefine what good government looks like.

If you can keep your values while constantly questioning your methods; if you recruit the best people regardless of political tribe; if you remain intellectually curious enough to change your mind when the evidence demands it; and if you judge every policy not by whether it is traditionally left or right but by whether it genuinely improves people’s lives, you may achieve something that has eluded British politics for generations.

Whether any of us sits on the left or the right matters far less than whether we can work together to leave Britain stronger, fairer and more confident than we found it. History will judge your government not by the promises it makes, but by the lives it improves. I sincerely hope you succeed, because if you do, Britain succeeds too - and so do those whose voices are too rarely heard.

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Guy Hands is the Founder of private equity firm Terra Firma.

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