Countries are different. They make different choices. We cannot harmonise everything. For example, it is neither right nor necessary to claim that the integrity of the single market, or full membership of the European Union requires the working hours of British hospital doctors to be set in Brussels irrespective of the views of British parliamentarians and practitioners.

We're all agreed that climate change is one of the greatest and most daunting challenges of our age. We have a moral imperative to act and act now.

I want completing the single market to be our driving mission. I want us to be at the forefront of transformative trade deals with the US, Japan and India as part of the drive towards global free trade. And I want us to be pushing to exempt Europe's smallest entrepreneurial companies from more EU directives.

The last thing I'd say is that you can achieve a lot of things in politics. You can get a lot of things done. And that, in the end - the public service, the national interest: that is what it's all about. Nothing is really impossible if you put your mind to it. After all, as I once said: I was the future once.

We need to have a bigger and more significant role for national parliaments. There is not, in my view, a single European demos.

At a time when we're having to take such difficult decisions about how to cut back without damaging the things that matter the most, we should strain every sinew to cut error, waste and fraud.

Because with courage and conviction I believe we can deliver a more flexible, adaptable and open European Union in which the interests and ambitions of all its members can be met.