Following is the text of David Cameron's victory speech after being elected to lead the Conservative Party today. He began by thanking his rival, David Davis:

"Thank you very much David. It’s a huge privilege and an honour and a great responsibility to take on this job and I will do it with everything I have to the best of my ability for my party and my country.

"I want us to give this country a modern compassionate Conservatism that is right for our times and right for our country."

"I’d like to thank all of the other participants in this election especially, David Davis, for the very civilised and decent and reasonable way it has been conducted. It has been good for our party.

"It has shown talent, it has has shown ideas, above all it has shown optimism about the future of our party and the future of our country and I congratulate David. He will be a vital part of the team in the future.

"I would also like to thank Michael Howard. Michael, you have given this party a sense of discipline, a sense of professionalism, a sense of purpose and we thank you for that and we mustn’t ever lose you.

"It has certainly been a long contest. There was a cartoon about halfway through which said if it goes on any longer David Cameron will be too old not too young and there were times when I sympathised. But it’s been good for us.

"I said when I launched my campaign that we needed to change in order to win. Now that I’ve won we will change.

"We will change the way we look. Nine out of ten Conservative MPs, like me, are white men. We need to change the scandalous under-representation of women in the Conservative Party and we’ll do that.

"We need to change the way we feel. No more grumbling about modern Britain. I love this country as it is not as it was and I believe our best days lie ahead. We need to change the way we think. It’s not enough just to talk about tackling problems in our inner cities - we have to have all of the right ideas for turning those communities around.

"And we need to change, and we will change, the way we behave. I’m fed up with the Punch and Judy politics of Westminster, the name-calling, backbiting, point-scoring, finger-pointing.

"I want and I will lead a Conservative Party that when the Government does the right thing, we will work with them, and when they do the wrong thing we will call them to account and criticise them. We won’t play politics with the long-term future of this country, we will work to get it right.

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