For the Record

Off we went to Birmingham, then Leeds, then seventy-three other constituencies in just four weeks. For years I’d done my Cameron Direct events, letting the public fire questions at me on any subject. It was exactly where I wanted to be, on a little stage we were carting around the country, not much more sophisticated than the soapbox John Major had taken around eighteen years earlier.

What Major didn’t have, though, was a man dressed as a chicken following him everywhere. Tony Blair did – one of CCHQ’s apparently. But what goes around comes around, and now I had a chicken of my own, this time from the Daily Mirror.

To begin with it was funny having this birdman on my tail. But the novelty wore off, and I finally decided to confront the stooge, unmasking him by lifting the head off his costume. It turned out that he was called Tristan, and he was left completely speechless when I asked what it was he was so keen to ask me. The next day, in Saltash in Cornwall, I was hit by an egg, enabling me to finally answer the question of which came first.

By this point I felt we were really getting somewhere with our economic message. Leaders from great British brands like Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury’s and Corus steel were coming out to condemn Labour’s proposed National Insurance rise, branded a ‘jobs tax’.

It’s important to emphasise what a shift this was. Since Black Wednesday, New Labour had courted Britain’s businesses effectively. Now we could claim to be the party of business once again.

We were making progress on our society messaging too. With the help of Michael Caine we launched the centrepiece of the Big Society, the National Citizen Service, or NCS. Expressions of interest in setting up Free Schools were coming in from around the country. And our pitch to public-sector workers about cutting bureaucracy and enhan­cing local control was a vast improvement on our efforts in 2001 and 2005.

A few days later, I launched our manifesto at Battersea Power Station. The manifesto was a blue hardback book titled ‘An Invitation to Join the Government of Great Britain’, which emphasised the Big Society theme.

But all the usual election paraphernalia – posters, chickens, eggs and manifestos – was about to be eclipsed by something completely new.

Ever since 1964, when Harold Wilson challenged prime minister Alec Douglas-Home to appear in a TV debate, there had been a similar call from someone during general election campaigns. In the past, it had always been the underdog doing the calling, and the favourite refusing (and in recent years that favourite had been followed around by a chicken – because they’d ‘chickened out’).

Until now.

I had decided back in 2005 that I wasn’t going to fit into the normal pattern of resisting debates if I was in the lead, or of calling for them if I was falling behind. I was going to go for it. I liked TV. I liked debating, although perhaps I hadn’t paid enough attention to the fact that when I’d debated on TV during the party leadership campaign it hadn’t gone well. Anyway, I always felt that TV debates were coming. The UK’s first general election leaders’ debates would take place in 2010 because, for the first time, the front-runner was calling for them.

Bill Knapp and Anita Dunn, the US experts I had hired to help me prepare for the coming ordeal, were brutally frank about the reality I was about to encounter: to my disappointment they told me that these wouldn’t really be debates at all. You don’t want to engage with your opponents’ argument, you just want to put your own point across. You should focus your efforts on delivering your pre-prepared soundbite down the camera lens. Avoid too much spontaneity in taking apart opponents’ arguments; it’s far too risky. Just get your ‘zinger’ – a one-liner destined for the headlines on the news programmes after the show – ready beforehand, and deploy it as soon as you can.

My disappointment quickly turned to worry. We did some practices in Millbank, with Damian Green (and sometimes Olive Dowden) playing Gordon Brown, and Jeremy Hunt as Nick Clegg. Halfway through, I threw down my notes. ‘It’s hopeless. Clegg will win hands-down. It’s easy. He can just say “A plague on both your houses.”’ Even if I’d been Demosthenes or Cicero, he was going to win.

Before that first debate, history in the making, I’d never been so nervous in my life. The news channels covered the build-up as if it was England in the World Cup final. Brown, Clegg and I stood on a primary-coloured set like gameshow contestants. As predicted, Clegg was painting the blue and red parties as the old guard, and himself as the new kid on the block. It seemed a breeze for him. He was even using the same phrases that Jeremy Hunt had as his stand-in during our mock debates – ‘two old parties’, ‘more of the same’, ‘there is an alternative’. Nick had prepared well – and he was good.

I was bad. Not switch-off-the-telly, hide-behind-the-sofa bad. But aloof and stiff. Lacking passion. Anecdotes that were too contrived. And one bit of absolutely essential preparation that I failed to put into practice was properly looking down the camera when I spoke. Colleagues and friends were polite afterwards, because while Clegg had undoubtedly won, at least I hadn’t lost (that honour went to Brown).

But Samantha was brutal. ‘You were hopeless – and you’ve got to watch the whole thing through all over again to see just how bad it was.’ She was right – and I did.

The Lib Dems surged ahead in the polls – into the lead in some. There was even a poll that said their leader was nearly as popular as Winston Churchill. Britain was in the grip of a new phenomenon: Cleggmania.

And I took it hard. I was the one who had wanted to do these debates. I hadn’t prepared properly for them. I’d let everyone down. I lay in bed, running through a list of people in my head, friends who I thought were going to lose their seats because I’d screwed up. The feeling was worse than fear or disappointment. It was guilt.

The second debate, in Bristol, went much better. It was on foreign affairs, and Clegg was vulnerable here. His party manifesto rejected ‘like-for-like replacement of the Trident nuclear weapons system’, thus putting our deterrent at risk. It didn’t do him too much damage though – the two of us drew in the opinion poll afterwards.

Arriving in Birmingham for the third and final debate, my anxieties reached a new high. So much was riding on my performance. The future of the country. The future of my party, my team, my friends and family. My future.

What happened next wasn’t planned or predicted, but I suppose it was inevitable. Brown and I had clearly both gone away and done the same thinking about Clegg. This guy was – according to the polls – running away with the election. Yet he was inconsistent. His policies had never really been subjected to proper scrutiny. The numbers didn’t add up. His manifesto included some seriously odd ideas.

We took him to bits, starting with his pledge of an amnesty for illegal immigrants. Months afterwards Nick told me that if he’d known this policy would be so contentious he never would have let it into the manifesto.

Afterwards, I bounded back into the hotel room. A poll there and then showed that I had won the debate. The relief was enormous. Finally I could get back to the real campaign, which culminated a few days later in a twenty-four-hour sprint to the finish.

My top-to-toe tour of Britain began in a hi-fi factory in East Renfrewshire in the evening. By 10 p.m. I was in a Carlisle fire station, with officers clocking on for the night shift. At 1 a.m. I was wandering around a factory in Darwen, Lancashire, before crossing the Pennines for a 3 a.m. tour of a Morrison’s depot in Wakefield. Next was the Grimsby fish market at 5 a.m. as trawlermen delivered their morning catch, followed by the first lesson of the day at a school in Nottingham, and then an ambulance station in Dudley.

Life on the campaign bus (which is rather like a band’s tour bus, but with less booze and more journalists) tests your senses as well as your stamina. After we had boarded with wet shoes from the Grimsby fish market, Sky’s Joey Jones decided to put some roast beef in the oven that was on the bus. As we wended our way round the windy Welsh roads towards a school in Powys, surrounded by the inescapable smell of fish and beef, everyone began feeling sicker and sicker.

At long last we reached our final stop, Bristol, where supporters including Sam had gathered. I was wrung out, but I had to give a rallying cry with what felt like the last breath I had in me: ‘I want a government that makes us feel good about Britain again – all that we are, all that we’ve done, all that we can do in the future … a government that’s about hope, and optimism and change in our country, not the doom and the gloom and the depression of the Brown years, which we can, tomorrow, put behind us – forever.’

But the news bulletins were focused on something else. Athens was ablaze, and several people had been killed after protesters reacted to planned austerity measures. Economic volatility and the vulnerability of countries like Britain returned to the foreground. The world was in turmoil. Who were the public going to ask to run Britain in these uncertain times? A Conservative government? A Labour government? Or something else?

As on every previous polling day in my adult life, I got up early on 6 May to go to cast my ballot. Sadly, my early voting was delayed by four whole hours, as two jokers had scaled the roof of my local polling station, Spelsbury Memorial Hall, to erect ‘Vote for Eton’ signs and swig champagne.

It is strange voting for yourself to become an MP. It is even stranger voting for yourself to become prime minister. And whereas at previous elections I would have visited polling stations and committee rooms in my own constituency, this time I had sent all my party workers to neighbouring marginal seats. So I spent the hours that followed fiddling around in my vegetable garden and chopping logs for our fire – two of my favourite ways of dealing with stress.

Later that night, Sam, my close team and I gathered in the sitting room at Dean to watch the exit poll. I felt a mixture of fear and hope – fear that we’d fail totally, and hope that we might be about to defy expectations. But I was left with a strange, in-between feeling when at the stroke of 10 p.m. David Dimbleby announced the result of the exit poll: ‘It’s going to be a hung Parliament with the Conservatives as the largest party.’

Some of the results that followed started to point towards a majority – the swings in Sunderland, the seats we picked up in the south, our better-than-expected performance in the south-east. At 1 a.m. we won Kingswood near Bristol – and that was 135 on our target list. But the north of England and London weren’t going as we needed them to.

As the voters’ verdicts unfolded across the country, I went to Windrush Leisure Centre in Witney for my own count. Though my eyes were also on the 649 other contests taking place, I was still eager to succeed in the patch I loved so much.

I was also reminded why it’s so important that our prime ministers are also MPs. Only in Britain would the person bidding for the highest office be sitting on a plastic chair watching his party’s fate unfold on a crackly TV. It is humbling and grounding to be accountable to your own con­stituency. And it was with genuine pride that I increased my majority.

By 3 a.m. it was confirmed there would be a hung Parliament. I took a call from Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California, congratulating me on my win. But Arnie, I said, it wasn’t a win. In what was the most surreal moment of the whole election, there I was, in a leisure centre, in the middle of the night, explaining the first-past-the-post electoral system to the Terminator.

When I got back to London I had to go to the CCHQ party in Millbank. The atmosphere was jubilant, but I was cautious – I could see from what was on the boards of ‘results in’ and ‘results to come’ that we were unlikely to make it.

Over at the Park Plaza Hotel I attempted to grab an hour’s sleep. As I closed my eyes, I lay there pondering it all. It was looking like being the most successful Tory result in eighteen years. But I was surprised and confused about the Lib Dems. Cleggmania had well and truly faded. They had lost seats. Yet – another odd feature of our politics – he might now be kingmaker.

I steeled myself. This had been the hardest slog of my life. But what was to come might be even harder.

I am clear what it was that produced the great swing in our favour. We had changed the Conservative Party, making it appeal once more to Middle England and making people in urban, liberal Britain feel that they could vote for us.

I am also fairly sure why we didn’t win outright. There was too much ‘and’ in our campaign – the Big Society and austerity; cutting some public services and increasing others; continuing to modernise and hammering Brown and Labour.

As for the debates, they didn’t have a dramatic impact on the outcome. The Conservative share of the vote was close to where the polls were at the start of the formal campaign. The Lib Dems also ended the campaign close to where they began, though Nick Clegg gave his party a tremendous boost where otherwise it may well have been squeezed by the two bigger parties and lost even more seats.

The truth is the real benefit of the debates to the Conservatives was elsewhere, and is often overlooked. By sucking the life out of the campaign, the debates meant Labour was never able to get its powerful anti-Tory cuts campaign off the ground.

Looking back, my view is simple: in those desperate economic times, even after the changes we’d made, the Conservative Party hadn’t quite sealed the deal with the electorate. People were still uncertain about the Conservatives.

This was even more true at a moment when budget cuts were needed. As I’ve said, we’d intended to respond to voters’ concerns by matching Labour’s spending in the first two years, and by promising to share the proceeds of growth between more spending and tax cuts. This formula was easy to understand, and allowed us to reduce the relative size of the state while still increasing the amount spent on essential services.

Then came the financial crash, and these reassurances weren’t possible any more. So people were uncertain. And we had been reflecting their uncertainty rather than allaying it.

Remember also that it was Everest we were trying to climb. We were trying to win a historic number of seats, while the electoral geography massively favoured Labour.

The data shows why. In 2005, a 35 per cent share of the vote had given Labour a majority. With our 36 per cent share in 2010 – and two million more votes than Labour – we didn’t clinch it.

So how did we measure against those great landslides of political history in the end?

The swing from government to opposition was less than Attlee had managed in 1945 or Blair in 1997, but it was on a par with Margaret Thatcher in 1979. And we had gained more seats – ninety-seven – for the Conservatives than at any election since 1931.

Yet it was what would happen next, the relationships I would forge and the decisions I would take, that was to make more significant political history.

12

Cabinet Making

‘David, congratulations!’ came the voice down the phone. It was President Barack Obama, and this was my first evening as prime minister after five tumultuous days of negotiations in May 2010. ‘Enjoy every moment,’ he said, ‘because it’s all downhill from here.’

I would often tell the story – and would use the same line when ringing other presidents and prime ministers after their election victories. But it wasn’t entirely true. The early days and weeks in government went extremely well, in a way that confounded many people’s expectations. Some thought a coalition would be unstable and prone to early collapse. In fact, at a time of great difficulty, when markets were fragile and protests were breaking out across Western capitals, the administration that I put together with Nick Clegg was to prove one of the most stable governments in Europe.

I believe the coalition succeeded in those first few weeks and months in part because our party had spent five years in opposition preparing for power. I had thought a lot about how to do the job of prime minister. I knew that the ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘where’ and ‘why’ questions would hit me the moment I walked through that big black door. And I understood that the mechanics mattered. Because of all that preparation, as well as feeling daunted, honoured and excited by the prospect of being PM, I felt ready.

In opposition we had developed a good system of short and focused daily meetings to bring the top team together and despatch the business of the day, chaired by George in my absence. The civil servants were doubtful that the routine would last, but six years later we were still assembling – PM and chancellor – for the daily ‘8.30’ and ‘4 o’clock’, as we called them.

I’ve always believed that ministers who automatically purge their predecessors’ staff are cutting off their noses to spite their faces. So I decided to keep the private secretaries I had inherited from Brown, including the smart and sardonic James Bowler as my principal private secretary, as well as cabinet secretary Gus O’Donnell and No. 10 permanent secretary Jeremy Heywood – both former colleagues from my Lamont days. Their expertise would be invaluable. ‘Your job is not to tell me when I get it right, but to tell me when I get it wrong,’ I told them.

The integration between my staff and George’s was to continue in government. We were one team, and I believe that became one of the secrets to our success, particularly as our driving mission was economic rescue.

The ‘one team’ spirit also applied to the No. 10 operation, where I wanted the political appointees and the civil servants to work together. And I wanted that open, trusting, collegiate atmosphere to flow through the coalition too. That meant, rather controversially, that our spads would work side by side, sharing offices. Sometimes people would walk into a room and find it difficult to tell who was the Tory, who was the Lib Dem and who was the civil servant.

We didn’t get it all right. The Conservative Party in opposition had tended to criticise the growth of No. 10 as making the PM’s office too ‘presidential’, and, in line with that thinking, I scrapped the PM’s ‘delivery unit’. This was a mistake – and we reversed it over time, building a similar team focused on the implementation of government policy.

Another early error was running a joint Conservative–Lib Dem Policy Unit. It soon became clear that this would be very difficult when everyone involved had loyalty to different leaders and their eye on the next party conference or general election, at which point we would be competing, not collaborating. The Policy Unit was split in April 2013.

The next question was where would I base myself in Downing Street. Margaret Thatcher had what was called her study on the first floor, by the stairs that led to her No. 10 flat. Tony Blair had his ‘den’ at the bottom of the main staircase, whose yellow walls are tiled with pictures of his – our – predecessors. Gordon Brown opted for something different – something that resembled a trading floor or newsroom.

In the end I chose the room that had been Blair’s. It was close to everyone else on the ground floor – the private secretaries, the duty clerks who staff the place night and day, the ‘garden rooms’ teams who support the PM wherever he or she is in the world, the press office, speechwriters, and events and visits team. But you could also shut the door, hold very private meetings and work, write or make telephone calls without being disturbed.

It was in that office, on my first evening, that I sat and read the letter Gordon Brown had left for me. Tony Blair’s letter of congratulations came soon afterwards. One of his pieces of advice stuck with me: however tough the job gets, remember that the British people have a grudging respect for whoever is trying their best to do it.

The one issue Sam and I had not settled was where we would live. Sam wasn’t sold on the idea of moving into either the flat above No. 10 or that in No. 11 – it was something we would have to work out. So that night, my first as PM, I went home to North Kensington.

Leaving the next morning for my first full day in my new job, I stepped out of our terraced home and into an armoured Jag. We sped off towards central London, with eight motorcycle outriders around us. Some would split off to block the junctions that fed into the main road, clearing our way. Which was incredible – until I saw the tailbacks I had caused. I felt like President Mugabe. So that was it – day one, executive decision: no outriders, except for emergencies. (I did use the Special Escort Group more and more as time went on. And they really are the most professional elite officers, protecting everyone from the royals to visiting PMs and training other forces from around the world.) The experience also made me wonder how practical our west London home might prove to be.

Then, of course, came the crucial question of who: who would I appoint to each department of government?

The art of the shuffle – and the reshuffle – was something else I had learned a lot about in opposition. But the pressure and media attention in government is many times greater. Basically, reshuffles are a nightmare. You are dealing with egos, big ones. Every move is scrutinised. Any delay is dithering. Any job rejected is a snub. End up with the wrong balance of left and right, male and female, and you are either hopelessly politically naïve or absurdly politically correct – or if you are unlucky, both at the same time.

Friends in business used to say, ‘We all have to take tough decisions to get the right top team – why all the fuss about political reshuffles?’ To which I would reply, ‘Yes, but you don’t have to appoint your entire team all on the same day, in full view of the world’s television cameras. And the ones you sack go away. The ones I sack sit behind me and plot my downfall.’

The best way is to plan reshuffles like a military operation. You need to have a strategy and stick to it. Every move is timed and scheduled. And whatever the resistance, even if you are forced to make small tactic­al retreats, you need to keep advancing.

Appointing your first government, though, is, relatively speaking, a pleasure. After all, you are helping colleague after colleague achieve one of their political dreams: taking office.

The first moves were obvious: making George chancellor of the exchequer and William Hague my foreign secretary. We had worked closely together over the previous five years, and I had assured them that the jobs they had in opposition would be the jobs they would take in government. I made William first secretary of state, essentially my deputy, so he could chair cabinet and take PMQs in my absence.

On that first night in Downing Street I also confirmed to Patrick McLoughlin that he would be the chief whip, and could work with the team at No. 10 to plan the cabinet and government formation that would happen the next day.

I wanted it to be straightforward. I had long believed that secretaries of state were shunted from job to job too often. Labour’s ministerial musical chairs had become increasingly absurd – they had a new home secretary every two or three years.

Most members of my shadow cabinet knew what jobs they would be doing in government because they had been shadowing them for much of the past five years. Andrew Lansley went to Health, Liam Fox to Defence, Eric Pickles to Local Government, Owen Paterson to Northern Ireland, and Andrew Mitchell to International Development.