For the Record

by David Cameron

  Politically the only events that came near to attaining significance were television encounters. There were my first two TV debates, one on ITV, the other on the BBC. And I think it is fair to say that I lost both of them.

  The face-off with Jeremy Paxman was, by contrast, something of a triumph. I enjoyed his books, his humour, and watching the spectator sport of his political interviews. But as an interviewer I thought that most of the time he was a self-indulgent monster. He wasn’t trying to get answers or inform viewers, he was just trying to make his victim look like a crook while he looked like a hero. To reverse Noël Coward’s dictum about television, I thought that Newsnight was a programme for polit­icians to watch rather than to appear on. Not least because hardly anyone actually watched it. I could see absolutely no point in doing an interview with Paxman: it would never be an attempt to examine policies or priorities, just an opportunity for him to show off and try to take me down at the same time.

  This infuriated my team. There is nothing a press officer hates more than their boss refusing to do an interview. Eventually they wore me down, and I relented. But I was prepared to turn the tables on Paxman.

  In spite of endless promises by the BBC about a neutral venue, the interview was staged at some lush wine emporium. And it soon became clear that the whole thing had been set up to try to make me look like a rich, spoilt child of Bacchus. I was a non-executive director of a company, Urbium, that owned and ran bars and nightclubs. And I should have predicted what was coming.

  The first question was, ‘Who or what is a Pink Pussy?’

  I paused and gulped. The only ‘Pink Pussy’ I had heard of was the notorious nightclub in Ibiza. In a split second I decided – thank God – that no answer was best.

  ‘What about a Slippery Nipple?’

  Now I knew where he was going: Pink Pussies and Slippery Nipples were both cocktails. He wanted to get stuck into outside interests and the responsibility of drinks companies. But before he had the chance to get going, I decided to unleash my own Paxman-like rant.

  ‘This is the trouble with these interviews, Jeremy. You come in, sit someone down and treat them like they are some cross between a fake or a hypocrite. You give no time to anyone to answer any of your questions. It does your profession no favours at all, and it’s no good for political discourse.’

  That, combined with teasing him about interrupting himself, put Paxman off his stride. He got nothing out of me, and I avoided interviews with him for the next five years. I was happy to leave it at played 1, won 1.

  And then the campaign was over.

  On 6 December 2005 I made my way to the Royal Academy of Arts on Piccadilly for the announcement of the count. The results were read out at 3 p.m. – and the victory was comprehensive. I had won over twice as many votes as my opponent. I had the mandate. I could get down to work.

  I went straight from a celebration party for MPs at the ICA on The Mall to the rather grim green office occupied by the leader of the opposition. By the desk at one end of the room is a pair of double doors leading out to a small balcony. I sat down on the ledge and smoked a cigarette as I thought about the day ahead, which would, dauntingly, feature my first Prime Minister’s Questions.

  The team met to discuss the task. We had talked a lot about supporting the government when it did the right thing, so I was fairly sure that I should make a start on education, promising to support Tony Blair in his desire to give schools more independence, particularly if he faced down the union-inspired opposition on his own benches.

  I suggested that if he brought up our approach in the past, I would say, ‘Never mind the past, I want to talk about the future. He was the future once.’ George said, ‘Never mind what he says, just say that line – it’s brilliant.’ I did. I had only ever spoken from the despatch box three times in my life. The backbenchers cheered behind me.

  First hurdle jumped. Many more hurdles to come.

  9

  Hoodies and Huskies

  It was minus 20 degrees. All I could see for miles was snow. Standing on a sled, I clung to the reins of several barking huskies. ‘Mush!’ I shouted, and we hurtled across the glacier.

  It had been four months since I’d taken the reins of a rather different beast. And I had decided to make Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, the destination for one of my first foreign trips as Conservative Party leader. It was dismissed by many as style over substance. But, like all the significant decisions during those early days of my leadership, it was part of a serious, thought-through political strategy.

  We wanted to demonstrate in the clearest possible way that this was a new leader, a changed political party, and – above all – that the environment and climate change were issues we were determined to lead on. They were personally important to me, but they also helped to define my sort of conservatism. Concerned about preserving our heritage, aware of the responsibilities (not just the limits) of the state, able to talk confidently about new issues that might not have arisen in earlier general elections, and respectful of scientific evidence.

  Yet in opposition it is hard to get across who you are, and to talk about the things you want to talk about. The government can just waltz onto the 10 o’clock news and talk about its latest plan of action, while you have to work relentlessly to try to set the agenda – but with what? Something you might do, if there is an election, if you win it and if the issue is still relevant in n years’ time.

  So we were prepared to take risks. And Svalbard really was a risk. For a start, it nearly resulted in images very different from the photos of me gliding along behind the huskies. I was given a whole load of instructions about how to operate the sled. I ignored all of them, and disaster nearly struck. The cameras were set up for a dynamic, fast-moving shot of me steering the sled. I managed to turn the whole thing over at high speed, and collapsed in a ball of snow, ice and, from everyone around me, hysterical laughter.

  These weren’t quite the pictures we wanted – I kept thinking of another opposition leader, Neil Kinnock, falling over on Brighton beach. Mercifully, these career-maiming shots never made it onto viewers’ screens.

  Later, as we clambered into a cave, everyone was asked to wear pro­tective helmets. I resisted, remembering William Hague’s baseball cap embarrassment as leader of the opposition. As a politician, you’re haunted by the ghosts of gaffes past.

  It wasn’t long before I patented my own.

  A leader of the opposition has a car from the Government Car Service to ferry them around, at least partly because they have a number of official responsibilities, and a big case of confidential papers to carry with them. I was allotted Terry Burton, who had driven some of my predecessors.

  For years as an MP I had cycled to Parliament, often with George. I didn’t want to stop now that I was party leader, and very occasionally Terry would bring this case, and sometimes my work clothes, including my shoes, in to the office for me. Soon the Daily Mirror was onto me, exposing the eco-mad Tory leader’s ‘flunky following behind in a gas-guzzling motor’. The Guardian dubbed Terry a ‘shoe chauffeur’. I was truly sad that the episode had tarnished our genuine ‘Vote Blue, Go Green’ message, our slogan for the local elections taking place that very week. And I’ve never lived it down.

  Presentation is important, but prioritising the environment through my trip to the Arctic really was as much about substance. We had to take a boat to visit the British Arctic Survey team, and I asked one of its members why they’d put their station somewhere that was surrounded by water. ‘Well, the water wasn’t there until last year,’ he said. It was a profound moment. Global warming was real, and it was happening before our very eyes.

  So what was the governing philosophy of my leadership of the Conservative Party in opposition?

  Two big things had changed.

  First, at the time it seemed as if the great ideological battle of
the twentieth century – right versus left, capitalism versus communism – was over. We had won. Labour now accepted the need for a market economy to help deliver the good society, and it appeared that full-blooded socialism was dead. The Conservative Party needed to take a new tack. We shouldn’t give up on our belief in enterprise and market economics, but it was time to bring Conservative thinking and solutions to new problems.

  The second thing that had changed was the electorate. Over the previous twenty years Britain had become more prosperous, somewhat more urban and much more ethnically diverse. Gay people were coming out, more women were going to work and taking senior jobs, social attitudes and customs were changing. And all of this, it seemed to me, had left the Conservative Party, one of the most adaptable parties in the world, behind.

  I saw myself, however new and inexperienced, as inheriting the mantle of great leaders like Peel, Disraeli, Salisbury and Baldwin, who had adapted the party. To achieve that, I wanted Conservative means to achieve progressive ends. Using prices and markets, and encouraging personal and corporate responsibility, could help our environment by cutting pollution and greenhouse gases. Stronger families and more rigorous school standards could help reduce inter-generational poverty. Trusting the professionals in our NHS, rather than smothering them with bureaucracy, could build a stronger health service.

  The Conservative Party, in my view, had got into a rut of tired and easy thinking. We had a tendency to trot out the same old answers. Want social mobility? Open more grammar schools. Want lower crime? Put more bobbies on the beat. Want a more competitive economy? Just cut taxes.

  We had another, even more profound, problem. People didn’t trust our motives. Whenever we suggested something, people seemed almost automatically to add their own mistrustful explanation of our motives. When we said, ‘Let’s reduce taxes,’ they added, ‘to help the rich’. When we said, ‘Let’s start up new schools,’ they added, ‘for your kids, not ours.’

  Part of this was a hangover from the end of the last period of Conservative rule, when Tony Blair and New Labour had caricatured Conservatives as uncaring. But some of it was our own fault. It was part of what I called – or more accurately what Samantha called – the ‘man under the car bonnet’ syndrome. We approached every problem or issue with a mechanical, process-driven response rather than a more emotional, values-driven answer about the ends we were aiming to achieve.

  At the same time as the new approach and new policies, I was determined that the Conservative Party should make its peace with the modern world. Our opposition to, or sometimes grudging acceptance of, a whole range of social reforms, from lowering the age of consent for gay men to positive action to close the gender pay gap, made us look and sound like a party that was stuck in the past, and didn’t like the modern country we aspired to govern.

  I wanted the Conservative Party to be more liberal on these social issues. I felt passionately that morally it was the right thing to do, and I thought it would help us to get a hearing from some people who had written us off. It seemed to me an embarrassment, really just awful in every possible way, that someone who shared our values might be put off voting Conservative because they thought we disapproved of their sex­uality, or looked down on their ethnicity, or didn’t want them to achieve because of their gender.

  Part of the problem was our personnel. We were the oldest political party in the world – and we looked it. Just seventeen of the 198 Tory MPs elected in 2005 were women. That was an improvement of four. Since 1931.

  Totally unacceptable. We were, after all, the party of the first woman MP to take her seat in the Commons. We gave the country its first female prime minister. Up and down Britain, women were among our finest councillors and our fiercest campaigners. But it just didn’t show on our green benches, which were, by and large, male, middle-aged, southern, wealthy and white.

  By day four of the job I had appointed all my shadow ministers. I thought it was important to bring my leadership rivals into the fold, so David Davis and Liam Fox shadowed the home and defence departments. I thought I’d got a good mix, but I ended up with more people called David in the shadow cabinet (five) than women (four). There simply wasn’t the range from which to choose.

  Come day seven I was at the Met Hotel in Leeds unveiling a plan to elect more women and ethnic minority MPs (of whom we had, shamefully, just two). It was imperative that we started to look more like the country we hoped to govern.

  The candidates’ list was immediately frozen. A new Priority List of 150 candidates, people we thought the cream of the crop, and better reflecting the make-up of modern Britain, was drawn up from the larger main list. All associations in winnable seats would have to choose from this so-called ‘A-List’.

  It caused uproar. Uproar so furious and so persistent that a year later I ended up agreeing that associations could pick their candidates from the full list, but half of the interviewees had to be women, thereby superseding the A-List.

  But the ambition never wavered. We carried on exerting pressure more informally, promoting the candidates we wanted. I knew this required action at every level. More women applying to be candidates. More women getting interviews in safe seats. More procedures during the selection process that emphasised the full set of skills required to be an MP, not just the big speech in front of the full membership. All this was very much driven from the centre.

  One of the greatest things about our election victory in 2015 was the seventeen non-white and sixty-eight women MPs elected to our benches, quadrupling the intake of a decade earlier. Indeed, as I write, there are six women MPs in the cabinet, four of whom were on that original A-List.

  It was worth the row.

  I was learning a great deal on the job. But as I cleared each hurdle – the hiring and firing of shadow ministers, the weekly bout of PMQs, the response to the Queen’s Speech – there was one that loomed larger than all the others: party funding.

  Long before we inherited a country in debt, we inherited a party in debt by £30 million, largely as a result of the 2005 general election campaign. The funding crisis had a wider significance. Before they let you run the country, people want to see that you are able to run your party.

  While donations to political parties had to be declared publicly, loans did not. So wealthy individuals preferred to make loans, and both the Labour and the Conservative parties succumbed to the temptation of this route. This led to the so-called cash-for-honours scandal, and Tony Blair being interviewed by police. Those responsible for Conservative fundraising were called in too. The case for the defence was clear: taking loans was within the rules, and there was a proper vetting process for awarding life peerages. Contributors to party funds shouldn’t be excluded, but it should never be the reason for their appointment. The problem was that while the vetting body – the House of Lords Appointments Commission – was told the details of the loans, the public and the media had not known about them.

  I resolved that we should stop taking these loans, and should pay off, or convert to genuine declarable donations, those we already had. I also decided that we needed to stop being so reliant on a small number of wealthy individuals. Even if they didn’t exercise undue influence over the party – and as far as I was concerned they didn’t – it would always look as if they could. For a time I even flirted with the idea of increased state funding for political parties, in some form or other. While I instinctively disliked the idea of taking more taxpayers’ money, there seemed to be a recurring problem with our system.

  Apart from big individual donors, of course, the whole system of trade union funding of the Labour Party was antiquated and wrong. Whatever people might say about the closeness of business or wealthy individuals to the Conservatives, the unions’ funding of Labour gave them votes at the party conference, votes to choose candidates and the leader, and votes to determine policy. They owned Labour lock, stock and block vote.

  Through
out the time I was party leader and prime minister there were talks between the parties to try to find a solution. I was prepared to go along with a cap of £50,000, or possibly less, on donations from individuals, as long as it was accompanied by a cap on union donations and the reform of Labour’s union links. I supported the idea of tax relief on donations, to ensure that parties had to fundraise properly and listen to their members, not just wait for the next dollop of taxpayer cash to arrive. But the talks always broke down. The caps we were prepared to accept were seen by the other parties as too high, and Labour was never truly prepared to break the union link.

  In any event, we were proving, step by step, that party funding through donor clubs, big one-off events and the party conference was possible. We established the ‘Leader’s Group’ of large donors, each committed to giving the party £50,000 a year. While this is a huge amount by any normal measure, it was a great improvement on passing the hat around to a very small number of multi-millionaires for a few massive, often multi-million-pound, donations. At its peak, the Leader’s Group grew to over two hundred people, and became the mainstay of our funding.

  While the press was determined to paint it as a ‘cash for access’ organisation, I was very proud of what we had built. We had shown that, even without extra state funding, our party could be properly funded. There were enough members for it to be clear that no individual would have undue influence. The dinners we had were informal and fun. And while there was no improper influence, as the financial and economic crisis hit, we had instant access to some of the best financial brains in the country.

  With Andrew Feldman as chief executive and then chairman, we bridged the gap between the person who raised the money and the person who decided how it should be spent, ensuring real commercial control; and from 2006 onwards the party never ran a deficit, and even had a surplus after both the 2010 and 2015 election campaigns, something which is unprecedented in modern party history. We sold our historic headquarters in Smith Square, and even the loss-making annual party conference started to make money: by the time I left office it was making close to £2 million a year. The party was debt-free, and there was around £2 million cash in the bank.