Of course, the most important question in terms of preparing for power was what to do about our policies. A new focus on the environment was one important element. Mending our broken society would be another. On my first full day of leadership I launched one of our new policy review teams alongside Iain Duncan Smith, whose Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) think-tank was pioneering a radical approach towards tackling the cycle of social deprivation. IDS’s review, and a speech I delivered on it a few months later, would prove the most controversial of the period. I wanted us to admit that although we had talked about aspiration a good deal, Conservatives had not done enough thinking about those for whom the bottom rungs of the ladder of opportunity just weren’t there, or had been smashed before they’d had a chance to climb them.
The speech I made at the CSJ reasserted the Conservative mantra, which I fully subscribed to, that poverty or deprivation were never an excuse for crime. But, I added, there was a context, a background, that we needed to understand better. So, as I put it, when people crossed the line and committed a crime, the response needed to be rapid and tough. But to help more of them stay inside that line, we needed more understanding, more help – even more love. I homed in on ‘hoodies’, the name for both the hooded sweatshirts teens wore and the teens themselves: ‘When you see a child walking down the road, hoodie up, head down, moody, swaggering, dominating the pavement – think what has brought that child to that moment,’ I said.
We needed to deal with the background issues that led some towards a life of crime, like family breakdown, unemployment, drug addiction, children growing up in care, and educational underachievement. It was a classic compassionate Conservative speech and series of remedies. But the combination of hoodies and love outraged some in the press: ‘Hug a Hoodie’ was the News of the World’s take on the intervention.
I don’t regret the speech. It set the context for a new approach: committed to backing the police and supporting tough penalties in our courts, but tackling the failures of the care system, reforming adoption, targeting family breakdown and chaotic families, and beginning the long process of reforming our prisons. These were to be some of our most important achievements in government, and their genesis was in a speech that many at the time said would herald our defeat.
As part of the same train of thought, even before I became party leader I had been developing the idea of a school-age programme that would help our children – all children, not just a privileged few – gain the skills they would need for adulthood, such as resilience, confidence, teamwork, respect and responsibility.
I came up with the idea after talking to those who had taken part in National Service, the period of compulsory post-war service in the forces which ended in the 1960s. The main thing that came across from those conversations was that everyone had been in it together. It didn’t matter who you were, rich or poor, white or from an ethnic minority, academic or not – you forged a common identity. That’s why I wanted there to be a residential element in this new programme, to take teenagers out of their comfort zones and put them into groups with others of different backgrounds, and also a volunteering element, teaching them the value of putting something back into their community.
National Citizen Service was, I believed, the answer to many questions of our age. The education system was failing to equip children with the skills for adulthood; NCS could help fill in the gaps. Our society was broken; NCS could teach the respect that was so lacking. Integration hadn’t worked – we were still too segregated, too suspicious of each other; NCS would bring people together, and prove that ultimately we had so much in common. Although it was never made compulsory, NCS would end up as a rite of passage for every teenager who wanted to take part. Today, more than 500,000 have done so, and it is the largest and fastest-growing youth volunteering project of its kind in Europe.
As we developed individual policies, a theme was emerging. This was helped along by another moment that would have a profound impact on me, and as a result, on the future direction of the party.
Balsall Heath was a neighbourhood in Birmingham that had been blighted by crime, prostitution and antisocial behaviour. House prices fell. The middle classes moved out. But a group of people who remained had got together and taken matters into their own hands. They tore down the escorts’ fliers, harassed kerb crawlers and reported the drug dealers to the police. They started taking better care of the parks and public spaces, planting shrubs and trees.
I was so taken by this story that I went to stay with one of the residents, Abdullah Rehman, and his family. I ate with them, slept in their spare room, and walked their children to school with them. Interestingly for a British Muslim family, they had chosen the King David Jewish faith school, on the basis that it had a good ethos and understood the importance of faith. ‘We all believe in Abraham,’ Abdullah told me as we dropped the children off, before showing me around the community he had helped to transform.
Here, in this Midlands suburb, society was proving more effective than the state. Bit by bit, the idea of government nurturing a stronger, better, bigger society was forming in my mind.
So in those first few months there was a lot to sort out: the political strategy, the governing philosophy, the personnel, the purse strings and the policies. But those aren’t the only demands on a new opposition leader.
If you have any hope of being an effective prime minister, and of looking like a credible candidate for the job, you need a crash course in diplomacy, and foreign and security policy. My early overseas trips did a lot to shape my world view.
The first was to Paris to see Nicolas Sarkozy, before his run for the French presidency. He was the interior minister at the time, and famous for his fiery personality. My first taste of this was waiting outside his office door with Ed as he shouted at someone. ‘Imbécile! Imbécile!’ was all we could hear.
Sarkozy was captivating – small, wiry and full of energy. He was always accompanied by an equally energetic translator, who spoke at a hundred miles an hour. He told me how he admired the British economic reforms, and wanted to be the Thatcher of France. He clearly believed in the ‘great man’ theory of history – muscular leaders making bold decisions and changing the world – and wanted to be one of them. I later came to feel that Sarko, as he was known, was less radical in reality. But an incredible act of kindness towards me in later years would make me grateful to him for the rest of my life.
I first saw Angela Merkel at an election rally in Stuttgart, when she walked on to the stage to the Rolling Stones song ‘Angie’. In her speech she complained about the interference of the European Commission, which had told barmaids in Bavarian beer cellars what they could and couldn’t wear. I would use this for years afterwards to persuade her that there was a Eurosceptic lurking inside her too.
My decision to leave the EPP rankled with her, but it didn’t affect the close partnership we went on to form. While she profoundly disagreed with the move, she could see that I was a conservative who took a different view to her on the vital issue of European integration.
When we met I could see that she was, as Margaret Thatcher had been, the best-briefed person in the room, able to work out in advance other people’s negotiating needs and strategies. I immediately saw that she was someone I could work well with. She has a sense of humour, and is an anglophile. From behind the Berlin Wall she had admired British science and British democracy. She saw us as natural allies when it came to vital issues such as support for NATO, backing fiscal prudence and a belief in free trade. Above all, I liked her down-to-earth, straightforward manner. There was no flummery or flattery – she liked to get on and talk about the things that mattered. And, again like Thatcher, she used her charm to get her own way. But Merkel is not a Thatcher. Her favourite expression is ‘step by step’. This was to be disastrous for the Eurozone, which needed bold reform but got incrementalism.
It was in America that I met the forty-t
hird president, George W. Bush. He was charming, intelligent and conviction-driven, quite unlike his caricature, and I admired what he was doing in the fight to combat AIDS and malaria. Yet I had tried to set myself apart from his neo-conservatism in a way that maintained Britain’s strong bonds with the United States. On the fifth anniversary of 9/11 I made a speech whose most reported line was that liberty couldn’t be dropped from the air by an unmanned drone. This was a criticism of unbridled neo-con interventionism, not a call for the unbridled American isolationism we are seeing a decade on. I didn’t believe you could have global US and UK leadership if you point-blank refused to intervene anywhere.
While these were all standard stop-offs, I also strayed dramatically from the path usually trodden by party leaders: India.
As I said in a blog I wrote at the time, we couldn’t afford to carry on obsessing about Europe and America while ignoring the fresh new forces that were shaping our world. It was an amazing visit. I travelled around Delhi in a tuk tuk, and walked through the Mumbai slums in the pouring rain to visit a community project, shocked at how starkly poverty and wealth sat side by side. While Tony Blair was fending off an attempted coup at home, I looked as if I was on a prime-ministerial visit. The contrast was helpful.
Sudan was a trickier visit, for here was the humanitarian crisis of our time. In Khartoum we met President Omar al-Bashir, a pariah who was later indicted by the ICC. When I mentioned an attack on a town in Darfur, in western Sudan, he claimed that it had actually taken place in the neighbouring country of Chad. Infuriated, I told him to look at a map. It was my first experience of how some of these leaders brazenly just lie.
The refugee camp itself was unforgettable. The sight of tents and huts stretching for miles, a city in the desert. The families who had lost everything, and had seen loved ones mown down by the Janjaweed militia as Sudanese soldiers looked on. The women, many of whom had been raped, telling me their harrowing stories. The only light relief came when we were sitting around talking through a translator, me bouncing one of the babies on my knee, and the baby decided to wee on me. Everyone laughed. Some things are universal.
In the middle of this hell was a literal oasis – a fifty-foot corrugated-iron tank, providing clean water for thousands of refugees. British aid sustaining and saving people’s lives.
Much of my approach towards development in later years could be traced back to that time, and to the pride I felt in the aid workers from the charity Oxfam – based just down the road from my constituency – who we stayed with during that visit.
While some of these visits broke with tradition, my next, the following year, broke with much of the international community.
In August 2008, Georgia, a sovereign country that had every right to regard its borders as inviolable, had been invaded by Russia on behalf of two Russian-backed but unrecognised statelets, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. It was a clear case of illegal aggression and occupation, and I believed the world’s oldest democracy had a duty to stand with one of the youngest and say so. I went to see President Mikheil Saakashvili, who I had met before and who I admired for his efforts to eradicate corruption, attract investment and get people to pay their taxes, a problem many leaders fail to crack.
He was under huge pressure, but was just about coping. There was tension in the air. Russian tanks were just twenty-five miles from the capital, Tbilisi. No one was quite certain if the ceasefire would hold, or the Russian tanks would start moving again.
‘History has shown that if you leave aggression to go unchecked, greater crises will only emerge in the future,’ I wrote in one article. ‘Today, Russia says it is defending its citizens in South Ossetia. Where tomorrow? In Ukraine? In central Asia? In Latvia?’
They say you shouldn’t make predictions in politics, but sometimes you do without realising it.
While modernisation was still being criticised by some in the press and the party, the public gave its verdict at the ballot box.
In the 2007 local elections we gained nearly a thousand new councillors and thirty-nine new councils. That represented 40 per cent of the vote, with Labour and the Lib Dems on 26 and 24 respectively. We were on track, edging closer to power. But there were rows ahead that threatened to throw us off course.
David Willetts, my shadow education secretary, whose vast intellect led to his nickname ‘Two Brains’, had given a speech on freeing schools from local authority control. In an aside, he talked about the evidence against grammar schools aiding social mobility, and said that a Conservative government wouldn’t open any more of them. Fine – that was our stated policy. I had said from the outset that there would be no going back to the 11-plus on a national basis. I was happy for the 164 existing grammar schools to continue, and to be allowed to expand, as we wanted other good schools to be able to do; but our focus was on improving standards for all 3,000 state schools.
Cue unprecedented uproar when the Today programme covered the speech. Shadow Europe minister Graham Brady was enraged. The Telegraph was incensed. The 1922 Committee was in revolt. Meanwhile, I was in Hull, spending three days at a school as a teaching assistant, and hearing all this down the phone from Ed.
On the subject of grammar schools, I reached for a new medium to set the record straight. I wasn’t just a blogger, I was a vlogger, recording a series of ‘WebCameron’ videos that were uploaded online.
I felt that the call to ‘bring back grammars’ was an anti-modernisation proxy, and I wasn’t going to stand for it. I looked down the lens and said: ‘It is a classic example of fighting a battle of the past rather than meeting the challenges of the future … The way to win the fight for aspiration is to put those things that worked in grammars – aggressive setting to stretch bright pupils, whole-class teaching, strong discipline, to name but three – in all schools.’ In fact my position was more nuanced than I made it sound. I still believed existing grammars should be able to expand, and in the same vein, that new ones could be built in areas where they were already established and population growth required it. I clarified this, but it looked like a climbdown.
And it came at a bad moment. We were just about to have a change of prime minister. Within a few days of the grammar school row it was Tony Blair’s final PMQs.
After he had spoken his final words from the despatch box, the Labour benches stood and applauded. I too stood up, and gestured to my own side to join in. They did.
Cherie Blair came and thanked me afterwards. She is another person who is quite unlike her public caricature. I’ll never forget, when I took Ivan to the premiere of the children’s film Ben 10, Cherie bending down to his wheelchair, looking him in the eye and speaking to him with great kindness and compassion.
I thought it was important to pay tribute to her husband in his last Commons appearance. For good and ill, he had changed British politics forever. And as I applauded, I felt a small inner thrill at the knowledge that a big obstacle on our path to victory had toppled. We were on our way.
But of course, it wasn’t to prove that simple.
10
Cliff Edge, Collapse and Scandal
It’s June 2007, Gordon Brown is prime minister, and it does not stop raining.
There was something apt about the ex-chancellor’s premiership beginning with the wettest weather in decades.
I had – and still have – huge respect for Brown’s intellect and his appetite for hard work. And mutual friends have told me how charming and entertaining he can be in private. But in public he seemed to have only one character setting: dour.
And when it came to Parliament, he had only one political setting: everything was about killing the Tories. While other Labour frontbenchers would build relationships with their opposite numbers, Brown would have absolutely nothing to do with his. The one time he did reach out to his shadow George Osborne, George and I were having dinner in Pizza Express in Notting Hill Gate. Brown wanted to ‘pair’ –
i.e. agree that neither of them would vote in an important forthcoming debate. When George very politely explained that he couldn’t do this without consulting our chief whip, Brown simply shouted and swore at him, before slamming down the phone.
So when he succeeded Tony Blair, I was rejoicing. We were ahead in the polls. And I was up against someone who hadn’t been elected, who had some real flaws – and who I thought it was possible to beat.
But initially things didn’t work out that way. As ever, ‘events’ intervened.
On Brown’s second full day in the job, there was an attempted bomb attack in London’s Haymarket, and then, the day after, terrorists drove a jeep laden with gas cylinders into Glasgow Airport. Brown reacted swiftly and effectively – and struck exactly the right tone about the threat we faced and how we should meet it.
The non-stop rain led to non-stop floods, affecting first one part of the country and then another. Brown immediately toured the affected areas, pledging money to flooded-out communities and families.
Then, after plagues of fire and rain, came disease. Foot-and-mouth was discovered on several Surrey farms. Having spent little more than a day on holiday, the new prime minister darted back.
And as his side of the political seesaw rose, mine began to sink.
First, Quentin Davies, a pinstripe-suited Tory MP, defected to Labour with a resignation letter of pure vitriol. His criticism of the modernisation project was very personal.
For the Record Page 14