The relationship was plain for all to see in the easy and instant connection we forged – one that was rooted in the values we shared.
Yes, he was a Democrat and I was a Conservative. But when it came to the issues in front of us, we didn’t need time to reach agreement. We were both committed to the defeat of the Taliban, but believed the war in Afghanistan shouldn’t go on forever. We agreed that lethal force should be used to defeat terrorism, and were passionate about progress on climate change and development. We were also pro-free trade, and wanted to counter the forces of protectionism that risked dangerous trade wars. Indeed, I always sensed that Obama was envious of our political system. I was in coalition, but still had the freedom and power to go further on these issues than he could.
My impressions on that visit were that he was a likeable, decent man with a great sense of humour and, as a former law professor, the ability to provide a brilliant analysis of the most complex situations. What a relief it was, I thought, that someone with good values and buckets of common sense was in the White House, in the most powerful job in the world.
The strength of the relationship also mattered at that first meeting, as there were some particularly tricky bilateral issues to deal with, including the horrific oil spill from BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010. This was being billed as a showdown between the US and the UK, between Obama and me. US officials continued to refer to the company as ‘British Petroleum’, though it had dropped the name in 2000 after a series of mergers and had, as I pointed out to Barack, the same percentage of American shareholders as British ones.
I accepted – as did the company – that it would pay a hefty fine in compensation, but the US system seemed to be hell-bent on breaking the business altogether. Not only would that threaten the livelihoods and pensions of many people – British and American – it would also leave this important company weak and susceptible to takeover, perhaps by a state-owned or state-controlled business from Russia or China. How could that be in our interests?
There was also an issue of basic fairness. When US-based companies – like Halliburton, which was one of the three companies involved in Deepwater Horizon’s operation – were not paying unlimited damages, why should a British-based one be singled out for such treatment?
I made all these points, but it was initially hard to tell how much impact they had. At least Obama could see how strongly we felt about the issue.
The most significant question we discussed in Washington was whether and how to talk to the Taliban. Though I was to make progress on this in the following years, it was another of the agendas I wish I had pushed harder.
After the summits and America came Turkey – not a country that is usually found on the itinerary of new prime ministers’ Grand Tours. But I was eager to change that. In a bid to reach out to the powers of the future, I wanted to go there as early as possible.
I had always believed Turkey’s success was important. It was a potentially powerful ally to Britain – vital to the Middle East peace process and in halting a nuclear Iran. It was a fast-growing economy of considerable size – ‘our Brazil’, I called it. But above all, it is one of the world’s most prosperous Muslim countries, proof that Muslim democracies and Muslim market economies can work.
For these reasons I believed that, in the long term, Turkey ought to be in the European Union. As I had said in my G8 speech – which apparently drove Sarkozy almost mad – I wanted to ‘pave the road from Ankara to Brussels’. I wasn’t saying that millions of Turks should automatically be allowed free movement across Europe (a stick I was to be thoroughly beaten with later). I was saying that in a flexible, multi-speed Europe, where membership meant different things for different countries – the Europe we wanted and would argue for – Turkey should be inside the wider tent. The EU should not be reserved for Western Christendom alone. (Incidentally, Boris Johnson thought this too.)
I spent a lot of time with prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He was canny and easy to get along with, and I was as frank as I could be. I told him I thought the Turks were in danger of going in the wrong direction. That there was a growth of Islamist sentiment which his party seemed to promote and appease, rather than challenge. If we genuinely wanted to move Turkey closer to Europe, he needed to help his friends by demonstrating the extent of reform and concern for democratic and human rights. And while Turkey had been one of the few Muslim countries to have a good dialogue with Israel, it was now leading the verbal onslaught against it.
Enhancing the British–Turkish relationship was an example of an agenda that ran into the ground. The trade issues progressed well, but the fact was that the mood in Europe was turning against any form of Turkish membership – and Erdoğan’s real ambitions were heading in a different direction.
From Ankara I flew to India to lead my first-ever trade delegation. I loaded up a plane with CEOs, cabinet ministers, top officials, heads of museums and galleries, even Olympians Kelly Holmes and Steve Redgrave.
This was commercial diplomacy in practice – and it was an agenda that yielded enormous results. We more than doubled exports to China and South Korea, and became the foreign investment capital of Europe, something that would be a key driver of the explosion in private sector jobs in the years that followed.
When it came to India, I argued that we needed a modern partnership – not one tinged with colonial guilt, but alive to the possibilities of the world’s oldest democracy and the world’s largest democracy. Many of Britain’s most successful business leaders and cultural figures are from the Indian diaspora community and would be our greatest weapons in that endeavour. I was proud to have many of them, like Priti Patel, Shailesh Vara, Alok Shama and Paul Uppal, on the Conservative benches in the House of Commons.
I got on well with prime minister Manmohan Singh. He was a saintly man, but he was robust on the threats India faced. On a later visit he told me that another terrorist attack like that in Mumbai in July 2011, and India would have to take military action against Pakistan.
Then came my curveball: Italy.
‘What’s the dress code for dinner?’ I asked one of my team before we set off for Rome. ‘A thong,’ he replied.
What a dinner it was. Everything was tricolour – mozzarella, avocado and tomato for the first course, then white, green and red pasta to follow. And so it went on. As did Berlusconi. Outrageous joke after outrageous joke – none of them funny.
Italian politics was a riddle to me. What did they see in a billionaire playboy with apparently no filter on what he said – or did? He once interrupted a long night at an EU Council by pushing the button on his microphone and announcing to the other twenty-six leaders that if the meetings were going to run on like this, ‘you should all do the same as me – and take a mistress in Brussels’.
On another occasion he walked into the room where we held the interminable meetings to find me chatting with the prime minister of one of the smaller countries whom he clearly didn’t know. When I introduced them he said, ‘You must come to Rome and meet my wife – you look just like her lover.’ That one, I confess, did make me laugh.
Over time I came to realise that, far from putting people off, Berlusconi’s unscripted brashness was part of the attraction. Italy had suffered so much from corruption in its political system that his eccentricities were a permanent reminder that he was different.
For all his loucheness, Berlusconi shared some values with me: he was pro-free market, pro-enterprise and anti-regulation. We tried to unblock a lot of foreign investments, including a BP gas terminal in Italy that had been in limbo for twenty years.
Italy was the fourth-largest European economy, a net contributor to the EU budget and a major player when it came to security. Yet it was often left out of discussions between the ‘big three’ – Germany, France and the UK. I thought we could rectify that, making Italy a big ally on NATO and on building a mo
re flexible Europe.
There were four Italian PMs while I was in office, and I was much closer to Enrico Letta and Matteo Renzi, who followed Berlusconi and Mario Monti. But I have to accept that, while Italy was a strong NATO ally and helpful during the Libya intervention, my attempt to put rocket boosters under the Anglo–Italian relationship was an example of an agenda that didn’t get very far.
Another agenda I hoped would produce real and lasting results was China.
The country had gone from the world’s eleventh-biggest economy to the second-biggest in just twenty-one years. Eight hundred million people had been lifted out of poverty – all because this communist country had embraced the capitalist principle of liberal economics.
Not that ours was a likely alliance. For them, we were still their oppressors from the nineteenth-century Opium Wars, and awkward neighbours during the years when Hong Kong was a British territory. For us, no matter how liberal China’s economics, it was still a one-party, authoritarian, communist state, with a woeful record on human rights and a tendency to rip off intellectual property, keep its markets closed where we opened ours, censor the internet and spy on just about everyone.
Yet the advantages of a deeper connection were undeniable. Thousands of Chinese students and tourists flocked to Britain each year. Chinese people loved our history and culture. With a burgeoning Chinese middle class, there was a massive potential market there, and although Labour had made some inroads, it remained largely untapped.
So, China: opportunity or risk? The coalition was split. Nick had been campaigning on the human-rights issues for years. And William was sceptical about the Communist Party’s intentions. He wrote me a letter during our first month in office with a stark warning about China ‘free-riding on wider global public goods’ – obstructing international action if it conflicted with its own domestic imperatives.
My stance – and George’s – was more pragmatic. It wasn’t, of course, that I didn’t care about human rights, or that I trusted a party which appointed one ‘paramount leader’ every five years. It was just that I thought there was a longer game to play, and a better way of getting what we wanted.
Yes, our ambition was largely economic, but an essential outcome of that economic partnership would be the greater political leverage it would give us. In other words, the trust that we could build from doing business together could lead to trust across a whole range of areas.
Naturally, we would always be vigilant when it came to China. We were hard-headed about the threat it posed, instructing our security services to map and counter the Chinese threat. Only by understanding and guarding against that could we trade with the country.
This would be the best, the safest, way to bring China into the rules-based international system – through rules on trade, but also rules on climate change, terrorism and human rights. The more it was part of the UN, the WTO, the G20, the more cooperative our relationship would be. We could influence its views on everything from climate change to Burma to North Korea. Which was vital – China would be a linchpin in all these matters.
On my first visit to China as prime minister in November 2010, with four cabinet ministers and forty-three business leaders, I knew I’d have to walk a tightrope, on the one hand trying to strike trade deals and showcase what we had to offer investors, and on the other raising issues around human rights and democracy.
Nothing was going to stop the Chinese in their pursuit of growth – getting people out of the countryside into the cities, into employment and out of poverty. If you were useful – if you could supply inward investment, exports and scientific knowledge, as we could – then you were considered a partner. ‘Transactional’ is the FCO jargon for that sort of relationship.
But there was still a tightrope to walk. So, when I went to Beijing University, I decided to make a more wide-ranging speech, focusing on the importance of democracy and the rule of law. Given that you can be locked up in China for so much as criticising the socialist state, going further than most Western leaders in promoting democracy would, I reasoned, more than offset any perceived obsequiousness in our economic dealings.
I didn’t quite stir a revolution. But I did provoke something when I said: ‘The rise in economic freedom in China in recent years has been hugely beneficial to China and to the world. I hope that in time this will lead to a greater political opening.’ The first question from a student after my speech was about what advice I’d give to the Communist Party in China in an age when more countries were having plural politics. An amazing noise went around the room, half admiration and half shock. I gave a measured answer about our countries having two very different systems. But as I looked around at the sea of faces I thought: is this system really going to last? My conclusion was that, in its current form, it couldn’t. After all, surely this was now a consumer society in which people had increasing amounts of choice over their lives. How could the ruling party frustrate that when it came to politics?
While my fundamental view hasn’t altered – change, in some form, will come – multiple visits to China have led me to a more nuanced view. The primacy given by both government and people to economic growth. The fierce sense of pride and exceptionalism. The attention given by the nation’s rulers to emerging trends and problems across the country. All these things mean that China’s path to greater pluralism may be a very long one, with a different destination to our own.
Given that so many other countries were trying to align themselves economically with China, this incident, and the unfortunate poppy set-to, which happened on the same visit, weren’t exactly welcome. A three-day visit to the UK by Li Keqiang, who was heavily tipped to replace Wen Jiabao as premier, gave us a chance to up our game. Li, who received red-carpet treatment, made it clear that some of my comments had not been welcome. But despite that we would make real inroads.
Finally, there is an agenda I really wish I had never started. That was the British bid to host the 2018 World Cup.
Britain had a strong case: the best stadia, the most enthusiastic supporters, club teams that are followed across the world, and a football-mad culture. We had also learned a lot from our successful bid for the 2012 Olympics.
The biggest barrier to bringing the tournament home for the first time since 1966 was the notorious world football governing body, FIFA, and its susceptibility to corruption. The bid also pitched us against Russia, a country with a government quite prepared to do whatever it took to win.
We threw everything into beating Russia – and Belgium and the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain – to host the 2018 Cup. I had the FIFA president, Sepp Blatter, to No. 10. He even got to hold Florence – a privilege reserved for presidents and monarchs, I joked at the time. Looking back, knowing what I know now, it makes me wince.
Then, in December 2010, I spent three days in Zürich, where the bidding process was taking place for both the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. With Prince William and David Beckham by my side, my confidence grew. We had the best bid – and a dream team to bring it home.
The process was rather like speed dating, with an allotted amount of time with each voting nation’s representatives to try to persuade them to back our bid. The three of us pleaded with people from Cyprus to Paraguay. America’s representative, a man called Chuck Blazer, was so enormous that as he got up to leave, his chair went with him.
The corrupt undertones were all there, but, typically British, we gave it our best and got through it with jokes. Vladimir Putin’s approach was classic. He suddenly cancelled his appearance, claiming that the whole competition was riddled with corruption.
The moment of our presentation approached, and my role was to kick it off with a short, off-the-cuff speech. I confessed to Prince William that I was nervous. He told me not to be – and just to imagine Chuck Blazer naked.
The three of us stood up and gave our pitch. We were followed by a video accompanied by Elbow’s ‘One D
ay Like This’. It was stirring stuff, and we got a strong ovation.
Our confidence grew. Six nations promised that they would vote for us in the first round: South Korea, Trinidad and Tobago, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, USA and England.
How many votes did we end up with? Two.
Russia, whose bid was fraught with problems including racism, won the chance to host the 2018 World Cup. Forty-degree Qatar, hardly a footballing hub, got 2022. Putin didn’t need to come. The fish had been bought and sold before we’d even got to the marketplace.
David Beckham was upset and angry. ‘I don’t mind people lying to me, but not to my prime minister and future king,’ he said. Blatter said we were just ‘bad losers’.
In the years that followed, a criminal investigation into the way the hosts of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups were chosen took place. Nine of the twenty-two members of the FIFA Executive Committee who awarded them have been punished, indicted or died before facing charges, including Chuck Blazer, who admitted fraud, money laundering and taking bribes on the 1998 and 2010 World Cups. For seventeen years Sepp Blatter presided over an organisation riddled with corruption. He has been banned from football for six years, and his plaque removed from FIFA headquarters.
One issue that proved to be more prevalent than I had expected before I became prime minister was corruption. I kept on seeing it for myself: from Omar al-Bashir’s refugee camps in Sudan to Blatter’s boardroom in Zürich. Those same forces that had denied Britain the World Cup – bribery, lack of transparency, collusion, fraud – were depriving people around the world of safer, healthier, wealthier lives.
At international summits we focused on everything – security, poverty, growth, aid, the environment. But we seldom said a word about one of the biggest drivers of these things: corruption. I resolved to spend my time in government – and after it – trying to change that.
For the Record Page 21