My assessment now is that we probably didn’t cut enough. We could have done more, even more quickly, as smaller countries like Ireland had done successfully, to get Britain back in the black and then get the economy moving.
Those who were opposed to austerity were going to be opposed – and pretty hysterically – to whatever we did. Given all the hype and hostility, and yes, sometimes hatred, we might as well have ripped the plaster off with more cuts early on. We were taking the flak for them anyway. Today, with austerity fatigue setting in, and the effects of that shown in the polls and election results, it’s even clearer that we should have taken advantage of the window of public support for cuts when it was open. The job we started still needs to be finished.
16
Nos 10 and 11 – Neighbours, Friends and Families
Downing Street. A strange row of a few tall, mismatched townhouses, cowering in the shadow of the mighty Foreign Office.
A little figure pops out of the shiny black door and sails down the road on a lilac-coloured scooter.
‘Hello, Flo,’ beams the first police officer she passes, his finger on the trigger of a machine gun. His colleague opens the iron pedestrian gate and the pink figure glides through, passing a photographer who is snapping away.
As she weaves through the tourists on Whitehall, her knackered dad, clutching a baby doll and a little glittery bag, accompanied by a plainclothes protection officer, tries to keep up with her, before they cross the road and disappear into a side entrance of the House of Commons.
This is Florence Cameron on her daily journey to nursery, and this is the only world she has ever known.
Florence first entered Downing Street as a bump on 11 May 2010. The pregnancy was complicated, because Samantha had a low-lying placenta and a real risk of bleeding and a very premature birth. We wondered about the wisdom of going to Cornwall that August for our annual holiday. But the baby wasn’t due until September, and neither of us fancied being cooped up in London.
When Sam began suffering birth tremors we went to the Treliske Hospital in Truro. The doctor was happy to go ahead there and then with the caesarean that Samantha was in any event planning to have. (After Ivan’s emergency caesarean, all our children were born this way.)
Our daughter arrived an hour later, weighing six pounds one ounce – and for the fourth and final time I had that amazing feeling of being the first person to hold the new baby, looking back at the team of midwives, doctors, nurses and anaesthetists who’d helped to bring this tiny, precious girl into our lives.
There followed some of the happiest days of my life. I went back to the holiday home to tell the other children the news, and for the next couple of days drove between Trebetherick, where we were staying, and the hospital in Truro. When Samantha and the baby were ready to leave, we were completely unprepared for the arrival of a baby. No cot. No pram. No bottles. No baby clothes.
Nancy, who had inherited her mother’s genius for design, had found a cardboard box, decorated it in tinsel and crêpe paper and put a pillow inside as a mattress. This was where our new daughter spent her first days – indeed weeks, as it was so successful that we continued to use it when we returned home to Downing Street.
After our initial scepticism, we had created a great home in No. 10. The biggest factor in this was Samantha. She was the one who did all the work to make our home life there so successful. She was the one who thought so carefully about how to protect our children and keep them grounded with their old friends and in their existing schools. She was the one who looked after me and kept me vaguely sane.
At the same time she fulfilled the role of prime minister’s wife in the most brilliant way. It’s not easy to do. Simply carry on with your own career, and you are criticised for not helping. Stay totally in the background, protecting your family, and you are accused of shrinking away. Back your husband or wife too vigorously, and you’re accused of meddling in politics. And heaven forbid that you speak out and offer a political opinion of your own.
Samantha continued to work for the business, Smythson, where she had been for fourteen years, starting as a window dresser and rising to design director. She held charity receptions in Downing Street every week. Quietly, and without publicity, she volunteered at a homeless shelter, the Passage, and for an organisation that helps to promote women, Dress for Success. She was assisted magnificently over the years by Isabel Spearman, then Kate Shouesmith and then Rosie Lyburn.
I can’t recall anyone criticising her for any element of what she did – and rightly so.
What was her secret? As well as having great judgement and being extraordinarily efficient, I think one of the keys to her success was that she didn’t change. At all. She was determined that her friends would stay the same. As much of her life as possible would stay the same. She would still go on holiday in the same places and spend time doing the same things with the same people.
And one other thing that never changed was that while she supported what I did, and cared passionately that I got things right, she wasn’t at all impressed with any of the trappings of office. She was thoroughly grounded – and hopefully she kept me slightly grounded as well.
Though, of course, I did relish living in that great building. Showing friends or visitors the State Rooms or the Cabinet Room after dinner, padding through the dark corridors trying to find light switches and door keys and to remember the important points about pictures, statues and pieces of furniture – the thrill never wore off.
Because while everyone knows the iconic front door, few people actually know what it’s like behind it. No. 10 is not open to the public, and the road is gated at either end. There are only a couple of hundred people working there, and just a few dozen who have ever actually lived there. The house was gifted to the first prime minister, Robert Walpole, by King George II, but Downing Street was thought a rather grotty part of town to live in, and it was only really in the twentieth century that successive PMs would actually make it their home.
What surprises many people is that the famous door is not just reserved for world leaders and photocalls; it’s what staff and visitors come in and go out of every day. There is no key; it’s manned by the team of ‘custodians’, 24/7.
The former drawing rooms and studies of the original seventeenth-century house now form a mishmash of offices large and small, and the many extensions and renovations over the years add to that higgledy-piggledy feel. The fact that our country’s seat of power has this slightly improvised, rickety sense – that it is both grand and homely – seems brilliantly British.
The big black door isn’t wooden, it’s metal (and the zero on it is a bit wonky because the original apparently was).Up the famous staircase are the beautiful state rooms, with their extraordinary views of Horse Guards and St James’s Park. The State Dining Room doubles up as a dance floor for staff summer and Christmas parties. Thatcher’s Study, now home to the vast oak table from the G8 summit, is used for everything from bilateral meetings to small drinks and dinner parties. It would also be the place I’d watch the EU referendum results come in, a whisky in hand, with my small team and Nancy by my side.
Everywhere you walk there are curiosities – fake doors, quirky objects – layered with historical facts and more recent gossip. Churchill’s chair (surprisingly small). Pitt the Younger’s desk (miniature for someone who was six feet tall). Thatcher’s gold-leaf ceiling. Macmillan’s coffin-shaped cabinet table. Countryside scenes by Turner not far from Tracey Emin’s neon art (an unexpected Tory supporter, she gave me a piece of art for the house – a pink lit-up sign saying ‘More Passion’ that I chose to go above the Terracotta Room entrance).
Through the arch in the street, opened only on rare occasions, you can walk into the Foreign Office courtyard, and beyond that into the Treasury.
Somewhere in all this there are two flats, behind alarmed doors. Because at the same time as being th
e heart of government, Downing Street provides a home for not one but two families (who tend to use the back entrance facing St James’s Park, avoiding the cameras and crowds).
From the flat above No. 11, a spiral staircase leads down to the garden. Of course the garden has its official purposes. It was the setting for political gatherings, charity receptions and even Shakespeare plays. We used it to promote the Olympics and school sports, and to celebrate the success of national football, rugby, cricket and other teams. From it you can see a reminder of the 1991 IRA mortar attack, whose damage to the brickwork has been left as a reminder.
But to Nancy, Elwen and Florence the garden was a football pitch, a cricket pitch, a playground (we had climbing frames installed) and a place to explore and have fun. I was often rescuing them from trees they had climbed up but couldn’t climb down.
Although Downing Street never sleeps – the duty clerks, press officers, custodians, police and switchboard operators work around the clock – it can be surprisingly quiet at night. Except, that is, in the No. 10 flat, which we moved to at the end of May 2010, and where Margaret Thatcher and John Major both lived. The noise of the bell in Horse Guards Parade would wake me at regular intervals.
Of course, for the children there was no distinction between what were home areas and what were work areas. It was all theirs. It was one giant labyrinth to explore, and they loved it. They’d climb across the green baize of the cabinet table and jump onto the chair used by Churchill, only half aware that they were here because Daddy was doing the same job as him. I say half aware, because they were more interested in the fact that there were Fox’s Glacier Mints in little bowls on the table. ‘Daddy, your office has sweets!’ I recall Elwen declaring.
I remember seeing the chief of the defence staff coming through the front door in full-dress uniform, decked out in medals, to be confronted by Florence, sitting on the black-and-white chequered floor of the hallway, asking him, ‘What are you doing in my house?’
She came to know people in the building well. She knew which desk she could expect a Polo mint, an apple, or part of a bar of chocolate from. She truly was a daughter of Downing Street.
Sam was growing to love it there too. While we were in the No. 10 flat she was preparing a refurbishment of the much bigger one in No. 11, where the Blairs and Browns had lived with their families. When we arrived it felt a bit like a tired London hotel – lots of brown furniture, pink carpets and damask. But beyond that there were beautifully proportioned rooms, high ceilings, tall windows and a sweeping staircase with an Adam-esque dome above.
Samantha was determined to bring it up to date and get it finished over the summer. Heavily pregnant with Florence, she would be marshalling builders, plasterers, decorators and carpenters while at the same time dealing with the No. 10 works department and clearing all the hurdles involved in making changes to a listed and complicated building.
We decided that we would add our own money to the allowance set aside to ensure that the occupants kept the place up to scratch and didn’t allow it to become dilapidated. It was well spent, and Sam did an amazing job. It was fresh and cool, but cosy too. The kitchen became the heart of the flat – and it was there that the dramas of family life, with all its tears, tantrums, homework crises, nit combs, art projects, cooking experiments and family arguments were played out over the next six years.
It saw its fair share of political dramas too. I found it very helpful to bring MPs, advisers, my coalition partners and world leaders – including the king of Jordan, the crown prince of UAE and the Chinese premier – up to the kitchen or living room to talk in a more informal setting. It was in our kitchen that Angela Merkel and I sat and agreed that we would do everything we could to stop Jean-Claude Juncker becoming president of the European Commission. Sadly, the informal setting didn’t always lead to the formal result that was desired …
In spite of the fact that we refurbished Downing Street, it was still infested with mice. There was one occasion when I invited Iain Duncan Smith and Northern Ireland secretary Owen Paterson for dinner in the kitchen to take their views about how to get the party together over Europe. As the two of them were urging each other on to ever greater bouts of Euroscepticism, their flow was interrupted by a succession of mice running across the floor – and by me eventually hurling an empty wine bottle at the creatures. It was a useless attempt at pest control, but it did briefly stop them ‘banging on’ about Europe.
The rodent problem was so bad that Liz Sugg was charged with a visit to Battersea Dogs and Cats Home. She came back with a chunky tabby who had been found as a stray and named Larry. He was not ‘the Camerons’ cat’, as the press liked to claim, but ‘Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office’. He didn’t catch many mice, but he was a fine-looking cat, although not the most friendly. I liked having him curled up in my office – even if he did cover every chair in white fur.
People assume that there are chefs in Downing Street, but there’s nothing of the sort.
Since there are no supermarkets around Whitehall, that meant weekly Ocado deliveries and the occasional dash to the Tesco Express at Trafalgar Square for forgotten items or requests. We did, however, have a wonderful cleaner called Connie, who took almost all her holidays in Las Vegas, then Debbie, who cried when we left.
But when I think back on Downing Street, while I think of a family home, of course most of all I think of work.
Every day began at 5.30 a.m., or shortly afterwards, when the alarm would go off and I would try to get out of bed to be at the kitchen table going through my paperwork by 5.45. I have always been a morning person, but I would still need to kick-start my system with a strong cup of instant black coffee. This was the time of day I could focus and get things done.
It all centred around the big red box – often more than one – which would be stuffed with papers submitted by my staff overnight. I would get through reams of them, and shocked them with my continued enthusiasm for this task, and also my eagle eye for detail.
An average box would contain thirty-two notes or briefings – each one of which might be dozens of pages long – as well as four intelligence reports and nine letters to read and sign. I’d also read some of the letters I’d been sent by members of the public, of which there were about 300,000 in my first six months as PM. That was before all the papers in my ‘day file’, which would contain the relevant information for each meeting, debate or event. A typical ‘PMQs pack’ alone would be two ring binders.
After that work and some breakfast with the family, I would head down to my office and plonk the heavy box on the desk of Ed Llewellyn or Chris Martin, who replaced James Bowler as my principal private secretary.
When people asked if I enjoyed the job, I was never quite sure how to answer. It was hard, and I had to take decisions that I knew would have a huge impact on people’s lives. But I never got over the feeling of it being an immense privilege to have such an opportunity. And I liked it – I liked the intellectual and physical challenge of being a political decathlete, switching from one discipline to the next and trying to give every single one of them your best.
Often Sam would ask me in the evening what I’d done that day, and I’d have blanks about the morning because so much had happened since. A day is a long time in politics for the exhausted incumbent of No. 10.
I was experiencing what I called ‘a new form of tiredness’, feeling not just physically run down, but mentally as though my brain was close to shutting down. For that reason, I rarely struggled to sleep. PMs’ sleeping patterns fascinate people. They think of Mrs Thatcher creeping down to her study at dawn after just four hours’ slumber, or of Churchill in his siren suit, lying in bed with a whisky and a cigar in midmorning after a night working on his papers.
Although I had so much on my mind when my head hit the pillow, chronic tiredness would drag me down into a reasonable sleep of seven or so hours most nights. Of course there we
re times when I knew a military operation was under way, or a hostage rescue was being attempted, when I would sleep with the telephone almost in my hand.
One of the things that helped get me through was the fact that I have always been able to catnap, to shut my eyes and recharge on the road, in the air and sometimes simply on the floor of my office with a book or a cushion under my head.
And one of the greatest advantages of the set-up was having my closest colleague living next door. The Osbornes started off staying at their home in Notting Hill, but in August 2011 they decided to move into the No. 10 flat. Not only were George and I good friends, but Samantha and Frances were close, and our children became close too. Nancy and Liberty Osborne (my goddaughter) would take it in turns to make unbelievable messes in either of our kitchens through their cooking experiments. And Elwen (George’s godson) and Luke Osborne would play various sports in the garden. On Monday nights they would have art classes together, something we have continued with since we all left Downing Street.
Did the dads ever argue? Often, but never with anger. Together, we found Downing Street a happy place to live and work. But for me those early days were disrupted by great sadness.
On 8 September 2010, my father died.
He had been an enormous influence on my life, and was incredibly proud that his son had become prime minister, but I think he always worried about the effect it might have on Samantha and me and the family. I remember being so happy that I had got Mum and him to come to Downing Street, and also to Chequers, in August 2010 before we went on holiday, and before they made what had become an almost annual pilgrimage to a very pretty hotel in the south of France each September.
For the Record Page 26