At Chequers we made up a bedroom downstairs, because Dad was finding it increasingly difficult to move, but he was determined to see all of the house. So three of us helped to get him up the stairs and into the Long Gallery, where I could show him Oliver Cromwell’s sword and Nelson’s pocket watch. I know it meant a lot to him to have time alone with me then, and to talk about everything I was doing.
By then Dad had had both his legs amputated, and had also lost his sight in one eye. He was becoming increasingly infirm – and it troubled him. He knew he was already a difficult person to care for, and that he would be an even trickier invalid. He said to me at the time, ‘I’m feeling old and tired, nothing really works any more and I feel I’m going a bit dotty. The list of things I can do is getting shorter.’
It wasn’t a ‘goodbye’ moment, because I didn’t know he was going to die, but I did feel that he was on quite a steep downhill track. Anyway, off we went to Cornwall, and before we got back with the newly arrived Florence, off they went to France.
Early on the morning of 8 September I was getting ready to prepare for Prime Minister’s Questions when the phone by my bedside rang. It was my mum telling me that Dad had been taken ill – possibly some sort of stroke – and she was very worried. I immediately feared the worst, and thought I must get over there with the rest of the family. Phones buzzed between all the siblings. Alex, Clare and I agreed to go. I called Ed Llewellyn to ask Nick Clegg to stand in for me at PMQs and rang Liz Sugg to see what flights were available to the south of France.
The family converged on City Airport, and we were all about to board the BA plane when we rang Mum one more time to find out the latest news. She thought things had stabilised; he had had a stroke, but he wasn’t getting any worse.
At that moment I thought it best if I stayed behind, and I said goodbye to the others. But as I headed back towards Downing Street and PMQs there was an amazing intervention. Nicolas Sarkozy came through on the car phone to tell me that he had heard my father was unwell, and his office had spoken to the doctors concerned. They were worried that the stroke was potentially fatal. He said, ‘Whatever you do, David, turn around and get back on the plane, and I will get you to your father.’
And that’s what happened. As we stepped off the plane at Nice Airport a helicopter was waiting to take us to the roof of the hospital where Dad had been taken. We all got to see him, but he was in a pretty desperate condition, having had what turned out to be both a bad stroke and a substantial heart attack.
We were able to briefly grip his hand before he was wheeled into one of those large lifts to be taken to an emergency room. At the very moment the lift door closed it seemed as if he suffered a further seizure. I remember Mum saying, ‘Poor Ian. I hope they don’t try and save him. I know that he’s going.’ When you have been married to someone for forty-five years, I suppose you’re so close you even almost know when they want to die. It was extraordinary.
Sarkozy then called to insist that we all stay at his official house, Fort de Brégançon, which is on a small and beautiful isthmus of its own fifty miles from Marseille.
We were cooked a delicious dinner, and sat reminiscing about Dad, drinking some of the president’s best wine and brandy. We drank long into the night, telling more stories about our father, and telling each other that such a quick departure when he was happy and in a place he loved would have been what he wanted. Mum pointed out that while us remembering him over drink and food was ‘what he would have wanted, he would have loved to have been there too’.
In the bay outside, two French navy patrol vessels stood guard, as did French soldiers over my father’s body in the mortuary.
These were extraordinary gestures, which I will never forget. Sarkozy and I were to have some great collaborations, particularly over Libya, and some ferocious rows, almost always over the EU. But without his intervention I wouldn’t have seen my dad before his funeral. I will never forget that act of compassion.
17
Progressive Conservatism in Practice
From the moment I entered No. 10, my life was dominated by Britain’s two most urgent challenges. The economic crisis occupied my days. The war in Afghanistan filled my head at night. But it was the prospect of radical reform that motivated me.
I know that some thought my modernising mission was just a paint job – a way of making our party more attractive to more voters by adopting a wider, more progressive range of concerns. Many in the press and in my own party thought that ‘Vote blue, go green’, ‘modern, compassionate conservatism’ and ‘the Big Society’ had just been slogans, not serious intentions. That I had ridden to the centre ground on a husky-powered sled, but now, in office, I would tack back to the Conservative comfort zones of the economy, defence, crime and Europe.
I scorned that assumption. Granted, not having the money to spend would make every part of our project more difficult. But the challenge of doing more with less, not least by reforming public services, was one that every Western government needed to meet. It wasn’t the only challenge we shared. How to make our environment greener. How to make the most of the opportunities offered by technology. How to put more power in the hands of a public that had been empowered by this technology and was increasingly disillusioned by centralised politics and the establishment. I was determined that, in all these areas, Britain would take the lead.
To achieve this, we alighted on ‘progressive conservatism’ – the idea that progressive ends are best achieved through Conservative means. It might have been the least well known of our phrases, but it was one of the most important.
It frustrated me greatly that so many of those progressive ends – a fairer, more equal society; a greener environment; more responsive public services; and more power for people – were most commonly associated with the left. How could Labour claim to own social progress, I asked, when it was Conservatives who had made such strides in cleaning up the factories and fully legalising trade unions (Disraeli), brought in free universal secondary education (Balfour and Rab Butler) and built houses for the many (Macmillan)? Few acknowledged that it was Churchill who was one of the first to endorse the idea of a National Health Service, or Thatcher who championed action on climate change. John Major should be cited as the leader who outlawed disability discrimination, but rarely is.
Many failed to understand that competent economic management – for which the centre-right was given due credit – underpinned all this. With forefathers like Burke, Adam Smith, Shaftesbury and Wilberforce, the centre-right did not deserve its reputation for selfish individualism. I was determined to resurrect the spirit of these great Tory thinkers by leading a generation of great Tory doers.
I wanted to show that the Conservative means that had worked so well in delivering prosperity in our economy – decentralisation, choice, competition, transparency, accountability – could deliver better public services and a stronger society too.
I firmly believed that we could smash through the old divides and become the party of economic competence and a first-class NHS; traditional values and equal rights; strong defences and a greener environment. Because these things weren’t the either/or binaries they were assumed to be.
Someone who was vital to all this thinking was Oliver Letwin. Oliver combines intellect with a massive capacity for hard work. His influence over our policy programme in opposition and in forming the coalition was huge. Now we were in government he remained instrumental. In many ways, he was another deputy prime minister.
And he was the person who, during our first days in government, set out to wary civil servants what ‘progressive conservatism’ would mean in practice. Businesses and charities having the chance to deliver public services. Remuneration linked to results. Devolving power from Whitehall to cities, communities, families and individuals – a great power giveaway.
The approaches of Blair, Brown and Thatcher proved my theory that the ri
ght had focused too much on markets; the left had focused too much on the state. Both forgot the space in between: society.
Far from feeling outmoded by 2010 – a sunny idea in a dark time – the Big Society felt to me like an idea whose time had come. Not only were we having to do more for less. Disillusion with top-down, big-state solutions was setting in. People talk about populism as if it was invented the day Britain voted to leave the European Union and patented when Donald Trump was elected. But it was already a growing force by the time we took office.
One example of the philosophy in practice was an outrage I felt viscerally: the fight against poverty.
I don’t doubt that Labour’s changes in this area were genuinely intended to help the poorest. They topped up older people’s state pensions with pension credit. They supported families with the mass expansion of working tax credits. The problem was that the benefits bill and the number of people reliant on welfare ballooned. It became dis-advantageous for older people to save money if, as a result, they would lose their pension credit. It became self-defeating for parents receiving working tax credits to take on more hours or get better-paid jobs. The safety net became more of a spider’s web, trapping people, sometimes for life.
What made it worse was that the political argument about poverty had settled into a sterile debate between those who saw it in absolute terms and those who saw it in relative terms.
The left favoured a relative measure: you were poor in relation to the median national income. This produced the odd effect that as the economy grew, poverty often appeared to get worse even though poor people were actually better off. And Labour locked in this interpretation with the Child Poverty Act.
On the right, the flaws in this seemed obvious. Relative measures might deem someone without, say, an iPad and an annual foreign holiday ‘impoverished’ because most middle earners have these things. Focusing on achieving some wider parity of lifestyle could sideline the real, urgent battle with grinding destitution.
I didn’t think either of these approaches was correct. I shared the view on the right that what mattered most of all was people who had been stuck in poverty. But I also felt that relative measures did have some role. The income gap does matter. ‘Even if material want did disappear, that would not be the end of the line for poverty,’ is how I put it during a speech in 2006.
What we needed to focus on was how an array of life problems could cause persistent poverty – the kind of disadvantage that imprisoned whole families in both absolute and relative deprivation. This formed a proper new narrative on poverty and inequality, tackling the causes and not just the symptoms.
High and long-term unemployment is one of the issues at the heart of the poverty problem. That is why our pro-enterprise, pro-business approach – cutting businesses’ taxes, giving investors new incentives to fund start-ups, encouraging unemployed people to quit the dole and start their own business – was so important to our poverty agenda.
The results were remarkable. Labour prophesied a million more unemployed. But for every job lost in the public sector, the private sector created five. By 2014, this country was creating more new jobs than the rest of the EU put together – 2.5 million during my time in office. The unemployment rate tumbled, hitting its lowest level since 1975.
In order to help people off welfare and into all these new jobs we launched the Work Programme, the biggest back-to-work scheme since the 1930s. Again, the scheme was recognisably Conservative: enabling businesses and particularly the voluntary sector to provide those services; paying them by their results; ploughing the savings we’d made on welfare back into the scheme; making sure the results were long-term by paying the provider once the employee had been in work for thirteen or twenty-six weeks, depending on their circumstances.
At one point, a thousand people a day were replacing their benefits cheque with a pay cheque.
Also important were new sanctions to make sure that people on out-of-work benefits were looking for jobs and taking available opportunities. These would be controversial: thousands of people would have their benefits docked because they were unable to prove that they were doing these things. And there were some mistaken decisions. But the results were undeniable. By March 2016 the number of workless households had fallen by three-quarters of a million, to the lowest proportion since records began.
It wasn’t just unemployment that was holding people back, though. Too many hadn’t a hope of escaping poverty because they were living with the terrible disease of addiction. However, unlike our success in helping people into jobs, helping others off drink and drugs was a tale of bureaucratic inertia, coalition mistrust – and failure.
Again, what had gone wrong was that the symptoms, not the causes, were being treated. Heroin addicts were given prescriptions for methadone, another opium-based drug. While this could help people lead less chaotic lives, it was still a highly addictive opiate; we were simply replacing one bad thing with a slightly less bad thing. Success was measured by whether you were engaged in a treatment programme – hooked on state-provided opium – not by whether you’d got clean and got your life on track.
Our aim was to change that by shifting the focus to a more progressive approach of residential courses and abstention and bringing in the voluntary sector, which I knew from friends who had suffered from addiction could do far more to help people escape the drugs’ clutches for good.
But the resistance of the official machine to abstinence-based treatment, and the lack of protection for drug recovery spending, meant there was only a limited increase in non-residential rehab, and a decline in publicly funded residential rehab.
We never quite got the figures that would prove to the Treasury that rehab would pay for itself in reduced unemployment. I know this is one of Oliver’s biggest regrets – and it is one of mine too.
Of course, welfare dependency and drug dependency might be the reasons an adult or their children lived in poverty. But the reason poor children so often turned out to be poor adults was inadequate schooling.
I would argue that all our education reforms – even those aimed at restoring proper discipline – were progressive, because they were aimed squarely at helping the poorest and making opportunity more equal. The actions we took to break open the state monopoly on education and tackle the dumbing down of standards are set out in the next chapter.
But one education policy particularly needs to be mentioned when considering the assault on poverty – and that is the Pupil Premium. This was a simple mechanism whereby schools received more money per pupil (around £600) for each child who came from a poor home. The idea had been developed over many years by a great centre-right thinker, and later my director of policy, James O’Shaughnessy, before it was incorporated into our 2010 manifesto.
By the time I left office, the Pupil Premium was set at £2.5 billion – a commitment from this country to its children that they will get the best chances regardless of where they’re from.
Another factor that drove people into poverty and kept them there was family breakdown. I have always believed that the family is the original welfare state; it is the unit that brings up children, teaches values, supports people when they fall on hard times, inspires, loves and guides. Many people put my head start in life down to financial advantage. But what gave me a real edge, I believe, was the unconditional love and support of two amazing parents.
Successive governments hadn’t thought enough about how important such an upbringing can be, and how vital it was for us to help families stay together if we possibly could. Indeed, they had taken policy decisions that actually made things worse – a benefits system that incentivised couples to live apart, a tax system that didn’t reward commitment at all, and an adoption system that made it ridiculously hard for loving couples to adopt children.
In opposition, I decided that every policy had to pass a simple test: does it support families and acti
vely promote them? A Marriage Allowance that would allow someone who didn’t use up all their personal tax-free allowance to pass it on to their partner was part of our 2010 manifesto. But our coalition partners were against it, and so was George. At the time I was so keen to ensure our Budgets were a success that I sacrificed ‘secondary’ policies to get the big things through. I regret not pushing harder on this. Ironically, it would have to wait for a divorce – between the Tories and the Lib Dems – to become a reality.
Where we did make huge progress on strengthening families, however, was on adoption.
During my speech to the Conservative Party conference in October 2011, I revealed a fact about the state of adoption in Britain: ‘Do you know how many children there are in care under the age of one? 3,660. And how many children under the age of one were adopted in our country last year? Sixty.’
There were all sorts of reasons for this, such as adoption agencies only matching children up with parents in their local borough. But the worst – the most shocking – was that some social workers were refusing to place black, mixed-race or Asian children with white adoptive parents.
In Ed Timpson, the winning candidate in the 2008 Crewe and Nantwich by-election, I had the perfect person to take on the challenge. Ed came from a family that had fostered ninety children, and he had two adopted brothers. A former family-law barrister specialising in care and adoption cases, he remained children’s minister from 2012 until he sadly lost his seat at the 2017 election.
He and Michael Gove, who was himself adopted, fought hard for reforms that culminated in the Children and Families Act, together with £150 million of extra funding for local authorities to improve their adoption services. Information on councils’ performance was published – an example of how transparency can help transform public services. Clear time limits were put in place for cases to get through the courts. Requirements to seek a perfect or partial ethnic match were removed. The number of children adopted increased by 72 per cent, the highest since records began in 1992. And 230 babies were adopted in 2016 – not enough, but moving in the right direction.
For the Record Page 27