It seemed the biggest battles I’d have to fight would be with my own party.
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Party and Parliament
A leader of the Conservative Party can never for a minute forget one vital statistic: it only takes 15 per cent of your MPs (in my case that meant forty-six of them) to write to the chairman of the 1922 Committee and trigger a vote of no confidence in your leadership.
Not once during eleven years as Conservative leader did I feel secure for any length of time. You never do in a party that has been described by William Hague as ‘an absolute monarchy, moderated by occasional bouts of violent regicide’.
Memories of Thatcher and IDS’s dethronements at the hands of Tory MPs were still part of the current politics of the party. There were several times between 2010 and 2015 when I thought I’d be next. I never knew if I was just one angry backbencher’s missive away from bust.
The good thing is that in this never-ending battle you are not alone. For a start, you have your parliamentary private secretary, who acts as your eyes and ears in the Commons. In my case, that loyal lieutenant was a major: Major Desmond Swayne.
‘Dessie’, instantly recognisable for his Panama hat and muttonchops, left politics for six months in 2003 to serve with the Territorial Army in Iraq. A dedicated Serpentine lake swimmer in Hyde Park, cyclist and jogger, he would have done a triathlon most days before the rest of us had even had breakfast.
A devout Christian, he was enormously popular with our MPs, and helped me, often via his notoriously colourful emails, with colleague management. ‘It is not a question of being able to please everyone all of the time,’ he would say. ‘Frankly you are lucky if you can please anyone, ever.’
In one email he explained that Edward Leigh, the hardline Thatcherite MP for Gainsborough who repeatedly voted against the government, ‘wants to come and tell you to your face that you are the Antichrist’. When the time came we had a jokey and enjoyable meeting. And Edward’s voting record continued pretty much as before.
Dessie also advised me on appointments, and seemed to have a nickname for everyone – ranging from ‘Poshy Posh’ to ‘Mincehead’. I didn’t always take his advice, and there were many ministers who remained in post despite Dessie’s entreaties to sack them, including Theresa May, who he advised me to get rid of – twice. (Theresa, incidentally, was referred to by Dessie as ‘Cruella’, while her cabinet namesake Theresa Villiers was ‘Morticia’.)
I spent whole days – whole parts of weeks – on party management. The Conservative Party really is the broadest of churches: a motley membership of centre-right moderates, hard-line Thatcherites and lite-libertarians. There are arch-Eurosceptics and ardent Europhiles. Social liberals and social conservatives.
It is also beset by groups and cliques – something I found baffling. I used to be a member of the One Nation dining club, a centrist group that met on a Monday night. There was also the Curry Club of 2010ers and the 301 Group of modernisers. But it was the right wing that had the serious factions: the 92 Group, the Free Enterprise Group, the No Turning Back Group, the European Research Group, the Cornerstone Group – it went on and on.
I once asked the Lincolnshire MP John Hayes – another eccentric who later became my parliamentary adviser – what Cornerstone was like. ‘It’s a mixture of high Tories, former regime loyalists and elements of the Christian right,’ he said. ‘It sounds like Beirut in the 1980s,’ I replied. ‘What have you done with the Druze militia and the Maronite Christians?’ (Modernisers believed that following Cornerstone’s advice would be the death of the party, and dubbed it the Tombstone Group.)
It is remarkable that this fractious, factional party could be a success at all. But it is: even despite our trials over implementing Brexit, it’s the oldest, most successful political party in the world.
At its best, there is a magic combination of values in the party which embraces aspiration, patriotism, freedom and common sense. This allows the Conservative Party to transcend class, geography, gender, race and sexuality. Then there is the ability to move with the times. The country keeps changing socially, and the Conservative Party keeps changing with it.
What’s more, the party has always had a desire to win. This instinct means that even though there is a home for those who like ideological purity, the party as a whole returns to pragmatism and moderation. (The definition of ideological purity does, however, change over time. At the turn of the last century, ideological purity meant committing to tariff reform to bind the Empire together. Later it meant free trade. Today, arguably, purity equals hard Brexit. At the time I became leader, many in the party thought purity meant a strict adherence to Thatcherism and a rejection of anything and everything that the Blair governments had done.)
The divide that began to emerge in the years of party modernisation and in the run-up to 2010 wasn’t so much ideological as hierarchical: a growing gulf between the leadership and the backbenches. I remember during one meeting of the 1922 Committee executive, the veteran MP Nicholas Winterton railed at me, ‘You should be doing this’ and ‘You should be doing that.’ ‘Nicholas,’ I snapped, ‘it’s not “you”, it’s “we”. We are one party.’
But when I moved my base out of Parliament and into Downing Street after the 2010 election, the inevitable gap between leadership and backbenches widened. Whitehall, the street that cuts through Westminster, physically divided MPs on one side and me and my cabinet on the other. It didn’t matter that I took great pains to be accessible and inclusive. Being behind those black iron gates symbolised (and to a certain extent produced) separateness.
The truth is that a minority would simply never accept my leadership. There were those irritated that the party had ‘skipped a generation’, and that generation had been theirs. And there were those who disagreed with my progressive conservative views.
Kate Fall said, ‘These people will never love you; they will tolerate you because you’re good and you can win.’ The complication was that I couldn’t bring political success if I followed their advice, and I couldn’t show clear leadership if I wasn’t true to myself.
Our alliance with the Lib Dems gave them further reason to dislike me. It’s not just that many in our party didn’t feel part of that alliance, or ownership of our programme for government. It was that a significant proportion of our backbench MPs detested the fact that we were in coalition. They would have preferred a minority government, opposition – anything but an alliance with what they saw as the sandal-wearing, tofu-eating brigade.
If only we had been able to fight the election on more right-wing principles, some believed, we’d have won a majority. I thought this view was crackers. We didn’t need less modernisation, we needed more. I still think that about the party today.
Trouble from the backbenches often came from the usual suspects on the Tory right who voted against the government regularly. But far more influential was the new intake – and almost half of all the MPs elected in 2010 were new to Parliament. The vast majority were supportive, crediting me with helping them to make it into the Commons.
However, rather than being a docile bunch who thought that filing through the right voting lobbies would lead to a ministerial job, they were independently minded and not afraid to prove it.
There were some amazing talents in the new intake who added great expertise and depth to our party. Their independence was in many ways an asset, because it garnered respect for Parliament and connected the party with voters. Yet it also made legislation and government harder to manage. The days when you could guarantee that your newest MPs would be the most loyal were over.
For some backbenchers, criticising the government was a way of ingratiating themselves with some of their most active party members. Coalition was part of that. When you rebel against a Conservative government, it can cause consternation in your local party. When you rebel against a coalition it’s seen as sticking it to
the Lib Dems.
While circumstances clearly made us prone to a more rebellious Parliament, I also admit that much of it was also down to my early failures at party management.
On 19 May 2010 I announced plans to – as I envisaged it – foster greater unity across the party by reforming the 1922 Committee. I wanted to foster the idea of us all working together to a common aim – nowhere was the ‘one team’ spirit more important than in our parliamentary party.
The 22 admitted all Tory MPs when we were in opposition. But now, in government, ministers – seventy-six of our 306 MPs – though able to attend, were excluded from voting. It was the us-and-them divide made flesh.
Even worse was that the make-up of the 22’s executive committee was unrepresentative of the wider party in Parliament. With the divide between frontbenchers, who couldn’t vote for the committee, and backbenchers, including those recently excluded from ministerial office, who could, this was likely to deteriorate further. Also, it met on a Wednesday, which made no sense since its purpose should have been to share information about upcoming business and political tactics for the week ahead.
Change was important. We had reformed trade unions all over Britain, but not the one at the heart of our own party. The vote to do so – crucially, to allow the whole parliamentary party to remain members when in government as in opposition – took place on 20 May 2010. We won it, but by such a small margin and against such opposition – some even threatened legal action – that we had to drop it. I had intended to hit the ground running on party management, but was left limping away, frustrated.
If I couldn’t instil discipline via reform of the 22, what about via the whips’ office?
The whips are, even more than your PPS, crucial to party management – your Praetorian Guard. I saw the chief whip, Patrick McLoughlin, most days. He was the most likeable and trustworthy colleague you could wish for. But we didn’t see eye to eye on everything.
One thing Patrick wanted to do was to ditch our manifesto commitment to introduce Backbench Business Days, when a cross-party committee would decide on topics to debate every couple of weeks, rather than letting it simply be dictated by the government (as it was on most days) or the opposition frontbench (as it was on the twenty ‘opposition days’ held each year).
I had a feeling that all good prime ministers should do something to enhance the role of Parliament. Margaret Thatcher had established the Select Committee system in its modern form. Tony Blair had subjected the PM to questioning by the committees’ chairmen. Gordon Brown had ensured that those chairmen were elected by MPs, not shuffled into place by the whips. I would – finally – give someone other than the government and the speaker a measure of control over at least part of the parliamentary timetable.
Dropping it would have made life easier for the government, but I wanted to keep our promise. Giving greater power to Parliament could play a part in helping restore faith in politics by making people feel their MPs were not mere lobby fodder. And for the same reason it would keep our party happy. But in truth it probably didn’t do much of either of those things. Certainly I got little thanks or recognition for it.
While I was working hard to bring the Conservatives together, I was also trying to cement the coalition.
On 28 May 2010 I was on the train with Vince Cable to a manufacturer in Saltaire, West Yorkshire, when I received a call about the chief secretary to the Treasury, David Laws. He was about to be exposed by the Daily Telegraph for claiming expenses for the cost of his London accommodation which he was paying to his landlord, who was also his partner. This was against the rules, but he had let the lie continue for fear of his family finding out his partner was a man.
Suddenly, the Lib Dems’ crisis became our crisis.
Andy Coulson, hardly a Lib Dem fan, hit the phones, trying to save David. The whole team, our spads and their spads, huddled around speakerphones, working out the lines to take, while I made a series of phone calls trying desperately to buy him some time.
I always thought Tony Blair was too brutal in pressing eject before an accused minister had got a fair hearing. Of course I knew you had to be tough and decisive – and when necessary, I was. For instance, when Patrick Mercer made racist remarks in 2007, I sacked him immediately from the shadow frontbench.
But when things were not so clear-cut, I didn’t want to rush to ruin someone’s career just to meet a newspaper deadline. So I attempted to convince David not to resign. The taxpayer wasn’t worse off. If he and his partner had been open, they could have claimed for a mortgage as a couple. I was always sympathetic to gay people who hadn’t felt ready to talk publicly about their relationships. But he was unpersuadable.
The coalition was working, even in crises, but our backbenchers, four months in, were generally feeling, in Dessie’s terminology, a bit unloved. A chance to change this came during our party conference in 2010.
Over eleven years we had a pretty consistent record of using our annual gathering to galvanise and steer the mood of the party – even turn it around – through the policies we announced and the speech the leader gave at the end of it.
It was rarely me that came up with the conference slogan, but this time I was clear about the words I wanted emblazoned across the International Conference Centre in Birmingham and littered throughout everyone’s speeches: ‘Together in the National Interest’.
Party conferences are usually occasions for strident invective against the other parties to unite your supporters and put fire in their bellies. This was strikingly different. I recognised that Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats were proper partners, getting stuck in, making big decisions and working together with us.
If one side of my personality – pragmatic, laid-back, consensual – was suited to sustaining a coalition, the other side – tribal and fiercely competitive – was suited to what I had to do in Parliament. Nowhere did this come out more (sometimes more than I could help) than at Prime Minister’s Questions.
As I’ve said, PMQs is a microcosm of the British parliamentary system: adversarial, noisy, partisan and unpredictable. It is important, and you have to do it well – to demonstrate that you’re the leader of your pack, to engage your party, to take on the arguments being levelled against you.
I dreaded it all week. It is as intimidating, demanding, exhausting and downright terrifying as anything you do as a prime minister. I was always deeply relieved when it was over. You’d think that after hundreds of appearances that fear would fade. It didn’t.
I developed a strict routine. It started with a very sketchy preliminary chat each Monday with Tristan Pedelty, head of No. 10’s Research and Information Department and chief civil servant for briefings, and my principal private secretary, Chris Martin. A young star of the civil service, Chris was great with the ideas, and also brilliant at getting me to focus.
On Tuesday, Tristan would bring an official folder containing every subject under the sun, with a particular focus on the six or seven topics that were likely to come up. Later this duty was taken over by a wonderfully frank and robust civil servant called Hanna Johnson. At this meeting there would also be my briefings spad – and I was lucky to have some sharp and clever people throughout: first Olive Dowden, then Alex Dawson, Adam Atashzai, Meg Powell-Chandler and finally Ed de Minckwitz. There would also be the parliamentary questions expert, who during the whole time I was there was the civil service stalwart Nicholas Howard. We would discuss and commission further information that might be needed. By the evening they would bring me an updated – even bulkier – folder, which I’d take to bed with me.
On Wednesday morning I would do my box in the normal way from about 5.30 a.m., but as the minutes ticked by my mind would drift to PMQs and the huge folder now on the kitchen table next to the rest of my work.
Downstairs, after a swift morning meeting I would meet with the PMQs team, plus a wider group including George Osborne, Mic
hael Gove, Gabby Bertin, Kate Fall and frequently Danny Finkelstein, in my study. From time to time other MPs would join us, such as James Cartlidge. These meetings were often a riot of laughter as we tried to come up with the most topical jokes, put-downs and what we’d call ‘zingers’ – the comments that the House would howl at, the journalists would tweet and the broadcasters would clip on their evening bulletins.
Michael would turn up with a Pret sandwich or bowl of porridge which we’d have to watch him eat while he reeled off the material he’d diligently prepared – some brilliant, most unusable. He’d make up poems; he’d write raps. He’d link together two stories of the day, something from popular culture, something from the other side of the world, and then deliver it with Carry On campness.
I would either drive or walk over to Parliament at 10.30 a.m. and then sit in my Commons study, alone. On my desk was a smaller ring binder and multicoloured subject dividers, and I would remove the parts of the official briefing I wanted, writing out bits in longhand and assembling it in my own order. I’d even take out scissors and Sellotape to cut out quotes I liked and stick them on the inside of the folder. It sounds a bit Blue Peter, but I found that I only really absorbed the facts – and knew where to find them immediately – if I had arranged them myself.
At around 11.30 a.m. I would have a final session of ‘net practice’ with my PMQs spad, who would fire a set of six questions at me. Others from the private and political office would join in. Then at 11.55 I’d go into the Chamber, which was filling up during the tail end of questions to one of the smaller departments.
You’re conscious that it’s all going on around you. Behind: your backbenchers roaring. Above: the press and those in the public gallery focusing hard. In the air: TV cameras and dangling microphones. To your left: your PMQs team in the officials’ box. In front of you: the opposition benches, jeering, muttering, braying, gesticulating – and that was just shadow chancellor Ed Balls, who I found really hard to block out. And all around you: MPs. Crouching in the aisles, spilling out into the corridors, sitting as close as lovers on a park bench.
For the Record Page 31