For the Record

by David Cameron

  Then it starts. ‘Questions to the prime minister!’ the speaker would shout.

  ‘Question one, Mr Speaker!’ the first questioner on the order paper would shout (there are twelve MPs chosen in a ballot – you know what their first questions are going to be, but not their all-important follow-ups). Typically, their first questions are all the same – ‘What are the prime minister’s engagements?’ – but they then have complete flexibility to ask any follow-up question they choose.

  Autopilot would go on. ‘This morning I had meetings with ministerial colleagues and others. In addition to my duties in this House I shall have further such meetings later today,’ I’d reply, as convention dictates.

  Then autopilot came off and the turbo booster went on. Typically there would be a question from my own side, and once that was dealt with, six would then come at me from the leader of the opposition. Usually on the same topic, designed to expose and humiliate.

  Both the prime minister and the leader of the opposition are under pressure to perform, but having been on both sides I can say – perversely – how much easier it is to be on the government side. Both of you have bricks to throw, but as PM you have a building to defend. And you always get the last word.

  The Labour leaders I faced over eleven years were all strong in different ways, with one exception.

  Blair was superb. He could turn from being statesman to party political jouster with consummate ease, and his sense of timing was excellent. He always claimed not to be a ‘House of Commons man’ but he played the Chamber like a music hall star at the London Palladium.

  Brown was tough, but if you were good you could get round him and lob a grenade or two into the bunker. His big problem was that he often convinced himself of a defence that literally no one else would accept, for example when he bottled the general election in 2007. ‘He’s the first prime minister in history to flunk an election because he thought he was going to win it,’ was my attack.

  Harriet Harman was effective. She asked questions about subjects she was passionate about, like equal pay and justice for rape victims. And she had a strong but likeable character, with a good sense of humour, which meant she managed to be persistent without ever sounding strident.

  Jeremy Corbyn was the exception. He seemed completely incapable of thinking on his feet. Every week as we did our preparation, my team would joke that Corbyn would ask the questions he should have asked the week before, like the Two Ronnies on Mastermind. For several months in a row this prediction was spot on.

  Corbyn’s tactic of reading out questions that came from members of the public actually made it easier, not harder, for the prime minister. While the rest of the House groaned, I thought, ‘Great, I’m finally getting the chance to explain our policies to voters.’ Any attempt to shout me down could be quelled by explaining that Mavis from Motherwell had asked a question and deserved a proper answer.

  The public reaction to my new, more deliberative approach to PMQs was decidedly mixed. While some people claim not to like the Punch-and-Judy nature of the occasion, others tune in because they like their politics as a contact sport. One woman wrote to tell me that every Wednesday she met with her neighbours at twelve noon, opened a bottle of Chardonnay, switched on PMQs and looked forward to a good old punch-up.

  Ed Miliband, who I faced for the longest period, was quick and annoyingly good at landing the class-themed blows on me that got his side of the House roaring.

  One day, 18 March 2015, I had my revenge. He had recently done an ‘at home with the Milibands’-type TV interview in his modest kitchen. Except that it turned out that this was the smaller of his two kitchens. It was the deception that got people. They don’t really care if you have a massive kitchen – but they do care if you try to pretend you don’t.

  Eleven-year-old Nancy was coming to watch me at PMQs that day, and I told her at breakfast that morning in the Downing Street flat, ‘Darling, I’m going to do something that I don’t want you to copy. It won’t be pleasant.’

  I hammered Miliband as someone who ‘literally does not know where his next meal is coming from’, and then concluded with the inevitable: ‘If he cannot stand the heat, he’d better get out of his second kitchen.’ Nancy was in the gallery punching the air.

  All that name-calling, backbiting, point-scoring and finger-pointing may seem strange when I was the one who said in 2005 that I was ‘fed up with the Punch-and-Judy politics of Westminster’ and would clean up PMQs. But I soon realised that there really was no alternative to playing the game. When you’re under attack, you defend yourself, you fight back. When MPs come together for PMQs it’s the entertainment of the week, and pretty soon you have to decide whether you will be the dinner or the diner. That is the reason I give for my somewhat aggressive delivery in those sessions – and for the fact that I used jokes to make my point.

  Apart from my first one or two appearances, I rarely watched the TV coverage of PMQs, but I did read some of the newspaper sketches. Sam used to say that on Thursday mornings I was like an ageing actor reading my reviews over the breakfast table, complaining that the critics hadn’t properly appreciated my performance.

  But when you’re on that spot at the despatch box, a primordial need to fight back kicks in. It’s such a high-octane atmosphere that you feel you’re suffering more from attacks than you actually are. The barbs get you. You fight back more than you need to. Blair would do well by soaking up the pressure over several questions and then hitting back with one powerful response, whereas all too frequently I found myself overreacting, or as George put it (usually with approval), ‘winning the battle and then jumping into the trench and bayoneting the wounded’.

  So yes, at their worst some put-downs were puerile and harsh, for example when I called Ed Balls a ‘muttering idiot’, which was how he was behaving, but it didn’t need to be said. (It was a strange sensation watching him just a few years later doing his ‘Gangnam Style’ on Strictly Come Dancing, cheering him on and whooping with joy with the children as we all voted for him.)

  For me, PMQs was also a real bonding experience with the parliamentary party. I think they felt respect, given how hard the performance is. As George would say, ‘It’s the only time the people behind you don’t want your job.’

  Afterwards, I would go to the Members’ dining room, sit at the long table with Conservative MPs and chat about what had just happened, and listen to the parliamentary gossip. On Wednesdays lunch was roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, which I would wash down with a glass of red wine – and try to unwind after the adrenalin hit of PMQs. I may have had a reputation for being aloof from my MPs, but I am quite sure that this was a routine no other prime minister in living memory had kept up.

  In the unique circumstances of the coalition, performing well in the House was never going to be enough. We had what I called at the time a ‘head–body’ problem. The head was made up of cabinet ministers or junior ministers delighted to be holding office after more than a decade in the wilderness. For most of them the coalition was an exciting challenge. The MPs in the body were either annoyed at not having achieved office or angry that the Liberal Democrats had taken their potential jobs and blocked some of our policies. For them the coalition was a source of frustration. To keep the head and the body connected, a charm offensive was required.

  By August 2010 I had had every single Conservative MP for a drink in the Downing Street garden, almost every peer and every defeated candidate, funded by Tory coffers. I got much better at bringing people in and making sure everyone’s voice was heard.

  As well as the garden drinks, we had drinks in the flat and even bacon-butty breakfasts in the Downing Street dining room if MPs were having to sit on a Friday (to demonstrate how relaxed some were about rebelling, I even remember Andrew Rosindell turning up at one of these breakfasts, bold as brass, before going to vote against the motion I was backing).

  The most va
lued invitation was to Chequers. These started off as being reserved for loyalists, but during the course of the Parliament more and more Conservative MPs visited. It was a physical way of sending the political message that we were in government together, ensuring that the leadership was seen as ‘us’ rather than ‘them’.

  Chequers is a sixteenth-century manor house near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire that was gifted to the office of prime minister in the 1920s. Its owners, Tory MP Arthur Lee and his American wife Ruth, had been worried that future prime ministers would have neither the money, the time nor the inclination to appreciate country life. So they gave them the ideal country house in which to work and relax.

  There are ten guest bedrooms. More than a thousand acres of land. An indoor pool. Tennis court. Two chefs. Plentiful staff. How can that possibly be justified? All I can say is that it makes the job more do-able, and frees the PM from the day-to-day fray so he or she can think and plan. The family and I would spend one weekend out of four there, and the rest at Dean.

  It is a great setting in which to escape the noise and chaos of London and to be reminded of the higher purpose of politics. I would look out of my study there at the trees Churchill had planted along Victory Drive – saplings after the war, now a double row of great, towering beech trees. It helped me to forget about all the gossip and the intrigues and firefighting back in Westminster and think about the bigger picture, take the longer view, and think hard about the big decisions I was taking.

  That is what Chequers allows you to do: work and relax. Everything is taken care of by the staff. Every Saturday and Sunday, much like every weekday, I would be working on my boxes at my desk from around 6 a.m., armed with a strong cup of coffee brought by one of the wonderful stewards, David and Harvey. But with no need to shop, cook, clear up or tidy, the day ahead gave me time both to work and to play with the children.

  The rural retreat is also a great asset for diplomacy, formal occasions, charitable events, staff events and seminars. One day-long seminar was suggested by Angela Merkel, who said as we watched the Queen during one of her state visits to Germany: ‘You know more about Islamist extremism than us, we know more about Russia than you. So let’s have you present to us for half the day and we’ll present to you the other half.’ She suggested holding it at Chequers, because she had so enjoyed her first visit when we sat up drinking whisky in front of a roaring fire in the Long Gallery.

  During that first visit I had taken her for a long country walk, and made a wrong turn at the top of nearby Coombe Hill. I ended up having to help her over a particularly treacherous fence. She laughed at the obvious joke about the Englishman, the German and the barbed-wire fence, and the weekend went extremely well. The farmer spotted our difficulties and put in a small stile, known from then on as the Merkel crossing.

  Tony Blair came to visit to discuss the Palestine issue. The Queen and Prince Philip came for their first visit in nearly two decades, and Philip planted an English oak on the North Lawn, next to one planted by Her Majesty when she visited during John Major’s premiership.

  Boris Johnson came with his family one Sunday and there was a highly competitive game of football on the lawn, with Boris slide-tackling one of his children so vigorously they had to retire hurt.

  At Chequers, Florence’s cot was in the room next to where Lady Mary Grey, sister to ‘the Nine Days Queen’, was imprisoned on the floor above our bedrooms. Nancy would give guests guided tours, and proclaim, ‘We won’t be living here for long – it’s only while Dad’s prime minister.’ She’d go into the house’s history, talking about some of the figures who had a connection with it, like ‘Oliver Crumble’.

  The fact that I was known for spending time with my family and enjoying myself at a place like Chequers brought criticism. It fed into the idea that I was a ‘chillaxing’ prime minister. The accusation was irritating, as I was always on top of the detail, and made decisions promptly and with care. But it was also a source of some pride, because I knew that the ability to have a break and switch off made me much more effective at my job.

  I remember Barack Obama telling me, ‘You’ll find that people will use your strengths as your weaknesses and vice versa.’ He said that one thing we clearly shared was an ability to get on with the job effectively while managing to maintain an equilibrium and an element of normality in our lives. That was a strength, but it was frequently portrayed as a weakness.

  The truth is, people want you to be normal, but the press criticise you for doing family things and taking time out.

  One incident that does seem to stick in people’s minds is the day in 2012 when we went for one of our regular weekend walks to our local pub, the Plough at Cadsden. On the day in question we had friends staying, and I remember bundling a big group of children into one car and watching as Sam did the same with another. Back at the house, as we were about to warm ourselves at the fireplace in the Great Hall, we both asked, ‘Where’s Nancy?’ Then followed the usual Mum-and-Dad discussion – ‘I thought you had her.’ Then the inevitable panic.

  Sam rushed back to the Plough, where eight-year-old Nancy was helping out behind the bar. All was well. (Months later Matt, the superb cartoonist from the Telegraph, sent us his drawing of Nancy sitting dejectedly at the bar of a pub, with the speech bubble saying she was worried about leaving her father to run the country. It is in her bedroom today.)

  Really, I think being prime minister is a bit like being a parent. No one tells you exactly how to do it, you have great responsibility, you learn on the job, you make mistakes, but you slowly learn to master most of the different aspects.

  And that’s how I felt when it came to managing Parliament and my party. From the lows of 1922 Committee reform and the lack of direction to the whips, to the highs of conference, PMQs, coalition unity and, of course, the charm offensive with my own backbenchers, I was raising my game.

  Looking back, I think that if I’d sat down more with my MPs, worked through the policies with them, explained, taken them with me, it would have fostered more loyalty and avoided some of the problems we faced.

  A good leader has to be a good teacher, and in the beginning I wasn’t. I was too busy learning myself.

  20

  Leveson

  ‘I swear by Almighty God that the evidence I shall give … I give,’ I stumbled, ‘shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.’

  You hear these words so often on TV. But when you have to say them yourself before a judge, as I did in June 2012, the fear – of faltering, of unintentionally misleading, of getting something, anything, wrong – is tangible.

  The phone-hacking scandal and Lord Justice Leveson’s subsequent inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of British newspapers didn’t just put me, the prime minister, in the dock. It implicated the press, the police and many other politicians. It dragged into the morass actors, authors, musicians, sports stars, former ministers, members of the armed forces, members of the royal family and, horrifically, the families of murder victims (as well as those whose lives had been made miserable by being falsely accused of such crimes).

  It led to criminal trials, the imprisonment of one of my closest advisers, and the closure of Britain’s best-selling Sunday newspaper. It brought the coalition close to collapse – and my premiership to the precipice.

  It changed the press forever, at a time when the media was already in dramatic flux. And it added to the decline of trust in the current system. Just as the financial crash had eroded faith in bankers, and the expenses scandal had damaged faith in MPs, the hacking scandal brought shame upon journalists.

  When I became an MP in 2001, I had a pretty clear view on the media. It was a symbiotic relationship: we needed them to communicate our messages, they needed us for stories; we wanted them to publish our successes, they wanted to scrutinise our failures. Inevitably, there is a crossover between the two professions: there are fr
iendships, poachers frequently turn gamekeeper, and vice versa.

  When you’re running a party, all this becomes even more important. It’s hard to win without the support of at least some of the media; it’s hard to govern without a reasonably fair hearing; and when it comes to delivering change, it’s hard to alter opinions without the media playing its part.

  That said, when I became party leader in 2005, I started out trying to do things differently when it came to media relations. I never found the idea of politicians wining and dining newspaper editors and reporters particularly seedy or sinister; I just thought it was outdated. I hadn’t relied on newspapers’ backing to win the leadership (in fact much of the Tory press had been hostile). Why would I rely on them to win the election?

  Instead, my strategy was to focus on broadcast media: getting onto the ‘6 and 10’ (6 p.m. and 10 p.m. news bulletins) each day. I was also keen on using new media, hence my WebCameron vlogs and my regular column on the Guardian’s Comment is Free webpage.

  But I didn’t ignore the newspapers altogether. Of course, I’d meet with journalists, broadcasters and editors for on-the-record interviews and off-the-record briefings to help them understand more about my motivations, judgement and values. Those encounters ranged from dropping into the offices of the local newspaper where I was campaigning that day to meeting national newspaper journalists and their proprietors.

  The biggest newspaper owner was the media mogul Rupert Murdoch, owner of The Times, the Sunday Times, the Sun and the News of the World. My first proper meeting with him was in January 2006 at a lunch at the headquarters of his company, News International. He was accompanied by the Sun’s political reporting team as well as Rebekah Wade, the paper’s editor.