By January 2012, my feelings on the issue had developed since May 2010. As I explained on tape: ‘My long-term view is that Europe is changing and Britain is changing in its relation to Europe because of the creation of the euro and a multi-speed Europe.’ The consequences for our Europe policy were potentially profound. As I said: ‘At some stage, altering Britain’s relationship with the European Union in some regards and then putting it to a referendum I think would be good Conservative policy for the next Parliament.’
So there it is. As early as January 2012 I was thinking that this would be the only way to change things. Long before the UKIP threat. Long before immigration started to rise. Two years before the European elections, and three before the general election. Anyone who claims we were bounced, or didn’t give the strategy enough forethought, has their riposte right here.
Even then, I believed our goals should be limited and specific. As I put it: ‘I wouldn’t alter [the relationship between Britain and the EU] as much as some of my colleagues. I think some of them are dishonest, in that they endlessly object to things that are actually part of the single market whilst at the same time saying that the single market is the key thing we want in Europe.’ The tape concluded with the observation: ‘There is a lot of dishonesty about the debate.’
Popularity in politics is a fickle thing. At any one time you can be fêted in one quarter and pilloried in another. And so it was with Europe and America: at the same time as achieving persona non grata status in Brussels, I was treated as a king – almost literally – when I went to Washington, DC for what was probably the closest thing a prime minister could get to a state visit.
That was thanks in part to the relationship I had forged with Barack Obama over several years. But the person I really had to thank was the Queen. With the exception of Lyndon Johnson she has met every one of the US presidents who have served during her reign – a quarter of all the presidents there have ever been. Yet only two had the privilege of a full state visit to the UK: George W. Bush and Barack Obama. When Barack and Michelle came in May 2011, they loved it, and I knew how much that was down to the relationship they struck up with our head of state. The warmth of my visit to Washington in March 2012 was, I felt, largely due to the success of their London trip.
After we landed at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, Samantha and I stepped off the plane and onto the red carpet, blinking in the sunshine. The US Air Force Band played both national anthems and we stood like statues. There were cameras everywhere.
As we were being driven off the tarmac I stared out of the window, looking ahead to the meetings with Obama, the ball at the White House, and everything else the trip had to offer. But when I turned around I could see tears in Sam’s eyes. ‘I can’t do this,’ she said, panic-stricken. While this was my idea of heaven, it was her version of hell. I was often guilty of forgetting that while I was a volunteer, she was a conscript. The pressure on political spouses can be huge – especially if this just isn’t their world. All eyes were on what she did and said and wore.
I said in a rather hopeless way, ‘Don’t worry. You’ll be great.’ Ever practical, Sam replied that if I wanted to do something helpful I could make sure she could have a vodka and some painkillers.
We got to the president’s guesthouse – which, amusingly, is named Blair House – just across the road from the White House, and the door was opened by the splendidly named Randy Bumgardner, the charming head of protocol who ran the place. The vodka and painkillers did the trick, and Michelle Obama’s presence during the school visit they made together also helped to calm Sam’s nerves.
There would be several firsts on the trip. I was the first foreign PM to hitch a ride from Washington on Air Force One. And when we landed in Dayton, Ohio, I would see my first-ever basketball game. Obama spent much of it explaining the rules to me, and I spent most of it pretending to understand.
Travelling back on Air Force One, I was beginning to flag. It was about 3 a.m. UK time. ‘Why don’t you use my bed?’ Obama asked. He opened a door at the front of the plane, to reveal a double bed in its nose. As I leaned back on it, he proceeded to tuck me in with a blanket emblazoned with the White House crest. ‘I bet Roosevelt never did this for Churchill,’ he said.
The next morning Sam and I turned up at the White House in a US government limo. There was a crowd of thousands, a full military line-up, a nineteen-gun salute and, once again, our national anthems. I stood alongside Obama on the stage in front of the White House that had been set for our press conference, and looked out over the Washington Monument. The sky was blue, the blossom was out, there wasn’t a breath of wind in the air. I wanted to press pause on my life right then, walk away from where I was and have a good look at what I was doing, because frankly I couldn’t take it all in.
That evening we had drinks – the Obamas, the Camerons, the Bidens, William Hague, Hillary Clinton and George Osborne – on the balcony of the president’s private apartment in the White House.
Later that night I had a reminder of the different natures of US and British politics. As Samantha and I stood in line with Michelle and Barack to greet the guests for the grand White House dinner, a whole series of Democrat-supporting gay couples came up to me, wanting to shake my hand. ‘We’re right behind your stance on gay marriage,’ one man said, adding, as he pointed at the president, ‘When are you going to convince this guy?’ ‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s odd. You’re asking this Conservative to persuade that liberal to back gay marriage!’
The Obamas had suggested that we both ask a favourite musician or group to play after dinner. They chose John Legend; we chose the British folk band Mumford & Sons, who at that stage were only beginning to reach stardom. They played their hearts out, and were fabulous. I had Barack on one side of me and Michelle on the other, and to her side was George Clooney. Needless to say, I didn’t really get a word in there.
Over the next few months my bond with Barack grew stronger, including at the G8 summit he hosted that May at his presidential country retreat, Camp David.
It was interesting how the EU leaders reacted to America’s involvement in the Eurozone crisis. Before the summit I had a video conference with Merkel, France’s new president François Hollande, Italy’s Mario Monti, Barroso and Van Rompuy, who were discussing why they didn’t want to talk about it in front of the Americans. There was an element of delusion about the severity of the situation. Van Rompuy even uttered the phrase: ‘Were it not for the situation in Greece, actually everything else in the Eurozone is going quite well.’
At Camp David each leader stayed in a beautiful log cabin, and everyone travelled around the wooded hills of Maryland by golf cart. When I arrived at the opening drinks, Obama took me to one side and said he wanted to meet with Merkel, Monti and Hollande, alone. His plan was to get them to see sense on action on the Eurozone. He didn’t want the Commission and the Council presidents there – or me. I was put out. We were six times more exposed to the Eurozone than the US, I told him. But he said the Europeans wouldn’t open up in front of me after what I’d said in the FT urging the ‘bazooka’ approach. He invited me instead to come to the gym with him first thing the next morning, so he could download the contents of his meeting.
Early the next day there was a knock on the door of my cabin. I opened it to find Obama standing there – I hadn’t realised he was coming to pick me up. I pulled on my trainers, and was soon being driven by the president in a golf cart, trailed by a convoy of secret service people in their own golf carts.
This secret ‘treadmill bilateral’ brought about a welcome change in the way Obama conducts meetings. Normally he talks at great length, in great detail. Exercising forced him to make his points more concisely. I said that the EU was just putting off the problem. He agreed. In fact, he seemed to think that an ongoing Eurozone crisis threatened his chances of re-election later that year, and was desperate for Grexit not to happen during the e
lection. We agreed that a contingency plan was absolutely necessary.
Some people question the purpose of bilateral visits and summits like those I attended in America in 2012. What was the point? Why meet in person?
The answer is that during those few days in Washington and at the G8 in Camp David, I got more one-on-one time with Obama than I’d ever had. In the car, in Marine One, in Air Force One, during the basketball game, at the various political events, at the dinner, and yes, on the treadmill, we had an enormous amount of time to talk. And I don’t just mean shooting the breeze, or talking about politics in general. We were covering all sorts of issues. Drawdown in Afghanistan. The growing crisis in Syria.
Some of these were uncomfortable topics, like the – frankly perverse – US decisions that were preventing us from selling munitions and other arms to Gulf allies. They claimed that this was to prevent vital US technology contained in UK-made weapons from falling into the wrong hands. Yet at the same time they were happily selling their own munitions, containing similar technology, to the same countries. America may be the land of the free, but it is not always the land of free trade.
The advantage of meeting like this is you get inside your fellow leader’s head, and really get to understand what they’re thinking. And it was on these trips that I got to understand Obama’s position on Iran, and agreed a strategy with him which I believe was to prove crucial.
For several years, war with Iran had been considered imminent. If Iran got close to developing a nuclear bomb, it was clear that Israel would strike pre-emptively in self-defence. By now Iran was probably less than a year from having enough fissile material to produce one bomb. That meant strikes were a growing possibility, to hit Iran’s nuclear-bomb-making sites before they could be hidden deep underground.
Obama and I agreed that such an attack would risk major escalation, but that the alternative of Iran having a nuclear bomb would be even more calamitous. An arms race. Regional instability. Major conflict. Even world war. The intended policy that we had inherited from our predecessors was sanctions so severe that Iran would uproot its entire nuclear infrastructure. Most of them hadn’t even been introduced, and were never going to work in time anyway.
It was time, therefore, for a new strategy. The priority was to make sure Israel didn’t act unilaterally. The country’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was constantly talking in apocalyptic terms. The Israeli Defence Forces were rehearsing attacks. Obama knew that he had to convince Netanyahu that the US would do the job a lot better than the Israelis ever could, if all other measures failed and Tehran got too close to the red line. I said I would support his efforts to persuade Israel.
The second element was keeping Iran far enough from having a bomb, while also maintaining a realistic negotiating strategy. A carrot was needed as well as a stick. Iran should not have the capacity to produce too much fissile material before our joint intelligence could spot it and US-led military action could stop it – but in return it should be allowed a substantial civilian nuclear industrial capacity.
It would be a political hard sell for Obama domestically, and a big shift for his intelligence, security and diplomatic services. Nor would it be easy to contain a hyperbolic Israel and an inflamed Iran. I said that Britain would row in behind the US, supporting it publicly, garnering EU support, and squaring our sceptical Gulf allies.
The third step was introducing the sanctions we’d spent so long talking about. I had approved the next wave in November 2011 – going beyond what the UN had done – by banning UK financial institutions from doing business with their Iranian counterparts, including the country’s central bank. In response, a mob attacked the British embassy in Tehran.
In January 2012 the EU, led by Britain, ratcheted up the sanctions and imposed an oil embargo. Iranian oil exports soon nearly halved – hugely important, since they formed 50 per cent of the Iranian government’s revenue.
The fourth step was intelligence. With the best intelligence agencies in the world, the UK’s covert programme could play a big part in stopping Iran getting a nuclear weapon. I received frequent reports on this work, and it was key to keeping Israel from leaping into action.
At the heart of this policy – and therefore key to preventing war – was keeping alive the credible threat of force. I was serious when I told Obama that I supported his approach. I said I felt that force was indeed the last resort, but that we had to prepare for it, and make it known that we were doing so.
But introducing the threat made this strategy hard for the Foreign Office to stomach. So for months Hugh Powell on my own staff led secret contacts with Obama’s NSC over contingency plans if Israel started a war or Iran crossed our red line.
At one point in the summer of 2012, Iran got within a few months of being able to produce a bomb’s worth of fissile material, and there were increasing signs of imminent Israeli strikes. It seemed we were planning for when, not if, a war would begin. To this day I’m not quite sure why Netanyahu didn’t act.
But by that time we had begun pursuing this new negotiating strategy. It had to be a largely American effort from Obama and his new secretary of state, John Kerry. Our role was to help keep the UN Security Council’s other permanent members (France, China, Russia), Germany and the EU on board. The EU’s high representative for foreign affairs at the time was Britain’s Cathy Ashton (we never accepted that the EU had a ‘foreign minister’, so didn’t use that title as other countries did). She would be crucial to delivering the Joint Plan of Action that built on the central US–Iran talks.
In July 2015 a historic deal was reached with Iran. In return for lifting sanctions, both Iran’s stockpile of nuclear material and its number of centrifuges would be radically reduced, so it could not rapidly produce a bomb. International inspectors would have much greater access, making it far more difficult for Iran to cheat. Iran could still in theory build a bomb. But, crucially, we had bought time; if it did violate the agreement, the US and its allies could take action – action the Iranians were now convinced would happen.
The following month, foreign secretary Philip Hammond visited Britain’s reopened embassy in Tehran and declared that our two countries could, after so many years of hostility, ‘draw a line and move on’.
I look back at the Iran deal and see many common threads with my wider approach to foreign policy. Getting a good-enough deal is a lot better than keeping an unachievable ideal alive. Being prepared to be a ‘hawk’ on military action is what allows you to be a ‘dove’ in diplomatic action. Weighing the value of a policy by whether it stops something worse happening. Challenging, and even bypassing, the UK government machine to get it to change direction. Using our place in multilateral bodies to steer them in the right direction.
And I look at the deal with pride, too. Yes, it left Iran able to develop its missiles and to make trouble in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere. But the most important thing is that we stopped a war, and did so safely. Of course, the problem that is Iran was not ‘solved’, but it was made less dangerous. The neo-con alternative of aiming for regime change to solve everything looked then, and still looks now, a lot more dangerous.
25
Omnishambles
‘When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions,’ wrote Shakespeare. He was, of course, talking about the state of Denmark. But he could have been talking about British politics in 2012.
In the space of just one week, I faced a whole brigade of woes. A Budget that went so badly wrong that a word used to describe it – ‘Omnishambles’ – entered the Oxford English Dictionary. A recently appointed Conservative Party treasurer allegedly promising ‘premier league’ access to me in exchange for money. And a senior minister advising people, before a potential fuel strike, to stockpile petrol.
In just a few short days we managed to alienate pensioners, charities, churchgoers, caravan owners and, most famously, pasty eat
ers. It was, to borrow another term from The Thick of It and In the Loop, which coined ‘Omnishambles’, a total ‘clusterfuck’. It made the government more unpopular, our reputation weaker and the remainder of our parliamentary term tougher. It helped to reverse our poll lead, lose us seats at the local elections and put us on the back foot.
Yet – and this is what made the whole saga so infuriating – the Omnishambolic appearance of things masked a reality that was in many ways sensible, substantial and frankly unshambolic.
We were better prepared for a fuel strike than at any time in our history. One donor’s blathering overshadowed a system of party finance that was more robust than ever. And a few, broadly rational, tweaks to VAT totally drowned out some vital tax reforms that would help to kick-start our economy and give millions of low-paid people a pay rise.
I am not saying we didn’t make mistakes. No British politician will try to tax baked goods again in a hurry. But the truth was that we needed to make some bold decisions to get the economy growing, without abandoning our work to reduce the deficit. Politically this was the critical time to do so, since we had three years for the policies to make a difference and three years for any arguments to fade.
Still, there were mistakes, and these began in the formulation of the Budget.
Getting a bold, gear-shifting Budget right means keeping it tight. Draft Budgets are notorious for finding their way onto newspaper front pages before the chancellor utters a word of them from the despatch box, which blunts their political and even economic impact.
For the Record Page 44