First in the queue for my Commons ‘bloodbath’ was Ken Clarke, an effective lord chancellor and justice secretary for the past couple of years, and a great help in shaping our economic programme. But I just couldn’t see him driving through the innovative reforms needed to alleviate the overcrowding in our prisons. It would also become an overcrowded cabinet unless I shifted things around.
He sat down, and I offered him a whisky. With Ken you know he is going to talk for ages, so you might as well turn the whole thing into a proper chat. I said I wanted him to remain in cabinet, but without a department, to continue to lend weight to our economic reforms. I thought he would stay – once Ken is committed to something he is loyal and dependable – and I was delighted when he said yes. He explained – using almost exactly the same words as when he had agreed to join the shadow cabinet years earlier – that he liked me and George, he thought we were doing a good job, and it was an interesting time to be in politics. He trundled off cheerily. An excellent start.
Then Caroline Spelman, my secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs, came in. I launched straight into my spiel. ‘We’ve worked together a long time, but I have to make changes because I’ve got to promote new talent. So I’m going to ask you to step down from the cabinet.’
She said, very legitimately, that there had been no performance appraisal – no one ever says if you’re doing a good job or a bad job. And the thing is, she hadn’t done a bad job. It would have been unfair to lay all the blame for the forestry fiasco at her feet, and she’d done good work brokering a vital international deal on biodiversity. But I felt I needed someone with stronger political support, both in Parliament and outside, and I thought a stronger champion for farming and rural affairs would help the government through what would be a difficult patch.
Then came Cheryl Gillan. As I’ve mentioned, once we had some Tory MPs sitting for Welsh constituencies it would make sense to have one of them as secretary of state. Cheryl represented a Buckinghamshire constituency, and so was at a clear disadvantage when dealing with Welsh MPs and the Welsh Assembly. I thought she would understand that. I wasn’t prepared for her tirade. ‘You’re saying I just don’t fit in, do I?’ she began. ‘I’m old, I’m a woman, you’re not offering me anything else. This is appalling.’ I didn’t know what to say. It was awful.
George Young, the leader of the House, lived up to his nickname ‘Gentleman George’ when I asked him to step down. He simply said, ‘I’ve loved working here, and I’ve enjoyed the job. You promised me two years, and I’ve had more than two years. I quite understand.’ He had given phenomenal service. Indeed, at seventy-seven he is still serving as a minister in the House of Lords today.
One extra river I wanted to cross was moving IDS out of Welfare and into the now vacated Justice Department. I thought he would be good at prison reform because he understood the issues and cared about improving our prison system. Plus, his obsession with Universal Credit and his consequent failure to implement other welfare reforms was becoming a bit of a roadblock. But he still provided important balance to the cabinet.
I thought the best way to get him to accept was, rather than offering him the prisons role and nothing else – and risk him becoming a disgruntled troublemaker on the backbenches – to give him the choice: stay or move. I talked up the new role. ‘It’s the most senior job in the government, and it’s the other half of the whole broken society agenda that you’ve pioneered so successfully,’ I said. He seemed tempted. I thought: the fish is halfway in on the line.
Then one of those strange flukes of politics intervened. The idea of IDS moving from Welfare to Justice was floated by Danny Finkelstein on Newsnight. Danny had no idea about the plan, and was simply speculating. But because everyone knew he was a close friend of both George and me, it looked like a Cameron–Osborne plot to lever IDS out of Welfare – and the plan was scuppered. Iain said he wanted to remain at the DWP, and I had to decide whether to keep him there or risk letting him go altogether. I didn’t take that risk. On reflection, that was a mistake.
Finally there was Sayeeda Warsi, the party chairman. I thought she would be all right, because she knew we needed an MP in that role. She was always at a disadvantage doing the job as a peer. A bit like Cheryl, that was a simple fact that wasn’t her fault.
I said: ‘I want you to have a really good career in politics, and I think the right thing for you to do now is to be in a department. I think the best department for you is the Foreign Office. There’s a great job to do there which involves the Commonwealth and Central Asia. I also want you to stay in the cabinet, and I’d like you to do the Women and Equalities job, because that needs to be done by a cabinet minister.’
It was an amazing role, and I could see her thriving in it. I had been looking forward to a constructive conversation and a happy future together. Instead, she objected to every part of the role and was very difficult to deal with.
She left without us resolving what would happen next, and went into a rather strange overnight phone negotiation with Ed. He found a neat solution: she would sit in two departments – the Foreign Office and the Department for Communities and Local Government. At the Foreign Office she would be responsible for Central Asia, but not the Commonwealth. She would carry out the cohesion job – focusing on faith, where she would excel – rather than the Equalities job.
But even with all these roles, the position wasn’t resolved until the morning, when Ed’s final offer made her turn her car around and come back (a politician making an actual U-turn). She was given a seat on the NSC and the title ‘senior minister of state’, which although it hadn’t existed on the ministerial ladder (parliamentary private secretary, parliamentary undersecretary, minister of state, secretary of state) until that moment, illustrated that she was number two in the FCO and the DCLG.
Tuesday was a much happier experience. In they came, one by one. Chris Grayling was delighted at being justice secretary. Theresa Villiers became secretary of state for Northern Ireland. Maria Miller, who had done a great job as disabilities minister, went to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport – she would carry through my equal-marriage plans. Owen Paterson, who was passionate about the countryside, went to Environment, bringing more of a right-wing balance to the cabinet.
And Jeremy Hunt, one of my smartest minds and safest pairs of hands, went to Health. Grant Shapps became chairman. He was loyal, energetic, and really wanted it.
The more earnest Michael Fallon was also considered for the chairmanship – as deputy chairman he was regularly sent out onto TV to fight any fire going, and was very effective at it. But I wasn’t yet sure he would be 100 per cent on my side in a crisis. Instead he went to the Business Department as the new business and enterprise minister.
Because of Patrick’s move to Transport – and I was really keen to get a Midlands MP into that job – there would have to be a sideways move for Justine Greening. There had been some talk in the press about her objection to a third runway at Heathrow Airport (it affected her con-stituency of Putney) making her position at Transport untenable. But that wasn’t my reason for her move. The airport decision had been delayed anyway, with the inquiry reporting at the beginning of the next Parliament. My motivation was simpler. It was not so much that I wanted her out, but that I wanted Patrick in.
I said my piece to Justine across the cabinet table. The role on offer would be good for her career development, and was certainly not a demotion. DFID was a massive foreign policy job, with a protected budget and a cause close to my heart. She was a modernising Tory who believed in the aid programme and had taken part in Project Umubano in Rwanda.
But a completely unexpected reaction followed. She said I was making a huge mistake, her volume increasing as she spoke. But eventually she assented. When I saw her at cabinet the next day she was completely calm, and said, ‘I think I owe you a note.’ ‘Of course you don’t,’ I sa
id. ‘It’s all right; forgotten and forgiven.’ But the truth is that you never completely forget a reshuffle experience like that.
My cabinet was finally complete. Now it was time to appoint forty-two junior ministers. But once again, before I could hire, I had to fire. That’s why I began the following morning back in the Commons, giving out bad news again. I saw everyone I let go, except the agriculture minister Jim Paice, who I had to speak to on the phone. He was reason personified.
The whole process of identifying – and then seeing – ministers for the chop is soul-destroyingly awful. There are one or two who clearly aren’t cutting it, but on the whole you are dispensing with people who work hard, enjoy what they do and expect to go further.
And I made some bad mistakes.
Nick Gibb had enthusiastically backed my leadership campaign, and he’d been a brilliant junior education minister under Michael Gove. He was fixated on returning schools to using the phonics method of teaching children to read, and I had backed his work at every turn. And we turned out to be right. Studies show that children learning by the phonics method are two years ahead of their peers.
But while I admired Nick’s work, I had bought into the theory that if you are a minister and you are not destined for cabinet, at some stage you have to go. Good rule, but terrible example. I should never have moved him, and I made good my mistake twenty-two months later when I gave him his old job back.
The consoling thought during all this bloodshed was that people go down, but they also come back up. Also, many who had missed out because of the coalition were now being given a chance. Experienced MPs – like Andrew Murrison, a former doctor in the Royal Navy who had come into the Commons at the same time as me and had served on the front bench in opposition – now had the chance to serve in government. He had sat patiently on the backbenches, and was given the chance to be a very effective defence minister, leading on the First World War centenary commemorations.
Another upside was more round pegs in round holes. Nick Boles, who had written and spoken convincingly about the need to build more houses, would do Planning. Matt Hancock, a former Bank of England official who had done much to help policy-making in opposition, would sort out Apprenticeships. Mark Harper, who had demonstrated his effectiveness at getting things done and managing tricky politics when working as Nick Clegg’s deputy, went to Immigration.
As with every reshuffle, not everything went like clockwork. There are so many moving parts that you always end up with a colleague without a job, or a department with too many ministers.
Next, we heard a rumour that Home Office minister Nick Herbert was so cross he wasn’t being promoted that he had cleared his desk and was going to walk out of the government altogether. I asked Ed Llewellyn to ring him up and find out if this was true, because if it was, it would solve a problem for me. It was true. Nick had done a great job as prisons minister and policing minister during the police and crime commissioner elections, and would later work incredibly hard on the EU referendum campaign. He was also a friend and supporter. But for me at this moment during a tricky reshuffle, he was a round peg in a round hole marked ‘exit’.
‘Brutal, bloody, horrible, but completed … and completed in pretty good order,’ is how I described the reshuffle at the time. It may not have been fun, but the job was done.
You don’t just lose ministers through reshuffles, you lose them through resignations too. I would face several. In every case the resignation was preceded by a press furore, and followed by endless debates about whether the saga was well handled. But nothing hooked the newspapers like the saga of Andrew Mitchell.
For all his talent, before Andrew had even started as chief whip he was pulling rank. But on 20 September 2012 I found out it hadn’t only been political staff he’d come to blows with. When Craig forwarded me an email from the press office saying there had been an altercation at the Downing Street gate, I wasn’t entirely surprised to find that it was Andrew Mitchell who had displayed a bad temper to the police officers.
The following day, the Sun said it had the full story. It alleged that when a police officer refused to open the main car gate for Andrew, who was on his bike, he had said, ‘Best you learn your fucking place,’ and called the officers ‘fucking plebs’.
Ed, Craig and Jeremy Heywood checked the CCTV footage, and saw that there clearly had been an altercation, after which Andrew had been ushered out of the pedestrian gate and had cycled off from there. I summoned Andrew to my office, and he admitted that he had lost his temper and used the f-word, but he swore he didn’t say the word ‘plebs’. I thought right from the start that swearing at police officers is bad enough, but if he had said ‘plebs’ it would have been truly appalling.
The police logbook from the gates was then leaked to the Telegraph, and its contents published four days later. It alleged that Andrew indeed swore and said ‘plebs’.
He maintained that he had said something like ‘You’re meant to be fucking helpful.’ I suspected the truth lay somewhere in between. I was sure he had said more than just that one sentence, but I didn’t believe he had used the word ‘plebs’.
I phoned Andrew from the flat and said, ‘Look, I want a public apology, and a grovelling one at that. “I’m incredibly sorry, it should never have happened, it will never happen again, but I’m going to get on with my job.”’
When the moment came, he apologised for showing a lack of respect. He said he’d had a difficult day, but that he hadn’t said the words that were attributed to him. It was one of the worst political apologies in the history of political apologies.
Over the following weeks the rather limited inquiry I had asked Jeremy Heywood to undertake was inconclusive. I didn’t want to sack Andrew – I’d just appointed him, and he had (sort of) apologised for the swearing, and denied using the loaded word ‘pleb’. And I believed him.
The most peculiar incident of the whole saga was the arrival in my office of an email purporting to be from a member of the public. This person – a constituent of John Randall, who happened to be deputy chief whip, and to whom the email was sent – claimed to have witnessed the entire episode, and said that he and a crowd of people had heard the word ‘pleb’ being used.
John Randall was despatched to find out who this person was, and he reported back that the man was a genuine, if rather uncooperative, constituent. And this is where I really failed: we should have taken this opportunity to launch a proper full-on inquiry into what was going on. Andrew was absolutely convinced that he had been stitched up: by the police, who wanted revenge for cuts, and by the papers, which wanted blood over Leveson. It didn’t help that he had long been going in and out of the gate, running late for cabinet, demanding that the officers open it for him.
The toll of all this on Andrew was immense – he lost a stone in weight. Meanwhile, the story wasn’t melting away; members of the Police Federation were even wearing ‘PC Pleb and Proud’ T-shirts at demonstrations against funding cuts. Andrew was losing the support of Conservative MPs, and because a chief whip should avoid the press and cameras, he was severely constrained as to what he could do, including attending the party conference. This was an unsustainable situation.
So, in the end, it became clear what had to happen. Andrew came to Chequers on 18 October and handed in his resignation. It was amicable.
I know I should have had some sort of proper inquiry at the time. But trying to demonstrate that I had a sense of proportion was an important part of my approach. Given the importance both of the chief whip and of respect for the police, however, that was a misjudgement.
After Abrasive Andrew it was time, I thought, for Gentleman George. So I rang George Young and offered him the job of chief whip (proof that anyone can make a comeback, at any time of life). Typical George, he was out on a Friday night speaking for a parliamentary colleague. He accepted the job with delight and to my relief.
But
that was not the end of it for Andrew, or for me. The week before he left, he produced a recording of a meeting he’d had with the Police Federation which contradicted its public statement on their discussions.
After that, he was truly on the rampage. I said to him in one meeting, ‘You can either just accept what’s happened, go away for a bit, work hard in your constituency, and I’ll try and find some way of bringing you back’ – I mentioned maybe being an envoy to Somalia, a big interest of his and mine, as a precursor for a ministerial role. ‘Or,’ I said, ‘you’re perfectly entitled to say “I’m not satisfied with that, I want to find out what the hell happened and pursue this.”’ I tried to steer him towards the former. Sometimes, in politics and life, you just have to let things go.
But I understood why he didn’t let it go. Two months later an officer was arrested in connection with the incident. Then the email from the member of the public claiming to have witnessed the altercation turned out actually to have been from a police officer. The whole thing unravelled in a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary in February 2013. I watched it in the flat, and felt delighted for Andrew but sick to my stomach about my failure to get to the bottom of it all. He had been completely stitched up.
Andrew sued the Sun for libel. Then the police officer at the centre of the affair sued him for libel. Over the following months, four police officers were sacked for gross misconduct. A text message in which an officer boasted that she could ‘topple the Tory government’ was exposed. Leaks from police to the Sun came out. The police officer who had posed as a member of the public was sentenced to a year in prison. Andrew was vindicated. Justice had been done.
In the cruellest postscript, however, he lost his High Court libel action against the Sun. The judge, Mr Justice Mitting, said he was satisfied Andrew did say the word ‘pleb’.
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