Andrew had been rude to people for years, he had sworn at police, he had played much of this affair badly. But none of that warranted what happened: a legal bill stretching into millions, and a man in pieces. I know he feels that he was badly treated by No. 10 and by me. And I concede that we should have held a full investigation immediately. But I held out for him for as long as I thought was right, and I genuinely had a plan for his return. He was content to return as a minister of state in either Defence or the Foreign Office, and I planned to bring him back in a 2016 reshuffle. It was not to be.
In April 2013 another surprise followed the Mitchell saga. Chris Huhne, who had protested his innocence on the saga of the speeding ticket throughout, changed his plea to guilty and was sentenced to eight months in prison.
Resignations aren’t just difficult because of the effect they have on individuals and their families. They are bad because they destabilise the government, take up time, distract from your agenda and reduce politics to daily instalments of a drama. By the autumn of 2012 we’d had the soap opera of ‘plebgate’, the crime thriller of Chris Huhne, and the Liam Fox mystery – not to mention the Omnishambles comedy of errors. We desperately needed to grab the narrative back – and the party conference would be the ideal moment to do so.
The lead-up was similar every year. After a few speech-prep meetings in Downing Street in July, my core team would reconvene at Chequers in September for our annual conference speech ‘sleepover’. As ever, Ed, Kate and Craig were there. Ameet Gill, Steve’s replacement as strategy director, came too, as well as Michael Gove.
But the vast majority of the detailed work – constructing the paragraphs, crafting the killer lines, choosing the ‘moments’ that would make people gasp or laugh or connect emotionally – would be the work of the speech team. There was no one more up to the task than my long-time wordsmith Clare Foges. After weeks hammering away at a laptop, producing draft after draft and watching me go over and over them, first on paper or on my laptop, and then in autocue sessions in the conference hotel in Birmingham, this was her finest yet.
It summed up what we’d achieved in just two and a half years: a cancer drugs fund; life-saving vaccinations for 130,000 children in developing countries; a European treaty vetoed; council tax frozen; two million of the lowest-paid taken out of income tax; the deficit down by a quarter; a cap on benefits; a million new jobs created; exports up; business creation at its fastest-ever rate; 2,000 more academies; seventy-nine new Free Schools; and the greatest Olympics and Paralympics in history.
Most importantly, it framed one of the big, long-term issues of our times: how to respond to the geopolitical power shift from west to east. The countries on the rise – China, India, Brazil, Nigeria, Indonesia – I said, were lean, fit, obsessed with enterprise, spending money on the future: on education, incredible infrastructure and technology. Whereas those on the slide – which would include us if we weren’t careful – were fat, sclerotic, over-regulated, spending money on unaffordable welfare systems, huge pension bills and unreformed public services. ‘We are in a global race today,’ I said. ‘And that means an hour of reckoning for countries like ours. Sink or swim. Do or decline.’ It wasn’t about clambering up the global league tables; it was about lifting up lives. Those forward-thinking countries delivered the things people needed to get ahead and to prosper, and we could do so too if we built an ‘aspiration nation’ that realised the potential of all its people.
Conference, as I’ve said, was one of those rare moments when we had the nation’s ear. At this moment I felt we were saying exactly what needed to be said, and had finally mastered the art of what this government was for. It had been a difficult year, but Britain was back on track – and so was I.
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Bloomberg
How are the biggest decisions made? They are usually rooted in convictions and beliefs. They tend to be contemplated for a long time, but are often expedited by circumstances. They are frequently influenced by other people’s views, and events that have taken place over many years.
One of the biggest decisions I would ever take – to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with the European Union and then hold a referendum on our membership – was an example of all those things.
Months, even years, of thinking, arguing, listening and planning brought me to this moment: sitting in a traffic jam at 7.45 a.m. on Wednesday, 23 January 2013, my blood pressure rising as I contemplated the difficulties of getting everything done that day and doing it well, and as I thought about the consequences beyond that.
I was travelling to the media and finance firm Bloomberg, where I’d make a speech announcing my policy of renegotiation and referendum. Time was tight, and the police protection officer driving me put on a few blips of the blue lights – just to ‘make some progress, Prime Minister’, as they put it.
I’d be facing Prime Minister’s Questions at midday, before flying to Switzerland to speak at the World Economic Forum in Davos. But before all that, at a time when I’d normally be at my kitchen table preparing for the most nerve-inducing event of the week, PMQs, I was on my way to make probably the biggest speech of my career.
‘There are days when you think, “Why on earth have I created such an appalling set of hurdles for myself?”’ I mused later when talking about the schedule. But critics could ask the same thing of the announcement itself. Why, when so many of my predecessors had avoided it, had I chosen to head straight towards this towering obstacle?
There are plenty of theories.
The most often repeated are that the commitment was a tactical measure devoid of strategy, or that it was only made because of the fractious state of the Conservative Party at that moment. Another is that it was driven predominantly by electoral considerations, and that I was spooked by the rise of the UK Independence Party. Or that the referendum pledge, far from being cast in iron, was a gimmick: I didn’t expect the Conservatives to win outright in 2015, and so didn’t believe I would have to deliver on my promise. And finally, that even if we did win the general election, my approach to the pledge was essentially flippant, because I assumed that Britain was certain to vote to remain in the EU.
There is a whole series of more detailed questions that I must answer. Was it the right deal? The right time? The right campaign? I will address all of those questions – and I will not say ‘yes’ to all of them.
But the speculation over my motivations behind the decision – why I was walking to the podium at Bloomberg, clutching fifty-six pages that could change my country and continent forever – I reject almost entirely. I want to answer that speculation in some detail.
The accusation that I decided to make the referendum pledge because I didn’t believe I’d actually have to hold one is absolutely false. One of the reasons I had thought so long and hard about whether promising a referendum was right and necessary was that I knew that once I made the pledge there was no going back. I understood from the beginning that Conservatives (not just MPs, but the press and voters) would not allow and sustain a future coalition that was created by abandoning the referendum pledge.
So I made it very clear from the outset, in public and in private, that if I didn’t get a majority, this was a red line: this policy was so important, so unlike any other, that I would not become prime minister after the next election in a government that was not committed to do it. In other words, it could not be traded away in some future set of coalition negotiations.
Actually, I didn’t think I’d need to insist on this red line, because I didn’t believe the Liberal Democrats would block it. After all, holding an in/out referendum if there was to be a ‘fundamental change’ in Britain’s relationship with the EU had been their policy in 2010. People often forget that the Lib Dems had theatrically walked out of the Commons in 2008 when the speaker refused to call their amendment asking for a referendum – and not just on Lisbon, but on Britain’s wider membership of
the EU. And who was it that called for the ‘in/out referendum that the British people really want’ in the Commons in March 2008? Well, that would be Nick Clegg.
The idea that the referendum pledge was frivolous, because I complacently assumed that ‘remain’ would win, is simply not true. I knew from the start that this was deadly serious, and I thought it very possible Britain would vote to leave. I said this repeatedly on tape from the moment I decided to call the vote. In October 2012, for example, I confessed: ‘This is very, very difficult and very dangerous. We could end up not being able to achieve enough to be able to put into a referendum and therefore effectively leaving the EU if we’re not careful.’
I had thought more about the pledge I made in the Bloomberg speech to hold a referendum than about any other decision I was to make as prime minister. From the moment I said those words into the camera lens – ‘It is time for the British people to have their say. It is time for us to settle this question about Britain and Europe’ – I worried about the outcome.
But I made the pledge because I genuinely believed it was the right thing for Britain. It was right to try to get a better deal for us in Europe. It was right for us to have our say on that deal, and on our membership more broadly. It was right, if we got a better deal, to remain in the EU. I believed this strategy was the most likely way to keep Britain in the EU. Indeed, that’s how I put it to my fellow European leaders: this is my strategy for keeping Britain in Europe.
The strategy failed. I failed. And that failure has had some serious consequences for the UK and Europe. But it all flowed from an attempt to do the right thing.
I had reached the conclusion that the risks of failing to act were greater than the risks of acting, and that we would have ended up on extremely weak ground if we had failed to reconfigure our status within the EU and put it to the people to decide.
The euro, and the British decision to stay out of it, had produced a new constitutional relationship that was simply not stable or tenable. The instability of this situation became particularly apparent during the Eurozone crisis and the EU’s response to it. The simple truth was that the EU was changing – and the Eurozone crisis was driving that change quite rapidly. Britain was in danger of being left in an organisation whose future was being dictated to by an integrationist core, those for whom the euro was their currency.
We were beginning to see decisions being made that threatened our national interest, the attempt to take vital trading in euros out of the City of London being a case in point. The crucial moment for me was, as I’ve said, when we vetoed a treaty because it failed to give legitimate safeguards to the UK, only to see that treaty implemented, using the institutions of the EU in full. And somehow it went through – miraculously – without the need for the unanimous agreement of member states. Such unanimity had been required for every other treaty change since the Union had been founded.
The choice as far as I was concerned was between sitting back and letting events take their course, accepting that the case for leaving would almost certainly get stronger, or having a proactive plan that dealt with the problem and secured our national interests, within a reformed EU.
I was increasingly convinced that an in/out referendum would be held in the not too distant future, quite probably by a successor Conservative government that might well recommend leaving. To my mind, holding a referendum was not only necessary to achieve the changes we required to secure Britain’s interests within the EU; it was needed to settle this issue within the UK. Better, I thought, to drive the process, rather than be driven by it.
All of this raises a bigger question: why was it that Britain seemed to have such a problem with the concept of a more united Europe, when other countries seemed, by and large, to be able to go along with it?
To explain this in detail, you have to go right back to the 1940s, when France, Germany and others formed the core of the new European Coal and Steel Community. This became the European Economic Community in the Treaty of Rome in 1957 – one which committed its members to ‘ever closer union’. It was this economic community that Edward Heath took us into in 1973, and which the public voted to remain part of in Harold Wilson’s 1975 referendum. But the vast majority of Britons were never going to love it like our European neighbours. We hadn’t founded it, and we hadn’t shaped it. Nor did most British people want ‘ever closer union’.
That difference of perspective, like so many other things, goes back to the Second World War. Many political leaders and thinkers in western Europe saw the nation state as having been the cause of fascism and conflict. Yet in Britain we saw it as a solution: in 1940 we stood alone, as a nation state, and by doing so helped to save European civilisation. So we were always going to be wary of proposals for political union.
Yet increasing political union is what happened. The economic organisation we were told we were joining gradually mutated into a political one. To be fair to the other countries in the EU – and to those who opposed our membership from the beginning – the concept of a political union was there in embryo right from the start.
The European Economic Community, or EEC as it was then called – and soon simply the EC – was never just a ‘common market’. This was the point that Enoch Powell and Tony Benn made over and over again in powerful speeches at the time. Powell had called joining the EEC potentially the ‘biggest event’ in Britain’s entire political history.
So the tensions between the economic benefits we wanted and the political union we opposed were there at the start. But it would take more than a decade before they started to reach breaking point.
In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher helped deliver the economic benefits of a genuinely common market by securing the treaty that delivered the European single market, and was rightly cheered at the time. But this came at the price of accelerating the political union that she claimed to oppose.
The single market was more than a free-trade area, and it could only be completed by wave after wave of EC regulations. The European Commission is the only body in the union that can propose new legislation. It has – to use the jargon – the ‘sole right of initiative’. And these regulations would be passed by a qualified majority, and not require unanimity. So the single market in effect required the ending of national vetoes in area after area. It represented a significant transfer of sovereignty from the nation state to the European Community.
Margaret Thatcher recognised the dangers of this – in particular the danger of onerous regulations being imposed on the UK in order to protect other countries from competition – and from 1988 started to develop the ‘thus-far-and-no-further’ approach to the EC of her late premiership.
I remember, as one of her researchers, nodding in agreement at the stand she took in her Bruges speech that year: ‘We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level.’ I also agreed with what she said in the Commons in 1990 during one of her last appearances at the despatch box as prime minister: ‘The president of the Commission … said he wanted the European Parliament to be the democratic body of the community, he wanted the Commission to be the executive, and he wanted the Council of Ministers to be the senate. No. No. No.’
But just as Britain was pulling away, the European Community was pulling together. The end of communism raised the prospect of a reunited Germany, and the fear that the tensions that had characterised the first incarnation of German unification might re-emerge. For many European leaders, the answer was more European integration – to bind powerful, united Germany within the European institutions and to press ahead with the already suggested common currency, the euro.
With 1992’s Maastricht Treaty, the pace of advance towards a more federal Europe quickened further. It eroded more national vetoes over legislation, created the European Central Bank, the euro and the Social Chapter, and established whole new areas – economic and social policy
– over which the organisation could legislate. In a genuine negotiating triumph, John Major and Norman Lamont secured opt-outs from both the single currency and the Social Chapter, solidifying what became a special status for Britain within the newly named European Union.
I thought that accepting Maastricht was – just – a price worth paying. We stayed in the decision-making body that governed the single market, but were out of the parts that most threatened our sovereignty: the single currency and the Social Chapter.
The runaway Britain-to-Brussels train had thus far been driven by those with a foot on the brake. But in 1997 there was a new driver, Tony Blair, and he was intent on using the throttle. He gave away our opt-out over the Social Chapter, and announced that the euro was ‘our destiny’. Further treaties – Amsterdam and Nice – swiftly followed. Each time, more national vetoes were eroded. And each time, despite vigorous campaigns by the Conservative Party, no referendum was offered to the British people.
Then came the big one: the grandly titled ‘European Constitutional Treaty’, in 2004. It was a detailed and ambitious attempt to provide a unified constitution for the EU, amalgamating all the previous treaties into one text and further driving political union and federalisation. Tony Blair was in favour, but he at least acknowledged – under political pressure from the Conservative Party – that this time the British people should have their say in a referendum.
I remember watching as he announced the referendum from the despatch box, declaring: ‘Let the battle be joined.’ I was absolutely convinced that the Conservative Party would be almost completely united in opposing the European Constitution – and that we would win.
So the three main political parties went into the 2005 general election promising a referendum on the proposed European Constitutional Treaty. But it was never to be. The derided European Constitution was rejected, via referendums, by several countries, then modestly amended and rebranded as the Lisbon Treaty, retaining all the worst elements, including a shift of power from the European Council of national leaders towards the European Parliament of unknown MEPs and powerful party groupings, and then railroaded through. Tony Blair took the opportunity to ditch his promise of a referendum. The Conservative Party renewed its calls for one, but the treaty was passed through all of the member states’ Parliaments, including our own, and the moment was missed. And so the democratic deficit between Britain and the EU grew greater still.
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