For the Record

by David Cameron

  The speech went well. I set out the three major problems: the changes in Europe, the continent’s lack of effectiveness in the global race, and, above all, the democratic deficit. My five major principles came in response. Europe needed competitiveness. It needed flexibility. It needed to be able to give powers back to member states rather than just taking them away. It needed democratic accountability. And it needed fairness – to make sure that any changes didn’t disadvantage those outside the Eurozone.

  The speech was tricky to land with so many different audiences. It had to explain to European leaders that we weren’t just being awkward neighbours, and make them understand why our attitude to the EU was different to theirs – more hard-headed, less emotional. It had to keep business leaders on board; they would likely fear the uncertainty that would hang over them. It had to demonstrate to the British people that I understood and shared their concerns, and was doing something about them.

  Three years later, immigration would be cited as the reason many people voted to leave the EU. So why did the issue of free movement between member states – the ‘fourth pillar’ of the EU – not warrant a single mention in the 5,000-word Bloomberg speech? It should have done, but there was a reason for its absence. At that moment it was immigration from outside the EU that was driving the numbers. I thought – wrongly, as it turned out – that that picture would continue. It was a bad mistake that I would later try to correct. But I shouldn’t have made it in the first place.

  The context for this was that I agreed that immigration to Britain was too high, and had been for many years. In opposition I had developed our policy on the basis that it was net migration that mattered: not so much the number of people coming into our country, but whether that number outweighed the number of people leaving, therefore putting pressure on public services and rapidly changing our communities.

  Until 1998, immigration had remained broadly in balance with emigration – there were as many people leaving Britain as there were people arriving. But ever since then, immigration from outside the EU had risen steadily. Then, in 2004, with the accession of seven former Eastern Bloc countries to the EU, including Poland – and, crucially, Labour’s failure to activate the seven-year transitional controls that all other countries except Ireland and Sweden imposed – immigration from within the EU shot up: from 66,000 to 195,000 per year in four years.

  However, by the time we took office in 2010, it was once again non-EU immigration that was on the steeper trajectory. We managed to get a handle on it, and thanks to the steps we took, the numbers started to fall sharply. But at exactly the same time – as the Eurozone crisis deepened and our economic growth far outstripped our neighbours’ – EU immigration rose again. We should have focused earlier on the importance of controlling not just one type of immigration, but all of them.

  What’s more, I didn’t see how deep the disillusion was – in some cases outrage – about our inability to control immigration. That was the EU trade-off: access to the single market in exchange for free movement of people, and therefore unlimited immigration from inside the EU. For many people the very idea of lack of control, coupled with changing communities and strained services, was hugely important.

  However, the immigration theme didn’t quite start to bite until after I’d taken my referendum decision. Ivan Rogers argues very powerfully that ‘The decision to offer an in/out referendum long predates the point at which that issue became central … [I]t was the domestic and cross-Channel political tensions unleashed by the Eurozone crisis which put us on the tramlines to Brexit.’

  Another communication failure in the Bloomberg speech was not pointing out how the caucusing of euro countries would really affect us. I spoke about the need for fairness between Eurozone and non-Eurozone countries, but I wish I had said more. When people complained about Europe it was about the cost, the border control, the influence it had over our laws – not about the threat it posed to our economy. I should have explained that issue more frankly.

  One reason for this failure is that I was speaking to more than one audience. I wanted to pitch this to Europe as the opening of a negoti­ation, as well as to British voters. I spoke to European leaders on the phone afterwards, and to Barack Obama too. Angela Merkel warned against arguing for British exceptionalism from the first. She said I should argue about reform for the whole of Europe, and then ‘let’s see what we can achieve’. If we couldn’t achieve some things, she said she’d be prepared to consider British opt-outs, but we shouldn’t start there. Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte said there were reforms in Europe that we’d all like to see, but that he’d like the twenty-seven to make them together.

  That night I ate at the Buffalo Grill in Davos with my team, ahead of another packed schedule. We were in good spirits. The speech had gone down well with European leaders, businesses, the press, parliamentar­ians and the public. ‘Mr Cameron has not caused a problem, but elucidated one,’ wrote The Times. I felt that captured it well.

  I knew it was high-wire stuff. But I believed that what would have been more dangerous was not having a plan. In that case we would have been gently heading towards the EU exit. As I put it on tape at the time: ‘The risks of playing with fire are now safer than sitting and watching the fire burn.’

  The following month I proved that things could change in Europe, and that Britain could lead that change.

  The level of the EU budget for the next seven years was coming up for renewal. I was adamant that there should be a cut. Member states like us had been cutting our own spending after the crash; indeed, the EU had imposed stringent cuts on many Eurozone countries. This wasn’t just Britain being difficult – as the third-biggest contributor, we had a big stake. And it was more than possible: the last budget had been very generous, and there was an appetite for a cut (besides which, they were hardly living on bread and dripping in Brussels).

  As ever, I was faced with achieving something between what Parliament wanted, what I thought was right, and what Europe would agree to. The sort of dramatic cuts those at home might have wanted were impossible. The EU had expanded, and we had obligations to the new member states. So it was extremely unhelpful when the Treasury published a projected figure of 886 billion euros, which I knew was far less than the other EU leaders would agree to.

  Then in October 2012 we suffered a parliamentary defeat when fifty-three Conservative rebels, joined by Labour, voted for a motion demanding a cut ‘in real terms’ to the EU budget, which I thought was raising expectations we would find it hard to meet.

  I knew there would be two factions in Europe. There would be those I called ‘the Alliance of Fiscal Discipline’ – the Danes, Dutch, Swedes and Finns – who would want to work with us: we were in regular contact with one another by text. Then there would be the Poles, French and Spanish, who didn’t want a cut. Sitting in the middle – as ever, the casting vote and kingmaker – would be the Germans.

  So I began to work on Angela Merkel. I invited her to Downing Street for dinner and gave her a presentation, half of it in German. I barely speak a word of the language, but Ed helped translate bits, and I made it as entertaining and understandable as I could.

  My aim was simple: to show that what she and I were arguing for was not that far apart. The fiscally prudent countries weren’t headbangers, I told her; what we were asking for was sensible. But we would have to veto anything that wasn’t in our interest. She wasn’t sold, but she was interested. And although we didn’t get an agreement at the following European Council in November 2012, we did get the total budget down from a trillion euros to 973 billion.

  My ambition, and that of my mini-alliance, was around 900. A little over if necessary. The last seven-year budget had a higher ceiling of 943 billion euros. We judged that around 908 would keep the budget fixed below the 2011 level, so there was my red line.

  I realised that if we got the three big countries to agree, then we could
bring everyone else along with us. Merkel and I agreed this approach in Davos in January 2013. At the following European Council that February, she and I arranged a meeting with François Hollande. We sat there with his translator, waiting and waiting, but he didn’t show. In the meantime, Merkel and I summoned José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, and told him what we were looking for. Around 907.

  Then, in the middle of the night, Hollande and Merkel appeared in my office. She said she thought they had a deal on 908.5. I wasn’t happy, because that was above the average of the 2011 and 2012 budgets. It was absurd: we were arguing at 2 a.m. over £150 million – a huge sum, of course, but less so when you consider that it is spread between twenty-eight countries, over seven years, and just how much it is paying for. Eventually we settled on 908.4 (I thought I could round that down), and shook on it. But Hollande wasn’t happy – he had said nothing below 913 in public.

  After they left I slept for an hour in my chair. Then I heard that Hollande was trying to get the figure up again. I said to Merkel, ‘You’re going to stick with me, aren’t you?’ She said, ‘Yes. François gave his word and is now going back on it.’

  Eventually, 908.4 was agreed at the full Council. A 3 per cent cut on the previous seven-year budget, the first-ever real-terms cut in the EU budget, thirty-five billion euros lower than the deal agreed by the last government – and a win for me. Good for Britain and good for Europe, I declared it when I returned home. And, I thought to myself, very good for my strategy to improve Britain’s place in the EU – and keep us there.

  If there was one person who might have sympathised with my trials in Europe, it was Margaret Thatcher. Now eighty-seven, she was increasingly frail, living with dementia and recuperating from a serious operation.

  When you’re in politics, you have to be rather more prepared for deaths than you would otherwise be. The BBC frequently updates its obituaries, so you can find yourself filming a moving, past-tense tribute about someone you’ve just had lunch with. Not only were the Thatcher tributes in the can; Clare had my speeches polished and perfected, and the funeral plans were also in place.

  Indeed, Margaret Thatcher’s funeral had loomed large ever since I became leader of the opposition. There were meetings about the planning – ‘Operation True Blue’ it was named – and I fought hard to make sure it was as close to a state funeral as possible.

  The only prime minister since the war to have been given a state funeral – where the costs are met by the government, there is a lying in state and full military honours – was Winston Churchill. Why did I think Thatcher should get something similar?

  Whatever your political view, you had to acknowledge that she was our first – and at this point only – woman prime minister. She had won three elections in a row, and served for a longer continuous period than any prime minister in over 150 years. While I recognised that opinions throughout the country were hugely divided, I believed she didn’t just change Britain, she saved Britain.

  On 8 April 2013 I was in Spain, having lunch with prime minister Mariano Rajoy during a tour to promote my Europe speech and strategy, when I heard that this great figure of history had died. I flew home and recalled Parliament, and there was a day of very moving speeches from all sides of the House.

  My position was slightly more nuanced than many of the uncritical devotees who spoke. I felt that my premiership owed a huge debt to Margaret Thatcher, but also marked a break from her. Some people would say that I had broken the spell: since 1990, all Tory leaders before me – indeed, all my fellow contenders in the 2005 leadership election – had been very closely linked to her and her ideology.

  By contrast, I had always felt myself more of a Thatcherist than a Thatcherite. I wasn’t always convinced by her approach, and thought some of the rough edges needed to come off. But on the big things – trade union reform, rejecting unilateral nuclear disarmament, our alliance with Ronald Reagan’s America, privatisation, Europe – she was absolutely right.

  In my speech, I talked about the turnaround she produced, and how the scale of it was all the more astonishing when you remembered the defeatism of 1970s Britain. Her credo – ‘sound money; strong defence; liberty under the rule of law. You shouldn’t spend what you haven’t earned. Governments don’t create wealth, businesses do’ – not only saved our country, it now seemed to be the consensus in politics.

  The night before her funeral I held a dinner at No. 10 for many of the dignitaries who had come to Britain for the occasion, including former leaders of Australia and Canada, Reagan’s advisers, and many of those who had worked for her here. Their passion for her, which was evident in the many brilliant stories they told, was matched by that of the leaders from eastern Europe who had also come for the funeral. They were very clear about what she meant to them. Her hatred of communism helped tear down the Iron Curtain and free them from tyranny. We often fail to appreciate in this country that Margaret Thatcher is celebrated from Gdansk to Bucharest as a great defender of liberty.

  At the service in St Paul’s Cathedral, I spoke from the Gospel of St John: ‘I am the way, the truth and the life.’ I later received a letter from Mark Worthington, her longest-serving aide, who was with her until the end, saying that if it wasn’t for me she wouldn’t have had the funeral she deserved. I was very touched. But it was the reaction that made the ceremony special. Because while protests had been predicted, and thousands of police lined the streets, the odd placard and chant were totally eclipsed by the spontaneous applause that followed her coffin along its route to St Paul’s. Then, as she left the cathedral for the final time, the sunlight flooding in, those of us inside could hear the applause ring out louder than ever, and the crowd erupting into a hearty three cheers. It was magical.

  And there was something magical too about this person, who had come from a grocer’s shop in Lincolnshire to change the course of our history. I was lucky to have known her, to live in the Britain she had built, and to have the enormous privilege of being able to, hopefully, build upon her legacy – including in one crucial aspect. She was never afraid to take on the biggest issues, and she recognised that acting was far better than apathy. I was determined to do the same.

  30

  The Gravest Threat

  The train journey between Brussels and Paris takes about an hour and twenty minutes – enough time for me and François Hollande to catch up between the European Council meeting we’d just attended and my visit to France on 22 May 2013.

  I liked Hollande. He was free from the hauteur and grandeur of many French politicians, and was warm, amusing and down to earth. Though we had had recent disagreements over the EU budget, he seemed genuinely as keen as I was on defence, security and intelligence cooperation between Britain and France.

  But our discussion was soon interrupted by events. Indeed, by the time we reached the Gare du Nord, the world would feel different to the one we had left at Bruxelles Midi. More dangerous. More brutal.

  Ed came over and told me that a man, possibly a soldier, had been hit by a car and attacked with knives near the Royal Artillery Barracks in Woolwich, south-east London. ‘PM’ – I remember him making this plain to me – ‘this wasn’t just a stabbing; they tried to behead the victim.’

  We got the live news coverage up on a stuttering smartphone. In the most extraordinary and disturbing footage, one of the attackers, wielding a knife and a meat cleaver, his hands soaked in blood, explained his actions to someone filming him on a phone. It wouldn’t be the last time I would watch a murderous lunatic address me personally as he carried out the most gruesome of deeds.

  As we sped through the French countryside, I thought of the as yet unnamed victim and his mother. Imagine being her; imagine being told her son had died – and then finding out how and why.

  I thought, too, of the new reality we had entered. No longer were we at risk only from complex attacks plotted by well-organise
d terror cells. Now it was also ‘lone wolves’ armed with nothing more than a car or a knife. I was touched by Hollande’s genuine concern. There was a sense that this attack in London was an attack on us all. I took huge comfort in that.

  By the time I stepped onto the platform in Paris, I had taken some early decisions. Theresa May would chair COBR in London. I would stay and carry out my plans for that evening, then go home. Abandoning my entire programme – giving off signs of panic – was what the terrorists would have wanted.

  Yet at the same time, at moments like this the public needs to be reassured. Responses need to be coordinated. A prime minister needs to take charge. And, of course, I felt very strongly that I had to go to Woolwich – and that I had to go to MI5 too.

  I have a huge sense of pride in our security services. As PM, every night my red box was full of vital intelligence reports. And every week I would receive a comprehensive update from my deputy national secur­ity adviser, Paddy McGuinness. Bald and burly, with ears that looked as if they had seen close combat on the rugby field, he was kind, intelligent and tough. A public servant to his fingertips, his notes always made fascinating – and chilling – reading.

  Because of this, I was one of the few people in the country who had a window onto an underworld of malice and hatred. In my three years as prime minister so far, MI5, MI6 and GCHQ had foiled plots to blow up transatlantic cargo planes, the London Stock Exchange, British army bases and the London Olympics. And those were just the ones that had been made public; there were many more. Every single year I was PM, at least one attack the size of 7/7 was averted. It is impossible to know how many lives had been saved by these quiet heroes. But this brutal attack in Woolwich was the first Islamist plot that had slipped through the net in eight years. I knew how the intelligence officers would be feeling.