That speech set the tone for the Budget. This was the moment of maximum danger; the growth forecast for 2013 had been halved. The following month we would find out if there had indeed been a triple-dip. The pressure on George was enormous, but he stuck to his guns.
He deftly defused the bombs of fuel and beer ‘duty escalators’ (automatic tax increases, set out in law) fixed by the last Labour government, freezing fuel for the fourth year in a row. One of the biggest packages in history aimed at tackling tax avoidance and evasion was unveiled. That would pay for making the first £10,000 of everyone’s earnings tax-free – at a stroke increasing the incomes of twenty-four million people and taking 2.7 million more out of paying any income tax at all.
Corporation tax falling to the lowest level in the G20 was meant to be the big business-friendly story, but the policy that turned out to be most popular was one that was thought up by David Gauke, the Treasury minister: exempting every business from the first £2,000 of National Insurance contributions. This wasn’t worth much to a vast supermarket chain, but it made a big difference to a small store or start-up business.
And then, finally, summer arrived, and with it a moment we had been waiting for. It wasn’t just positive growth forecasts for the future; it was more the past that made the headlines. On 27 June 2013 the ONS revised its economic data for 2012. Not only had we averted a triple-dip, there hadn’t even been a double-dip in the first place. In fact, the middle quarter of the three negative quarters (the first quarter of 2012) was revised up from -0.2 per cent to 0 per cent. So it looked then as if we had only just avoided a triple-dip. Today, the data shows that we were nowhere near a triple-dip: after further revision, that first quarter of 2012 showed 0.6 per cent growth. Two earlier quarters, in late 2010 and late 2011, that were originally reported as negative, were revised and showed growth. Talk about damned lies and statistics. I joked to George that I wanted to sue the Office for National Statistics for giving me stomach ulcers and chronic stress.
I’d seen the policy of deficit reduction criticised on TV, derided at the despatch box, and questioned in international forums from the European Council to the G8. Now here it was: Plan A hadn’t resulted in the turmoil everyone had predicted. Indeed, our international allies like the US started to tighten their belts.
Still, though, we needed to shift the dial; and we needed people who could help us do so. While a brilliant economist and a shrewd adviser, Mervyn King had become somewhat passive at the Bank of England, and even quite resistant to what we wanted to do on credit easing and activist monetary policy. His term was due to end in 2013, and we were determined to find a governor who could make a real difference.
Three thousand miles away in an office in Ottawa, Dr Mark Carney was doing something special at the Bank of Canada. Like Mario Draghi, he knew that the job of a central bank’s governor was not simply to safeguard the banking system and control inflation. He knew that a central bank had a role in supporting growth and tackling monetary problems in the economy. He was an innovator, and the sort of person who would use the Bank’s balance sheet to unblock the financial system. A supporter of ‘forward guidance’ on keeping borrowing costs low, he also chaired the Financial Stability Board, part of the international architecture that was sorting out the financial system in the aftermath of the crash. He was exactly who Britain needed in the hot seat at Threadneedle Street.
There were so many reasons he couldn’t do it, not least moving his young family to the UK, but George simply wouldn’t take no for an answer, persevered and we got our man. In July 2013 Mark became the first non-British governor in the Bank’s history. In office, he moved fast to introduce forward guidance on interest rates, to unblock the financial system by revamping the Bank’s liquidity operations, and to modernise the Bank’s internal workings.
Business surveys started picking up during the first half of 2013, and on 25 July the GDP figure for quarter two came out as plus 0.6 per cent. In other words, in time for the July target Rupert had envisaged.
Within a few months the IMF estimated that our growth in 2014 would be faster than that of any other G7 country. Employment reached a record high. The top 1 per cent of earners were, for the first time since the beginning of the twentieth century – thanks mainly to the reduced top rate of tax – contributing more income tax to the country’s coffers than the bottom 75 per cent.
Olivier Blanchard was ‘pleasantly surprised’. Vince was vanquished. Boris kept quiet. George and I were vindicated. And Rupert was right: our economy was, finally, going gangbusters.
32
Love is Love
I must have been in and out of the front door of 10 Downing Street thousands of times, but there is one moment I’ll remember more than most. As I was leaving, one of the custodians stopped me and said, ‘It’s because of you that I’m able to marry my boyfriend this weekend.’ It was a reminder that politics has the power to make a difference and change people’s lives.
Equal marriage was one of the most contentious, hard-fought and divisive issues during my time as prime minister. We would lose party members; one even came to my surgery and tore up their membership card in front of me. It was an issue that I would worry and even wobble over. But I have absolutely no regrets, and it is one of the things of which I’m proudest.
In ‘coming out’ for gay marriage, in some ways I surprised myself. As I’ve said, perhaps I was a slow learner when it came to modernisation. I have a terrible tendency to get lost in the endless detail of policy problems – the man under the car bonnet again – and often fail to see the bigger, emotional picture.
I was on the wrong side of Section 28. I also ended up abstaining on – rather than voting against – IDS’s rejection of gay couples’ right to adopt. I should have proactively supported that right. Even when it came to civil partnerships in 2004, which I was fully in favour of, I remember my arguments: they were great for ensuring that gay couples weren’t discriminated against when it came to important details like hospital visiting rights, inheritance and rights for bereaved partners.
I remember Samantha hitting back quite forcefully. ‘You’ve got the right conclusion, but the wrong argument,’ she said. I was the difference-splitting, circle-squaring policy wonk focusing on all the practical details, when there was a far bigger point staring me in the face: people should be able to enter into a legal union with the person they love. End of.
I have always believed in freedom of choice. And I have always been a strong believer in marriage – a rather unfashionable view in some ways. There were all the maxims about its benefits: family is the original welfare state; marriage is a framework of commitment. There were all the facts and figures: parents who are married are twice as likely to be together when their child is sixteen than those who are not married but living together.
And for Sam and me there was more than statistics. There was the strength of the vows we made in 1996. Marriage stops you running at the first sign of trouble, and we were proof of that. The pressure that having a disabled child puts on a couple can cause a marriage to break down. Despite the advantages we had, we had felt the strain during the most difficult times with Ivan. But we got through it.
‘Pledging yourself to another means doing something brave and important,’ I said in my 2006 conference speech. ‘You are publicly saying, “It’s not just about ‘me, me, me’ any more. It’s about we: together, the two of us, through thick and thin.” That really matters. And by the way, it means something whether you’re a man and a woman, a woman and a woman, or a man and another man.’
That was what I felt in my heart. Love is love, commitment is commitment – whoever you are and whatever your sexuality. My commitment to equal marriage was the logical next step – though it would take a few people to convince me.
There were many chats with Sam. For a long time she’d been saying, ‘A civil partnership is really a marriage, so why don’t you
call it a marriage, and then it’s properly equal? It’s not going to make me feel any less married if two gay people want to get married.’
Many of the people around me – particularly George, Kate, Danny, Nick Boles and Michael Salter, my head of broadcast – continued to push on this. We had taken important steps as a Conservative Party on these issues. The next big thing we could do for gay people – indeed, the missing piece of the equality jigsaw – was to allow them to get married.
Despite my increasing keenness on the policy, by 2010 I hadn’t quite fully come around to the idea of gay marriage, and it wasn’t in our election manifesto. However, the accompanying ‘Contract for Equalities’, by the then shadow equalities minister Theresa May, said that we would consider the case for changing the law to allow civil partnerships to be called and classified as marriage.
Then, in coalition, we were working with a party, the Lib Dems, that backed gay marriage. I stood before my party – a party that carried so much baggage on this issue – and announced that gay marriage would be our next big, progressive social policy.
The way to do it, I decided, was not to talk about what a departure it was. It was to talk about how the reform was rooted in our fundamental beliefs: ‘Conservatives believe in the ties that bind us; that society is stronger when we make vows to each other and support each other. So I don’t support gay marriage despite being a Conservative, I support gay marriage because I am a Conservative.’ Applause rung out. That short sentence was a giant leap for our party.
Getting it through Parliament was going to be a team effort. Theresa May, who as home secretary had the Equalities brief, met senior Church leaders to try to explain our position. Her equalities minister, the Lib Dem Lynne Featherstone, did an excellent job leading on what became the biggest consultation in government history.
In 2012, when I moved the Equalities brief out of the Home Office and to the DCMS, Maria Miller had the responsibility for driving the beast of a Bill through Parliament. Officials told her it would take a year to get it through; I asked her to do it in six months.
However, I wasn’t expecting either the level or the nature of the opposition we faced. Conservative associations were broadly opposed. There was fierce opposition from much of the parliamentary party, which went far beyond the usual suspects. And the cabinet contained opponents too. I knew from the off that Philip Hammond would be opposed, and Owen Paterson joined him.
My director of strategy Andrew Cooper wrote to me on 20 April about the concerns that were expressed in political cabinet. He explained that ‘the assertion that Middle Britain’ opposed gay marriage was completely false. ‘Middle Britain’ was in favour of gay marriage. The principle that ‘gay couples should have an equal right to get married, not just to have civil partnerships’ was supported by more than a 2–1 margin, 65 per cent to 27 per cent.
My parliamentary aide Dessie was, as I’ve said, a Bible-believing Christian. And he, on theological grounds, was not opposed to gay marriage: ‘We use our judgement to deal with situations that were never contemplated in the Bible. That judgement, however, ought always to be informed by the principles taught in the Bible, and summarised by Jesus, as loving God and our neighbour.’
Then there was Patrick McLoughlin. He came into my office one afternoon and told me straight, ‘You’ve got to stick with this, boss. I’m an old-fashioned Tory, and a Catholic to boot, but I’m fed up with our party being on the wrong side of the argument every time. I feel embarrassed that I opposed civil partnerships, and I never want to be in that position again.’
Of course I understood people were uneasy about the change. The liberal bigotry which condemns the character of anyone who dares to hold traditional beliefs is itself illiberal – and growing. So I always made it clear that it would be a free vote.
There were two options for the legislation. The first was a one- or two-clause Bill that made same-sex marriage legal, and would allow the first gay marriages to take place in January 2014, but would have to be augmented with secondary legislation. The second option was a ‘carry-over Bill’ that (unlike most legislation, which fails if not passed within the year) would be more detailed and would spill over into the following year. The latter was safer, but not risk-free. I opted for the quick option. People had waited long enough to be able to marry each other, and we just needed to get on with it.
I also had to square the biggest circle, which was the Church.
The clergy that I knew personally were in favour. Mark Abrey, my local vicar at St Nicholas’s Church in Chadlington, was an enthusiastic supporter. So too was the priest at my children’s school in Kensington, Father Gillean Craig. I’d see this eccentric, High Church figure when I dropped Nancy and Elwen off, standing at the school gate in his long wool coat and a beret, and I attended the school services he took. ‘Good for you on gay marriage,’ he said after one. ‘We’re not all opposed to it or sitting on the fence.’
Except most were. And I was determined to try to neutralise this hostility, producing four safeguards that were known as the ‘quadruple lock’.
One: a religious marriage ceremony for a same-sex couple would only be possible if the religious organisation carrying it out had ‘opted in’ (most didn’t, but the Quakers, Unitarians and Reform Jews did). Two: no religious organisation could be forced to marry same-sex couples. Three: it would not be unlawful discrimination for a religious organisation or representative to refuse to marry a same-sex couple. Four: it was not a common-law legal duty on the clergy of the Church of England and the Church in Wales to marry same-sex parishioners (as it was for heterosexual couples).
When I look back now, I think the quadruple lock was excessive. Stipulating that an entire Church must agree to gay marriage if just one wedding is to take place in one church seems over the top.
I was disappointed that Churches took the strong line they did, especially when I knew some of their leading members privately supported it, but kept the ‘party line’ in public. Justin Welby (who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 2013) made positive noises, but publicly he had to oppose it.
I gave a speech in the garden of Downing Street in 2012 for the annual LGBT reception, and was quite clear about my frustration. ‘I run an institution – the Conservative Party – which for many, many years got itself on the wrong side of this argument. It locked people out who were naturally Conservative from supporting it, and so I think I can make that point to the Church, gently. Of course this is a very, very complicated and difficult issue for all the different Churches, but I passionately believe that all institutions need to wake up to the case for equality, and the Church shouldn’t be locking out people who are gay, or are bisexual, or are transgender from being full members of that Church, because many people with deeply held Christian views are also gay. And just as the Conservative Party, as an institution, made a mistake in locking people out, so I think the Churches can be in danger of doing the same thing.’
With the legislation prepared and the Church circle sort-of squared, the next matter was passing it into law. Labour and the Liberal Democrats would ensure that the votes were delivered, so there was little danger of it not going through Parliament. But getting gay marriage through the Conservative Party – and I wanted their support – would prove to be like the proverbial camel and eye of a needle.
The Second Reading took place on 5 February 2013, and passed by 400 to 175. Ultimately, 136 Conservative MPs opposed the Bill. Some of them I knew were lost causes. But others shocked me.
Meanwhile, amendments to the Bill were tabled in the Commons and the Lords to equalise civil partnerships and introduce humanist marriages – which would have delayed it – and to hold a referendum – which could have wrecked it.
Despite that, the legislation passed on 21 May 2013, by 366 votes to 161. Overall, 134 Conservative MPs opposed the Bill, accompanied by fifteen Labour MPs, eight Democratic Unionists, four Lib Dems and one in
dependent.
There were parties outside Parliament – MPs inside the Chamber could hear the cheering and singing. But I was at the European Council that day, and found myself being enthusiastically hugged by the bow-tied Belgian PM Elio Di Rupo. The world’s second openly gay head of government was embracing the first centre-right politician to have legalised same-sex marriage.
Since then, over 20,000 same-sex couples have been married, and over 10,000 more have converted their civil partnerships into marriages. For many, this meant marriage later in life. Think of all of those years: couples who either had to hide their relationship, or settle for a civil partnership, finally able to declare their love for one another as freely and legally as anyone else.
Even UKIP, which made such a play of opposing gay marriage, eventually said they would not reverse it. Twelve countries around the world have followed suit and legalised it, and more will follow. When I came out for gay marriage in 2011, Barack Obama was still opposed to it. As we legislated in 2012, centre-right leaders in France and Germany were still voting against it.
In 2015 Britain was voted by the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Inter-sex Association as the best place in Europe to be gay.
As Michael Salter – now Michael Salter-Church, having married his boyfriend Rob – put it, it is about more than the legislation, or even marriage: it is about the message it sends out. In the year I was born, homosexuality was still illegal in Britain. But today, all people growing up in this country know that they are equal in the eyes of the law and society, whoever they are, and whoever they love.
For the Record Page 56