For the Record

by David Cameron

  There was something else in this area that we needed to put right.

  Alan Turing was the brilliant mathematician whose work cracking Nazi codes at Bletchley Park is thought to have helped to shorten the Second World War by two years. Yet in 1952 he was convicted of gross indecency, and was chemically castrated. He committed suicide shortly afterwards. But it was society that should have been ashamed. After the wartime secrets of that quiet manor house in Buckinghamshire came to light in the 1970s, Turing’s genius was finally recognised, and his treatment condemned. I wholly supported those campaigning to absolve him, and it was fitting that 2013, the year in which gay marriage was legalised, ended with a posthumous royal pardon for Turing, granted at the government’s request. As promised, after the 2015 election, all those convicted of such offences would be pardoned, and thousands of terrible wrongs put right.

  An unhappy by-product of the gay-marriage triumph was that it continued to foment unrest in the parliamentary party. Rebellion seemed to follow rebellion. Despite that, in 2013 we were starting to turn a corner when it came to party management – partly because we had an election in two years and people actually wanted to win, partly because we were seeing a growing economy, and partly because we had got better at managing things, helped hugely by Jo Richards and Laurence Mann in No. 10.

  At the same time, the sensible forces in the parliamentary party were beginning to fight back, with the 301 Group and the 2020 Group winning a series of battles. In the 1922 Committee elections in 2012, one serial rebel, Peter Bone, was unseated and another, Stewart Jackson, was defeated. Philip Hollobone was also voted off the Backbench Business Committee. This prevented an unrepresentative minority from having a disproportionate dominance over party affairs and parliamentary business.

  In my seven years so far as party leader, there hadn’t been much talk of leadership challenges. That is quite unusual for a prime minister – think of all the attempted coups against Gordon Brown and John Major; think of Thatcher and Michael Heseltine. It was also surprising given the fact that we were in coalition, and had a Parliament prone to rebellion.

  But in 2013, chatter started. The threat – I was slightly surprised to learn – came from Adam Afriyie, MP for Windsor. He had been holding dinners for potential supporters, I was informed in regular notes from Sam Gyimah, my new PPS (Dessie was now a Treasury whip). Looking at the names, I branded them ‘the ultimate B team’. Adam, meanwhile, had real potential as an MP, but was making a bit of a fool of himself.

  He made his move by attempting to amend the Bill on the EU referendum to force a nationwide vote before the end of October 2014. Almost all backbenchers agreed that this was simply not a sensible suggestion, and did not leave enough time for renegotiation. The amendment went down in flames, 249 to 15. Even Jacob Rees-Mogg condemned the stunt as unhelpful.

  But Adam wasn’t the only suspected challenger.

  Theresa May popped up in March 2013 to deliver a ‘wide-ranging’ speech at a ConservativeHome event. Alarm bells ring when someone steps outside their brief. But when they start to wax lyrical about their brand of conservatism, that’s when the leadership-pitch klaxon goes off.

  Theresa’s intervention, however, was something I dismissed at the time. I put it down to her notoriously ambitious and aggressive spads (they were frequently at the heart of rows, and ran the Home Office like a fortress). Michael Gove, on the other hand, was red-faced furious. Even though he himself wasn’t one to confine himself to his own brief, he chastised Theresa for her actions during a heated political cabinet meeting. Everyone else stared at the table.

  Theresa is sometimes seen as an iron lady, and she can certainly be tough, but in person she is very reserved and rather nervy. She had also been nothing but loyal to me. A couple of days later I had breakfast with her in Downing Street. I thought she was uneasy and embarrassed about the whole thing. I told her I was sorry about what Michael had said, and that I didn’t put him up to it. She replied, ‘I’ve always been loyal, and I would never stand against you.’

  I didn’t feel threatened by Adam or Theresa. In politics it’s the anonymous plotters you have to watch out for, and I could never quite shake that feeling of vulnerability.

  Despite all that, as 2013 turned into 2014, I was beginning to get my mojo back. Party management was working better. Cabinet camaraderie was much improved. The Policy Unit in Downing Street was firing on all cylinders: I had brought in some really bright people with great ideas, and given the task of leading it, and gearing up for the manifesto, to Jo Johnson, MP for Orpington and brother of Boris.

  I also had a new PPS. Sam Gyimah was great, but he was more of a policy person. I needed a Hoover of gossip, who lived and breathed Westminster – with legs so hollow that he or she could spend hours drinking on the Terrace and eating in the tea rooms.

  In Gavin Williamson I found that person. He was likeable, fun and different, with the face of a twenty-three-year-old researcher and the mind of a wizened whip. He would try to lighten my mood with stories or quotes about what MPs had been getting up to. ‘Which Tory minister has had carnal relations with a Labour MP?’ he once asked me as he wandered into my office.

  Tony Blair once said that as time passes, a prime minister becomes more capable but less powerful. I’m not sure I felt the same. More and more I felt that I was reaching the top of my game. I had the makings of an A-team around me, I was getting the hang of things, and gay marriage had shown me how you can dramatically change society and lives through sheer persistence and belief. But what about internationally? When action was needed once again to prevent murder, would I be able to take my party with me?

  33

  A Slow-Moving Tragedy

  Just as nobody predicted the Arab Spring, none of us guessed that it would be Syria where that spring would turn to such a bleak, harsh and apparently ceaseless winter.

  The rise of social media, the growth of young populations in the Middle East, the spread of Islamist extremism, Sunni/Shia sectarianism and Western anti-interventionism – so many of the trends I witnessed during my time in British politics collided in this eastern Mediterranean country, which would become the site of the bloodiest conflict of the twenty-first century so far.

  You can measure the conflict by its scale: nearly 500,000 people dead, twelve million – over half of the population – displaced. You can measure it by its brutality: hospitals barrel-bombed, civilians used as human shields, children gassed to death, whole towns bulldozed and bombed into submission. You can also measure it by the consequences it had for other countries. It almost overwhelmed Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan, whose vast refugee camps I visited. It contributed directly to the rise of terrorism, with the sadism of President Bashar al-Assad helping to transform the ailing al-Qaeda in Iraq into the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham – ISIS – the most prolific terrorist group in the world. And it drove more migrants to seek safety in the West, causing angry political conflict in Europe and undoubtedly contributing to the Brexit vote.

  Before the uprisings, Syria looked like a relatively stable country. Compared with many others in the region, it was a relatively safe place to live if you were a Christian, Druze, Kurd or other minority group. The country’s leader was a softly spoken, suit-wearing, British-educated doctor who seemed committed to a more Western future, and to bringing his country in from the cold.

  When William Hague visited him in Damascus in January 2011, just as the Arab Spring had broken out, Assad told him confidently that his regime would avoid the fate of the dictators in Egypt and Libya. Apart from anything else, he said, Syria was united by an ideology of resistance to Israel, and it had been Egypt’s foolish attempts to make peace with Israel that had opened the door to revolution.

  But appearances were deceptive, and his confidence was delusional. Sure enough, demonstrations began in Syria in March 2011. People protested for the same reasons as their Middle Eastern neighbours: the co
rruption of their rulers, their desire for jobs and a voice. They believed that there was an alternative to this police state that didn’t tolerate dissent, and that this was the time to seize it.

  Initially the protests were peaceful. A Foreign Office assessment sent to me at the time rated Yemen and Egypt as ‘red’ in terms of likelihood of instability, whereas Syria was rated ‘medium to low’.

  But then Assad began to show the sort of dictator he really was. The regime deployed army and paramilitary units, killing scores of protesters. Within months a multi-factional opposition had formed, as demonstrators armed themselves and resisted his rule.

  At this time the Foreign Office view was that Assad could not survive beyond the end of 2012.

  Yet far from folding, Assad carried on playing, deploying every card he had. He exploited ethnic divisions between the majority Sunnis and the powerful minority Shias, of which his Alawite sect was a part. Some people who initially rose up against the dictator fell into line because they feared a takeover by the mostly Sunni rebels.

  Unlike in Libya, where the opposition had been quick to express their unity, in Syria the opposition was more divided. Over time, a ‘national coalition’ which we would support would form, but it was deeply divided between various factions.

  There was the Free Syrian Army (FSA), which was formed of hundreds of groups, largely supporting a democratic, secular future for Syria.

  There were many legitimate Muslim Brotherhood-style Islamic groups, which would accept a Lebanese-style settlement with guaranteed rights and protections for minorities like the Alawites.

  But there were also jihadists, like the Al-Nusra Front and later ISIS, who saw Islamist ideology as Syria’s future. That was a gift to Assad. He could say that, rather than being a genuine opposition, the revolutionaries were extremists – indeed, he would actually aid those jihadists, buying their oil, releasing them from jail, sparing them his firepower. In other words, there was poison in the antidote. This was one of the factors that condemned Syria to destruction.

  Just as the Syrian people fell into sectarian camps, so too the world lined up on the side of either the Sunnis or the Shias, with most of the Gulf countries backing the predominantly Sunni rebels, and Iran and Russia supporting their old ally Assad with equipment and personnel.

  These helped to create the conditions for a prolonged conflict. But the most important factor in Syria’s plunge into the abyss, the primary reason for the conflict’s length and viciousness, was the way the regime chose to fight: depopulating and terrorising rebel-held areas, indiscriminately targeting them with heavy weapons, and cutting off aid supplies. This created a refugee crisis, while also enabling the regime to force Syrians either into territory it controlled, or out of Syria entirely. That denied the rebels the population from which they could draw their manpower. Syria would be destroyed, and Syrians killed and dispossessed by the hundreds of thousands, simply to enable Assad’s survival.

  Then there was the fact that Syria was known to have large stockpiles of chemical weapons. From mid-2012 I received reports that Assad was testing chemical delivery systems, and that concerned me. It wasn’t far-fetched to think that a man who was inflicting such brutality on his people would resort to such tactics.

  Of course, there were voices asking us why we wanted to see the back of the Assad regime when we couldn’t possibly know what would follow. But when you measure the possibility of a bad outcome were he to go, versus the certainty of continued dreadful brutality and a descent into deepening civil war and Islamist extremism were he to stay, I believed the choice was straightforward. In what sane world could this brute be part of the solution? Who was going to put down their weapons if the polit­ical compromise on offer included Assad? And there was a clear British national interest: continued conflict without transition to a new settlement would fuel extremism and terrorism, while destabilising the regime and driving ever-larger flows of refugees.

  I was determined that Britain would be in the vanguard, because without our leadership I feared stasis. Back in August 2011 I made a statement, together with Merkel and Sarkozy, calling for Assad to stand down. In August 2012 we agreed to give ‘non-lethal assistance’ to the rebels, such as body armour, medicines and communications equipment. We had expelled Syrian diplomats from London. We set up a ‘contact group’ of countries to coordinate sanctions against the regime and assistance for the opposition.

  As fighting raged in cities like Homs and Aleppo, I became convinced that the only way we could help to remove Assad and achieve at least the chance of positive change was if two things happened. We needed the diplomatic activity and an international alliance to try to secure his removal via pressure from above, and we needed to help generate the pressure from below by supporting the opposition. The ideals of the former could never be achieved without the latter.

  Supporting the opposition never meant Western boots on the ground in significant numbers. An Iraq-style invasion was politically unsellable at home and abroad, and wouldn’t have been right in this conflict anyway. But I knew that for the opposition to have any chance against the regime we had to go beyond this ‘non-lethal assistance’. They would need our ‘lethal assistance’ – weapons, training, and back-up from the air. That became my mission: to shift the dial towards this approach.

  Legally, we had to build the case that the UK could legitimately provide lethal assistance.

  Militarily, we had to get the generals out of their Iraq and Afghanistan mindset, towards a more indirect approach based on training, equipping and mentoring irregular Syrian forces.

  Politically, we couldn’t continue to palm off all responsibility onto a UN mediator hamstrung by formal diplomacy. We needed to get our hands dirty, with covert deal-making between key opposition figures and Alawites, even with the Assads themselves, so they had an acceptable exit strategy.

  Domestically, we had to keep counter-terrorism at the heart of our strategy. Our aim was to get the successor regime and the ‘good’ opposition to combine forces and destroy the plots at source. The NSC endorsed this approach in early November 2012.

  Diplomatically, we had to build the case with other key players. I visited the UAE and Saudi Arabia that month to move them towards supporting the rebels. William had already been to the United Nations and helped to put the case for a strong resolution, which Assad’s friend Russia, together with China, unsurprisingly blocked.

  The UK then took the assertive step of announcing official recognition of the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, supported by the FSA, as the ‘sole legitimate representative’ of the people of Syria. America followed suit a couple of weeks later.

  Once again, all this hinged on US support. Syria was on a different scale to Libya; to have America just ‘leading from behind’ was not an option. Only it could coordinate a big training and mentoring operation while providing the intelligence, surveillance and air power that would give the opposition the decisive edge on the battlefield. As soon as he’d won the presidential election of November 2012, I told Obama, ‘Syria is the foreign policy issue which will define your second term,’ willing him to go further and faster now he had four years ahead. He was cautious, but knew we had to look afresh at all options.

  In January 2013, Hugh Powell gathered representatives of relevant agencies from the US, France, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar to try to forge a serious commitment to integrate mentoring teams with opposition forces inside Syria. The objective was to force the regime’s leadership to agree a ceasefire and transitional governance arrangements which would preserve much of the basic state structure. Assad would go, but not immediately.

  A mini regional headquarters was agreed. We set up a collective process for monitoring and assessing which opposition fighting groups were sufficiently reliable.

  But we needed lethal force, for example the use of special forces and equipm
ent. And we needed a plan when it came to chemical weapons (we had already asked the military at the start of the year to identify potential targets for airstrikes).

  At the time, I described the situation as ‘right direction, insufficient force’. It just didn’t feel as if our allies shared our urgency, compulsion and investment. ‘I think the history books will write that Britain was active and on the right side and making the right arguments,’ I recorded. ‘But it is frustrating that it’s not going the whole way.’

  Yet if I looked closer, the frustrations weren’t solely coming from overseas. Many of them were much closer to home.

  For a start, I was pretty frustrated with my cabinet. While George Osborne, Michael Gove and Oliver Letwin strongly supported a more muscular foreign policy, and Nick Clegg was of a similar mind to me, around the cabinet table there was something of an alliance between Iraq War-obsessed Lib Dems and non-interventionist Conservatives who saw few key British interests at stake. Some senior cabinet ministers were sceptical about us becoming further involved.

  Our military and security services were, on this issue, a huge source of frustration. From late 2012 I proposed that a small group should meet to discuss Syria, including cabinet members, officials and military top brass, as well as Jon Day (head of the Joint Intelligence Committee) and John Sawers (‘C’, the head of the secret intelligence service).

  David Richards and Sawers offered their cold calculus: that what we had in our toolkit could not guarantee the outcome that we wanted. ‘Maybe it’s just a wicked problem that cannot be solved,’ was the gist. I made the point that just because we didn’t have the ability to achieve change on our own, that wasn’t a decisive argument for holding back altogether. Indeed, we could only galvanise the necessary international action if we were prepared to take steps ourselves.

  ‘We might make things worse, Prime Minister,’ I was told.