For the Record

by David Cameron

  I delayed my return to Britain because I was told that Rajapaksa was asking for another meeting with me. My tough diplomacy had not resulted in ‘I’m never speaking to you again’; it had resulted in ‘OK, actually I do want to try.’ In our one-on-one he pleaded with me. We’re doing the right thing, he said. It was going to take time. We mustn’t criticise them so much. Didn’t I realise that if he did what we asked, if he held a proper inquiry into war crimes, the Sinhalese people would murder him?

  Ultimately, as predicted, the Sri Lankan government would offer no concessions and the CHOGM communiqué would make no criticisms. Instead we ended up, as ever, with weak-willed, head-in-the-sand consensus, thanking Sri Lanka for its ‘warm hospitality’ and praising Rajapaksa for his ‘able stewardship’ of the event.

  The following year, after a good deal of British lobbying, the UN Human Rights Council voted to open an inquiry into war crimes committed during the Sri Lankan civil war. Two years later, Rajapaksa unexpectedly lost office. I was delighted to welcome his successor, President Maithripala Sirisena, to No. 10 in March 2015. For a while, Sirisena looked like the answer. But in 2018 he appointed Rajapaksa to his government, and hopes for that beautiful country were once again looking strained.

  I wasn’t unused to having my hopes dashed when it came to foreign affairs. Indeed, 2013 brought further disappointment – as well as atonement, frustration and sadness – in my dealings with other countries.

  The disappointment came from Burma. I had visited the long-time military dictatorship a year earlier, just after it had taken its first steps towards democracy by holding by-elections. No UK PM had visited since independence in 1948. I met the pro-democracy campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi, who would soon run for the presidency, and reflected on what an amazing story hers could be: from fifteen years of house arrest to transforming her country into a real democracy. However, by the time she came to visit London in October 2013, all eyes were on her country’s Rohingya Muslims, who were being driven out of their homes by Buddhist Rakhines. There were stories of rape, murder and ethnic cleansing. The world is watching, I told her. Her reply was telling: ‘They are not really Burmese. They are Bangladeshis.’

  She became de facto leader in 2015, and the violence against the Rohingya went on.

  The atonement related to India. For a long time, friends and colleagues in the British Indian community had encouraged me to go to the Golden Temple in Amritsar. This holiest of Sikh sites had been the scene of a massacre in 1919, when British Indian Army soldiers fired upon a peaceful public meeting, killing hundreds of people.

  No serving prime minister had ever been to Amritsar, let alone expressed regret for what happened. I wanted to change both those things, and would do so after the trade mission – the largest in UK history – I would lead to India in February 2013. Ahead of my visit there was an internal row about whether I should say ‘sorry’. But ultimately, I felt that expressing regret for what I described in the memorial’s book of condolence as ‘a deeply shameful event in British history’ was appropriate. I knew what it meant to British Sikhs that their prime minister had made that gesture, and I’m glad I did so.

  The frustration came from China. Every year, the Dalai Lama visited Britain and asked for a prime-ministerial meeting. Given that China didn’t recognise Tibet’s independence (and neither did the UK), and that until recently he ran an alternative government in exile, such a meeting would alienate the very people we were trying to develop a relationship with.

  But politics aside, this elderly monk who preached peace and kindness was the leader of a religion. So I said I would meet him not as a political leader but as a religious leader, at St Paul’s Cathedral, where he was seeing the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Foreign Office said the Chinese would pretend to be cross about this for a couple of months, but it would blow over.

  Instead, our ambassador in Beijing was summoned for a dressing-down, and the Chinese government released a statement condemning our action. Ministerial visits were cancelled in both directions. The freeze lasted eighteen months, and only came to an end when George Osborne was invited to visit in October 2013. Boris was also in China that week. He got all the headlines – Boris on a ferry, Boris on a high-speed train, Boris on the drums. But the real action was George quietly brokering things in the background, laying the ground for my trip the following month and discussing a mammoth Chinese investment in the UK nuclear power sector.

  I was robust about how I approached the UK–China relationship. We would be critical partners. As I put it to the BBC’s Nick Robinson on our arrival: ‘I simply don’t accept that there is a choice when you come to China that you either talk about growth, investment and jobs, or you talk about human rights. You do both. And that’s what I’m doing on this trip.’

  My year of foreign affairs ended with sadness.

  I had first met Nelson Mandela when I visited Johannesburg in 2006. In December 2013 I received the news that he had died, aged ninety-five. I led the tributes in the Commons soon after, praising the struggles of a man whose fortitude and determination changed his country and changed the world. A memorial to his life was held in Johannesburg the following week. Tens of thousands of people gathered in the Soccer City stadium – a sea of world leaders past and present, South Africans, banners, face paint, singing, cheering, electric speeches. The booing during the speech of President Jacob Zuma, the country’s current leader and the apogee of corrupt leadership, demonstrated once again how desperately we needed to stamp out this scourge.

  By the end of the year I had been to twenty different countries, hosted two incoming state visits, held over a hundred bilaterals with other world leaders and attended fifteen international gatherings. Although I still had the same aims, I felt the 2013 me handled things differently to the 2010 me – I was becoming a better leader. But as we entered 2014, all the focus would be on my next big challenge: the general election.

  36

  The Long Road to 2015

  ‘You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.’ It was the former New York governor Mario Cuomo who famously captured how flowery pre-election promises can turn to dust as the routine business of government is ground out.

  In some ways we turned this political dictum on its head. In office we took on causes that were wide-ranging, far-reaching, sometimes even era-defining. Being the first Conservative-led administration anywhere in the world to allow gay people to marry the person they love. Galvanising the globe in the fight against dementia. Keeping our aid promise to the very poorest. Doing our bit to preserve our planet by, albeit rather quietly, becoming one of the greenest governments ever.

  There was still a lot to be done, but as we embarked on the long road to 7 May 2015, I knew we’d have to stop talking about many of the things I cared about if we were to be in with a chance of winning. To move from a poetic policy platform to a more prosaic narrative.

  Winning was something many commentators had already declared impossible. As the radical and reform-minded Conservative commentator Fraser Nelson put it in 2012: ‘By now, it will be clear even to David Cameron that he is on course to lose the next general election.’

  The lack of boundary reform had turned a hurdle into a high jump. Plus, the precedents weren’t great. While a number of prime ministers had won a second term, since the war only Clement Attlee had held on to power after serving a full five-year term. Even then, he’d only squeaked home, and he had started with a majority. To win, I’d need to get a better result than at the last election. No one had done that after completing a full term since Lord Palmerston in 1865.

  I was determined not to make the mistakes of our mixed-messaged, too-many-cooks 2010 campaign. We needed a plan, we needed discipline, and we needed the right people – specifically the right person – leading it all.

  I’ve talked about my admiration for Lynton Crosby. Although the 2005 election campaign was a failure, I bought his key
defence – that he was brought in too late: ‘You can’t fatten the pig on market day,’ as he put it. It’s true that I didn’t like the tone of some of that campaign, but I’ve never had a problem working with people I don’t always agree with, and I could override Lynton when I thought he was wrong.

  By the end of 2013 he had moved into CCHQ. I’d see him several times a week in my office, with my team or alone. People like to imagine a brash Aussie stomping in, but in fact Lynton was polite, and even rather deferential. He was also very sensitive to criticism, and I had to convince him several times not to resign over some mishap or other.

  But he did know how to enforce focus and discipline. And for that, he had an array of dictums. ‘Don’t be Connie the commentator’ was how he would urge me to stop merely responding to the events of the day. The gnomic ‘You need to bell the cat’ took on any number of meanings as the campaign progressed. ‘Get the barnacles off the boat’ was his famous call to streamline our message and ditch side-issues. It became something of a motto.

  Lynton’s list of things we shouldn’t focus on was long. But what about the things we should focus on?

  Lynton put it frankly: you’ve been taking tough decisions, working through a programme, all with a clear end in sight, but you simply haven’t explained it like that.

  So this new device had to be presented as a plan, one that linked our record so far with what we had yet to do. It also had to be economic. After all, the economy was and is voters’ biggest concern. And it had to be for the long term. Because after thirteen years of government that effectively said ‘Spend for today, to hell with tomorrow,’ we had an administration casting its sights further ahead, beyond the Parliament, our political careers and even our lifetimes.

  This is how the slightly clunky, but unmistakably clear and simple ‘Long Term Economic Plan’ (LTEP) was born. We were campaigning in prose.

  I could recite its points in my sleep. Reducing the deficit so we could deal with our debts, safeguard our economy for the long term and keep mortgage rates low. Cutting income taxes and freezing fuel duty to help hard-working people be more financially secure. Creating more jobs by backing small business and enterprise with better infrastructure and lower jobs taxes. Capping welfare and reducing immigration so our economy would deliver for people who want to work hard and play by the rules. Providing the best schools and skills for young people so the next generation can succeed in the global race.

  When I launched it on 1 January 2014 the starting gun was fired on an election campaign, with over a year and four months to go.

  The messaging was crucial. A governing party that has the economy on its side – as we did with the revised GDP figures in 2013 and with real wages rising by mid-2014 – has a big advantage. But it doesn’t deliver automatic victory. You need, in a disciplined way, to make your economic effort the central question in the campaign.

  When we alighted on the long-term plan that’s what we did. Labour, by contrast, hopped from message to message – tax avoidance, Rupert Murdoch, the NHS. They would win skirmishes, but once their ‘squeezed middle’ rhetoric stopped working for them and the economy started working for us, they never found a consistent issue to fight us on.

  The irony was that our parliamentarians, who found it almost impossible to accept lectures from me, were more than happy to do so from an Australian political pro. They were happy to get on board with his message discipline – so much so that the phrase ‘Long Term Economic Plan’ was uttered 826 times in Parliament in just eighteen months. The prospect of the ballot box concentrates minds.

  Just as we needed to focus our messaging, we also needed to focus our resources. This brought with it an awkward question: to what extent would we target Lib Dem seats?

  Stephen Gilbert had already drawn up the so-called 40:40 strategy – forty marginal seats we needed to win, forty we needed to hold. Since 2012 ministers had been filing through these seats, and campaign managers were gradually being appointed in each of them. Now Stephen made a pitch to amend the list of seats. He said the Lib Dems had scuppered boundary reform, and as a result we could only win a majority if we won more of their seats. We shouldn’t just target a few Lib Dem seats, we should go for all of them. Especially as they were where my personal appeal was strongest.

  Lynton didn’t need much persuading. But George and I were less sure. If the strategy failed, and the Lib Dems remained intact, there would be no possibility of a renewed coalition. But if we didn’t go for the Torbays, Twickenhams, Baths and Cheadles, we would probably lose to Labour anyway. Plus, if we had the courage of our convictions, we shouldn’t be campaigning with compromise in mind. The decision was to do it.

  It was ambitious. Some of the majorities we needed to overturn were huge. But CCHQ was ready – the coffers well stocked, the office well-staffed – all because Andrew had been determined not to run it down in the so-called ‘off years’ between general elections.

  There was, however, one party agenda we failed dismally on: membership. During Francis Maude’s time as chairman we took a step backwards when it was proposed that we scrap national membership and return solely to membership via local associations. I foolishly agreed. In this case, devolution didn’t work. Some constituency associations with low membership rolls enjoyed running a cosy cartel that picked the candidates for council and parliamentary elections and went to each other’s soirées, without bothering to recruit new people. There were even some local parties that, when you called and asked to join (and we did this as part of a ‘mystery shopper’ exercise), told you their membership was ‘full’. We also had no idea how many members there were, and were effectively unable to launch a national mass-membership drive.

  Those who argue that what matters is not the number of members, but the number of active members, are right to a degree. But a political party needs mass membership for a pool of talent to call on: your candidates, your councillors, your activists, your association chairs, your donors. The bigger the membership, the more representative your party will be (though Ed Miliband showed what a disaster hurried reforms can be when his eye-catching £3 membership drive left Labour open to a far-left takeover).

  Although we lacked paid-up members, we did have the activists, whose numbers remained pretty solid throughout the coalition. We also had young supporters, who Grant Shapps was busily convening into a ‘Team2015’ deployable force, ready for the election. We had more councillors than all the other major parties put together – and again, this held, even though, for most parties in office, seats on local authorities usually plummet. (In the 1980s and 90s, the last time Conservatives were in government, our local government base was almost wiped out; this time we lost fewer than seven hundred councillors and ten councils while I was in power, still leaving us with nearly 9,000 councillors and 191 councils.)

  With Lynton full-time, a plan in place and our MPs in line, I felt a surge of confidence. I thought we could win. As I put it at the end of January 2014: ‘We’re three or four points behind and sixteen months to go with a recovering economy and an opposition leader that people haven’t warmed to. I feel pretty bullish.’

  There was another reason for that confidence. Politicians often say they don’t look at polls. That’s a lie. There were two polling questions I paid particular attention to: the leaders’ personal ratings, and the parties’ ratings on ‘Who do you trust to run the economy?’ By now the Conservatives had a ten-point lead over Labour on the economy. And the polls on leadership had me at around 40 per cent approval rating and Miliband in the mid-twenties.

  That didn’t mean we were going to win the election by that margin. Research showed that I was more popular than the Conservative brand, while the Labour brand was more popular than Ed Miliband. However, it still rather put the onus on me, personally, to get out there in those 40:40s with the candidates to explain what the LTEP meant to ordinary people.

  Most Thursdays, a lot of M
ondays and several two- or three-day stretches were put aside for these so-called regional tour days. They became part of the rhythm of my week.

  I loved them. I loved getting out of the No. 10 bunker and having the time to think. I loved the high-fives and selfies in noisy school playgrounds. I loved the banter on the factory floors. I loved the pride in people’s eyes as they walked me around their lab, explaining the intricacies of their research. I loved it when the latest couple to have benefited from Help to Buy showed off their new home.

  If you followed politics only on Twitter or the Today programme, you would assume that everyone is permanently furious. But life isn’t like that. Most of the time people are pleased to see you. They tell you how they are feeling and how you’re doing. They have things they want to mention to you or raise with you – not shout at you. That’s more revealing than any poll or briefing or focus group, and it was a big part of those tour days.

  Rude remarks were rare, and as a result I tended to remember them. They often happened in the places you would have least expected. For instance, in a café in Ely, the heart of Conservative Cambridgeshire, I ordered a full English breakfast, and one diner piped up, ‘I hope you choke on that.’ The staff and customers spent the rest of my breakfast apologising and reassuring me that Ely really wasn’t like that.

  My schedule would never have been possible without helicopters. I had used them since opposition – it was the only way, short of tele­portation, that I could meet the demands of a modern party leader or prime minister.

  I was never very happy in them, though. After recounting one exper­ience to Samantha – I’d just flown somewhere in a helicopter with one pilot, one single rotor, one engine, and a crack in the glass, while it was raining – she made me promise only ever to travel with two pilots and twin engines.