For the Record

by David Cameron

  We still had some hairy moments. Once, in opposition, the helicopter I had borrowed was trying to land in a muddy field in West Yorkshire before a nearby party event. Some enthusiastic supporters had laid out a small carpet so we wouldn’t get covered in mud as we clambered out. But as we neared the ground the carpet was sucked up into the air, and was seconds away from being caught in the rotors, with potentially disastrous effects. My children sing an infuriating song about ‘dumb ways to die’. Frankly, this would have taken the biscuit.

  Then there was the visit to Humberside, where I grudgingly went to support David Davis in his by-election. The constituencies of party leaders and prime ministers attract the single-issue/joke/crank candidates, and between general elections they have by-elections to keep them busy. So DD found himself up against Mad Cow Girl of the Monster Raving Loony Party, a representative of the Militant Elvis Party, and the football presenter turned conspiracy theorist David Icke. As we were about to leave, we found Icke standing next to our helicopter and telling us quite matter-of-factly that it was going to crash. Given that this was a man who believes the world is run by reptiles and who predicted in 1997 that the world was about to end, I didn’t think his crystal ball was that reliable. But we did take our seats rather gingerly, and held on a bit tighter than normal …

  Regional tours were run and delivered by Liz, the indefatigable Martha Varney and the scarily efficient Events and Visits team of civil servants they led. But there were many more people involved. As well as civil servants from the communications team, I was often joined by one or more political press people. There was Craig. There was Alan ‘Senders’ Sendorek, my fun and dynamic long-time head of political press. There was often Graeme Wilson, the hugely popular, softly spoken Ulsterman who became my press secretary after being the Sun deputy political editor. Sometimes there was Giles Kenningham, head of communications at CCHQ, a wheeler-dealer type whose net-practice questions were so aggressive I’d sometimes say, ‘Steady on, Giles’ – but I’d always be grateful once I got to the interview itself.

  Back at No. 10, it was Ameet Gill and Robin Gordon-Farleigh who coordinated all the business of government, via the famous No. 10 grid. They would decide the theme of the day, pumping the Policy Unit for a constant stream of LTEP-related announcements, or Research and Information for LTEP-related milestones.

  Indeed, Meg Powell-Chandler and the Research and Information officials worked late into the night cutting the official stats in every direction, so I could turn up anywhere in Britain knowing how many jobs had been created there, how many more children were in good schools, how many Help to Buy homes had been bought, and so on.

  Michael Salter set up my broadcast interviews before the tours. There was a way of talking to a dozen or so radio stations called the ‘GNS [global news service] round’. You sit with headphones on in front of a microphone, and move seamlessly from BBC Radio Berkshire to BBC Radio Humberside without ever leaving your chair. The biggest risk is geographical failure – woe betide you if you confuse Tyneside with Teesside (as I did once, and was never allowed to forget it).

  Clare Foges and Jess Cunniffe would craft speeches for every event I spoke at, and draft the local newspaper op-eds that would coincide with those visits.

  So much for ‘Cameron’s chumocracy’ that I read so much about in the papers. The vast majority of my political team had either come to me as researchers in opposition, or arrived over the years via job interviews, CCHQ referrals, or because I’d poached them from think-tanks, newspapers and broadcasters.

  Ed and Kate may have been close friends, but they had only become so because we’d worked together over the years. They were both more than qualified for their jobs, and I resented any implication that they weren’t there on merit.

  So much, too, for the ‘old boys’ network’ I was also accused of running. By 2015, 44 per cent of my special advisers were women. That was not the result of positive discrimination, just an open attitude towards picking the best woman (or man) for the job.

  The dictum ‘All politics is local’ influenced our very deliberate strategy to target local and regional newspapers, radio and TV stations. We calculated that when it came to the media we could bypass the Westminster village and go straight to the actual villages, towns, cities and counties that could help us secure that elusive victory.

  Why was that important? Because the national media had become so jaundiced and cynical about politics that it was almost impossible to get them to report what you were doing. Every policy story would turn into a ‘process’ story (over which Lynton would eff and blind), explaining not what we were trying to do for the country, but what it meant for me or my political strategy – or, frequently, whether it was an attempt to distract from a ‘scandal’. Anything that would sell papers in an age when people were increasingly reluctant to buy them.

  Local papers were of course going through their own declining sales and frequent closures. But at least they seemed genuinely interested in what you had to say. People mistake that for being soft. It’s not: it’s because their readers actually care about whether their local road is going to be widened or there will be a new power station in their area. These things make a difference to their lives – much more so than who is up or down in the jungle of Westminster politics. Unsurprisingly, opinion surveys showed that people trusted local newspapers more than twice as much as national ones.

  The regional strategy was backed up by the policies of what was becoming a truly localist government. This had been there from the start, and was boosted by the report I commissioned from Michael Heseltine, who had helped regenerate Liverpool in the 1980s and was now calling for a large pot of funding for local growth. It duly came, in the form of the Single Local Growth Fund, and was distributed via Local Growth Deals. There were City Deals, where Westminster funded local authorities to drive economic growth in the way they saw fit. This was a lot of jargon for what was essentially better transport, skills, housing and other infrastructure, as dictated not by central government but by local communities.

  George had initially been less of a decentraliser than me. But the experience of government converted him. As chancellor he saw not so much the damage London’s dominance did to the rest of the country as he did the missed potential of the north – and, ever the politician, the potential for the Conservative Party to make electoral strides in those parts we had failed to reach for so long.

  By the start of 2015 we found ourselves visiting every region together, and launching a LTEP tailored to each area, with specific, tangible promises on what we would do if re-elected.

  The biggest focus needed to be in the north of England. The unemployment gap between south and north was stubbornly high at 5 per cent. Some of the poorest regions in western Europe were in this part of our country. George’s beloved ‘Northern Powerhouse’ initiative would become the highest-profile of this devolution revolution. The key point was that the great northern cities of Leeds, Liverpool, Sheffield and Manchester, though individually not a match for London, could be so collectively. Connect them with better transport, play to their strengths in science and industry, boost their cultural assets with government grants, give them the clout that comes with electing a city mayor, and we could help transform the neglected north.

  Labour was furious at seeing the blueprint for the north drawn up by a Conservative government with support from Labour council leaders. It felt great politically, and more than that, it felt right.

  Another example of the LTEP in practice was our Spring Budget. Keeping interest rates persistently low had meant people could afford mortgages, and helped enable the economy to recover. But those trying to live off modest savings found it difficult. They’d worked hard, put money aside, and were getting a lousy deal.

  The existing policy towards private-sector pensions didn’t help. In return for tax relief on money you put into your pot, there were restrictions on what you could
do with it when you took it out, in particular the requirement to purchase an annuity which would give you an income for the rest of your life. The justification was that if a pensioner blew all their cash instead of buying an annuity, they’d have to rely on the public purse to support them.

  But because we’d introduced a higher basic state pension (‘the single-tier pension’) there would be far less means-testing in future, and therefore far less risk of additional burdens on taxpayers if pensioners ran out of savings. We had always disliked the condescending, nanny-state insistence on making people buy an annuity, but now we had both the means and the rationale to carry the day. George announced from the despatch box what had been kept a secret between us and a select few: that from now on people could do what they wanted with their pension savings – draw it down over time, buy an annuity, or take it as a lump sum. It was cheered to the rafters.

  While you can remove barnacles and try to concentrate on your main message, you can’t entirely control events. Another expenses scandal was around the corner, but this time the undoing would come about not so much because of the offence itself, or the lack of an apology, but the manner of that apology.

  Back in 2012, the Daily Telegraph published a story about Maria Miller. Maria had taken the decision to designate her Basingstoke constituency home as her main address, and then claimed £90,000 in allowances on a Wimbledon address that she had purchased years earlier, and shared with her husband, children and parents. This was the controversy: was taxpayers’ money being used to house her parents, rather than just her direct family? The subsequent investigation found that she had not deliberately abused the expenses system, but she should pay back £5,800 she had inadvertently over-claimed. It recommended too that she apologise for her uncooperative and combative approach to the inquiry.

  ‘I know you’ve been through a miserable time,’ I told her. Her family, including her elderly parents, had been hounded by the press. She hadn’t done what she’d originally been accused of. ‘But whatever apology you’re going to make, make it in spades. You can’t say sorry enough times.’ Instead, she ended up giving a thirty-two-second apology in the House of Commons. This was a fatal error. She was encouraged to go, not pushed, and resigned the following day.

  It was a real shame to lose Maria. In 2013 she’d been flying high – one of my star ministers who made a real difference as minister for Disability, helped to deliver gay marriage and got us home and dry on Leveson. By 2014 she was back on the backbenches. What a difference a year makes – and in a couple of years I’d know how that felt.

  There was an upside to the Maria problem, however. It gave me the chance to bring Sajid Javid, the financial secretary to the Treasury, into the cabinet, and to move Nicky Morgan up another rung of the Treasury hierarchy. The son of a bus driver from Pakistan, Sajid became a vice president of Chase Manhattan bank aged just twenty-five, before charging through the Conservative ranks to win the constituency of Bromsgrove in 2010. Nicky, a successful solicitor and now the common-sense MP for Loughborough, was as modest as she was impressive.

  I looked at people like this and saw the modern, compassionate Conservative Party I had always wanted to build. They’d come of age as junior ministers and were ready for the next step – into cabinet or senior ministeral roles. Along with Matt Hancock, Liz Truss, Stephen Crabb, Anna Soubry, Tina Stowell and Esther McVey, this was my dream team – the line-up I wanted to present to the electorate in less than a year’s time. Which meant another reshuffle – and my biggest roll of the ministerial dice yet.

  You can spend as long as you like thinking who you want to promote and where to. But reshuffles always come down to the question of how many people you are prepared to fire. It was time to harden my heart.

  Gentleman George Young, who had gallantly stepped in after ‘plebgate’, was only ever a temporary appointment as chief whip.

  Ken Clarke, now aged seventy-four, had told friends he was willing to start winding down.

  Francis Maude, Eric Pickles and David Willetts had each had four years doing jobs they loved, and the changes they had made – civil service reform, local government reform and university reform – were secure. It might be possible to ask them to stand aside after a good innings.

  IDS had done less of a good job in Welfare, and perhaps I could finally move him.

  Then there was Owen Paterson. He had been a great Northern Ireland secretary, but his time in the Environment job hadn’t worked out as well as we’d hoped. Owen seemed to have a tin ear when it came to showing understanding of a controversy, and a more sensitive communicator could surely do better at defusing rural rows.

  However, the biggest change was forced upon me. Before the reshuffle William Hague came to see me and said he wanted to stand down at the 2015 election, after twenty-five years as an MP. George tried everything to keep him on the team, even offering to swap jobs with him if he would stay on. But William was determined to go. He would gladly become leader of the House of Commons, he said, understanding that he would look like a lame-duck foreign secretary if he stayed on and everyone knew he was leaving.

  By this time I had one overriding test for reshuffles. When your private secretary says to you on the following day that ‘X, the new health secretary, is coming to see you,’ do you think, ‘Yes, great, that’s the person I want running the health service,’ or do you think, ‘Why is this person coming into my office?’

  So one question that reshuffle posed was how I felt when I heard the words, ‘The education secretary is coming to see you,’ and saw Michael Gove bounding in. In many ways I felt energised. Michael was the reforming minister of his generation. Just days before the reshuffle he would be hosting a huge Education Reform Summit at Lancaster House at which ministers from around the world testified to the triumphs of our school freedom agenda. Not only was he one of my best friends, his wife Sarah Vine, a journalist on The Times, got on brilliantly with Sam. Our children were at the same school, they had lived a few streets away from us in North Kensington, and we still met up for dinner and they would often come to stay at Chequers.

  So why did I move this zealous and charming eccentric from his job as education secretary?

  The main reason was that I believed Michael was becoming a threat to our reforms. In the beginning I was glad he took our fight to the failure-preserving, status-quo-defending teaching unions. But we were now four years in, and despite all the successes he was struggling to take even previously reform-minded teachers with him. He had become so unpopular that there wasn’t just a danger to the policy, but to the politics.

  His enthusiasm and energy expressed themselves in long sermons in cabinet about everything from Islamist extremism to economics. He frequently and unhelpfully ranged well beyond his brief, for example in an article he wrote about the portrayal of First World War generals in the sitcom Blackadder. Here was Connie the commentator, and her name was Michael Gove.

  In March 2014 he spluttered his way onto rocky ground when, triggered by Jo Johnson’s recent promotion to head of the Policy Unit, he declared the number of Old Etonians at No. 10 ‘preposterous’ in an interview with the Financial Times. This was unfair, because Jo had a first-class brain and was a convinced Tory moderniser.

  With Oliver Letwin and me in the cabinet, there were indeed a large number of people who had come from one school. But that was the world we’d inherited – literally. It was the world we were trying to change with our school reforms, so that one day No. 10 would be stuffed with people from free schools and academies across the country. But it wouldn’t happen overnight, and I couldn’t bar good people from government just because of the school they went to. I always thought conservatism was about where you were going, not where you came from. Class war was never our thing.

  ‘Just get on with running the Education Department, and stop commenting on everything else under the sun,’ I told Michael over the phone. But he couldn’t help h
imself. That summer a letter about an Islamist fundamentalist plot to take over a group of Birmingham schools was leaked. The letter itself was a fraud, but there was little doubt that there was a concerted effort to indoctrinate children with hard-line Islamist values. Michael rightly ordered an investigation into this so-called Trojan horse plot, but then ‘sources close to’ him (aka him) accused the Home Office of failing to ‘drain the swamp’ of extremists. The Home Office hit back with a genuine leaked letter, criticising the academies programme and Michael himself.

  I couldn’t have this mudslinging. We were supposed to be one team, and would soon be going into an election. The leaker in this case was Theresa May’s spad Fiona Cunningham. While Michael’s briefing was wrong, it was the lesser of the two offences. The Home Office letter was calculated, petulant and frankly unsophisticated. It was accompanied by an accusation that ‘Lord knows what more they have overlooked on the subject of the protection of kids in state schools.’ I was clear: Michael had to apologise; the spad had to go.

  Speaking of bad spads, Dominic Cummings was still in the business of bilious briefing to the papers. Having left government in 2013, he could now put his name to his insults. I knew he was still dripping his poison into Michael’s ear as well.

  I needed Michael in a top job, but I was beginning to think that a different, less high-profile role might be better for all of us. And he had planted the seed in my mind a year earlier. ‘If you were ever to give me another job, I’d love to be chief whip,’ he told me. His obsession with people and politics, all that passion and antagonism – perhaps they could be used to recharge the Whips’ Office.

  Two weeks before the reshuffle I got him into the Downing Street flat and put it to him. ‘I think you’ll be brilliant at it. You’ve done four years at Education. All the big changes are made. I want you on the inner team.’ He went away to think about it, talked to Sarah, and confirmed the next day that he would do it. I then described to him all my plans for the reshuffle, right down to the lowest junior minister. He was all ‘Yes, do this … Oh, I wouldn’t do that … Don’t sack that person – sack this person.’