The next day I was in Wantage, Oxfordshire, visiting the Williams Formula One factory when my plan hit the barriers. Michael emailed to say he had changed his mind. What had happened? I smelt Dominic Cummings, and totally flipped.
Reshuffles fall apart if people go back on their word. This was a job Michael had suggested, that he had accepted, that he had started to do. I rang him and said, ‘I don’t accept your email. You have agreed to do this job. I’ve told you everything we’re planning. I accept your withdrawal of the email, and I expect to speak to you later on today about how we are going to finalise the reshuffle.’ I followed this with a text: ‘You must realise that I divide the world into team players and wankers. You’ve always been a team player. Please don’t become a wanker.’
As I began my cabinet clear-out the next day, Michael’s colleagues were about to sort themselves into team players and … people who proved more difficult.
Gentleman George was a gent. Ken was content. Eric and Francis I kept on in the end, but David Willetts was gracious about moving on. David Jones, the Welsh secretary, couldn’t have been nicer. He said he’d enjoyed serving, it had been great, and he would help in any way he could. He knew Stephen Crabb would be an excellent appointment.
Dominic Grieve, the attorney general, may have seen the end coming. He was a brilliant lawyer, and had huge respect among the legal profession. But there was a genuine problem. The European Court of Human Rights was finding against the UK for refusing to give prisoners the right to vote. The idea that convicted criminals should have that privilege disgusted me. And to my mind, Parliament was sovereign: this was a matter for MPs to decide, not the courts, particularly not foreign ones. Not according to Dominic: he said our international obligations should override our parliamentary sovereignty. Linked to that, he cited the Ministerial Code, which said we couldn’t break the law. So he ended up arguing that it was impossible for us not to propose legislation to allow at least some prisoners to vote, and that as ministers we would have to back it. I fundamentally disagreed. The right of prisoners to vote was not part of any international charter we had signed up to. It was the view of a foreign court, and if Parliament wanted to disagree, it should feel able to. As a result of this disagreement I could see how impossible it would be for Dominic and me ever to reach a more general agreement about reforming the ECHR, the Human Rights Act and the European Court of Justice. So he had to go.
Andrew Lansley had every right to be disappointed. He’d given up his cherished job at Health, and now I was asking him to move again because I needed his job as leader of the House of Commons for William.
Tina Stowell would be Lords leader – she’d been great at taking gay marriage through the Upper House. Philip Hammond would be foreign secretary. He was hard-working, extremely able, and loyal, and I thought he would do a good job in pushing an outward-looking foreign policy. I chickened out of giving Anna Soubry Defence, and made her a minister of state in the department instead. Michael Fallon, who had proved to be the safest pair of hands, would be an ideal fit as secretary of state. Liz Truss, I was sure, would excel at DEFRA.
Esther McVey managed to blab herself out of the secretary of state for culture job when she went on TV during the middle of the Maria Miller crisis and failed to properly support her colleague, despite being asked to do so by No. 10. Instead, she would be IDS’s number two at Work and Pensions, attending cabinet. Yes: once again, I failed to move IDS.
The most difficult conversation was with Owen Paterson. He said I was making a terrible mistake, and I should think about it overnight. I said I was sorry, but my decision was final. He was furious, and stormed out of my office.
Things were difficult too with Liam Fox. Three years after his departure from cabinet, I was offering him a way back into government with the job of minister of state at the Foreign Office. He’d be on the National Security Council, a senior government figure, knocking at the door of the cabinet – but apparently he was totally insulted by the proposal.
More seriously, Michael Gove was devastated by what happened when his appointment was announced. None of us had properly focused on the fact that the chief whip only attends cabinet, rather than being a full member. To me, that was just semantics: Michael would be at the table for every discussion. The job also involved a pay cut, although I had offered Michael a flat in Admiralty House to help make up the difference, and so he could live closer to the Commons where he would be spending more time. But when it dawned fully on him, and others, that he’d be taking a £36,000 pay cut, it seemed like a demotion.
Sarah Vine was furious. ‘A shabby day’s work which Cameron will live to regret,’ she tweeted the next day, quoting a Max Hastings op-ed which, with the usual moderation the Daily Mail applies to things, described Michael’s demotion as ‘worse than a crime’.
Appearances matter in politics, including to the people alongside you. I had created a strong team, but tensions and unhappiness were on the rise, and the long-term consequences would be very serious indeed.
37
Junckernaut
So our campaign was under way, but at the same time we faced another obstacle: the election of Britain’s seventy-three Members of the European Parliament. This mattered in itself, but it would also have an impact on the political atmosphere, our ability to keep the party together and, crucially, our capacity to unite the right behind re-electing the government.
I had seen several European election campaigns up close, from Margaret Thatcher’s disastrous ‘You’ll live on a diet of Brussels’ campaign in 1989 to Michael Howard’s aggressively anti-Labour strategy in 2004, which had said far too little about Europe. I had tasted success, too, when we topped the poll in 2009.
This time we needed to demonstrate that, with a strong economy and renewed respect abroad, we could bring powers back from Brussels, and ultimately deliver the in/out referendum we had promised. For anyone wanting real change on Europe, surely that was the winning argument. UKIP couldn’t give voters the choice. Labour and the Lib Dems wouldn’t. Only the Conservatives could and would.
Yet there were many factors in UKIP’s favour. European elections were prime occasions for protest votes, and now the Lib Dems were in government, UKIP was for many voters a natural ‘none of the above’ party. Policies like gay marriage and HS2 had driven disaffected Tories into its arms. It would also be able to scoop up voters after the demise of the BNP. In addition, UKIP had been increasing its appeal to working-class voters, particularly in the north, where many felt neglected by Labour.
There was also the Nigel Farage factor. I first met him in 2002, when I was a new MP and he was a new MEP, and we were appearing on Radio 4’s Any Questions together. People often say ‘He’s the sort of person you’d have a pint with,’ to convey how down-to-earth he is. I’ve never had a drink with him, but we did have a cigarette as we waited for the show, and I can attest to his amiability.
Yet there are many contradictions. A man who preaches anti-politics, but who has himself been a politician for twenty years. A critic of cor-porate interests and banking who made his money as a commodities trader in the City. A working-class warrior who went to private school. Someone who bemoaned European immigration, but was married to a German, and lambasted an EU gravy train he’d been riding for years.
At heart, I thought he was easy to understand. I know the type very well. A Conservative who thought ‘Enoch was right’ about Europe and immigration, who admired Margaret Thatcher for her strength in turning the country round, but overlooked her commitment to our membership of the EU and to making a success of a multiracial Britain.
Once Thatcher was gone and European integration started to accelerate, there would always be a danger to the Conservatives of a breakaway party from the right. This was assisted by the failures of globalisation, and a sense that too many people were being left behind either economically or culturally, or both.
What Farage lacked in working-class credentials he made up for in charisma and an instinctive understanding of his audience. He was also willing to show an unpleasant side. His dog whistles – more like foghorns on occasion – on TB or HIV sufferers coming into the country seemed designed to stir up anger rather than to solve a problem.
It was a mistake of mine to refer to UKIP as ‘fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists’ in 2006 – not because it wasn’t true of some of its members, but because saying so alienated those UKIP supporters we were trying to win back. That said, the party remained a haven for the unsavoury. We alighted on a better strategy, of remaining silent about UKIP while feeding the press details of the eccentric and sometimes obnoxious things their candidates and councillors were saying. There was no end of material, including a claim made by one UKIP councillor that it was my fault that the country had been afflicted by floods – God’s wrath for passing gay marriage.
Not that any of this changed anything. Because as it turned out, this election wasn’t about gay marriage or HS2. It wasn’t about the credibility of Nigel Farage or UKIP. It wasn’t even really about Europe, at least not all the European issues. It was about immigration and its link to Europe. And on this Farage had the advantage.
One exchange brought this home to me. Ahead of polling day, Nick Clegg had challenged Farage to two live TV debates. While it would give Farage huge profile, I understood why Nick did it. He was fed up with the press painting him as the Tories’ poodle, and wanted to demonstrate his passion about a subject on which he was knowledgeable and had a distinctive position.
During the first debate, Nick had what seemed a great idea. UKIP had a difficult relationship with the truth, and he planned to expose it by producing one of its leaflets from the recent Eastleigh by-election.
‘It says here that twenty-nine million Romanians and Bulgarians may come to this country,’ he said. ‘There aren’t even twenty-nine million Romanians and Bulgarians living in Romania and Bulgaria. It is simply not true. So let’s have this debate, but let’s have it based on facts.’
In any other situation it would have been a zinger. But Farage had a trump card. ‘I’m not claiming that twenty-nine million people have the right to come to Britain,’ he replied. ‘I am claiming that 485 million people have the total, unconditional right to come to this country if they want to.’
Farage had hit on a central political vulnerability of our EU membership terms. We had no hard-and-fast control over immigration as long as we were in the European Union. Even if we argued that the current levels of EU migration were acceptable, indeed even if people agreed with that claim, Farage would always have the argument that we had no control.
On Sunday, 25 May 2014, UKIP won twenty-four seats in the European Parliament, eleven more than in 2009. We lost seven, leaving us with nineteen. It was the first time the Conservatives had ever come third in any national election, and the first time since 1906 that a British election was won by a party other than us or Labour. Farage called it an ‘earthquake’.
Perhaps ‘tremor’ would have been more accurate. UKIP hadn’t done as well as we’d feared, and we were only one point behind Labour. Just one in three people who could vote did vote – this was hardly a mass movement of the people. The real test would be at the general election, and I was reassured of our chances a few days later when we beat UKIP at a by-election in Newark by a healthy margin.
But there was one thing I didn’t question. If we hadn’t already promised a referendum on our membership of the EU, that would have been the central issue of the campaign, and we would have been forced to move after the result. The pressure would have been broad. Those who argue that it was not necessary to hold a referendum often miss this point.
I never thought UKIP’s win was an anomaly or an irrelevance. Anti-EU sentiment rumbled right across the continent. The borderline-racist Front National won the election in France. In Germany, the anti-EU Alternative für Deutschland took seven seats. Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn won three seats, while the far-left Syriza won the election. The Economist summed it up: ‘After the years of financial crisis, the biggest danger to the European project is now economic stagnation and, above all, political rejection.’
José Manuel Barroso’s decade as president of the European Commission, the most powerful of all the presidential positions in the EU, was coming to an end. It was the perfect moment for someone to grasp these threats, adapt to the changes and modernise the organisation. Instead, we were presented with the most federalist, integrationist, Brussels beltway frontrunners: the former Luxembourg prime minister Jean-Claude Juncker, and the European Parliament president Martin Schulz.
How on earth did this happen?
Previously, presidents had been chosen by the European Council, which was made up of all the elected leaders. It worked on a basis of unanimity: every member state had a veto, so eventually the Council would find someone every country was content with. This is how Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair were able to block candidates who were seen as antithetical to Britain’s interests.
But then the process changed. Most important of all, the requirement for unanimity in the European Council was dropped. And the Lisbon Treaty required the Council to propose a candidate for the European Parliament to vote on. It did not require European political parties to identify ‘lead candidates’ in advance of European Parliament elections. But that is exactly what happened. Interpreting Lisbon far more widely than ever intended, each main party grouping in the Parliament would now put forward its own ‘Spitzenkandidat’, or top candidate, for the role. They would then use the result to determine which of these ‘top candidates’ came out on top.
It sounds democratic, leaving it up to elected MEPs. But it wasn’t.
First, the idea of Europe-wide parties with Europe-wide candidates was a fiction. Hardly anyone would go to the polls thinking, ‘I am voting for this or that European president’; they would be voting on a whole host of domestic and European issues. No Spitzenkandidaten would be on the actual ballot paper.
Second, the process transferred power away from member states, undermining sovereign national governments and parliaments. The Council, formed of the democratic leaders of those states, would be presented with a lead candidate and be encouraged to endorse them. Countries with genuine concerns could be overridden.
So this changed the terms of our membership quite fundamentally. It altered the relationship between national governments and European institutions. It was a big step towards making those institutions accountable to each other, rather than to their member nations.
A speaking note I took into my meeting with Herman Van Rompuy said: ‘It’s a fundamental change in the balance of power towards an institution [the EU Parliament] for which there is little love and understanding in the UK, and a major disruption of the sort of balance which could keep us in and engaged …’
Jean-Claude Juncker is a European integrationist to the core, an architect of Maastricht and monetary union. He had been a keen supporter of the Constitution that morphed into the Lisbon Treaty, and when the French came to vote on it he made no secret of his lack of regard for their democratic will: ‘If it’s a Yes, we will say “On we go,” and if it’s a No, we will say “We continue.”’ For the EU’s survival, for Britain’s future in it, and for my renegotiation, there could hardly have been a worse candidate.
His election wasn’t inevitable. We might have lost our veto, but many national leaders told me privately that they opposed Juncker’s appointment, including Angela Merkel. She would be key. We were the leaders of two of the three largest countries in the EU. If anyone could claim a democratic mandate in blocking the appointment of a particular candidate for Commission president, surely it was us.
Our discussions on the matter started at the beginning of the year, during Merkel’s visit to the UK. After her speech in Parliament we had lunch, and I invited her up
to the flat for a coffee alone in the kitchen to discuss the two most prominent Spitzenkandidaten at that point.
Both Germany’s Martin Schulz – put forward by the socialist grouping in the European Parliament – and Jean-Claude Juncker – put forward by the EPP – were unacceptable to Britain, I said, particularly Juncker. Schulz, as a German socialist, was a candidate Merkel would do pretty much anything to block. Personally I found him quite charming, with a love of football and huge knowledge of European and British history. But his answer to every problem was more Europe, much more Europe.
So we were in agreement: I needed Merkel to stop Juncker, and she needed me to stop Schulz. She repeated that intention when I visited Hanover the following month, and we sounded out non-Spitzenkandidaten like Ireland’s Enda Kenny, the Italian prime minister Enrico Letta, and Danish PM Helle Thorning-Schmidt.
When it came to the European Parliament elections, the EPP finished with 29 per cent of the seats, compared with the Socialists’ 25 per cent. The EPP claimed that was a mandate for their Spitzenkandidat. ‘I won the elections,’ proclaimed Juncker.
Merkel was unimpressed with such a presumption. ‘There will be a fairly broad tableau of names on the table,’ she told a press conference. In other words: this is not a done deal, Jean-Claude.
But then it all began to fall apart. Her party and their coalition allies were angry that she had gone against the candidate they had endorsed months earlier. Juncker also had the backing of Germany’s most powerful media group, Axel Springer SE, whose papers published editorials claiming Juncker was a democratically elected president who we mere national leaders were trying to thwart. To them, defending this principle was more important than Britain’s membership of the EU.
For the Record Page 65