For the Record

by David Cameron

  The pressure was too much for Merkel. After the G7 we met at the British ambassador’s residence in Brussels on the evening of 4 June 2014, and she was downcast. ‘I think I’m going to have to let you down,’ she said. It wasn’t our relationship that had changed; it was her circumstances. She didn’t quite say, ‘It’s not you, David, it’s me,’ but it felt like being dumped. She said it had become such a major political issue that even her mother had called her to tell her to vote for Juncker. I’d heard elsewhere that she was having trouble sleeping.

  I didn’t give up. We sat up drinking until about 1.30 a.m., and she conceded that despite everything, there was still a chance to block Juncker.

  The next meeting she and I had was with Mark Rutte and the Swedish prime minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, at his equivalent of Chequers, Harpsund. We returned to matters of Juncker. Rutte and Reinfeldt said they wanted to work with me to block him, but would only do so if Germany helped them by preventing it ever coming to a vote.

  The four of us sat up after dinner, drinking red wine, this time until 2 a.m. I was tired, but didn’t dare leave in case they cooked something up without me. We were waiting for those magical words from Merkel – ‘It’s all right, we’ll block this guy together.’ She got close, but they never came.

  By the next morning her team had got to her, and she said she was going to have to vote for Juncker. Indeed, at the closing press conference she made some not very subtle comments about ‘threats’ that had been made about UK membership should he get the job. It felt like game over.

  If it was impossible to stop the ‘Junckernaut’, as we called it, why did I insist on a formal vote on his appointment? Well, I couldn’t stop the backroom stitch-up, but at least I could force them to do it in the open. I thought it was important for people to see that I had objected, and that Europe had taken this decision against Britain’s view. Plus, there was still the faintest flicker of hope that some countries might side with Britain.

  When Van Rompuy came for a meeting in Downing Street, I pressed upon him the need to do things properly. He prevaricated, and said he wouldn’t guarantee a vote. ‘There is no point continuing with this meeting, then,’ I said, standing up and showing him the door. We weren’t even halfway through our hour-long slot. He looked stunned. I am not sure a prime minister had ever spoken to a president of the European Council like that before, but I needed him to know that the usual behind-the-scenes deal was not an option. As expected, the news flashed around Brussels instantly.

  Soon enough, Reinfeldt and Rutte told their respective MPs that they would support Juncker. I rang the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, the one person I knew would stand by his word on this Spitzen sham. We were hardly political bedfellows – the once liberal, dynamic politician was becoming increasingly authoritarian. But on this, he was right. And he was my only ally.

  By chance, the next European Council was to be an unusual one, beginning in the town of Ypres. We would be commemorating a hundred years since our continent fought so bloodily over this small corner of Belgian land. The Germans were desperate to avoid the symbolism of a bust-up on the former battlefield, and tried, unsuccessfully, to push back the vote to a later summit.

  As we stood under the Menin Gate and heard the haunting notes of the Last Post, I showed the Greek PM, Antonis Samaras, and Barroso where my great-great-uncle’s name, John Geddes, was carved onto the arch, one of 55,000 who fell in Flanders but whose bodies were never found. Merkel and I talked about the World Cup in Brazil.

  At a dinner afterwards, I made a speech. ‘We have our differences, and we’re going to talk about them tomorrow. But I want you to know that my plan is to keep us in the European Union, and so far it’s working.’ I explained that since the Bloomberg speech, the UK’s support for staying in Europe had gone up rather than down. However, I made it as clear as I could that the reason I opposed Juncker was that his appointment and its consequences would jeopardise this. I wasn’t the only one who still hoped he could be thwarted. ‘Maybe a miracle will happen tomorrow,’ Rutte whispered to me.

  Yet miracles only seem to work in one direction in Brussels. And when we gathered around the familiar table in Justus Lipsius the next day, Orbán and I were voted down twenty-six to two.

  How many do I think actually wanted Juncker? I’d put it at about two. He was the wrong candidate, with the wrong views, at precisely the wrong time. I had always claimed that ‘What I said in Britain, I say in Brussels.’ I’d rather lose than lie. And I’d rather try to do what was right.

  The newspapers the next day put it plainly. ‘Britain Nears EU Exit’, said The Times. ‘One Step Closer to Quitting Europe’, said the Telegraph.

  In the meantime, I would have to work with Juncker. Our personal relationship actually wasn’t bad. He was convivial, and enjoyed political gossip – we would share stories about his old sparring partners John Major and Norman Lamont. He was also amazingly tactile – a big hugger and kisser – often with a strong aroma of his trademark scent of brandy and cigarette smoke

  His wasn’t the only Commission job that was up for grabs, and Merkel was already asking me which of them I wanted for Britain. ‘After everything that happened, you can have whatever you want,’ she said. I asked for the financial services portfolio, for which I’d earmarked Andrew Lansley or Jonathan Hill, the leader of the House of Lords. ‘What really matters to me is people who will help Britain with our renegotiation,’ I told her.

  Over in Brussels, ‘Whatever you want’ turned into ‘I’ll do my best.’ We spent weeks fighting to get Jonathan Hill into the job, including an unprecedented second European Parliament Committee grilling. I pointed out to Merkel’s team, only partly joking, that the time between a Merkel promise and a Merkel promise being broken was getting shorter – ‘the half-life of a Merkel promise’, I called it. She was still an ally, still a friend. I just couldn’t trust her quite as I had before, and she knew it.

  She urged me to meet the head of the EPP, Manfred Weber, because the Parliament committees would vote on the individual candidates before holding a straight yes or no vote on the whole team. He came to Downing Street, and once again I was fascinated how two countries could look at the EU and see something so different. They see it, with this federalist European Parliament, as a fount of democracy, power and accountability, whereas we see it as a useful forum for mainly economic cooperation between democratic nation states.

  There were two ways that the curious incident of Juncker shifted my thinking, and I confessed them both on tape on 2 July 2014.

  The first was that it reinforced my fear that I might not succeed in my renegotiation. The second was that it wasn’t unthinkable for me not to recommend that we stay in the EU.

  As I put it, a referendum and the threat of a UK exit meant that ‘We could get a decent set of changes that you could market as guarantees for Britain, but there are moments when I think actually what we want and what they want is quite incompatible. So I don’t think it’s written yet whether we can get the changes that we need.’ I went on to say, ‘I am closer to saying if we don’t get the renegotiation then there is no point in staying in the European Union. Maybe even I would be able to contemplate an exit. But I haven’t got there yet. I am wrestling with this. I am finding it very troubling. But I am convinced we have to deal with this issue.’

  Either way, the saga of 2014 made renegotiation and referendum more difficult, but more vital than ever.

  Yet my political trials in Europe were fast being put into perspective by what was taking place on the furthest reaches of the continent. Who ever said that the Cold War was over?

  38

  A ‘Small Island’ in a Small World

  It felt familiar – like something from the Second World War. Tanks rolling into towns. Buildings seized. Roadblocks appearing. National symbols torn down and occupiers’ flags hoisted high.

  Except this wasn’t
Adolf Hitler in 1939; it was Vladimir Putin in 2014. And when he invaded Ukraine, he didn’t just cross a geographical border – he crossed a political line. Part of a sovereign territory had been seized by force of arms. The rulebook that Europe and much of the wider world had tried to live by since the end of the war had been torn in pieces.

  Most people in the West don’t think much about this ‘international rules-based system’. We don’t have to. As physics holds together the material world, politics is supposed to help hold together the human world, giving us order, stability and peace. We respect other countries’ borders; they respect ours. We trade with them; they trade with us. We sign up to various organisations – the UN, the WTO, NATO and, yes, the EU – in order to cement that cooperation and make our world a smaller place. It’s the quid pro quo that’s developed since the twin horrors of Hitler and Stalin, and, except in the Balkans, it has largely held in Europe.

  So when those rules are broken, it matters to us. Putin’s actions rejected politics, asserting instead that the national interest is better served by old-fashioned, land-grabbing isolationism than alliance-building, rule-abiding internationalism.

  Just as the West, including our own Foreign Office and National Security Council, had not seen the Arab Spring coming, so it had failed to predict Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Yet it wasn’t a total shock. I was a student of Cold War history; I knew what Russia was capable of. I knew Putin, too – over the past four years I had probably got to know him better than any of my predecessors had. I knew how much Ukraine meant to him, how he lamented the loss of Yalta and Kiev.

  I also knew – I had seen up close – what Putin had done in Georgia. My response to that invasion had been criticised as opportunistic. Yet when I warned that a weak Western response would embolden Russia I was absolutely right. I was also right when I asked, ‘Where next? Ukraine?’

  I had been concerned about the volatility of the region for some time. That’s why I insisted on going to the rather obscure Eastern Partnership Conference in Lithuania in November 2013. I had a pretty bad relationship with Dalia Grybauskaitė, the country’s president and the conference host. As a former EU commissioner, she was very much a ‘lie down and obey Brussels’ type. But where we did agree was on the need for a tougher approach towards Russia, to defend the Baltic states and show solidarity through NATO.

  I understood the vulnerability they felt. For decades they had been suppressed by the Soviet Union. After the fall of the Berlin Wall they had chosen to reassert their nationhood as sovereign states, yet the Russian bear still cast a shadow across their eastern borders, fully accepting neither their sovereignty nor the international rules upon which it was based. In fact, the bear was beginning to growl again, flying sorties over NATO airspace and staging war games and missile tests near the border. There were cyberattacks and old-fashioned trade blockages. These included imports of Lithuanian cheese, and for Grybauskaitė this was the last straw.

  The nations that made up this Eastern Partnership with the EU – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine – may not have figured a great deal in my foreign affairs or national security briefings. But while most countries in Europe fell clearly into either the Western or the Russian sphere of influence, these were at the intersection. Which way they turned would help shape global politics.

  In 2013 Ukraine was very publicly trying to make its decision. The president, Viktor Yanukovych, had made much of his intention to enter an Association Agreement on greater trade and security cooperation with the European Union. Indeed, he was meant to be signing it at this very Eastern Partnership conference. But he stalled, suspending prep­arations to join the agreement and renewing talks with Moscow.

  I had first met Yanukovych at Davos in 2007, and found him the worst sort of dictatorial, kleptocratic, Soviet-style puppet. At the Eastern Partnership dinner in Vilnius, after plates of cheese (of course) were handed round with drinks, I sat between him and the Armenian president, Serzh Sargsyan. The Armenians had already opted for the Russian customs union, and it looked as if the Ukrainians were about to do the same.

  I had got the lowdown from the Azerbaijani president, Ilham Aliyev. I always found this wily old dictator interesting to talk to about his neighbour Iran, Russian affairs and what was happening behind the scenes. ‘It looks like Yanukovych wants more money and a better deal from Russia,’ he said, ‘so he’s playing the EU, pretending he wants an Association Agreement.’

  If that was what was happening, Yanukovych had profoundly miscalculated. Because his citizens had become very excited about a potential partnership with the EU, and when he walked out of the conference confirming that he was pulling out of the deal, protests erupted in the centre of Kiev. Young people braved the biting winter to turn the Maidan Square into the ‘EuroMaidan’.

  After his forces fired upon the crowds, killing seventy-seven people, Yanukovych was toppled. There were incredible scenes as ordinary Ukrainians stormed his palace, taking selfies in his gilded bathtubs, holding his Fabergé eggs, even wandering around his private zoo. They had uncovered evidence of corruption on a sickening scale.

  I couldn’t help being excited by the sense of youth, hope and liberation, the palace-storming desperation for democracy and freedom. But, as in the Arab Spring, when hope opens a door, it is often malign forces that walk through.

  While the world watched the west of Ukraine, Putin pounced in the south, the Crimean peninsula. On 27 February, Russian special forces seized the parliament and the airport, roads at Sevastopol and Simferopol were blockaded, crossings to the mainland were blocked and the Russian flag replaced the blue and yellow of Ukraine. Invasion – in Europe, right on NATO’s doorstep.

  Where did that leave me? Hadn’t I spent years cultivating a relationship with this man?

  It’s certainly true that in 2010 my aim had been to form some sort of positive relationship with Russia, as one of the BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa – with immense growth and trade potential.

  Our relationship was starting from a pretty low base. Since the state-sponsored poisoning of the former Russian secret-service agent and defector Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006, we’d put Anglo-Russian relations in a deep freeze, and no UK leader had held a proper bilateral meeting with a Russian leader since 2007.

  At the time, Dmitry Medvedev had been keeping Putin’s presidential seat warm until Putin could return under the terms of the Russian constitution (he had already served the maximum two consecutive four-year terms as president, and was now serving a term as prime minister). Medvedev and I met at the G8 in Canada, and he invited me to Moscow. He was articulate, friendly and attuned to Western issues and concerns. Our first conversations were about rapidly changing technology and its potential. He was impressed with Tech City in London, and wanted to promote similar developments in Moscow. Obama had told the major powers in Europe that here was someone we could deal with – and we should try to.

  Stepping into the Kremlin for the first time is one of those things you never forget. You walk through anteroom after anteroom of palatial grandeur, each one more ornate than the last. The whole thing is more tsarist than Leninist – they want you to know you’re entering the heart of a great empire.

  My visit culminated in a great banquet at which we had to drink toast after toast of vodka, giving a short speech after each one. With Russia, a popular and safe topic for me to focus on was our partnership in defeating Hitler. By the sixth shot, even a history buff like me was running out of great battles to toast, and losing my ability to articulate them.

  From 2012, when Putin resumed the presidency, we enjoyed a series of moments that held out hope for the future, from the Arctic Convoy ceremony to my Sochi visit. I never forgot that the man I was dealing with was a former KGB officer, and an old-fashioned Russian nationalist. But we needed to have a relationship. It was making a difference on trade, and it could
have made a difference on Syria. I was willing to try, and to take risks. But the attempt soon hit serious obstacles. The US experience was broadly similar. Despite Hillary Clinton’s attempted ‘reset’ of relations with Russia, America announced sanctions through the Magnitsky Act. Russia was furious about Western intervention in Libya and Syria. We were all furious it had granted asylum to Edward Snowden.

  By the time I arrived at the G20 in St Petersburg in September 2013, things had already cooled between me and Putin. The Russian parliament had just approved a law banning so-called ‘gay propaganda’ – state-sanctioned homophobia, just months after the UK had legalised gay marriage – and we had made our disapproval very clear. A Russian official then reportedly described Britain as ‘just a small island’ that ‘no one pays any attention to’.

  I was asked about the comment at my G20 press conference. It had been relayed to me shortly before I was due at the event, and I had scribbled some thoughts down in the car. It was a joy to depart from the official script and let rip.

  ‘Yes, we are a small island – in fact a small group of islands,’ I told the reporters. ‘But I would challenge anyone to find a country with a prouder history, with a bigger heart, with greater resilience. This is the country that cleared the European continent of fascism, that took slavery off the high seas. We’re a country that has invented many of the things that are most worthwhile, everything from the Industrial Revolution, to the television, to the World Wide Web …’ As I went on to list many achievements – ‘our literature, our art, our philosophy, our contribution, including, of course, the world’s language’ – I could almost hear the Enigma Variations in my head.