For the Record

by David Cameron

  I was also right to risk an ‘in/out’ vote, rather than allowing ‘Devo Max’ – which would have given the Scottish government power over everything except foreign affairs and defence – on the ballot paper. Granted, it would have made a Yes vote less likely. And granted, we ended up delivering something like Devo Max anyway, through the Vow. But I am convinced that having this third option on the ballot paper would have been a conveyor belt to independence. A majority for Devo Max would have been seen as a victory for Salmond. He would have added up the votes for independence and the votes for Devo Max, and claimed that this was an overwhelming mandate for separation. That would have made independence merely a matter of time. Instead, it is a matter that all the parties that support the Union can credibly claim is settled.

  There is a lesson here for those wondering how you deal with the rise of populism. We could easily have ignored the separatism peddled by the SNP. We could have maligned them and their form of nationalism. Instead, we identified the anti-establishment sentiment early on, we confronted it, and took the necessary risks.

  That was good for our country. But it was also good for our party. Because by driving a respect agenda, by holding the referendum, winning it, and completing the devolution settlement, a Conservative revival no one thought possible was born. In 2016 the Scottish Conservatives overtook Labour as the second-biggest party in Holyrood. Then, in 2017, we snatched so many seats from the SNP that we became the second-biggest Scottish party in the UK Parliament. With the phenomenal Ruth Davidson at the helm, I don’t doubt that we could become the biggest.

  Just as I’d seen off one so-called anti-establishment threat, another came along.

  That year’s party conference was meant to be a smooth one. We had won the Scottish referendum. The economy was recovering. Labour was crashing on the all-important measures of the economy and leadership, and were only at 34 per cent in the polls to our 32 – i.e. not far enough ahead.

  There was one worry, however. Over the summer our MP for Clacton, Douglas Carswell, had defected to UKIP, triggering a forthcoming by-election. The betrayal was no surprise. Carswell was anti-EU, and a serial rebel who styled himself as an intellectual and an outsider. Perversely – and rather unintellectually – he had stood for the Conservatives when we weren’t offering an EU referendum pledge, and then switched to UKIP when we were. For me, that demonstrated the attraction UKIP still held for some colleagues.

  Ever since, we had been on defector watch. I despatched Michael Gove to see every suspect, instructing him to get them to promise, preferably in writing, that they were not going to cross the floor. They all reassured him.

  On the Saturday before party conference I was enjoying a rare day in Dean before heading up to Birmingham that evening. We went for a family bike ride, the five of us gliding along the tree-hooded roads of west Oxfordshire, followed by a nice lunch at home. I was getting ready for a reinvigorating post-referendum, pre-conference nap when my phone rang. Two messages in the space of the next ten minutes put paid to any hopes of an afternoon’s rest or a freewheeling conference.

  I sat at the kitchen table and explained the double mess to Samantha. ‘There’s this one guy, he’s called Mark Reckless,’ I said. ‘He’s a Conservative MP – well, he was a Conservative MP. Because now he’s resigned and wants to be a UKIP MP. There will have to be a by-election, as there will be for Carswell. And we’ll have to beat this one. Not least because he’s an absolute idiot. Then there’s this second guy. This one’s a minister, Brooks Newmark. Really good man. Well, he was. I mean, he’s married, he has five kids, and the Mirror has just caught him sending pictures of himself in paisley pyjamas – “sexting” – to a girl on social media who doesn’t exist. Who is actually a male reporter.’

  Sam took in these two very different types of betrayal. She has a habit when being told about any sexual indiscretion by a man to broaden her remarks to include the entire male gender. ‘What is it with you men?’ she exploded. ‘This time, darling, never mind men,’ I said. ‘What’s happening to my sodding conference?!’

  I thought about what should happen next. Could Brooks really claim that it was entrapment? Was he just a bit sad? I took the view, however, that it was far graver than that. This was a government minister sharing explicit pictures with a stranger, leaving himself, and the UK government, wide open not just to ridicule, but blackmail. The risk he had taken wasn’t just sad, it was serious, and he couldn’t remain as a minister.

  I saved my real disgust for Reckless. I knew he was anti-EU, but at a lunch he had assured Michael Gove that he had no plans to defect. The night before he resigned, he even left a message on Grant Shapps’s voicemail about coming campaigning.

  In the end, it was not a nap but treachery that reinvigorated me. Reckless wasn’t going to wreck my conference. In fact, I was going to turn this into a positive.

  That night at the conference hotel I watched the 10 o’clock news with the team. Everyone erupted into laughter when Reckless appeared. But I knew that to the grassroots, this man wasn’t so funny. I myself had taken over from a defector in Witney, Shaun Woodward. I knew how grassroots Tories would be feeling.

  I started with the National Convention, an annual gathering of all the association chairmen from across the country. I rallied them with my speech: ‘You are the people who stuff the envelopes, walk the streets, bang on the doors … and for all this time you got a man who sits on the green benches, and this is how he has treated you.’

  As I went from area reception to area reception, from the south-west to the north-east, I did the same thing. At each one, the Reckless section of my speech got longer, more animated, more enraged. The crowds loved it, and by the end of the three days the diatribe culminated in the call to arms: ‘LET’S GO OUT THERE AND KICK HIS FAT ARSE OUT OF PARLIAMENT.’

  By the time I got to my keynote speech, another Clare masterpiece,I was totally pumped. Delivering it on the stage of the Birmingham Symphony Hall, I’d never felt more like the leader I wanted to be. It was proper, undiluted, modern, compassionate conservatism. I ranged from a celebration of Scotland to a homage to our troops leaving Afghanistan. I trumpeted the rise of jobs and the fall of the deficit. I poured scorn on zero-hours contracts, modern slavery and Ed Miliband. I outlined how our LTEP would become ‘a plan for you’, through reforms to housing, schooling, pensions and the NHS. I spoke about my vision for Britain to lead the genomics revolution, to conquer the sort of rare diseases my family had faced.

  There were two big tax promises. If we won the election we would raise the threshold at which people paid the 40p rate of tax from just under £42,000 to £50,000, and the tax-free allowance to £12,500. From modest incomes to middle incomes, working people had a home in our party, and I was proud of that.

  What about the two issues fuelling UKIP: immigration and the EU? My approach was to show that they could be tackled moderately and intelligently, without UKIP’s populism. I said that we needed controlled borders and an immigration system that put the British people first; that we’d succeeded in curbing migration from outside the EU, but needed to curb it from inside the EU. Here I gave a glimpse into the sort of renegotiation I wanted to pursue in Brussels. I wanted to break the system by which employment agencies signed people up from overseas and not in the UK, meaning they could get immediate access to our welfare system and send benefits payments to their families back home. ‘Britain, I know you want this sorted. So I will go to Brussels. I will not take no for an answer. And when it comes to free movement – I will get what Britain needs.’

  At an earlier point I had thought I might go further on these entwined issues and set out what was required in more detail, including a control over the numbers coming to Britain from the EU. Eventually I persuaded myself that too much on immigration would just take over the conference.

  This part of the speech was one of the early indications of how difficult things would later be in m
y negotiations with the EU, and in the referendum campaign. Had I gone too far? Did I raise expectations of concessions from the EU that it wouldn’t ever make? Or had I failed to go far enough? The issue was hardly just going to go away, so maybe it was better to be more specific. Yes, it would raise expectations, but only expectations the British people already had.

  For the moment the speech did the trick, providing a strong response to the defections. But come mid-October, the sleepless nights had returned. Carswell had won his by-election in Clacton by a huge majority, and become UKIP’s first ever elected MP. Then in November Reckless won again in Rochester. UKIP was looking worryingly like part of the furniture.

  What’s more, the British public weren’t just making it up about immigration. They were genuinely concerned, and they had reason to be concerned. The numbers were out of control. You could see it in crowded doctors’ waiting rooms, in ever-expanding class sizes. People wondered whether the new housing being built would be for their children, or for immigrants who hadn’t arrived yet. ‘I’m spending a lot of time thinking about it,’ I confided on tape. On one level, I said, I felt depressed about the problem. Had I helped create it? Had the Tory Party lost touch with its grassroots?

  On another level, it was clear that events had created a perfect storm for UKIP. The failure of living standards to recover quickly after a very tough recession. Large-scale immigration. The Eurozone being a mess, making Europe look like the source of all our problems rather than of opportunity. A coalition which, inevitably, people on the right didn’t like. Nigel Farage’s charisma. Globalisation causing tensions, pressures and difficulties. Add gay marriage to all that, and you had the ideal opportunity for an anti-immigration, anti-Europe protest party.

  This was a European (and, eventually, a global) phenomenon. The Swedish prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt and his government lost the election that month because they’d ignored the dissatisfaction with growing migration and tried to actively embrace it. In France, the Front National was taking off because François Hollande had failed to get to grips with migration.

  As with Scotland, I wanted to be a centre-right leader who addressed the problem rather than ignoring it. Yet again, I had political pressure – the rise of UKIP – born of a real problem: rising immigration and the EU’s obstinacy. A migration crisis was brewing, and it was only set to get worse – just as we were heading into a general election.

  41

  The Sweetest Victory

  Election victors often say, even if they had been surrounded by doubt, that they always knew they’d come through in the end. I can’t say that about 2015. At all. Although I thought there was a better than 50 per cent chance of us being either the largest party in a minority government, or in a coalition of two, or even three, parties, I never gave a majority much more than a wistful ‘if only’ thought. And anyway, when 2015 dawned, I wasn’t thinking about the outcome, only the input. It had been a long road to this defining year, and now we were on the home straight. I braced myself for the hardest slog of my life.

  I wondered if elections these days were as gruelling as what my predecessors put themselves through. I thought about previous leaders facing sometimes six public meetings a night, talking without amplification to large crowds, with no helicopters or planes to get around in, and no mobile phones or internet to communicate with. In the 1950 election, Clement Attlee was famously driven on a thousand-mile tour of the country by his wife in their family car (before, apparently, she calmly went to the polling station and voted Conservative).

  But politicians back then were not followed by twenty-four-hour news, or scrutinised by social media. They did not have a rainbow of parties to contend with, or a tide of anti-politics and apathy to swim against. I was faced with a more presidential campaign in a less deferential age.

  Roads are a favourite metaphor of politicians, and would provide the subject of our first general election poster campaign, which I launched in Halifax on 2 January. ‘Let’s stay on the road to a stronger economy,’ it said, depicting a long strip of tarmac stretching through a rural landscape. The first thing I asked before I approved the poster was where the image came from. I was assured that it was an amalgamation of roads from this country. It turned out after I’d unveiled it that it was in fact just one road: in Weimar, Germany.

  A bumpy start to a big year – the gibes wrote themselves. But I had so much faith in Lynton that one pothole didn’t bother me much. In fact, it probably bothered him more. As I’ve said, he couldn’t stand ‘process stories’, where the press fixated not on what we were saying, but how we were saying it – all the behind-the-scenes stuff that turned politics into reality TV. Which is why he hated TV debates: the coverage was all about how the candidates looked and behaved, rather than the substance of what they said.

  I believe debates are part of the fabric of elections now, and am proud of my role in making that the case. Theresa May’s refusal to take part in the debates in 2017 damaged her, and I don’t believe any prime minister or leader of the opposition will make the same mistake again. However, after my 2010 experience the downsides were obvious to me, so I saw Lynton’s point.

  First, while there may be a moment of truth during a debate, or an answer that underlines someone’s position, ultimately, like much reality TV, they are largely confected, scripted and rehearsed. And they take up so much of your time.

  Second, they give an artificial leg-up to the underdog. As the incumbent, it was all risk for me. If I took part in a debate that included UKIP, it would give Nigel Farage an opportunity to play the insurgent, as Nick Clegg had done in 2010. Debating Ed Miliband had similar potential pitfalls. Because the ‘winner’ in a TV debate is the person who wins the battle of expectations. And because expectations for Miliband were so low, all he had to do was turn up and not fall over, and he’d be deemed victorious.

  I was determined that the debates shouldn’t suck all the life out of the rest of the campaign, as they had in 2010, so I suggested some of them be held earlier. The broadcasters reluctantly agreed.

  The issue, then, was who was going to take part. Here the broadcasters made a big mistake: they proposed the three main parties plus UKIP. You could see their rationale. UKIP had just won the European elections and had two MPs. But UKIP wasn’t the only minority party that had enjoyed mainstream success, or that had an MP at Westminster. Caroline Lucas was the Green Party MP for Brighton Pavilion, and the Greens had done well in European elections. I argued that there was no justification for excluding them.

  The BBC agreed. But then they made their next move, and their next mistake. Surely, they argued, with nine MPs between them, the SNP and Plaid Cymru should be included. I think they thought this would annoy me, but I said ‘Great.’ A row then erupted about whether the DUP and the other Northern Irish parties should take part. I just stood back, watching the ruckus I’d created. Keep going, I thought. At this rate I’d be debating Bus Pass Elvis and the Monster Raving Loonies.

  Of course, being the incumbent in an election does give you the advantage of already doing the job you’re applying for. But it also has its drawbacks, your vulnerability in TV debates being the perfect example. And there is also the fact that you have less time to prepare and to campaign, because you’re still doing your job.

  In deciding the sort of campaign we would fight, I was influenced by two key meetings.

  The first was held in early January 2014 at Chequers, for the key members of cabinet, plus my core team. Craig Oliver presented Lynton’s research explaining the public’s view of what we had to offer, based on our record and our reputation. As we talked it through, the picture of what we should focus on began to emerge like a brass rubbing: security. Everything we were doing was about giving people security, and that should be our offering at the election. All the different shades of Conservative around the table agreed.

  The second was during the G20 summit in Australia a
t the end of 2014. I spent the evening with my old Commonwealth centre-right coterie: New Zealand’s John Key, Canada’s Stephen Harper and Australia’s Tony Abbott. We always got together when we could, and kept in contact in the meantime. Sometimes you need people from a long way away to give you some perspective on what’s happening right in front of you. And what they said about message discipline, over about four bottles of red wine as we looked out over the Brisbane sky, was illuminating. We had to become far more disciplined. The UKIP surge and the issues of immigration and Europe were boulders in our way. We would need to roll them aside so we could get back on the right road. Preferably a British one.

  March’s Budget, our last of the Parliament – perhaps our last ever – gave us an opportunity to do just that. George didn’t leave any doubt about how strong our economy was. Britain was the fastest-growing major economy in the developed world. Our rate of growth, he took great pleasure in noting, was 50 per cent faster than Germany’s, three times faster than the Eurozone’s, and seven times faster than France’s. We could genuinely say we were rebalancing the economy. Investment was now growing faster than consumption. The north was growing faster than the south. And it was all being done with fairness at its heart: the top 1 per cent of earners were paying over a quarter of all Britain’s income tax, the highest proportion on record.

  Accusations that the jobs boom was being fuelled by low pay were shot down with an increase in the minimum wage. Tighter regulations defanged the loan sharks. The worst types of zero-hours contracts were outlawed. A massive rise in the tax-free allowance meant that people shouldn’t have to rely on foodbanks or loans in the first place. The proposals neutralised so many UKIP, Labour and Lib Dem arguments – shooting so many of their foxes, as the saying goes – that the Lib Dems called it ‘the fox-shooting Budget’.