For the Record

by David Cameron

  Soon I was launching our Small Business Manifesto, to coincide with a letter in the Telegraph in which 5,000 small-business leaders endorsed the Conservatives. It was a hot room packed with young entrepreneurs, and everyone was standing with their phones in the air like at a gig. ‘Taking a risk, having a punt, having a go – that pumps me up!’ I told them, talking about the genuine thrill I got from seeing people grow their businesses. I don’t think the Institute of Chartered Accountants headquarters had ever witnessed such fervour.

  This gave me the confidence for the final ‘TV moment’, which was a special format of Question Time, with Miliband and me being quizzed separately by the audience, moderated by David Dimbleby. This time I brought a prop. Liam Byrne’s ‘there is no money’ letter was tucked in my inside pocket, ready to whip out at any suggestion that Labour could possibly be trusted with the economy again.

  How did Miliband do? Well, his big error was to say that he didn’t think the last Labour government had spent too much money. The audience actually gasped.

  In the green room beforehand we had said, ‘Yes, but remember: all he has to do is turn up and not fall over …’ But then it happened. He tripped off the stage as he left. His stumble was so slight you might have missed it, but in the internet age every gaffe becomes a gif, and every split-second slip is out there forever. It was ungenerous of me to take pleasure in it – I was lucky that Liz had pointed out the trip hazard to me beforehand – but I was so knackered, things were so tight, and we were so close to the finishing line that I was looking for wins wherever I could get them.

  Once we were into May, we were motoring. Rallies at Asda HQ in Leeds and at Neasden Temple in north London. To Twickenham, where Vince Cable had a 12,000 majority. To Nuneaton, the bellwether seat we’d be fixated on during election night. We were working so hard. Four hours’ sleep a night. Non-stop during the day.

  One evening we stopped for a team dinner at the Holiday Inn in Manchester. ‘David! David!’ we heard a Lancastrian accent shouting. I could see Liz getting ready to rugby-tackle the interloper when we realised it was the comedian Peter Kay. ‘David, are you all right, mate?’ he asked. ‘Do you need a hug?’ Actually, I did. He put his arms around me and told me to keep going. It wasn’t a political thing. It was one middle-aged bloke who spent his life on the road saying to another that he understood.

  Then came Labour’s big announcement. And what an announcement it was. You could see how it came about. They looked at their weaknesses with voters: they had no plan, and while people liked their promises, they didn’t believe them. So they decided to kill these two birds with one stone: an eight-foot granite stone. The tablet, quickly dubbed ‘the EdStone’, was inscribed with six platitudinous pledges, such as ‘A strong economic foundation’ and ‘An NHS with the time to care’. One person dubbed it ‘the heaviest suicide note in history’. It gave us a laugh, but it also gave us a kick. We were outraged that Miliband said he wanted to put this eyesore in the garden of Downing Street, and spooked by the possibility of it happening in just five days’ time. We needed to do everything we could to stop it.

  With every last ounce of energy we hit the final stretch: a journey from one end of the country to the other, starting in Cornwall and ending, via Dumfries, in Carlisle. Over thirty-six hours we saw round-the-clock Britain in microcosm, through walkabouts in town squares, rallies at businesses, and visits to a zoo, a nursery, new homes, a farm and a UPS centre at midnight. We finished up with a huge rally in Carlisle. As I stepped off my prime-ministerial battle bus to greet the crowds, I knew that it really could be the last time.

  After that, there was nothing more I could say or do. Sam, Liz, Kate and I got on a helicopter. Someone had given me a bottle of wine, and I opened it as we took off. We didn’t have any glasses, which meant downing the contents of our water bottles and decanting the wine into them.

  After casting my vote at Spelsbury Memorial Hall early the next morning I joined Michael Gove, William Hague, George Osborne, Ed, Kate, Craig, Liz and Ameet Gill at a venue we had borrowed to plan for potential outcomes.

  Scenario one was that we’d have just enough MPs to form a coalition. We worked out what to do in that case: react strongly; say that the Conservatives are the largest party and can therefore provide strong and stable government. We had discussed continuing as a coalition with Nick and Danny, and Oliver Letwin was beavering away on a document, but that was the extent of our preparation. The Lib Dems would have to agree to our promise to hold a referendum on the European Union, but I didn’t think that would be an issue.

  Scenario two was the zone of uncertainty – the combination of us plus the Lib Dems and the DUP adding up to less than 323. This would be very difficult, because although we’d be the largest party, the SNP plus Labour would be able to stop us forming a government.

  We decided that in that case it would be wrong for me simply to announce that we would struggle to form a government, and therefore concede defeat – particularly as we would still, by some distance, be the largest party. Events should be allowed to play themselves out. After all, Labour had ruled out formal cooperation with the SNP, and if they were going to go back on their word, it should be done in plain sight.

  As the Conservatives would be the largest party, I would say that in the national interest I was prepared to lead a minority government for a year. I would present a Queen’s Speech that would attempt to reach across the aisles. We would propose to abolish the ‘bedroom tax’, introduce the enhancements to Scottish and Welsh devolution, and because all the major parties accepted the spending review for 2015–16, we’d implement those plans and hold an election in March the following year.

  Scenario three was coming behind Labour in any form. I was very clear that even if we were only one seat behind them, that was it. I would immediately resign as PM and party leader.

  Clare Foges went to the sitting room to work up the speeches for each of the three outcomes. That afternoon we all sat in the garden at Dean as I read them aloud. ‘I’m leaving Downing Street for the last time, we wish Ed and Justine the best, they’ll find behind that black door very professional people who will do everything …’ I was touched that they were all in tears – and I was pretty choked up myself.

  My mind was still on the polls, or rather one poll, the exit poll, which was still several hours away. I decided to go for a walk through the fields around Dean, and Ed and George joined me. I put something to them. ‘We’ve thought about coalition, we’ve thought about losing. Let’s imagine we get 315 or more, enough not to need the Lib Dems …’ This was the scenario no one had even mentioned. Ed told me not to be ridiculous.

  I was getting updates through the day. Lynton said we could get three hundred. Stephen Gilbert was sticking to 293. Jim Messina was predicting over 316, but no one told me that, because they didn’t want to get my hopes up.

  In my head, I had been on 293 seats – lose twenty, win ten was my guess. But as the clock ticked down to 10 p.m., my prediction sank. Tories vote early and Labour supporters vote later, so as the day went on and we received reports of a rising turnout, Labour began to do better and better. Craig was getting calls saying that Labour was starting to brief journalists that, constitutionally, it is who can command Parliament’s respect, not who is the largest party, that forms a government. I just kept thinking about all the seats we were going to lose. Would we even be in the 280s?

  I made pizza for everyone that evening before we took our places in front of the TV in Dean, in almost exactly the same spots where most of us had sat five years before. The bongs of Big Ben were followed by the voice of David Dimbleby revealing the exit poll. ‘Ten o’clock. We are saying the Conservatives are the largest party.’ Everyone in the room leapt up. I tried to remain calm. Good. We thought this would happen. What mattered now was whether it was true, and if so, the size of our lead.

  The predicted numbers flashed up on screen: a 3-D m
e with 316 seats, and a 3-D Miliband with 239. More cheers. But I was confused. That was just too good. No one had predicted 316. Craig reassured me. He had edited the BBC’s election-night coverage before, and knew John Curtice and the modelling he did. If anything, he thought he was underplaying it.

  At about half past midnight, Swindon North vindicated that confidence. We’d held on to the key Labour target with a massive, unexpected swing.

  At 2 a.m. I became convinced we were on our way to victory when the critical seat of Nuneaton saw an increased Tory majority.

  Then there was my own count, taking place at the Windrush Leisure Centre in Witney. In a room full of gym equipment, my constituency team – Tash Whitmill, Rose Rawlins and Julia Spence – and I gathered in front of a small TV that was showing the biggest election upset in recent years.

  The SNP were steadily snatching Labour strongholds, including Gordon Brown’s old constituency, Kirkcaldy. They unseated all the Scottish Lib Dems but one. What the SNP were doing to Labour in Scotland, the Conservatives were doing to the Lib Dems in England. Even Vince Cable lost in Twickenham.

  As my own results were about to be called, I took my place on the stage alongside the giant Elmo, the Wessex Regionalists and a guy dressed as a sheikh. I was returned as MP for my beloved Witney, with a bigger majority. I would be back with my amazing constituency teams, including the wonderful Caroline Balcon, my longest-serving staff member.

  The speech I gave would be important – it would set up what I’d say later at Downing Street. Craig whispered to me: ‘One Nation. Start with One Nation.’ I told the crowd: ‘I want my party, and a government I would hope to lead, to reclaim a mantle that we should never have lost, the mantle of one nation, one United Kingdom. That is how I will govern if I am fortunate enough to form a government in the coming days.’

  There was no longer any ‘if’, however. Sam and I were driven back to London, helicopters above us, police outriders around us. I was crying. It was a sense of release more than anything else. I hadn’t realised until now how great the weight of it all had been.

  But before we went home to the flat in Downing Street, there was somewhere I needed to go. CCHQ was my political home. It was the organisation I’d worked for as a young graduate, and where I’d first led a team. I’d been in and out of its various locations in my various roles, as a spad, a candidate, an MP, a party leader, a prime minister – and now the first Conservative prime minister in twenty-three years to win a majority.

  ‘I am not an old man,’ I told the assembled staff. ‘But I remember casting a vote in ’87, and that was a great victory. I remember working, just as you’ve been working, in ’92, and that was an amazing victory. And I remember 2010, achieving that dream of getting Labour out and getting the Tories back in, and that was amazing. But I think this is the sweetest victory of them all.’

  In the end, 11.3 million people voted Conservative, 600,000 more than in 2010. But it was all the other victories within that which made me so proud.

  We finally won the south-west, defeating all fifteen Lib Dem MPs in the region. For the first time since 1970, you could walk directly from Land’s End to Westminster and never set foot in a non-Conservative constituency.

  We won more Welsh seats than we had for thirty years, increasing the number of our MPs from eight to eleven, taking Gower from Labour for the first time ever.

  We held on in Scotland, ending up with the same number of MPs there as the Lib Dems and Labour.

  We won the support of modern Britain, with over a million votes cast for us by people from ethnic minorities – an estimated one in three people from those communities. In fact, Sikhs and Hindus were more likely to vote Conservative than Labour – up from 11 per cent in 2005 to 49 per cent. Gay voters, for the first time ever, were almost as likely to vote Conservative as Labour.

  Our party was more reflective of modern Britain, as well. In 2005 we had just two BME MPs; now we had seventeen. Then, there were just seventeen women MPs; now there were sixty-eight.

  The stories of our new MPs were the story of modern Britain. On our benches we now had people like Seema Kennedy, who was four when she and her family were forced to flee revolutionary Iran. Johnny Mercer, who a few years earlier had been a soldier in Afghanistan. And of course Scott Mann, who just days earlier had been delivering the post in Cornwall.

  The moderate, reasonable sensibleness of modernisation which so many people had said would bring down the party had won us new support. Some said I had helped UKIP’s cause through my support for gay marriage and the green agenda, yet it didn’t split the right – even though UKIP had won 13 per cent of the vote. I think it’s because that modernisation was underpinned by those small ‘c’ conservative issues. It was that, plus our economic stewardship and an effective campaign, that finally sealed the deal with the electorate.

  42

  A Conservative Future?

  I bounded up the staircase and into the flat. Inside, Sam was getting the kids ready for school. Blue bags still filled the hallway, ready for our potential move. But now I knew we were staying put, while the rest of British politics moved around us.

  I thought I should try and close my eyes for half an hour that Friday morning to fortify myself for what was ahead. Results were still rolling in, so I switched on the radio by my bedside. As I drifted off, I listened, stunned, as the shadow chancellor, my Commons tormentor Ed Balls, lost his Yorkshire seat. Then I woke to hear that Nigel Farage had failed in South Thanet. And – joy of joys – we had kicked Mark Reckless out of Parliament.

  Then, within the space of one hour, Farage, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband all resigned as leaders of their parties.

  Amid the tumult, however, there remained a reassuring fixed point in British life. Prime ministers come and go, but there is always the monarchy. Being re-elected does not constitutionally compel you to see the sovereign in person, but I wanted to do so because I thought it was right, not least because this would be a different government. So that lunchtime Sam and I drove to Buckingham Palace, our tally of MPs now 325, just one off a now-assured outright majority.

  I was taken through to see the Queen, trying desperately to suppress my excitement.

  I said to her that five years ago when I came here, I couldn’t tell her what sort of government I was going to form, but this time I could tell her that we were going to have a majority Conservative government. I joked that it might be a small majority, but said it was getting bigger all the time.

  Though I didn’t know it, at that moment the 326th seat, my neighbouring constituency of The Cotswolds, was being declared for the Conservatives. It was the first outright Tory win since John Major’s surprise victory in 1992. We would end up with 330 MPs – what I called my ‘small but perfectly formed majority’.

  I returned to Downing Street and stood before a wall of cameras to make a speech. Five years earlier I had set out a plan to rescue our economy in the wake of the financial crisis. Now my mission was to heal social divisions, partly created by that crisis, partly built up over many decades.

  Step back and Britain was richer, safer, greener and fairer than ever before. But zoom in and you could see the cracks running across the country. The prosperity gap between north and south. The opportunity gap between rich and poor. The barriers to true social mobility. The separatist sentiment in Scotland. The failure of some immigrants to integrate in some communities. The discrimination based on gender, race and religion. Governing for one nation was about mending those fissures.

  Had the bookies been right, it would have been Ed Miliband stepping through the big black door. EdStones notwithstanding, he’d fought a strong campaign and I told him so that morning over the phone. He’d done what an opposition leader is meant to do: holding us to account, forcing us to move on policies. He was decent and magnanimous in defeat.

  That afternoon he would be making his final official engagemen
t as Labour leader when he joined Nick Clegg and me at the Cenotaph for the seventieth anniversary of VE Day. I felt terrible for Nick. The Liberals had been almost totally demolished, and I knew that was the one thing he didn’t want. He desperately wanted to leave his party in a reasonable state. Instead, they were down from fifty-seven MPs to just eight.

  We had texted each other a bit through the night – good lucks, well dones, and commiserations, particularly over Danny Alexander’s ousting and Nick’s inevitable resignation. It was the only fly in the ointment for me – that my triumph was my friend’s tragedy.

  Now the campaign was over, my new obsession was the size of the task ahead. Governments succeed or fail on whether they make a good impression in their first three months. Even though I was exhausted, it would be foot to the floor for the first hundred days.

  On the Saturday after the election the congratulatory phone calls were still flooding in. The difference between now and 2010 was that many of these people weren’t just world leaders; they had become friends, particularly Enda Kenny, Angela Merkel, Mark Rutte, Matteo Renzi, Stephen Harper and Barack Obama.

  Merkel was full of praise. She said how much she’d enjoyed working together, and looked forward to the next five years. I reflected upon how different the Merkel I had come to know was to the Merkel of popular imagination. People perceive her as collaborative and cooperative – which she is – but this is combined with a ruthless streak. There wasn’t much talk about the EU that morning, but I knew she’d be tough on what was to come.