And no wonder. This was a man who wanted to leave NATO, scrap Trident, nationalise large swathes of British industry, put up taxes and abolish the monarchy. There were recordings of him describing terrorist organisations like Hamas and Hezbollah as ‘friends’, and memories of him bringing IRA supporters to the Commons just two weeks after the 1984 Brighton bombing.
I had only ever thought of him as an earnest, eccentric leftie – a sort of hangover from the 1980s Dave Spart type of socialist immortalised in the pages of Private Eye. Their world view can be summed up as anti-Western and anti-capitalist. They are so against American hegemony that the USA can do no right, and its enemies are courted as friends. Nothing else would appear to explain Corbyn’s consistent support for Iran’s mullahs or Putin’s Russia. The conventional analysis was that ‘Red Ed’ had leaned too far left for the electorate. Surely, then, the last thing the Labour Party needed was Comrade Corbyn leading it off a cliff. Which is why the bookies put his chances of winning at 200–1.
But then something incredible happened.
Thousands of people started joining Labour, taking advantage of the recently introduced £3 membership tier that allowed new members to vote for the next leader. Greens, anti-austerity protesters and the rest of the loony left flooded the party. A few Tories joined up too, delighted to be able to throw some more lead onto Labour’s sinking ship.
On 15 July 2015 I was heading towards Committee Room 14 to give my end-of-term talk to Conservative MPs and peers before the summer recess when I passed Corbyn in the corridor. I had just seen the latest news on the Labour leadership election, and said to him, ‘Jeremy, the New Statesman poll has just put you right ahead!’ He looked bemused.
As we discussed the implications of Labour’s leadership contest in our team meetings, we tried not to be complacent. Perhaps Corbyn was tapping into some profound anti-politics sentiment. Maybe this was our Syriza moment, with the birth of a new radical leftist populist movement. Britain clearly wasn’t immune to the populism that was sweeping across Europe. And then, he might actually be better than we thought.
But after about ten minutes of this we’d all say, ‘Oh, come on, the guy is a disaster for Labour and brilliant for us.’ His rise wasn’t just a result of the entryism enabled by the new membership rules. In capturing the centre ground, what had we left Labour with? Cooper couldn’t argue for a living wage – we were already doing it. Burnham couldn’t call for progressive social reforms – we were making them anyway. Kendall couldn’t hammer us over discrimination – we were all over the gender pay gap and equal marriage – and there’d be more to come.
Indeed, as well as capturing it, we’d actually shifted that centre ground rightwards. It became a consensus – at least at that time – that governments had overspent and savings needed to be made; so much so that Labour, under Harriet Harman’s temporary leadership, abstained on our Welfare Bill (Corbyn was the only leadership contender who voted against it).
I went off for our annual Balmoral weekend with a spring in my step. Not only was the political picture rosy; we were also going earlier than usual, which meant we would simply be staying at the castle rather than attending the Braemar games. The novelty of spending an afternoon watching the caber being tossed had somewhat worn off.
Instead, I had the usual choice: riding, fishing, walking, deer-stalking, shooting. I hadn’t picked up a shotgun for almost eight years, so I thought, why not?
That morning it was pouring with rain as I headed off to the moors. I liked the comedy of walking up a hill, a borrowed shotgun in one hand and a BlackBerry in the other. Then the message came through: Corbyn had won, with 59 per cent of the vote – more than all the other candidates put together.
What a lovely weekend it was. Chris Martin had brought his girlfriend Zoe Conway, and we had a wonderful dinner with William, Catherine and some of her friends. There was tea with Charles and Camilla, and the traditional BBQ cooked by Prince Philip on an otherwise deserted moorside.
I had been clear from the start that Corbyn should receive all the courtesies and briefings due to a new leader of the opposition. Doing things properly meant telling him his invitation to join the Privy Council was in the post, and that I would be seeing him at the Battle of Britain commemoration that Tuesday (royal banquets, war memorials – how these events would pain this pacifist republican!).
He kept asking whether I thought he could do things like PMQs differently. ‘Do I have to do it all myself? Can I share it out?’ he said. I said it was up to him and the speaker – he could do what he liked.
When the time came to leave Balmoral, our helicopter landed on one of the lawns outside the castle and the pilot let little Prince George sit inside until we boarded. Because the doors had been left open, by the time Sam and I took off, the cabin was full of midges. We spent the journey swatting them with rolled-up newspapers, but we were still bitten to pieces. It seemed I already had a blood feud with the future king of England.
I was in my hotel room in New York, attending the UN General Assembly, when Corbyn delivered his first conference speech as party leader. As I watched it on an iPhone, I mulled how his popularity defied reason.
For a start, there was something of Nigel Farage’s fraudulence about this ‘man of the people’ who was actually a privately educated career politician. His run-ins with the press, and his failure to bow properly at the Cenotaph or sing the national anthem, revealed that he was irritable and petty. The ‘kinder, gentler politics’ he espoused didn’t fit with his overly earnest, aggressively leftist tone.
I concluded that he was in fact a conduit. A repository for anti-austerity, anti-establishment sentiment. People were projecting their hopes and ideals onto him, irrespective of his ability. Something of a ‘useful idiot’, in Lenin’s cynical phrase.
I was in my twenties when the end of the Cold War was proclaimed as ‘the end of history’. Western liberal democracy and market economics had triumphed and become the global consensus. It was said there would be no new system, no going back. Yet here we were, with a whole generation in their twenties who had never endured 1970s Britain, or seen the tyranny of the Soviet Union, and who felt that capitalism wasn’t serving them. Nationalisation seemed appealing. State power sounded more egalitarian than corporate power. Rules appeared fairer than freedom.
George and I talked about this a lot. It seemed we would have to win the old arguments in favour of freedom, markets and enterprise all over again. We would have to convince people of the merits of equality of opportunity, as opposed to equality of outcome. As I was to put it in my conference speech: ‘not everyone ending up with the same exam results, the same salary, the same house – but everyone having the same shot at them’. That was the difference. That was conservatism.
Still, these were halcyon days. Labour had elected someone I was sure was unelectable, the economy was growing, I’d got a majority … A devil on my shoulder began to whisper: what would be so wrong about a third term? I could do two and a half or three terms, beat Thatcher’s record, and not have been driven mad at the end of it …
As soon as I felt my head being turned, I checked myself. Don’t even go there. Surely ten years as prime minister and fifteen years as party leader would be long enough. Plus, Sam wouldn’t have stood for it. She had been amazing, but only because she knew it would come to an end at some point, and we would get some of our old lives back.
Yet it was dawning on me how difficult it must be being the daughter or son of a prime minister, and how it would become even harder as they grew older.
For now, Nancy was very well-adjusted. In fact, she had suddenly become quite interested in politics. I was on the phone one breakfast time when she asked me who I was talking to. I said it was the Chinese premier. ‘Well, tell him to free Ai Weiwei and to stop eating endangered species,’ she replied, quick as a flash.
Nine-year-old Elwen was also wise beyond hi
s years, though he once came home rather morose, and said, ‘I think people only talk to me because I’m the son of the prime minister.’ I felt bad that my job made things hard for him, but after a day he was back to his normal happy self.
The youngest member of the family was only just coming to terms with the strangeness of her family situation. Samantha’s mother visited the flat one Monday night, and Flo rushed up to tell her, ‘Grannie, Grannie – don’t tell anyone, but my dad’s the prime minister.’ We found out that she had been going around to everyone she met telling them her little secret. Yes, two terms would be quite enough for all of us.
Farce interrupted business, however, when a biography titled Call Me Dave was published the Monday before our party conference. I had known it was coming, and that it wasn’t exactly going to be a fair and faithful account of my life in politics. Over the months my team and I had joked about what it might contain, coming up with more and more elaborate accusations it might make. But even the most creative (or lewd) among us couldn’t have dreamed up its most widely reported claim – the one that came to dominate the book’s serialisation and publicity – which was that I’d done something disgusting to a dead pig at a university society initiation.
Here, I can reveal the truth about that story. The first I heard of putting private parts in pigs was when Craig told me about the allegation on the morning of 21 September 2015. My first reaction wasn’t anger, or embarrassment, or worry about the impact. It was hilarity. I couldn’t believe someone could be so stupid as to research and write a book about me, and include a story that was both false and ludicrous. Anyone who chooses a career in politics requires a thick skin and a sense of humour.
Setting an end date for my time in office had put me in an unusual position. I didn’t have unlimited time to do what I wanted to do. And I would set out exactly what that was in that year’s conference speech, which this time Jess was writing. Clearing the deficit and ending the money-go-round were still vital, but I also wanted to get to the heart of what was causing all those problems, by intervening vigorously and tackling the deep social problems that had been holding Britain back.
Because the biggest, gravest division in our country was not between north and south or male and female, but between the vast majority who could get by and get ahead in life, and those for whom life was a desperate struggle, and for whom hunger, homelessness, abuse and addiction were a reality.
It wasn’t just rhetoric. At one point we had ten departments working on the life-chances agenda, including Education on parenting schemes, the Cabinet Office on a social investment fund and the Treasury on ways to alleviate personal debt.
‘We are not a one-trick party,’ I told the conference hall in Manchester. We weren’t just here to fix our broken economy, but to fix our broken society. To do so, we must enter those no-go zones where politicians often don’t dare to venture. I spelled out the facts. A teenager sitting their GCSEs was more likely to own a smartphone than to have a dad living with them. Every day, three babies were born in Britain addicted to heroin. Children in care were far more likely to fail at school, turn to prostitution and even commit suicide than anyone else. And Britain had the lowest social mobility in the developed world: the salaries we earn are more linked to what our fathers were paid than in any other major country.
‘Over the next five years we will show that the deep problems in our society – they are not inevitable,’ I vowed. ‘That a childhood in care doesn’t have to mean a life of struggle. That a stint in prison doesn’t mean you’ll get out and do the same thing all over again. That being black, or Asian, or female, or gay doesn’t mean you’ll be treated differently.
‘Nothing is written. And if we’re to be the global success story of the twenty-first century, we need to write millions of individual success stories. A Greater Britain, made of greater expectations, where renters become homeowners, employees become employers, a small island becomes an even bigger economy, and where extremism is defeated once and for all.
‘A Greater Britain. No more its people dragged down or held back. No more, some children with their noses pressed to the window as they watch the world moving ahead without them. No – a country raising its sights, its people reaching new heights. A Great British take-off, that leaves no one behind. That’s our dream, to help you realise your dreams. So let’s get out there – and let’s make it happen.’
We talked about reaching ‘lift-off’ in speeches, and I came off stage about 30,000 feet high. As I drank Guinness in the green room I had never felt more content in my own skin, or more excited about where I was taking the country. We were still doing something that most politicians in the last thirty years hadn’t done, which was make cuts, but we were doing it in the right way – the fair way. I felt that I had everything on my side: experience and energy, plus my party and my country. I find it hard to write about that now, because it makes me so sad to think about what might have been.
43
Rolling Back the Islamic State
On 26 June 2015 I was sitting at the European Council table when the Maltese prime minister Joseph Muscat whispered to me that there had just been a terror attack in France. ‘Oh God, not again,’ I said. It was six months since ISIS gunmen had murdered twelve people at the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
Now, a lorry-driver near Lyon had attacked his employer, beheading him and then driving his car into gas cylinders and shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ as firefighters overpowered him. I went over to a grim-faced François Hollande, who was getting up to travel straight back to France. I wished him my sympathy and assured him of Britain’s solidarity.
Then it began to emerge that there had been another terror attack, this time in Tunisia. It soon became clear that the vast majority of those killed were British.
The scene was the stuff of nightmares. A young Tunisian man wielding an AK47 had wandered along a popular tourist beach near the city of Sousse, shooting holidaymakers indiscriminately before continuing his spree in a nearby hotel. Thirty-eight people were dead, including thirty British citizens.
Philip Hammond chaired COBR while I flew back. I was shocked by the scale of the attack – the biggest loss of British life to terrorism since 7/7. Yet I wasn’t shocked by its nature. This was the sort of thing we had known would happen somewhere, at some stage. Tunisia wasn’t particularly high on the list, but there wasn’t really anywhere that wasn’t on the list. Islamist extremist terrorism was so widespread that there had been five major attacks that same day. As well as France and Tunisia, Kuwait, Somalia and Syria also saw shootings, bombings and stabbings on what was dubbed ‘Bloody Friday’ by the press.
It wasn’t a coincidence. Days earlier an ISIS leader had urged supporters to carry out slaughter to mark Ramadan. It was also a year since the establishment of the caliphate, which had by now engulfed a third of Iraq and nearly half of Syria, and spawned satellites around the world.
As I’ve said, my thinking on this had shifted somewhat. I knew these fanatics were not representative of the religion as a whole. As one bystander famously shouted when an ISIS-inspired knifeman was tackled on the London Underground later that year, ‘You ain’t no Muslim, bruv.’ Quite.
But however evil they were, however wrong they’d got it, they were finding something in Islam to justify their actions. Take the caliphate. The Koran and the Hadith both can be, and both have been, interpreted as advocating the idea of a state for Muslims, headed by a Muslim caliph. For some, the idea of a caliphate harks back to the earliest, and in their view, purer and more successful, version of Islam.
Now, you may be a Muslim who completely disagrees that this caliphate should be modelled on the barbaric times of the past. You may be a Muslim who thinks the idea of the caliphate is complete nonsense. But no one can deny that the idea comes from Islam. To defeat the extremism, I firmly believed, we needed to understand that, just as we had to underst
and its links with gang culture and crime.
We also needed to understand exactly how the death cult was being spread. ‘No one joins ISIS from a standing start’ is how I often put it. It is less of a leap to go from being a British teenager to an ISIS fighter or an ISIS bride if you have first been exposed to the Islamist ideology that promotes these anti-democratic values. These weren’t just being trumpeted on the internet by Islamist preachers. They were being quietly condoned in some communities. This brought me back to my view that we needed to confront non-violent extremism as well as violent extremism.
However, making this argument brings its own difficulties. Many people hear ‘Islamism’ being attacked and assume it is everything about Islam, and all the people who adhere to it, that are under fire. The language matters here. I always tried to speak about ‘Islamist extremism’ and ‘Islamist extremist violence’, rather than just use the label ‘Islamist’. Donald Trump doesn’t bother with that distinction. Indeed, he goes in the other direction, frequently referring to ‘Islamic terrorism’, which in my view is extremely unhelpful.
Another difficulty is that there are Muslims with deeply conservative religious views who are neither Islamists nor supporters of violence. Some of the non-violent extremist behaviour we identify as contrary to modern British values – gender segregation, intolerance towards homosexuality, for example – flow from these conservative views. But they are not limited to hard-line Islam. There are orthodox Jews and fundamentalist Christians who take a similar approach on some of these issues.
How do we chart our way through these waters? We should vigorously stand up for equality, and be increasingly impatient towards these practices wherever they occur, particularly when they encroach on the public sphere. Hearing that Muslim parents often refused to shake hands with a female teacher friend of mine shocked me. Such behaviour doesn’t make you a terrorist, but it should be robustly challenged in a free and liberal society like ours.
For the Record Page 75