For the past two and a half years, David Cameron had looked like he was on his way to Number 10. He enjoyed commanding leads in the polls and the followers of political fashion among celebrity, business, the media and Whitehall were very obviously positioning themselves for a return of Conservative government. Since the New Year, the Tory march on power had faltered. Despite Labour’s many difficulties, the Conservative advantage in the polls was shrinking. Most polls now suggested that the next parliament would be hung.
In the last week of February, George Osborne, who was Tory election co-ordinator as well as Shadow Chancellor, convened a council of war at his home in Notting Hill. The Osborne meeting was attended by key members of Cameron’s inner circle: Steve Hilton, the Director of Strategy; Andy Coulson, the communications chief; and Michael Gove, the Shadow Schools Secretary. They concluded that they had made two major mistakes. One was to release draft sections of the Tory manifesto, which had encouraged the media to start scrutinising them as if they were already the Government. From that had flowed the second error: sending out muddled messages to the voters.90 Later in the week, the Shadow Cabinet met for a two-hour session at which there was more agonising about what had gone wrong. ‘People are beginning to flap,’ said one of those present.91
Cameron had zig-zagged on tax policy. He had U-turned when he ditched a ‘cast iron’ guarantee of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. There were careless blunders such as the misrepresentation of statistics about violent crime which attracted an official rebuke. The core Conservative message on the economy had become confused. Since the autumn, when Osborne warned the country to brace itself for ‘an age of austerity’, the Tories had ramped up the prospect of immediate and deep spending cuts in an ‘emergency Budget’ which would be introduced within fifty days of them taking office. Swing voters became alarmed by what this would mean for public services. Panicked by the results of their polling, the Tory leadership trimmed. Cameron was now saying that a Conservative government would not make ‘particularly extensive cuts’ and ‘certainly not swingeing’ ones in its first year.92 This made the Tories look deceitful, masking their true intentions behind contradictory statements, or vacillating, saying whatever they thought would please people at any given moment.
There was an even more fundamental problem. Cameron had disciplined his party, modernised its image and tried to position it on the centre ground. He was the most successful Tory leader in well over a decade. Yet he had not done enough to convince voters that his party was genuinely that different to the Tories they had angrily evicted from office thirteen years ago. The party chairman, Eric Pickles, admitted in an interview with me that they were most vulnerable to the accusation that they were ‘the same old Tories’.93 A poll of voters in the election-deciding marginal seats found that 75 per cent agreed that it was ‘time for a change’, but only 34 per cent desired a change to the Conservatives.94 The gap between those figures was the measure of their failure. The Tory leader put this down to voters being sullen because of the recession and the expenses scandal, both of which had left them disinclined to place faith in any politician. It had become a cliché of commentary that Cameron had not ‘sealed the deal’ with the country. He tried to rationalise this: ‘I don’t think you ever quite seal the deal until people put their cross in the box.’95
The Tory leader being more popular than his party – the reverse of the case with Labour – it was in their interests to make the contest as presidential as possible. His pollsters convened a focus group to ask them to pick their favourite from twenty photos of Cameron. The party then spent £400,000 putting up 1,000 posters bearing an image which was blown up and looked air-brushed. The posters had acres of white space to tempt graffiti artists and inspired satirical versions on the internet which were much funnier and more compelling than the expensive originals. Even Cameron admitted: ‘The spoofs were better, probably.’96 The next round of Tory propaganda implicitly acknowledged that many voters were still embarrassed to think of themselves as Conservatives. The posters were on the theme: ‘I’ve never voted Tory before …’ These too were sent up by cyber satirists. One lampoon had a picture of Tony and Cherie Blair with the caption: ‘We’ve never voted Tory before, but we like their plans to cut inheritance tax for millionaires.’ Another showed a man with a black eye: ‘I’ve never voted Labour before, but I have worked for Gordon Brown.’ A third pictured a family saying: ‘I’ve never voted Tory before, but this fox stew tastes delicious.’97 The internet was subverting traditional campaign methods on which the Tories were over-reliant.
The party was in a jittery state when it gathered for its spring conference in a rain-lashed Brighton. Their leader repeated his trick of delivering a speech without the aid of an autocue, but the novelty of that act had worn thin. He felt obliged to admit that ‘the British people have still got some big questions that they want to ask us and we have to answer. They want to know what sort of party we are. They want to know what we stand for. And they want to know some things about me. Are you really up for it?’ This was a remarkable public confession from Cameron: with barely more than a month left before the start of the election campaign, he had still not answered some basic questions about himself and his party. He retained, though, one great asset which he exploited remorselessly: the visceral hostility of many voters to his opponent. The Tories continued to work on the assumption that any product would look good if the alternative was Gordon Brown. Cameron said: ‘I want you to think of the incredible dark depression of another five years of Gordon Brown and say no, no, we’re not going to do that.’98
The Tory leader did not look relaxed in Brighton – and with good reason. Some days earlier, he had arrived at his parliamentary office in the Norman Shaw North building to find a letter from Sir Gus O’Donnell. He was writing with a warning that the Cabinet Office would shortly accede to a Freedom of Information request to reveal the private undertakings given in order to secure a peerage for Michael Ashcroft. The billionaire from Belize, whose donations exceeded £10 million, had been by far the largest bankroller of the Conservative Party over the past thirteen years. As Deputy Chairman, he also presided over its campaign in marginal seats. Ashcroft rather revelled in his image as a James Bond villain. He had been known to entertain Tory staffers with impersonations of Blofeld, complete with a toy white cat to stroke in a menacing fashion. Ten years before, after previous nominations for a peerage had been rejected because of his tax status, Ashcroft had procured his seat in the Lords by giving ‘my clear and unequivocal assurance’ that he would ‘take up permanent residence in the UK’. In a letter to the then Tory leader, William Hague, Ashcroft declared these to be ‘solemn and binding undertakings’.99 Hague obtained the peerage for his friend and bankroller by copying the pledge to Number 10 and to the Political Honours Scrutiny Committee.100 They granted the peerage in the belief that Ashcroft would pay tax on all his wealth and even asked for proof, evidence which the committee never received.101 Hague had written that taking the peerage would cost Ashcroft ‘tens of millions a year in tax’.102
For the decade since, senior Tories had been made to squirm by interviewers who asked whether the promises given to secure the peerage had been fulfilled. Ashcroft had simply stonewalled about his tax status. The Monday after the Tory spring conference, and in an attempt to pre-empt the Freedom of Information disclosure, the Tory peer posted a statement on his website finally admitting that he was still shielding his vast overseas earnings from the taxman. It was now revealed that he had secretly persuaded the authorities to construe his ‘solemn and binding’ undertakings as a promise only to be a ‘long-term resident’.103 This indicates that a taxpayer is not committed to staying permanently in the UK. The distinction was vital because it allowed him to carry on claiming non-dom status and not pay tax, estimated at £100 million or more, on his foreign income.
The disclosure generated days of damaging media coverage for the Conservatives. The Guardian headlined the story ‘Tories’ dir
ty secret’ and editorialised that Hague was ‘forced to choose between appearing as a conspiring knave or else a credulous fool’.104 This was also horribly embarrassing for Cameron. As recently as December, the Tory leader had claimed that ‘the undertakings he gave at the time of being made a peer are undertakings that he is meeting.’105 Labour, delighted to have their opponents on the back foot, accused the Tory leadership of being complicit in a decade of deception. Many Conservative newspapers and commentators were just as lacerating. Simon Heffer of the Daily Telegraph turned up the dial on his scorn to maximum: ‘If you wish to own a political party in Britain, you should at least have the good manners to pay all your taxes in Britain.’ Attacking Cameron and Hague for years of dissembling about Ashcroft, the columnist asked: ‘How can we be happy to be ruled by people of such abominable judgement? What else do they know about, but choose not to tell us?’106
The Ashcroft Affair added to a heap of recent Tory embarrassments. It was revealed that Zac Goldsmith, the wealthy Tory candidate for Richmond Park, had been claiming non-dom status. Sir Thomas Legg published his final report into the expenses claimed by MPs between 2004 and 2009. A total of 392 current and former members of the Commons, just over half the number whose claims had been audited, had to repay a total of £1.2 million.107 Of the ten largest repayers, eight were Conservatives. The paleo-Tory backbencher Nicholas Winterton gave an interview in which he objected to MPs being stopped from claiming first class travel on the grounds that he didn’t want to share a railway carriage with standard class passengers because they were ‘a totally different type of people’.108
These episodes all undermined Cameron’s claims to have reformed the Conservatives. He had always been sensitive to charges that his party was elitist and privileged. Newspapers had been stopped from publishing a photograph of him posing in tails with other members of the Bullingdon Club. At a news conference called to discuss the economy, Cameron was swamped by questions about when he had known that Ashcroft was still a non-dom. ‘I admire people who try to flog a dead horse,’ wriggled an evasive Tory leader. ‘But the horse is dead and should no longer be flogged.’109 The Ashcroft Affair made the Tories look like a party of the selfish rich in a more effective way than Labour propaganda ever could.110 It also suggested that a Conservative government would be as prone to scandal as any other.
Yet New Labour’s own sleaze-splattered record meant it could not credibly occupy the high moral ground. Some of Labour’s donors and peers were nondoms. Three Labour MPs, Jim Devine, David Chaytor and Elliot Morley, appeared in court in March charged with several counts of false accounting relating to their expenses claims. A television sting, in which a reporter posed as a representative of an American company recruiting politicians for lobbying work, snared three former Cabinet ministers. A video camera, hidden in a bowl of potpourri, captured them hawking for money from corporate interests and bragging about what they could do for firms who paid them. Stephen Byers was caught on camera remarking: ‘I’m a bit like a sort of cab for hire.’ He said that his metered rate was between £3,000 and £5,000 a day. He made boasts, which he later retracted, that he had brokered secret deals with Cabinet ministers to the benefit of big businesses. Geoff Hoon shamelessly told the undercover reporter that he was looking to turn the knowledge and contacts he had acquired in government into ‘something that, frankly, makes money’. Patricia Hewitt presented a five-point plan to help businesses influence ministers and civil servants.111 On being exposed, the trio admitted to being foolish, but denied they’d broken any rules. They were pilloried by everyone.
Gordon Brown reacted with a mixture of fury and schadenfreude. He relished the chance to punish a trio who had all been involved in plots to depose him. At 9.30 on the night that Channel 4 broadcast the exposé, Brown rang Hoon to tell him that he had had him sacked as an adviser to Nato. Brown concealed from Hoon that he, Hewitt and Byers were also going to be suspended from the Labour Party. The first they knew about that was from the lead story on the ten o’clock news.112 This was a gesture since all three were standing down as MPs, but it brought their parliamentary careers to an ignominious conclusion.
The affair also made it easier for the Tories to shrug off attacks on their sleaze.
On Saturday, 20 March, the Conservatives unveiled their latest poster targeting Brown. It had him dressed as a pilot with the slogan: ‘Gordon is doing sweet BA’. Right on the eve of the election, British Airways flights were being grounded by a cabin crew strike. The rather puerile Tory poster was wrong: Brown spent many hours of many days negotiating with both the management and the unions in an endeavour to avert the strikes. Andrew Adonis, the Transport Secretary, says: ‘Gordon was very worried that the Tories would get up a line about this being a return to the Winter of Discontent.’113 Brown initially thought he had persuaded Derek Simpson and Tony Woodley, the leaders of the Unite union which represented the cabin crew, that strikes would be a disaster for Labour’s election prospects. ‘They pretty much told Gordon they’d call it off, but they couldn’t carry their own people.’114 When the action commenced, Cameron duly jeered at Brown: ‘It is back to the 1970s.’115 Even the Tory leader didn’t really believe that. There was little evidence that the strikes impacted on voting intentions, and the union did finally suspend the action before the start of the campaign, but there was a consequence for the Prime Minister. This was another diversion, and one which sapped the energy of a man who was already extremely tired, when he was about to face the rigours of an election.
Brown had been trying to get fitter. Sometimes he went running with his bodyguards in St James’s Park, but that lured photographers to the park in the hope of snapping pictures of the Prime Minister looking knackered. So he would quite often put on his trainers, but not change into any other sportswear, and go into the back garden of Number 10. There he would sprint up and down in his shirt and suit trousers.116 ‘Gordon was permanently exhausted,’ says one of his senior advisers. ‘In a normal business, he’d have been sent home.’117 A minister who saw a lot of him recalls: ‘Gordon looked dreadful. He was physically worn out.’ In the middle of a meeting, fatigue so overcame Brown that he suddenly stopped speaking, folded his arms on the table and used them as a pillow for his head. The minister was at a loss what to do. ‘I thought he’d fallen asleep.’118
The state of Brown worried Peter Mandelson, who accurately observed that ‘in any election campaign, energy, and frankly the appearance of energy, in a candidate matters.’ Against the younger Cameron, ‘the last thing we needed was a candidate who looked so exhausted that he might not make it to the future.’119
A tired leader was just one of the handicaps weighing down Labour as it headed towards the election. The economic message lacked clarity because of the continuing split between Brown’s desire to campaign on ‘Labour spending versus Tory cuts’ and Alistair Darling’s unwillingness to follow a strategy he regarded as lacking in credibility. When the Chancellor presented the Budget at the end of March, he had a few items of good news. The one-off levy on bankers’ bonuses announced three months earlier had brought in about £2 billion, four times as much as originally forecast. The deficit was mildly less horrendous than had been feared. A late revision had cut the estimate to £163 billion. This was still very high and the near collapse of Greece under the weight of its debts was a warning of rising market intolerance. Darling had deliberately hidden the improvement in the deficit from Brown until the last minute so as to prevent the Prime Minister from demanding that they make more pre-election spending promises. That, thought Darling, would enhance neither his historical reputation nor the Government’s plausibility with voters and the markets.120 Darling was now able to defy his next-door neighbour because the Chancellor had waxed into a more respected and assertive figure. ‘The last Budget was Alistair’s Budget,’ says one Treasury minister. ‘Gordon had virtually no input at all. In the final months, there was a progressive sapping of power and authority from Gordon which allowed Alistai
r to become his own man.’121 The absence of Brownian gimmicks marked this Budget as authentically Darling’s work. Most commentators commended the Chancellor for doing his unflashy best with a dreadful hand. ‘Mr Darling’s stock has never been higher,’ considered the Guardian. ‘He is a rare Labour asset going into a difficult election.’122 The Financial Times thought he had ‘a good story to tell on state activity through the crisis and the downturn’.123 The Conservative-supporting Telegraph acknowledged that ‘he excels’ at oozing ‘reassurance and steadiness’.124
It was a tribute to him that the Chancellor who had presided over the worst recession in generations had emerged with his reputation enhanced. Brown even felt forced to make a grudging promise that Darling would remain at the Treasury if Labour returned to office. The Chancellor might be finally liberated from interference by the Prime Minister, but he could not wriggle free from the straitjacket imposed by the state of the national finances. The only pre-election sweeteners he could afford were to double the stamp duty threshold for first-time home-buyers and give a boost to the winter fuel allowance for pensioners. His statement contained fewer giveaways than any pre-election Budget in three decades. Gilts and sterling barely flickered in reaction to what everyone regarded as a holding Budget until the election was over.
The economy had tentatively emerged from recession at the beginning of the year. ‘The recovery has begun, unemployment is falling and borrowing is better than expected,’ said Darling, who contended that it was because the Government had made ‘the right calls’ that ‘recession has not turned into depression.’125 This was a reasonable argument. The recession had been considerably less painful in vital respects than the Tory recessions of the eighties and nineties, when unemployment peaked at much higher levels, there were more business failures, and many more people lost their homes. Labour deserved credit for that. Whether it would get much was moot. In terms of lost growth, the recession had nevertheless been the longest and deepest in more than 75 years. The economy had shrunk by well over 6 per cent, the steepest contraction among the major industrial states after the export-dependent Germany and Japan. Britain had one of the largest deficits in the G20.126 Because Brown was so reluctant to acknowledge the consequences, Darling leant to the other extreme and emphasised future spending cuts in a way not helpful to Labour’s prospects. In interviews, the Chancellor agreed that there would be a post-election spending squeeze which would be ‘deeper and tougher’ even than that administered by Margaret Thatcher in the early eighties.127 This was honest, but dismaying to those planning Labour’s campaign. ‘Alistair saying that pulled a very large leg out of our argument against the Tories.’128
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