This is the fourth time both leaders have met: but their personal relationship doesn’t recapture the spontaneity of their helicopter ride in Canada the month before. Cameron is naturally gregarious, but takes his cue from Obama, who settles into a businesslike, emotion-free zone, where he feels most secure. His staff too are very different from their predecessors in the days of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Indeed, Cameron’s team find the White House ‘surprisingly transactional’. They are very aware of what they can get from Cameron, and set out to get it. But the impression of the trip is encouraging, which is why Cameron’s team is so keen that it took place early into his premiership. Back home, the PM is portrayed in the British media as a heavyweight figure, parlaying and at ease with the world’s most powerful man. They have a longer than planned walk around the White House lawn, jackets on shoulders, and a surprisingly warm press conference.
The BP oil spill which threatened at one point to stain the discussions is barely mentioned. Differences emerge instead over the conduct of the economy. The Obama administration is not fond of austerity, and think Plan A is going too far too fast, and will not work. Their economic guru (and close friend of Brown’s), director of the National Economic Council, Larry Summers, is a core figure to them. On the economy, if nowhere else, the Obama White House felt happier with Brown.
Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the terminally ill Lockerbie bomber, had been the cause of considerable friction between both countries when the Scottish government released him from jail to Libya in 2009. The US administration suspects that pressure from oil companies was responsible for the release and are angry with Brown. Cameron himself can show a clean sheet. He is on record as resisting the transfer of al-Megrahi to Libya. On his first evening in Washington, he sees four senators to placate them. He impresses figures on Capitol Hill and in the White House, and helps lance the boil. Doing so clears the way for Cameron’s party offering Obama a state visit to the UK, which follows in May 2011.
Cameron is pleased to have resolved the issue of troop withdrawal from Afghanistan before the summer recess. Difficult discussions will need to take place in the autumn with NATO allies. But the British intent has been made public, and he believes that he has achieved the right balance, of a dignified rather than over-hasty exit. He has already started the sad task of writing handwritten letters, as did Blair and Brown, to the next of kin of British soldiers who have lost their lives. He shuts himself away and never wants to be hurried when he writes them. His staff always give him time, recognising that these are sensitive moments for him. The month before the Washington trip, the 300th British soldier had died in Afghanistan. A further 153 soldiers will be killed before the troops leave, and many billions of pounds will be spent. Did he struggle because in his heart he found it difficult to write that the deaths had not been in vain?
SEVEN
Life and Death in the Cameron Family
February 2009–September 2010
Wednesday 8 September 2010. Cameron is up at 5 a.m. in the Downing Street flat, and is soon working through his prime ministerial boxes. Four months into the premiership, he has an early-morning routine of working for two hours on the sixty or so items placed in them by his private office the night before, added to by the overnight duty team. Officials are pleased to go back to the convention of prime ministerial boxes: Gordon Brown did not use them, preferring email or summoning or phoning the person he wanted. But Cameron willingly delves into his red boxes, dealing with all the notes meticulously, writing detailed comments in the margins. Unlike Brown, he is happy to be challenged on paper as in person. Brown would regard questioning of his thinking as a challenge to his authority. ‘Gordon knew he should be in charge but thought everyone else was out to get him. Cameron equally knows he should be in charge, and thinks everyone should know that too,’ says an official who served them both.1
At 6 a.m., his mother Mary disturbs his reading when she calls his mobile with worrying news about the health of his father, Ian, aged seventy-seven.2 They are on holiday in the south of France. Ian and Mary have four children: sons Alex and David, and two daughters, Tania and Clare. Cameron is immensely proud in his first months as prime minister to show his father his study and the adjacent Cabinet Room in Downing Street, culminating in drinks outside on the terrace. Shortly before the Cameron seniors left for France, he invites him to Chequers. Ian had been born with no heels and is confined to a wheelchair so David pushes him around the mansion. ‘I was determined to get him up the stairs, too. There’s a beautiful room where there’s Cromwell’s sword,’ Cameron says. ‘He wanted to as well. There’s a rope that goes up the stairs; it was a bit like going up the north face of the Eiger. He pulled as we pushed and finally we got there.’3
Cameron pauses after his mother’s phone call. His father is far from young, and had suffered health complications all his life, but the family has not expected any sudden deterioration. He picks up his mobile and calls Liz Sugg, the indomitable aide who organises his trips. ‘My father is in hospital and I may need to fly to see him.’ She logs the information calmly. At this stage, the family are still far from certain how serious the illness is and he debates whether he should go. He is anxiously preparing for the first PMQs since the summer recess. He expects to be up against Labour’s Harriet Harman – it is still a month before Ed Miliband will be elected party leader – and the likely questions are the highly charged topics of phone hacking, as well as public spending and electoral reform. Cameron phones Tom Fletcher, his foreign affairs private secretary, to talk over the dilemma. Fletcher, although inherited from Brown’s Number 10, is already much trusted and respected. While Cameron shuffles his papers and contemplates the health of his father, Fletcher calls Peter Westmacott, the British ambassador in Paris, and the Elysée, the French president’s official residence. Sugg researches flights to the south of France.
Nicolas Sarkozy’s and Cameron’s relationship goes back a few years. In his first foreign visit as Conservative leader in January 2006, Cameron deliberately chose to meet the French interior minister and presidential hopeful. They subsequently met in June 2008 and March 2010, establishing an easy rapport, upon which Cameron built when he made his first visit abroad as prime minister, on 20 May, to Paris. A working dinner at the Elysée sees them united on bolstering defence and security co-operation, key for Cameron with the impending budget cuts in the SDSR. Their discussion later bears fruit in two treaties signed in Downing Street following talks at Lancaster House on 2 November. Deepening nuclear co-operation is all part of the new entente cordiale, from which emerges an agreement over joint nuclear research in Burgundy and Berkshire.
Sarkozy is keen to ingratiate himself with Cameron during the May 2010 visit. The Elysée has heard that Cameron is a keen tennis player, and the president presents him with two racquets made by French company Babolat. After dinner, Cameron ruffles French security by insisting on walking the 250 metres from the ambassador’s residence, the Hôtel de Charost, down the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré to the elegant hôtel particulier, purchased by the Duke of Wellington in 1814, that houses the British Embassy. Cameron is in high spirits and, despite the late hour and the fact that it has just rained, wants to play tennis at once on the embassy’s timeworn and rather slippery grass court. Kicking his shoes off, he plays barefoot against Fletcher under the moonlight, staff egging them on. ‘I don’t think we kept a score, but if we had, he would have won,’ recalls Fletcher diplomatically. Cameron sits up late into the night with his staff reflecting on the dinner. Sarkozy had been on expansive form, regaling Cameron with indiscreet stories about fellow leaders, and revelling in his trick of making his guest feel they are the most important figure in the world. ‘You and me will do this together … We are the only two people who really understand,’ the president repeatedly says.
Forward to 8 September. Time is rushing on. Cameron is still split between duty to his father and to his still new job, anxious to provide a strong lead at PMQs. News about his fa
ther’s health is uncertain and confusing, but he decides on balance to go. His convoy sets out from Downing Street to London City Airport where Sugg is holding reservations on the 9.45 a.m. flight to Nice. A short time into the journey, fresh calls suggest his father’s condition may not be too serious. Cameron instructs the convoy to turn around. Then his mobile phone rings. He is told that Jean-David Levitte, Sarkozy’s trusted diplomatic adviser, has some worrying news. Sarkozy has dispatched one of his private doctors in haste to the hospital in Toulon, and he is concerned. ‘Go, go, go,’ says the caller from Number 10. ‘Get on the bloody plane.’ At the same time, Sarkozy is speaking to Fletcher: ‘Do your job and send him, just send him.’
Fletcher calls the PM again and reasons with him: ‘Why take the risk? Sarko is telling you to come.’4 Cameron calls Clegg and talks it through with him. The deputy prime minister readily agrees to stand in for him at PMQs. The two party leaders have become quite close. The prime minister’s convoy turns around again and heads back towards City Airport. They are now running very late. It is touch and go if they will make the British Airways flight in time. The convoy speeds through the security gates and goes straight up to the aircraft. Cameron runs up the boarding stairs with his security team and staff and settles at the front of the plane. It takes off just after 10 a.m. They touch down in Nice shortly before 1 p.m. French time. The party are escorted to a French army helicopter laid on by Sarkozy to fly them to Toulon, where waiting French police drive them to the Font-Pré hospital. There he meets his mother and rushes to the bed to see his father, who dies shortly afterwards.
Cameron has taken the right decision. In the hospital ward in the south of France, the world of Westminster politics seems a million miles away. He is able to say goodbye properly to his father. He adored him. Much of Cameron’s philosophy of life can be traced to the head of this very close, old-fashioned, very English, upper-middle-class family. They grew up in Peasemore in Berkshire, a small country village with a parish church opposite the house. The upbringing gave Cameron his sense of community, which was later to blossom in the Big Society’s advocacy of localism. During the election campaign on Sunday 18 April, Samantha’s birthday, he had spoken in his parents’ presence of their influence, at the Sun Inn, near Swindon. ‘The Big Society … is thanks to my mum and dad. It’s down to them,’ he boasted proudly, before going over and kissing them.5
His father taught him the value of pragmatism. A Conservative, though not an ideologue, and a stockbroker, he imparted to his son the merits of fiscal conservatism and prudence with the importance of balancing the books. Earlier in his son’s career, he advised him on investments; when Cameron became prime minister, it was deemed wise to sell them and it horrified Ian that it was done at such an inopportune point financially. Despite his disability, Ian remained a formidable figure, never letting his difficulties act as an excuse, and exuding throughout his life a calm authority and decisiveness, inherited by his younger son. ‘My father is a huge hero figure for me,’ Cameron says in an interview during the 2010 election campaign. ‘He’s an amazingly brave man because [of] his disability. But the glass with him was half full … I think I got my sense of optimism from him.’6 Ian was a huge bon viveur, a lover of a punt on the horses and the good things in life. He was completely single-minded about whatever he turned his attention to. Cameron would often talk about him, and how his confidence, grit and zest shaped him.7
Sarkozy’s timely intervention cements their relationship, which bears fruit in the months to come, notably over Libya. That early September night, Sarkozy offers the Cameron family use of the president’s official residence on the Mediterranean coast, the Fort de Brégançon. The world’s media has descended on the hospital so they welcome the seclusion. Cameron and his brother Alex stay up late drinking the fine wine that Sarkozy has instructed they are given. The loss brings the brothers even closer together.
Ian’s funeral is held on 16 September at Peasemore. The ceremony coincides with Pope Benedict XVI’s speech to Parliament. Cameron has to miss the papal address but meets the Pontiff subsequently at a private audience. Cameron is institutionally, but not spiritually, religious. He enjoys the ceremony and rhythm of church services but does not derive profound solace from them.
His staff worry how the seismic blow of the loss of his father might affect him in the busy autumn political season now upon them. ‘I am the sort of Englishman who cries at weddings, not funerals,’ he says to reassure them. There is barely any time for grieving: He fits in a European Council between the death and funeral, and makes it clear it is business as usual. But there are to be many moments in the coming years, notably during the Jubilee and Olympics summer of 2012, when he becomes sad and nostalgic that his father cannot see him leading the country. He is distressed too that Ian never had the chance to see his grandchild, Florence Rose Endellion, born in Cornwall on 24 August, just two weeks before he dies.
These weeks have been a roller coaster for the Cameron family. His own feet indeed had hardly touched the ground since the New Year, and the intense start to his premiership means that he had been looking forward more than usual to a proper summer holiday. He and Samantha left for Cornwall in mid-August in high spirits. Some turbulence had followed some over-hasty comments in late July, that Gaza was a ‘prison camp’, spoken when he was in Turkey, and that Pakistan was ‘looking both ways’ on terrorism, uttered the next day when he was in India.8 Andy Coulson and the team had tried to make a virtue of him being a ‘shoot from the hip’ kind of leader.9 But he is happy overall with how he has begun as PM, with his response to Bloody Sunday, his Obama meetings and stance on the economy. Samantha is feeling much happier in Number 10 than she had expected, though she is still painfully shy. She has redesigned the flat (largely at their own expense) to look elegant but homely, like all the places they had lived in: ‘She had properly nested in it,’ says an aide. ‘She was feeling much more settled and her state of mind soothes him. They have a home upstairs in Downing Street to escape to, which she likes, and that helps him too.’ When Samantha is happy, so is he.
Once in north Cornwall, they plan to get the mandatory press photographs over with at the beginning. Samantha does not enjoy the ritual, especially as she is clearly so pregnant, putting on a brave face in a bright yellow dress. The idea is to have a few days resting on holiday before coming back to London for the birth. But events move quickly and Florence is born at the Royal Cornwall Hospital in Truro on Tuesday 24 August. It is ‘a bit of a shock’, Cameron says, but not entirely unexpected because ‘Samantha’s babies have tended to come a bit early’.10
The birth is another big adjustment for both of them, bringing home once and for all that they are no longer private citizens but surrounded, even on these most intimate occasions, by staff and security, with the media and its invasiveness never more than a door or a window away. He realises that he cannot even go to the shop for nappies or the small things that Samantha needs. Some in the media are caught trying to talk to the nurses looking after them. Samantha’s anaesthetist is a refugee from Gaza: even at the moment of delivery, Cameron is asked, half-jokingly, about lifting the blockade on Gaza. As with all their previous children, the baby is delivered by caesarean section. Florence is their fourth child, a sister to Nancy and Arthur, aged six and four.11 ‘She is an unbelievably beautiful girl and I’m a very proud dad,’ he says.12 ‘Florence is a great source of happiness for him,’ says a friend.
Number 10 announces he is taking paternity leave. He throws himself into looking after Nancy and Arthur, and visiting Samantha and Florence in hospital. He is due to address the UN General Assembly on 24 September so asks Clegg to go in his place, the first Liberal Democrat leader from the UK ever to address the body. On 3 September he and Samantha pose for an official photograph outside Downing Street on a brief return to London. A member of the public called Mary has knitted a shawl which she has sent to Samantha. She is contacted by Number 10 to say Florence will be wearing her creati
on. The photo of David and Samantha showing off Florence becomes the image on their first Christmas card from Number 10 in December.
The Cameron family depart for Chequers for a few days of rest and seclusion behind its high walls, protected by police. Domestic joys vie in his mind with work anxieties. As we will see in the next chapter, storm clouds are gathering over a scandal enveloping Andy Coulson. It gnaws away at him. ‘We had bleak and grim moments among the team,’ recalls one. Adrenaline is further pumped into the system with the publication of Tony Blair’s memoirs A Journey. Everyone at Number 10 seems to be reading it or listening to it on tape. Blair is referred to in hushed tones by some as ‘the master’; he is seen as the supreme political operator taking on his party, dominating the media with his command of communications, and providing strong leadership from Downing Street. Blair’s reflections about his premiership lend weight to Hilton’s thesis that Cameron must move at pace. The master squandered his first term, as Blair himself admits in his book. Cameron’s team are even more determined not to make the same mistake. The youthful Blair will not remain a model for long.
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