Cameron at 10

by Anthony Seldon

  Number 10’s Andrew Cooper, co-founder of polling organisation Populus, is brought in by Osborne to provide advice on election strategy. His research suggests the electorate in Scotland can be divided into three camps: nearly 40% are convinced unionists and are safely in the bank as No voters. Just under 30% are firm nationalists, while the remaining third are undecided. The effort must be directed to this third who will decide the outcome. Cooper’s advice is that love-bombing Scotland and talk of common bonds will not in fact do the business: the effort must be placed instead on independence being irreversible and the economic interests of Scotland demanding a No vote. His hard-nosed advice is not universally popular in Number 10, but leads to a change of tack. Ed Miliband is invited for a meeting with Cameron and Clegg to discuss Labour support for securing agreement on the referendum’s terms, which are still up in the air.

  As the talks grind on over the summer of 2012, Cameron becomes frustrated: ‘I don’t see why we can’t tie all this up by the end of September,’ he says. He knows that Salmond is trying to string it out for his own advantage, so he insists on agreement being reached by the end of the month. His impetus irritates Salmond, but it speeds the process, and in September a consensus is reached on the negotiating text. Moore leads the charge, negotiating directly with Nicola Sturgeon, Salmond’s astute and well-briefed deputy. ‘Salmond wanted to dip her blood into the process in case it all went wrong and then wanted Cameron to come to Edinburgh to hammer out the final details with him. We weren’t having any of that,’ says an official involved with the negotiations. The way is cleared for the final agreement. The day before it is signed, Michael Forsyth, who had been so emphatic with Cameron in late 2011, is one of the senior Tory figures to spread alarm when he now compares Cameron to ‘Pontius Pilate’ who has washed his hands of Scotland. He tells the Sunday Times that ‘Salmond has been able to get what he wants … it sounds like a walkover to me.’19 His words foreshadow those of many Tory critics over the following two years, climaxing before referendum day. Scotland is becoming another stick with which to beat Cameron.

  On 15 October, the Edinburgh Agreement is signed at St Andrews House, home of the old Scottish Office. Cameron and Salmond agree that sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds will be allowed the vote, there will be a single ‘yes/no’ question, and the vote will take place in the autumn of 2014. The hopes of Osborne et al who wanted a quick referendum have been thwarted. The Scottish Parliament are given the legal authority to hold the referendum. The campaign has begun. As the PM’s pen hovers over the paper, Llewellyn later says that ‘I felt the weight of history bearing down on us. If one thing kept me awake at night, it was this.’20 The next day, Tuesday 16 October, Cameron says to Cabinet ministers, ‘The Scottish negotiations are a model for the rest of you.’ His pleasure at being spared murky, smoke-filled rooms negotiating is apparent to all. ‘I turned up. I signed. I left.’ All know the words Veni, vidi, vici, attributed to Julius Caesar a few years after his failed attempt to invade Britain. Has Cameron, with insufficient thought, signed away its dismemberment?

  TWELVE

  London Riots

  August 2011

  Friday 5 August. Craig Oliver is strolling around the corridors in a near empty Number 10. Cameron’s team have taken a hard pounding since the New Year on many fronts and have been desperate for a holiday. The usual form is that the team go away at the same time as Cameron himself, leaving just one of them manning the fort. Oliver, the communications director, was the last to join the team, in February. By the time he has his feet under the table, all the other team have booked their holidays. He has drawn the short straw.

  The day before, eight miles to the north in Tottenham, Mark Duggan, a twenty-nine-year-old man of mixed race who worked at Stansted Airport, was shot dead by police at 6.15 p.m. The news barely registered with Oliver, but on the Saturday morning crowds gather outside Tottenham police station, protesting against the police. The demonstration begins peacefully but erupts into violence. That evening, arson and looting break out across Tottenham. Twenty-six police officers are injured.

  The Camerons are blissfully unaware. They are relaxing in a villa in the Tuscan province of Arezzo. Ed Llewellyn is in Paris where his wife is shortly to give birth. Kate Fall is deep in the country, while press secretary Gabby Bertin is in New York. Cameron picks up the news but is not remotely eager to break away from Samantha and the children to return to London. It is the right judgement. ‘You can’t bring the prime minister back from his holiday every time something goes wrong, because you might be seen to be panicking,’ said a Number 10 aide. Oliver decides to sound out Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell and the Number 10 permanent secretary, Jeremy Heywood. ‘I think this is becoming very serious,’ he tells them down the phone. Their response is to go easy on bringing the PM back. ‘What will he do?’ is Heywood’s response. Officials believe that it is dangerous to be seen to be panicking, which might escalate the violence. Besides, prime ministers need holidays like anybody else.

  Sunday 7 August sees violence spread from Tottenham across London. Photographs appear in the papers of a relaxed Cameron in casual clothes, tanned and smiling, in a café in Montevarchi, ‘with his arm round a waitress he had forgotten to tip on a previous visit’. Placed side by side with images of wrecked buildings in Tottenham, it makes uncomfortable viewing for the prime minister’s team.1 He speaks to the Home Secretary, Theresa May: her opinion is that he need not return.

  Events take an uglier turn still on Monday night. The capital descends into chaos. Oliver has been watching the scenes of vandalism and looting from shops on the television screens in his office in Number 12. He is mesmerised and shocked by the shots from helicopters of areas of London ablaze. Some of the images are akin to the horror of the Blitz. Oliver might be the new kid on the block, but he is convinced that the prime minister needs to come back. He phones Heywood and tells him the political requirement is now for the prime minister to come back. In Paris, Llewellyn too is watching the unfolding picture on Sky television with mounting dismay. In the early evening he calls Cameron, imploring him to return that night. ‘I’m coming to that conclusion myself,’ Cameron tells his chief of staff. The fear is the police may not be able to control the rioters in London, and, galvanised by social media, ‘spontaneous’ riots are spreading across several cities. A conference call at 7.30 p.m. with his team confirms his intentions. ‘I want to go to every area affected, meet the people affected, and understand for myself exactly what is happening and why,’ he tells them.2 An RAF plane is mobilised to fly to Italy to bring him back. He leaves the villa at midnight, boards the plane at Pisa at 3 a.m. and walks through the door of Downing Street just before 6 a.m. ‘It was the right call,’ he tells a relieved Oliver. Llewellyn has calculated he can hop back to London on the Eurostar before his first child is born. ‘If the PM had delayed his return another twelve or twenty-four hours, it would have been a disaster,’ he is later heard to say. From nine o’clock that evening, several fires are burning across the capital. It proves the busiest night for the London fire brigade since the Second World War. Is this conflagration the first event in a complete breakdown of civil society unleashed by Cameron’s austerity programme, which, one year in, is showing no signs of working?

  Not for the first time, Cameron understands the near impossible demands on a prime minister. Back too early and he would have been slated for grandstanding. Too late, and he would have ceded control of the agenda to Ed Miliband, who is back from a family holiday in Devon on Monday night and saying he is ‘shocked by the scenes we are seeing in parts of London and Birmingham’, or to Clegg, who is preparing to return from holiday in the West Country. Boris Johnson, himself heavily criticised for his absence, decides to fly back from his family holiday in the Rockies. National disasters raise the stakes for all. As Cameron wrestles with tiredness after his night flight, he hears Theresa May on Radio 4’s Today programme saying that the disorder is on a scale ‘not seen in this country for many
years’.3 Nothing, he realises, can prepare one for the loneliness of being PM.

  On Tuesday 9 August Cameron has an update with Clegg and May at 8 a.m., and chairs the meeting in Cabinet Office Briefing Room A (COBRA) at 9 a.m. The room is crowded with ministers, officials and police. Standing space only is available for the less senior officials. Cameron is disconcerted by the police. Their reaction to the rioting the night before is to claim an operational success, despite the riots spreading to Birmingham with 400 arrests being made due to ‘copycat criminal activity’.4 ‘No, no, no!’ says Cameron furiously. ‘Your job is to intervene and stop it.’ The public mood is one of incomprehension and a feeling that the police are standing by and watching whilst the rioting is taking place and buildings are burning. Cameron says, ‘Look, you have one more go to get this right, otherwise we’ll do it my way.’ In his mind, he is already envisaging curfews and allowing use of water cannons – an anti-riot device that had been used in Northern Ireland, but never on the British mainland. Police numbers in London need to be more than doubled, he says, and they should dramatically increase the number of arrests. (By early Tuesday evening, the total number of arrests would climb to 563, leaving no spare police cells in the capital.5)

  After the meeting is over at 11 a.m., Cameron comes outside Number 10 to make a statement:

  These are sickening scenes – scenes of people looting, vandalising, thieving, robbing, scenes of people attacking police officers and even attacking fire crews as they’re trying to put out fires. This is criminality, pure and simple, and it has to be confronted and defeated … I have this very clear message to those people who are responsible for this wrongdoing and criminality: you will feel the full force of the law and if you are old enough to commit these crimes you are old enough to face the punishments. And to these people I would say this: you are not only wrecking the lives of others, you’re not only wrecking your own communities – you are potentially wrecking your own life too.6

  The words are substantially Cameron’s own, coming from deep inside him. He knows that the nation looks to him for a grip that had been lacking over the previous few days and he is determined to provide it. So serious does Cameron judge the crisis that he announces that Parliament will be recalled that Thursday.

  Craig Oliver and Liz Sugg have been planning which of the affected areas in London he should visit. Sugg is described as Cameron’s ‘secret weapon’, ever resourceful and sans pareil at masterminding his travel. She dispatches him to Croydon in South London, where he visits members of the Reeves family whose 144-year-old furniture store had been burnt down the previous day. He views a corner shop which is still burning. He talks to Kit Malthouse, chair of the Metropolitan Police Authority. Relations with the police are still uneasy after the previous two days: politicians have been blaming the police for handling the riots ineptly, while the police response has been that the politicians are in no position to criticise when they have been on holiday. Cameron and Malthouse agree to work together and that the police will have the political backing to get tough. Having insisted on visiting Tottenham to survey the damage on Monday, despite some resistance in Number 10 that it might be seen as an over-reaction, Clegg then travels to Birmingham the following day.7 The visit does not go well. He is booed by crowds on a walkabout in the city centre. ‘Go home,’ young people in the crowd shout at him. ‘Go on – run, run, run’, they shout at his car as it departs.8

  Boris Johnson encounters similar heckling when on Tuesday he visits Clapham Junction, scene of some of the worst rioting. ‘I came as fast as I could,’ he says, when angry residents ask why he hadn’t come home earlier. ‘Where were the police?’ they shout at him. ‘Tonight, we’re going to have huge numbers of police on the streets,’ he replies.9 ‘People felt angry because they’d seen their shops, their property attacked and, sod it, the sodding mayor has been somewhere else,’ he says later.10 As the heckling grows louder, he appears disoriented and his usual loquacious charm eludes him. But when someone hands Johnson a green broom, he marches defiantly towards the crowds in the street, saying that he is on the side of innocent Londoners. The mood suddenly turns and the heckling subsides. Cameron’s aides urge him to do the same. ‘No,’ he tells them. ‘It’s not prime ministerial.’11 That evening, violence spreads to Merseyside and Manchester.

  A second Cabinet meeting is convened on Wednesday 10 August, following a meeting of COBRA. News is received that three young men have been killed in Birmingham when a speeding car hit them in the early hours of the morning: witnesses say they were only trying to protect local property from being attacked.12 COBRA debates the impact of the greatly enhanced police presence on the streets of London the night before, with officer numbers rising from 6,000 to 16,000. Cameron asks for an early assessment of the increase. The meeting is more measured than the day before, and relations with the police more harmonious. Afterwards, Cameron gives a second statement on the street outside Number 10, promising that the police would have whatever resources are needed to bring the rioting under control, including water cannons. He is keen to point out that the ‘more robust approach’ is working.13 However, water cannons are played down by the Home Secretary and the president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, Sir Hugh Orde, both speaking on Radio 4’s The World at One. ‘The police are very clear – they tell me, at the moment, they don’t need water cannon,’ May declares on the radio.14 Later that day, Cameron goes to the West Midlands and meets residents, police and local officials in Birmingham and Wolverhampton. Earlier in the day, Tariq Jahan, the father of one of the three men run over and killed in Birmingham, who just hours before had tried to save his son’s life, made an emotional appeal for calm. ‘Why, why? … It makes no sense why people are behaving in this way and taking the lives of three innocent people.’15 The impact of his words, more than any other statement uttered by politicians, is immediate. That night the streets are silent.

  By the morning of Thursday 11 August, order begins to return. No major incidents of violence are recorded. As Oliver emerges from Hammersmith Tube station, he notices a sense of calm, and sees police everywhere: ‘The levers had been pulled. The response was very, very strong.’16 The House of Commons convenes for its special recall. At 11.30 a.m., Cameron thanks the House for returning and proceeds to highlight a timeline of events and what is being done to restore order. Directly addressing the victims, he says:

  No one will forget the images of the woman jumping from a burning building, or of the furniture shop that had survived the Blitz but has now tragically been burnt to the ground; and everyone will have been impressed by the incredibly brave words of Tariq Jahan, a father in Birmingham whose son was so brutally and tragically run over and killed. Shops, businesses and homes – too many have been vandalised or destroyed and I give the people affected this promise: we will help you repair the damage, get your businesses back up and running and support your communities.17

  Later that afternoon, Theresa May addresses the House claiming that ‘the last five days have been a dark time for everybody who cares about their community and their country’. She argues that the violence seen throughout the country ‘raises many searching questions, and the answers may be painful to hear and difficult to put right’.18 She announces that courts are being opened up to process cases very quickly and that very tough sentences will be enforced. She announces all police leave will be cancelled. Miliband’s tone changes from condemnation to showing more empathy for the plight of the protestors. ‘We all have a duty to ask ourselves why there are people who feel they have nothing to lose and everything to gain from wanton vandalism and looting,’ he tells the House, before calling on the government to reconsider spending cuts to the police.19 Cameron’s stark expression of outrage strikes more of a chord in the press than Miliband’s overtly political response.

  By Friday 12 August the riots have petered out completely. In total, over 3,000 people have been arrested and five killed. An exhausted Cameron meets Samantha and the
children back from Italy at Gatwick airport before going on to Dean. On Sunday, the Cleggs come to lunch. Cameron now looks for an opportunity to set the riots in context. In Opposition, fired up by Steve Hilton, his argument had been that society overall had been broken. He thinks he must distance himself from this umbrella view: British society isn’t broken, only parts of it are. Specifically, there are 125,000 problem families in the country – though many millions of families are not broken. These families have been the focus of one of Whitehall’s most tenacious figures and a former appointee of Tony Blair’s, Louise Casey. She is later to be appointed director general of the ‘troubled families unit’.