Cameron at 10

by Anthony Seldon

  Cameron is boyishly pleased that the Jubilee coincides with his premiership. He wants to hold a street party as part of the ‘big Jubilee lunch’, an initiative in which the whole nation is invited to share lunch with neighbours. Rain dictates that the event moves inside. To mark the conclusion of the Jubilee year, on 18 December 2012, the Queen will attend a Cabinet meeting at Downing Street.

  Johnson only just squeezing home in the mayoral election, and the very wet Diamond Jubilee, take some shine off the summer. So too does the NHS bill, causing continuing difficulties, as is proposed House of Lords reform, and the Leveson Inquiry, still in full swing. In June, Osborne goes before the inquiry and more embarrassing text messages come out about Cameron. With all these challenges, if the Olympics now go wrong, it may well spell the end for Cameron, and he knows it. The games are New Labour’s legacy to the Tories, achieved by Blair in July 2005, one day before the 7/7 terrorist attacks on London. Cameron’s own efforts to secure a major sports tournament do not go so well. He returned home empty-handed from the English bid to host the FIFA World Cup in 2018. He was deeply upset and angry about losing, and Russia being victorious. He suspects foul play. ‘We really felt we had a good shot. But we felt we had been completely misled,’ says one of his team.

  Not screwing up the Olympics is thus a major preoccupation for Cameron. ‘If this goes wrong on our watch, it will be a disaster,’ he repeats regularly in the first half of the year. The consequences would be ‘absolutely dire’, confirms an official. ‘The media was just waiting for some kind of disaster.’ Cameron views the Olympics as ‘a humungous opportunity to show off the UK in the best possible light, to tell the world “we were open for business”’, as Ed Llewellyn puts it.5 In the run-up to the Olympics, two weeks of global industry conferences are planned focusing on a different sector each day, to be kicked off by a major British business promotion event. The Battersea Power Station redevelopment, to cost £8 billion and expected to create 20,000 jobs, is launched as part of ‘the biggest ever drive to attract investment into Britain’.6 Cameron is so determined nothing is going to spoil the games that he invests intensive personal time to ensure that they are a huge success.

  Terrorist attacks are a principal worry in his mind. He wants the SAS brought up from their base in Hereford to minimise any possible risk. Surface-to-air missiles are placed on tower blocks in East London to shoot down incoming rockets and hijacked airplanes. The police are given greater powers to search people and property. This is the largest police operation on British soil since the 1926 General Strike. ‘Our view was that if terrorists know that we are there, and they won’t get away with anything, that will minimise the risk,’ says an official. Cyber terrorism, though, proves to be the greatest threat, with a plot to knock out the lighting for the opening ceremony.7 A police raid on a bedroom in a private house clinically eliminates the risk.

  Cameron has great self-belief that his personal attention alone will maximise the chances of the Olympics being the big success he so desperately craves. He had moved into full swing in January 2012, chairing monthly meetings of the Olympic committee of Cabinet, which is serviced by the Olympic secretariat, set up the previous month. This works alongside the National Security secretariat for the duration of the Olympics, and is overseen by an official, Simon Case. Cameron is a forceful chairman of the Olympic committee, on which sit senior Cabinet ministers, heads of the security services, Seb Coe and Boris Johnson. With the possibility that Johnson might lose the mayoral election to Livingstone, officials contemplate the historically unusual possibility of having Conservatives, Lib Dems and Labour all on the same Cabinet committee. Risks it considers include immigration queues at Heathrow, London transport grinding to a halt, and government visitors from abroad not receiving requisite respect. The experience of opening the Millennium Dome on 31 December 1999, when a fifth of the 10,500-strong audience did not receive their tickets in the post, is very much on their mind.8 So too are the Beijing Olympics in 2008, with embarrassments including dubbed voices and false fireworks. Jealousy plays a part too: the team reckon more money had been spent on the opening ceremony in Beijing than they had to spend on the entire Olympics. By May, the secretariat has a hundred people, and they are operating 24/7 from their war room underneath COBRA.

  Three weeks before the opening ceremony, panic sets in when G4S, the security firm brought in to staff the venues, reveals that it cannot fulfil its remit. Cameron steps in. He chairs two key meetings of the Olympic committee to arrange bringing in troops. The week before the opening ceremony, he chairs daily meetings. On the Monday, commander-in-chief of land forces General Nick Parker briefs David Richards that a further 1,200 troops are required. Richards and Jeremy Hunt persuade the PM of the case, against the advice of Theresa May. She is angry. She later comes to the operational command centre at High Wycombe and says to Parker, ‘you are the general who deployed far too many troops’. The G4S furore adds to a perception in the country that preparations are not going well. The press are having a field day: everything from G4S to concerns over temporary ‘Olympic lanes’ to speed officials through the London traffic lead to a series of negative headlines. A worried Craig Oliver calls a number of newspaper editors. ‘Look, you need to give this a fair wind. Obviously there will be teething problems, but don’t write it off as a disaster before it’s begun.’ The coverage changes.

  Danny Boyle, the film and theatre director responsible for the opening ceremony, comes to show Cameron what he has planned. The PM is disconcerted by his focus on the NHS, especially given contemporary sensitivities with the bill. He would have preferred something more ‘Churchillian’ but knows he has to be very careful what he says. He makes it clear to Boyle that he would have liked the opening ceremony to be a celebration of all the UK was most proud of, not just the NHS.

  Number 10 puts great thought into the events Cameron is going to see, giving due weight to the Paralympics to avoid accusations he is not taking them as seriously. The London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) advise Cameron’s team which British athletes he should see at both the Olympics and Paralympics. He is very conscious of striking the right balance and not being seen to be ‘sitting around watching sport all day’ when he should be running the country. Liz Sugg, his events and travel co-ordinator, works with LOCOG to ensure he attends the right events at the right time, and that he is in place to meet key figures from the Olympic movement as well as foreign leaders. John Casson, the foreign affairs private secretary, has a big say. He wants to ensure opportunities for bilateral meetings with foreign leaders are maximised. A ‘judo summit’ takes place with Putin. The Whitehall saying ‘don’t waste a good funeral’ morphs into ‘don’t waste a good Olympics’. Cameron has no history of interest in attending sporting events or following the Olympics. He enjoys tennis, and will keep up with news during Wimbledon fortnight: he is thrilled to be present when Andy Murray wins the Championships in 2013. He also follows Test matches, and will often have cricket on the screen when he is working in his study or listen to it on the radio when he is in the car. Nevertheless, Cameron finds himself thoroughly swept up in the Olympics, the pageant, excitement and sense of occasion.

  After the euphoria of the opening ceremony, the games themselves start badly on 28 July, with criticisms of empty seats (exacerbated by officials from around the world booking mass seats but not bothering to use them in the early rounds). On the first day of competitions, Cameron goes to The Mall to see the cyclists. The expectation, on the back of Bradley Wiggins’s success in winning the Tour de France a few weeks before, is for British cyclists to triumph. When they don’t, the press write stories about the ‘curse of Cameron’.9 But then British success starts taking off. He is in the velodrome on 2 August, along with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry, to see Britain win gold in cycling. He rejoices in the success of Mo Farah, Jessica Ennis, and especially Nicola Adams, the world’s first Olympic female boxing champion. The beach
volleyball is taking place on Horse Guards Parade just beyond the garden of Downing Street, and he is frustrated it isn’t visible from the upstairs rooms of Number 10 because the large stands obscure it, though he manages to attend a game with Samantha and the children.

  An awkward moment comes when Cameron is booed, albeit drowned out by applause from the crowds, whilst presenting Ellie Simmonds with her second gold swimming medal of the Paralympic games;10 ‘the PM loved giving her the medal and the boos weren’t noticeable in the room so he didn’t hear them,’ explains a close aide. It pales into insignificance beside the treatment of Osborne, who is roundly booed presenting medals to the winners of the men’s 400 metres at the Paralympics.11 When Seb Coe had phoned him to ask if he would be willing to present a medal at the Paralympics, he wondered about the wisdom of doing so. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked. Osborne has taken his children to several Olympic and Paralympic events, and has an intimation of impending disaster as the time for him to present the medals approaches: ‘I thought I can’t get out of this. I am slated to present a medal. But I knew it was going to be a disaster the moment I walked out.’ He laughs it off at the time, saying it was ‘not surprising’ that the chancellor will be unpopular at a time of austerity, but afterwards describes it as ‘a pretty unpleasant experience’.12 His children are watching him, and for the first time perhaps, they realise the full enormity of the job their father does. For all his self-confidence and high intelligence, Osborne is a more sensitive and vulnerable figure than he appears. Andrew Feldman, watching the grizzly affair on television, thinks, ‘We can’t possibly win from here.’ He comments, ‘We had all hoped the Olympics, as well as the Jubilee, would give us the boost we needed. It wasn’t happening.’13

  Ultimately, however, the Olympics and Paralympics prove a great sporting success: Britain comes third in both the Olympics and Paralympic gold medal tables (with twenty-nine Olympic and thirty-four Paralympic gold medals). The Olympics are also organisational and cultural successes. Politicians, officials and military combine to do a very professional job. It is a financial success too, helped by the Treasury insisting on a large contingency back in 2005–6, much-needed in view of the recession, unforeseen back in those Elysian days. GDP figures show a minor Olympic dividend, though less than hoped. Cameron soon turns his attention to the legacy. School sport is a particular opportunity, an area he knows is not the natural habitat of Michael Gove. A school sport initiative is launched in January 2013, with Jessica Ennis playing a key part, though inevitably the government is criticised over the following years for not making more of the legacy.

  After a torrid 2012 to date, Cameron’s mood is lifted by the Olympics. He takes Samantha and the children to Majorca for a few days between both sets of games and is back in London on 29 August to attend the Paralympics. He then goes to Cornwall for a quick break, but is back on Monday 3 September for a government reshuffle. Planned initially for the spring, it was pushed back to July because of the fuel crisis. The stormy end of the session – ninety-one Tory MPs voted against the government on Lords Reform on 10 July – and with the Olympics imminent, Number 10 decided to push it back again until after the summer break. Neither Cameron nor Osborne are enthusiasts of reshuffles. Cameron came to power believing that they almost never resolve the problems they were designed to solve, and almost always produce fresh problems. Craig Oliver had been reading up about reshuffles under the Conservatives and Labour over the previous thirty years, which reinforces their belief that they should be minimised. A conversation with Godric Smith, one of Blair’s media team, further fortifies their prejudices.

  Besides Cameron and Osborne, Llewellyn and Fall are key figures in working out the details of the 4 September reshuffle. Conservative MPs have become deeply suspicious and resentful of Osborne’s influence over appointments. Osborne prides himself on being very good at picking people. Mark Carney, appointed Bank of England governor in July 2013, and Paul Deighton, formerly chief executive of LOCOG and appointed a Treasury minister in January 2013, are two appointments with which he is especially pleased. Other figures owing their advancement to him include Matthew Hancock, Greg Hands, Sajid Javid and Paul Kirby, head of the Policy Unit.

  Final touches are made over pizza in the chancellor’s dining room in Number 11. Each fresh appointment will be announced on Twitter in real time, so all have the same story at the same time. The corner piece of the reshuffle is the decision to move Andrew Lansley. He has ‘had his card marked since the spring’ and only the delayed reshuffle allows him to continue in office so long. Cameron takes time to accept Lansley has to go; their interview is particularly painful. Lansley believes that he is being offered an EU commissioner job for the next round in 2014. In the interim, to the surprise of Cameron’s team, he accepts the leadership of the House of Commons, which is widely considered a demotion.

  Appointing Jeremy Hunt as his successor makes admirable sense. Cameron was first impressed by Hunt when he helped him prepare for the 2010 TV debates and liked the calm bedside manner and confidence he exuded. His opinion of Hunt rockets during the Olympics: Hunt’s loyalty, mastery of detail and ability to foresee and overcome problems persuade many in Number 10 that he can handle a much bigger brief. Getting him out of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport following the Leveson Inquiry is another reason for the move. They worry that the Murdoch press might react against his appointment because of the furore over the BSkyB bid, but no such campaign materialises.

  The reshuffle tries to address Number 10’s fragile grip over the party. Sayeeda Warsi must go as party co-chairman. While many admire her resolve, she had a number of disagreements over campaign strategy in the run-up to the 2012 local elections with senior figures in CCHQ, including the director of campaigns Stephen Gilbert, a stalwart of the party machine. Cameron and Osborne want someone who will create a feeling of optimism and purpose with the party in the country. Feldman has sorted the organisational and financial side of CCHQ as co-chairman; it now needs a charismatic leader to galvanise the party. They alight on Grant Shapps as co-chairman, who has done a good job as Minister of Housing. Cameron never found it easy to find the right party chairman, but he believes Shapps, who is eager for the job, will be biddable as the election approaches.

  Finding the right chief whip is another ongoing problem. Patrick McLoughlin has done the job since May 2005. He is widely liked and trusted, but with further fierce battles coming up, they need a more assertive figure. Enter Andrew Mitchell, Osborne’s idea. He had been a strong and effective International Development Secretary, had been in the Whips’ Office in the 1990s, and has a military bearing from his days in the Royal Tank Regiment. He is on the right of the party too, a benefit. Cameron’s team are desperate to put the travails with the party over the last two years firmly behind them, and they believe Mitchell will ‘sort out the party’. His assertiveness is evident from his very first minutes in his new post. Mitchell insists that Number 10 does not interfere with the running of the Whips’ Office. ‘Mitchell made clear that in recent years the Whips’ Office had been too much of a “sergeants’ mess” and it needed to revert to its previous [role] as an “officers’ mess” composed of the young and talented passing through and older more reassuring senior types,’ recalls one. Have they appointed the right man? ‘Some of us were saying: “Look, it might not be too late to review this decision.”’ McLoughlin is happy enough to leave, and is flattered by Cameron’s phone call to him the previous Friday to say, ‘I would like you to head a major department.’ He is invited to become Transport Secretary, with a clear instruction to press ahead with the high-speed rail project HS2.

  Warsi’s departure, on top of widespread critical comment that Cameron has insufficient women in his government, helps explain the promotions of Maria Miller to succeed Hunt at Culture, Theresa Villiers to succeed Owen Paterson at the Northern Ireland Office, and Justine Greening to succeed Mitchell at International Development. Chris Grayling is promoted to Justice Secretary. A
s one of only two figures to hold positions in the shadow Cabinet but not to receive Cabinet posts in 2010 because of the Lib Dems, he has much support. Nick Herbert, the other shadow Cabinet minister to miss out, is judged not to have handled his disappointment as well. Grayling, in contrast, quietly put his head down, and did well as Minister of State for Employment. It means shifting Ken Clarke sideways to Minister without Portfolio. He is lucky to survive. He had been squabbling with May at the Home Office which created tension, and had been winding up Cameron with talk of prisoner rights and prisoner voting. Yet senior aides in Number 10 felt his ‘wise experience’, shorn of departmental responsibility, would still be of value to them.

  The Justice Secretary berth had originally been cleared to make way for Iain Duncan Smith. Cameron is much more instinctively loyal to Tory grandees than Osborne, who is an iconoclast by comparison. But two years of listening to Osborne’s belittling of IDS and his reforms at the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) have left their mark. ‘You’ve been there a couple of years, would you like to move on to Justice?’ Cameron asks. ‘I’ll think about it,’ he tells the PM.14 IDS subsequently discussed the move with BBC political editor Nick Robinson, musing that he had been quite attracted to the idea because it would enable him to develop his thinking about the rehabilitation of offenders. That night, Danny Finkelstein, The Times journalist and close friend of Osborne’s, goes on BBC2’s Newsnight and speculates about the reasons for IDS moving from DWP. IDS firmly suspects Osborne’s hand behind what he is saying, although Finkelstein insists he had been thinking through the logic of the move, rather than taking any cue from his friend. IDS tells Cameron the next day that he wants to remain at DWP. ‘If he really wanted to move me, he could have done,’ insists IDS. ‘But I said that I wanted to see through the reforms.’15 Forcing a former Conservative leader to move against his will is not something Cameron wants to countenance.