Throughout the autumn of 2012, Number 10 and many MPs continue to believe that the Lib Dems have ‘pulled a fast one’ on them and argue that boundary reform was linked to AV, never to the House of Lords. They come out in public and allege that the Lib Dems were never sincere about backing boundary reform, because it could damage them heavily at the 2015 election as some Lib Dem MPs would lose the benefit of incumbency. ‘Failure to get House of Lords reform through was just the pretext for not supporting boundaries,’ Feldman and many others believe.31 Is there some truth in this claim? The answer is yes. After failing on AV and Lords reform, boundary changes are simply no longer possible for the Lib Dems, even though legislation has been passed to enact them. ‘If we have the boundary changes, we will lose so many seats. If that happens, they’ll get rid of me as leader of the party,’ Clegg himself admits. ‘They would then have to work with another leader, so the whole thing is impossible.’ Clegg’s aides confirm that he would not have survived if he had whipped his MPs into delivering harmful boundary changes, having failed to deliver both AV and House of Lords reform for the party. ‘The idea that Nick could whip his party into voting for all the blue bits once the yellow bits had got nowhere was an impossibility,’ says an aide. Some Conservatives, like Jesse Norman, believe the Lib Dems were never going to agree to boundary reform regardless of AV or Lords reform, while others, like Michael Gove, think that they might have supported it; either way, it is unknowable.
The parliamentary vote on boundary reform is held on 29 January 2013. The result is long expected: MPs vote by 334 to 292 to delay reform to 2018 at the earliest. Last-minute attempts are made by the Tories to persuade the Democratic Unionists, the SNP and Plaid Cymru to support them, but the will simply isn’t there. The Conservatives are outvoted. The breakdown in coalition relations in the Lords, where Lib Dem peers amended the legislation, had precipitated Strathclyde’s decision to resign on 7 January. The vote is the first time Lib Dem ministers vote against their Conservative colleagues in the Commons. Earlier that month, debate had taken place inside Number 10 about the Conservatives offering their own nuclear retaliation, withdrawing from the coalition unless Lib Dem MPs support the boundary changes. They know that the Lib Dems will be hammered if it precipitates a general election. Llewellyn, the ‘ultimate protector of the coalition’, as insiders describe him, will not hear of it, and neither will Cameron. But the fact that some in Cameron’s court are considering ending the coalition early only shows how very jaundiced relations have become.
An angry exchange takes place between Cameron and Clegg in Number 10. Cameron makes it clear he feels very let down by Clegg. After the meeting, insiders say they have never heard him speak so critically of the DPM. Both men feel the other has gone against private understandings. Even though Cameron knew the defeat was coming, the result is still a rude shock. He is in a bad place. Conservative MPs begin saying: ‘You told us it was essential to have boundary changes to win the general election. We don’t have them. What now?’ One insider believes that ‘Many thought it was the last straw in the relationship with the Lib Dems’. To Hague it is the worst coalition crisis of the five years.32 Officials think the same. It is the only time that Jeremy Heywood, in his capacity as Cabinet Secretary, takes out the official papers to examine how a minority government might operate, holding several meetings in his room in the Cabinet Office to explore the options. Some officials are very surprised that the Lib Dems have gone ahead with their threat on boundaries.
Ironically, experiencing the depths of the descent from the Rose Garden harmony helps make the principals come to their senses. Powerful forces may be pulling the coalition apart, principally Conservative MPs and Lib Dem purists, but at the centre, the forces are centripetal. For all their anger and critical words about each other in the privacy of their enclaves, Clegg and Cameron retain a respect for each other which goes far beyond mutual survival. They come from the same world, are both rational and logical, and don’t let emotion overcome them. Civil servants watching them together are apt to think of the mafia expression: ‘differences are strictly business, not personal’. Osborne can be the most impulsive of the four on the Quad, but even he retains throughout a close relationship with Danny Alexander, arguably the most pragmatic. These four alone hold everything together in these terrible months.
Clegg at heart also knows how much he needs the coalition. No sooner has Chris Huhne departed than another rival for the leadership strolls into the limelight: Vince Cable. Clegg’s staff become obsessed during 2012 with the Business Secretary. ‘Vince was on manoeuvres with Plan A not working,’ says a Cameron aide. And yet, the common enemy of Cable helps reunite Clegg and Cameron.
Both leaderships need to discover a common narrative. The Conservatives worry that Clegg is being driven towards greater ‘differentiation’, while the Lib Dem leadership worry that Cameron is drifting to the right to buy off UKIP supporters. Within days of the Coalition Agreement being signed off in May 2010, Letwin had said to Clegg, ‘The time will come when we will need to renew our programme for government.’ Clegg is keen and agreed saying ‘You have to refuel your tank at some point mid-flight.’33 ‘Our vows will need to be rededicated in the future,’ Letwin had written to Cameron shortly afterwards.34 Embryonic conversations took place in mid-2011 and the early summer of 2012. On 16 July, Cameron and Clegg appear together at a railway depot at Smethwick in the West Midlands. They announce a Midterm Review to be published in the autumn, alongside a £9 billion railway investment programme. In the September 2012 reshuffle, David Laws returns to government as Minister of State at the Department of Education and the Cabinet Office. Laws is a figure who is trusted by the Conservatives. Clegg appoints him leader of the Midterm Review on the Lib Dem side, working with Letwin and the Number 10 Policy Unit. Aside from discussions on Budgets and Autumn Statements, Laws and Letwin now often attend meetings of the Quad.
The work begins in earnest before the party conferences. The review will be both a celebration of what has already happened as well as a statement of collective intent for the remaining two and a half years. The coalition partners are delighted to discover that over 80% of what had been laid out in the Coalition Agreement has either been enacted or is in train. This is widely briefed out to show, not least to both parties in it, that the coalition government has had significant policy successes. Alighting on common policies for the future is more problematic. The Conservatives want further welfare reform. Clegg puts his foot down. He made a video in September 2012 apologising for student loans: if Cameron will make a similar apology for his broken promise to pensioners, Clegg says he will agree to include welfare. Now it is Cameron who refuses to budge. A way through the deadlock is found, and they agree on long-term care, a new single-tier pension regime, and more spending on roads. The review talks help heal divisions between both parties. The package is agreed finally at an away day at Chequers in December 2012. Cameron’s team push the launch date back to January 2013 because they want to show they have impetus going into the New Year, and to finally draw a line under the annus horribilis, an overused phrase but one the leadership feels aptly describes 2012. The cap on the cost of social care is agreed in a conference call between Cameron, Clegg and their staff on New Year’s Day.
Cameron and Clegg launch The Coalition: Together in the National Interest on 7 January. The fifty-page document contains a scorecard of what the coalition had pledged in the initial agreement, what it has achieved, and what it plans to do. ‘We are dealing with the deficit, rebuilding the economy, reforming welfare and education, and supporting hard-working families through tough times,’ the introduction says. ‘On all of these key aims, our parties, after thirty-two months of coalition, remain steadfast and united.’35
Cameron feels a new confidence this January. It isn’t only the unanimity around the Midterm Review: he also has a cunning plan to neutralise his European problem and with it, he hopes, to swat UKIP. But he is still very far from out of the woods. The fin
al four months of 2012 have been especially testing on him politically and personally. Even those closest to him are struck by his inner reserves of optimism and strength, and how much he draws on Samantha as his rock.
TWENTY
Halfway Point: Autumn Blues
September–December 2012
It is the autumn of 2012, the midterm point in the parliament. Cameron is just weeks away from being challenged as party leader if he doesn’t turn a corner. For six months or more he has faced problem after problem. The economy is showing no signs of improvement, nor are the opinion polls, and his flagship domestic policies in health, welfare and education are coming under intensive fire. He desperately needs a successful reshuffle to rejuvenate the government and to give the speech of his life at the party conference.
The reshuffle on 4 September goes down well. Optimism grows in Number 10. But just fifteen days later Andrew Mitchell, whose promotion to chief whip is one of the centrepieces, finds himself in the middle of an explosive and toxic fracas. On the evening of 19 September, he leaves his office in 9 Downing Street, jumps on his bicycle and rides up to the main gates leading onto Whitehall. In spite of usually cycling through the main gates, he is directed by the policeman to the pedestrian gate. As he does so, Mitchell utters some of the most contested words in the entire five years of the government. According to leaked police logs, later apparently backed up by an eyewitness account, he called the police ‘plebs’. This was political dynamite. The next morning the Sun reported the exchange. What was so damaging was that the words fitted into the narrative of a patrician government treating working people in a patronising and offensive way. Mitchell later apologises, arguing that he said ‘I thought you guys were supposed to fucking help us,’ but adamantly denying that he used the emotive word ‘plebs’.1 However, in a libel trial in November 2014, Mr Justice Mitting ruled that he was satisfied that ‘at least on the balance of probabilities … Mr Mitchell did speak the words alleged, or at least something so close to them as to amount to the same, including the politically toxic word pleb’.2
Cameron is furious when he hears about the episode. Number 10 have already become frustrated with Mitchell. They are very happy with the job he did as International Development Secretary in championing the 0.7% of national income for aid, a cause close to the prime minister’s heart. But now that they are working up close and personal with him as chief whip, they find him restive. He speedily brings greater operational and political clarity to the Whips’ Office, and a regimental sense of order, but ruffles many feathers in doing so.
The episode has been filmed on security cameras. Ed Llewellyn, Chris Martin and Oliver Dowden go downstairs in Number 10 to view all the tapes, which unfortunately do not have recorded sound. But after many viewings they cannot tell what Mitchell said, let alone what actually happened. Mitchell is summoned to Downing Street. The prime minister decides he will have to adjudicate personally. He wants to believe Mitchell’s account of what happened, but equally he wants to be seen to be supporting the police. For four and a half weeks, Cameron stands by his man, even while the pressure mounts. Cameron’s team do not imagine for one moment that there could have been a police conspiracy, but they simply don’t understand why the police’s version of events does not reconcile with Mitchell’s explanation. It is a puzzle. Cameron is later stunned when he watches a Channel 4 programme presented by the veteran political reporter Michael Crick which calls into serious doubt the evidence provided by the police. Over the next two years, at least four police officers are sacked for misconduct and one imprisoned.
From 25–28 September, Cameron is in New York addressing the UN General Assembly, before travelling to São Paolo, Brasilia and Rio de Janeiro. The noise from ‘Plebgate’, as it comes to be known, is growing. Cameron just wants to focus on his conference speech. On Sunday 30 September, he invites Boris Johnson, who has been separately ruffling feathers, to Chequers. Number 10 are irritated that Boris has weighed into Plebgate on the side of the police, saying it would have been ‘wholly commonsensical’ to arrest Mitchell for his behaviour.3 Johnson has also accused Cameron of preparing the ground for a U-turn on a third runway at Heathrow, which would kill off ‘Boris Island’, and has claimed an ‘in/out’ referendum on EU membership is unnecessary.4 Boris is slated to make two speeches at the conference in Birmingham. Number 10 believe he is ‘on manoeuvres’ against their man.5 So they release a statement from Cameron to say that ‘Boris has been a great friend of mine for a long time and a first-class mayor of London.’ Johnson assures Cameron there is no cause for alarm. Whereas Cameron is apt to believe him, George Osborne is more sceptical.6 This is not what either need.
While Miliband is rallying the troops at Labour’s conference in Manchester, Cameron is working from Chequers. Over dinner, and several glasses of wine with three of his Number 10 aides – Andrew Cooper, Ameet Gill and speechwriter Clare Foges – Cameron asks ‘Do you think that Mitchell uttered the word “pleb”?’ Cooper doesn’t think he did, though agrees that ‘it smells a bit fishy: you get the sense it’s not the first time that he’s been cocky with them’. Cameron replies, ‘I just don’t believe he said it. He looked me in the eye, and I cannot believe he said those words. Something here is not adding up.’
Mitchell’s position had come under greater threat when an email was sent to the Whips’ Office on 20 September, allegedly from a bystander outside the gates of Downing Street. ‘Imagine to [sic] our horror when we heard MR MITCHELL shout very loudly at the police officers guarding “YOU ______ PLEBES!!” [sic] and “YOU THINK YOU RUN THE ______ COUNTRY” and just continued to shout obscenities at the poor police officers. My nephew, as was I, totally taken aback by his, [sic] MR MITCHELLS’ [sic] behaviour and the gutter language he used, especially it [sic] appeared directed at the police officers.’7 Cameron had been resisting holding an inquiry, but the pressure has by now become too great, and he directs Jeremy Heywood to investigate the matter swiftly. The Cabinet Secretary concludes the evidence is not clear and certainly not compelling enough to justify forcing the chief whip’s resignation. Osborne, who suggested Mitchell for the post, remains his supporter and tells him, ‘We will stand behind you. But you have to understand that if you have lied, the world will come down on you.’8
Matthew Hancock offers a sober view of the government’s plight. ‘After the omnishambles Budget, we knew we had to have a plan to get back on track.’ It consists of two parts: ‘First, get things stabilised for the party conference and ensure no screw-ups there. Second, have a very good 2012 Autumn Statement.’9 Pulling off these aims is still very much in the balance. Pressure mounts on Cameron’s speech. Clare Foges normally starts thinking in June/July about what he might say in his conference speech, has a session with the team in late July, mulls it over in August and goes flat out on it in September. This year it is different: Craig Oliver and Andrew Cooper have been cooking up themes since April. They recognise that Cameron’s strategy post-Hilton is in a listless state and they need to help the PM find clarity. His party conference speech goes through twenty-eight drafts (although by draft four, in June, the main items had been established).
The question Cameron’s team keep asking is ‘What is our unifying idea?’ Cameron is innately suspicious of talk of vision per se. More pressing is the need to find a recognisable argument, connecting the government’s reforms despite the climate of austerity. At a political Cabinet before full Cabinet in June, Cameron invites every minister to elucidate an overarching argument. After a lengthy discussion, William Hague comes out with ‘We are in a global race, and we will fail unless we become more competitive.’ Ministers nod their heads wisely, a good sign because Cabinet buy-in during this volatile period is essential. ‘We needed something that would lift our agenda beyond merely sorting out the mess Labour had left behind and that didn’t just define everything through the lens of cuts. We needed something positive and forward-looking, and the idea of the global race was key to providing it,’ says Co
oper.10 ‘Frankly, I should have started “global race” when we came into government: the importance of promoting British exports and British economic power abroad gave us a very simple and clear message for my speech in 2012,’ admits Cameron.11 ‘Aspiration’ becomes Cameron’s other key message, via Cooper’s polling. He and Oliver wanted to find a theme true to Cameron that had popular appeal. Research finds that even though most voters don’t use the word ‘aspiration’, the great majority know what it means, and it resonates with them. The research also shows that the Conservatives need to articulate more forcefully that they are on the side of those ‘who work hard and want to get on’ and that they, not the bankers and benefit scroungers, are the real contributors to the economy and the country.
What links both themes is the idea that aspiration will unleash the potential of everyone in Britain, allowing the country to compete better in the global race. These two themes become the organising concept of the government, at least until Lynton Crosby further narrows them down for the 2013 conference. ‘It is very noticeable that the Big Society is there no longer,’ says one of Cameron’s team. Cameron is one of a very small group to mourn the passing of Hilton and his agenda. Oliver and Dowden feel a hum of contentment that they have rationalised the Cameron project around an agenda over which they feel much more ownership. ‘For the first time,’ says one insider, ‘we had a clear narrative about what we stand for. It makes our life much simpler.’ The conference speech is to be the most important of the five Cameron delivers as prime minister, in part because, as Kate Fall says, ‘2012 was the first party conference speech where he said, “This is me, this is what I believe.”’12
The speech has several writers. Steve Hilton makes a brief return from California to help. Padding around shoeless in the PM’s suite on the twenty-second floor of the Hyatt Regency in Birmingham, he writes the slightly patronising section in the speech where Cameron lectures Miliband about taxes. ‘Ed … let me explain to you how it works. When people earn money, it’s their money. Not the government’s: their money. Then, the government takes some of it away in tax. So, if we cut taxes, we’re not giving them money – we are taking less of it away. OK?’ Danny Finkelstein sees the speech very late in the day and says, ‘We need a stark reminder about how bad it was.’ The beginning of the speech runs: ‘In May 2010 … We were entering into government at a grave moment in the modern history of Britain. At a time when people felt uncertainty, even fear. Here was the challenge. To make an insolvent nation solvent again. To set our country back on the path to prosperity that all can share in. To bring home our troops from danger while keeping our citizens safe from terror. To mend a broken society.’ The section concludes: ‘Two and a half years later of course I can’t tell you that all is well, but I can say this: Britain is on the right track.’
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