Cameron at 10

by Anthony Seldon

  Speechwriting begins in great secrecy in early November. The aim is for Cameron to deliver it at the end of the month, but it is postponed until 18 January the following year because of the EU Council. It is then changed again because of the fiftieth anniversary of the Elysée Treaty which will take place on 22 January, with major celebrations in Berlin and Paris; it is then postponed because of the hostage crisis in Algeria of 16–19 January. Cameron has to remain in London to oversee COBRA meetings and co-ordinate Britain’s response. British nationals are among the forty civilians killed when the crisis reaches a bloody conclusion. The morning of 23 January is hurriedly chosen for the speech because it falls between the Elysée celebrations on the 22nd and the start of the four-day World Economic Forum in Davos which Cameron has to travel to later in the day on the 23rd.

  Where should he deliver the speech? The location had been the subject of diplomatic angst for several weeks. Brief consideration is given to Berlin and Brussels. But then the team alighted on the Chamber of Commerce in Amsterdam: the Dutch have a similar outlook on the EU to the British, Mark Rutte is very open to reform, and the hall itself has long been associated with free commerce. All was set until the hostage crisis dictated a move to London, and then the Elysée Treaty celebrations which forced a change in the date. A scramble was on to find a venue: Bloomberg’s modern office building in the heart of the City of London was available and happy to host.

  No speech by Cameron has been more anticipated. Llewellyn, the chief speechwriter, is aware that it has to succeed with three different audiences. Firstly, Eurosceptics in the Tory Party, who need convincing that this will be the first serious attempt since the referendum on membership in 1975 to establish popular consent for the EU. Secondly, the business community: extensive conversations take place with the CBI and groups of business people (which result in a supportive letter to The Times on 24 January, the day after the speech). Getting business onside is crucial for the Conservatives politically. Finally, Cameron has to convince key EU leaders that the speech is not just a cynical ploy to help him out of personal difficulties with his party, but a sincere and credible contribution to the European debate. ‘He had to develop a narrative on why Britain should stay in the EU,’ says one senior official. ‘He began thinking through the speech with one thing in mind: “If I am ever to persuade the public of remaining in, how do I convince them?”’ Merkel is the key. Without her support, the announcement could be a fiasco.

  Wooing Merkel is a major preoccupation on a flight back from the Gulf on 7 November. She is coming to a private dinner in Number 10 that evening. Cameron has an idea: ‘Why don’t we show her a PowerPoint and give some of it in German?’ The team likes the idea: it is a way of engaging her and injecting humour and informality. Further conversations take place with the team back in Downing Street. Hurriedly a presentation is cobbled together, including pictures of Cameron and Merkel hugging. The two topics for their discussion are Cameron’s impending speech, and the EU budget negotiations which are then in full swing. It is decided that the PowerPoint presentation should stick to the technicalities of the EU budget, before moving onto a more wide-ranging conversation. He greets her at the front door and shows her up to the Pillared Room where they have a drink, and then he shows her through the double doors into the Small Dining Room. They sit opposite each other at the table as she is taken through the presentation partly in German on the screen.

  Cameron begins by describing his own Euroscepticism, and how he feels the British public don’t give him the benefit of the doubt over Europe. She asks why frustration with the EU has got so high.

  He provides two responses: ‘First, the single currency was key because it changed everything, and this is exacerbated by the eurozone crisis that Britain is watching from the margins. You are in the midst of a huge existential crisis which we are not part of.’ He tells her that the single currency has thrust itself forward as the most important European project to the detriment of the member states outside the eurozone. As a consequence, the single market has been neglected. He finishes by asking her: ‘What is most important to you – the single market or the single currency?’11 She looks at him and listens intently to every word, attempting to understand what he is saying. At European Councils, she has a habit of studying her fellow leaders very closely, trying to get inside their heads to decide whether or not they are serious. She is reserving judgement on Cameron. Secondly, he tells her, ‘The British people never got a choice to vote on Lisbon. It spread much unhappiness towards the political establishment.’

  Interrupting him, she asks whether he wants to stay in the EU.

  ‘Like many in my party, I’ve supported our membership of the EU all my political life, but I am worried that if I don’t get the reform objectives I’m setting out, I won’t be able to keep Britain in. I am passionate about the single market, I am passionate about foreign policy co-operation, but if I don’t listen to British public opinion, then Britain will depart from Europe. The European project was mis-sold here, so what I want are changes that will make it possible for Britain to stay in.’ Aides listening to the conversation have never heard him give a clearer definition of his European politics.

  The genie is out of the bottle, she replies, implying that antipathy has been allowed to grow in Britain in a way that she wouldn’t have allowed in her own country. Cameron returns to the way the country felt betrayed by the political class over the Lisbon volte-face. She doesn’t fully understand: why has the political class betrayed the people?

  ‘I have a problem with my party,’ he replies, ‘even though elements in the Conservative Party are more pro-Europe than the country, which is even more sceptical.’ He insists the problem is deeper than placating his Eurosceptic backbenchers. It goes to ‘the very heart of the British understanding of democracy’.12

  She probes him about sentiment in the business community. Surely some of them are pro-EU, she asks, insisting that both countries can rally round an agenda of greater competition. They clearly strike common ground here.

  Cameron goes on: ‘But the more I fight for competitiveness in the EU, the more I feel you are leaving me to do it on my own when it is exactly what you want. I find it very frustrating.’

  She is staring very hard at him. If Britain leaves the EU, or if it leaves Britain behind, she tells him, Europe will be lost. ‘Without you, I don’t know what is going to happen.’ They then turn to his veto in the EU the previous December. She knows why it made him a fleeting ‘hero’ in the eyes of the country.

  ‘That was a side benefit, not a deliberate choice,’ he responds. He wants her to realise that he had not set out with the veto in mind. ‘I came to see you in Berlin to try to get a deal with you.’ She tells him that he was too forceful, too certain – making the most of the disagreement. He says that is the British style. Other cultures in the EU do things differently, she says, but he replies that to be forceful is very British. Perplexed, she refuses to accept any pride in being controversial. She is genuinely fascinated by the way his mind works; but she still doesn’t think he’s right. Why can’t he create more space to retreat and compromise, like her? She tells him about her own statecraft: by asking for less at the beginning, she gives herself more flexibility and keeps her options open. After discussing Israel, Libya, Iran and Greece, they return to the main point. She will try her utmost to keep him on board, she concludes, warning him not to rush into saying ‘I’m leaving the ship.’

  ‘No,’ says Cameron, ‘this is our EU as much as anyone’s. Therefore I have to be pushy for our interests; but I don’t want Britain to leave.’

  It is the frankest conversation they have ever had about Europe. She offers him advice on talking to the northern states, to the Bulgarians and to Poland. They need to understand what he is doing, she insists. If he is seen as just a wrecker, it will be hopeless. He wants to find a way for Britain to stay in. If he goes into the Council and makes it ‘Britain vs The Rest’ it will become self-fulfilling,
she warns starkly.

  He becomes defensive at this point. ‘I don’t accept that we just turn up at the Council to be difficult; we put lots of initiatives on the table,’ he replies, listing examples. He returns to his central theme, using his full emotional force with her: ‘I need to make a pitch to the country. If there is no acceptable deal, it’s not the end of the world; I’ll walk away from the EU.’

  Now the chancellor draws on her psychological arsenal: as an older woman, she tells him, it is difficult to know whether she regrets him being so decisive, or to admire it. It can be very helpful to have some friends in the room, she says.

  He pauses and reminds her of his difficulties in Parliament: ‘I lost a vote in Parliament and it was humiliating,’ he says, referring to the vote over the EU budget two months earlier.

  She is intrigued how the parliamentary system works. What happened to the Conservative MPs who voted against him, she asks.

  A senior aide comes in at this point and talks about those Tory MPs who never accepted his leadership and want to destroy him, regardless of the consequences. But the great majority of Conservative MPs are not like that: ‘It’s just that they’re terrified of their constituency associations.’

  ‘I won’t break promises that I made on development spending and universal benefits for pensioners, even when so many in my party want me to break them,’ Cameron tells her. He wants to take the poison out of the EU issue.

  She knows he wants a deal. ‘I do get it.’ If she can be certain of that, she will try to find a way through for him. She adds that although she will try and help, there are limits to what she can do, given Germany’s multilateral relationships in Europe – a caveat remembered more in Berlin than in London.

  The dinner is a turning point in Cameron’s relationship with Merkel. She has some sympathy for his argument that the Common Market Britain joined in 1973, and voted to remain a part of in the 1975 referendum, was a very different entity from what it had now become. She leaves Number 10 with a much clearer understanding of how the British public might have felt cheated, especially when denied a referendum on Lisbon.

  Llewellyn returns to writing the speech soon after the Merkel dinner, spending several weeks on it with John Casson, Cameron’s foreign affairs private secretary. Cameron, in parallel, holds a series of talks with Cabinet ministers, including Theresa May, Philip Hammond, Iain Duncan Smith and Ken Clarke, taking them into his confidence to bring them onside. Clarke is the most tricky: ‘I am totally against referendums,’ he says. He is ‘horrified’ that Cameron was contemplating holding one. Although in ‘resigning mood’, he falls short of threatening to resign. Cameron tells him: ‘We can’t get away without having one. We can have the argument during the referendum itself, and it will allow us to get on with governing.’13 Clarke is gratified to hear Cameron say the intention is to reform the EU, completing the single market in services, and having more deregulation. Cameron focuses intently on his own party. He knows that the threat of withdrawal is necessary not just to focus minds in Brussels, but to gain credibility with his backbenchers. He spends time talking to Graham Brady, who says he is pleased that his ‘suggestions are taken on board’, and that it is a speech with which most Conservative Eurosceptics could live.14

  Cameron then turns his attention to winning over key EU leaders. He holds long conversations with Frederik Reinfeldt of Sweden, Mark Rutte of Holland, Mario Monti of Italy, and François Hollande of France, who is the most difficult. Merkel’s advice is to ‘make it a European argument, and not just an argument about Britain’. The Private Office carefully notes their concerns, and Llewellyn rewrites the speech over Christmas, partly in London and partly in Paris. When he shows it to Cameron in the New Year, Cameron says, ‘I want to give it now.’ He doesn’t want to see the speech again, and is quite detached from it, which is unusual, as he often tinkers with major speeches. But he thinks that Llewellyn has got the core argument right and is happy to trust his judgement. Security around the text is unusually tight because of the fear of leaks, not least by the Foreign Office. Simon Fraser, the acute permanent secretary, comes across the road into Number 10 a few days before delivery to look it over.

  Finally, the text is ready. On the morning of 23 January, Cameron speeds across London to the modern Bloomberg building on Finsbury Square, and at 8.10 delivers the speech in front of a video wall. ‘Seventy years ago, Europe was being torn apart by its second catastrophic conflict in a generation … And millions dead across the world in the battle for peace and liberty. For us, the European Union is a means to an end – prosperity, stability, the anchor of freedom and democracy both within Europe and beyond her shores – not an end in itself … I never want us to pull up the drawbridge and retreat from the world. I am not a British isolationist. I don’t just want a better deal for Britain. I want a better deal for Europe too.’ The speech is one of the most pro-EU speeches given by a British prime minister for some time. The next Conservative manifesto, he says, will ask for a mandate to negotiate a new settlement with the EU, and once it has been negotiated, he will give the British people an in/out referendum.

  The team are more than usually anxious about how the speech will be received. Having delayed it for so long, the concern is there would be nothing fresh to say, given the extensive trailing of the referendum announcement. ‘My worry was that it would be an anti-climax, but it wasn’t,’ says a senior aide, ‘we were very pleased by the way it landed.’15 Cameron too is delighted: ‘It got us ahead of the debate in the country, and the debate in Europe,’ he says.16 Expectation management had been pitch perfect: ‘Many of the key parties expected it to be worse than it was,’ says one insider.

  The speech is so early in the morning because later that day Cameron has PMQs in the Commons. As he enters the chamber, he is cheered to the rafters by his backbenchers. ‘The reason that those on the Conservative back benches are cheering is not that they want to vote yes in an in/out referendum; it is because they want to vote no,’ booms Ed Miliband. ‘Can he name one thing – just one thing – which, if he does not get it, he will recommend leaving the European Union? … Why can he not say unequivocally that he will vote yes in a referendum? Because he is frightened, because of those on the Conservative back benches.’17 Cameron gives Miliband as good as he gets. ‘He needs to go away, get a policy, come back and tell us what it is. In the meantime, our approach is what the British people want. It is right for business, it is right for our economy, and we will fight for it in the years ahead.’18

  Cameron then flies to Davos, which is useful because he can speak to his fellow EU leaders individually to explain what he is trying to say. The extensive prior lobbying has helped the speech’s positive reception in Berlin and across the EU. There is widespread, if not universal, agreement amongst EU leaders that there needs to be a reform agenda, including competition and subsidiarity. To gain wider support, Cameron enlists the support of John Major. He knows that the last Conservative prime minister had been treated very badly by his predecessor, Margaret Thatcher, and that it stung.19 Attacks from Thatcherites have not prevented Major becoming admired across the party. Cameron had consulted Major before the Bloomberg speech, and Major wants to know how he can help now that it has been delivered. It is arranged that Major should talk about it on 14 February at Chatham House, where he says: ‘I don’t like referenda in a parliamentary system, but this referendum could heal many old sores and have a cleansing effect on politics … We need a renegotiation, and a referendum endorsement of it. And if that is denied, the clamour for it will only grow.’20

  After Bloomberg, the EU budget remains unfinished business. The EU had been volatile during 2012, with feelings towards Britain still raw after the December 2011 EU veto, and with uncertainty about what Hollande’s succession of Sarkozy in May would mean for France’s relationship with Germany, and its impact on the EU. As the focus of interest shifted to whether the Merkel/Hollande relationship would build on the Merkel/Sarkozy partnership, the
heat was taken off Britain. Below the radar, Britain put great focus on securing safeguards for the City of London, and EU lead diplomat Ivan Rogers spent six months travelling around EU capitals doing his best to negotiate a deal by December.

  The seven-year budget, known as the Multiannual Financial Framework, became a major focus towards the end of 2012. In November, EU member states are not ready to settle. The budget is a big topic for Merkel and Cameron at their Downing Street dinner on 7 November. Merkel and her European adviser, Nikolaus Meyer-Landrut, are irritated that the Treasury has spoken in public about the real-term freeze of €886 million over seven years which Cameron is hoping to secure. Cameron knows Merkel is cross about it but nevertheless decides to present the figures to her.

  ‘Why did you put this number out there?’ she exclaims, adding that it left very little room for negotiation. Why does he always do this, she complains; there is no flexibility at all.