Cameron at 10

by Anthony Seldon

  Cameron summons senior Cabinet ministers to his office in Number 10 late in the afternoon on 25 November. He is appalled that so many of them have been briefing the press. Former Cabinet ministers, who were not at the meeting, join in the fray. Ken Clarke, who left the government in July, blames Cameron directly: ‘By laying so much stress on immigration, he is giving in to the silliest of his critics.’18 Cameron is exasperated and tells assembled ministers, ‘let’s not pretend that this is not a serious issue and that we won’t face a massive backlash if we don’t deal with it. It’s about far more than the EU’. Osborne speaks up forcefully: ‘we are the pro-business party and we believe in jobs and we need jobs for growth. We will be in trouble if we go into the general election and people are saying we are screwing it up’. Philip Hammond, the new Foreign Secretary, takes a noticeably more Eurosceptic tone. One senior Number 10 aide has had enough: ‘what we all need to do is shut the fuck up talking about it’. Another of Cameron’s team reflects ‘how lonely it is to be prime minister. Your two most senior Cabinet ministers are in two very difficult, different positions. You are utterly alone.’

  Years of barely concealed impatience break out into the open. Osborne and Harrison have been sceptical of May’s line for a long time. They do not think the Home Office should be erecting barriers to good students coming to the UK, nor indeed to those wanting to come to the UK from China and developing countries. They think that Cameron should have done much more to rein in May, and react strongly against what they see as her increasing leadership pretensions, whipped up by friends in the press, which they regard as ‘ludicrous’. For months their anger has been focused on May’s two feisty special advisers at the Home Office, Nick Timothy and Fiona Cunningham. Now their hostility is directed on her. With the usual channels breaking down between the Treasury and the Home Office, relations have become very fragile indeed. Briefing and counter-briefing between the Treasury and the Home Office rise to unedifying levels in the latter part of 2014.

  John Major is often the figure who Number 10 turn to when boxed into a corner. A senior aide speaks to Arabella Warburton, Major’s right-hand figure since his days in Number 10, and they agree that Major should give a speech in Berlin in mid-November. The aim is to make the EU Commission, and specifically Germany, know how much is at stake. Major rises to his theme: ‘What we must all realise is that a divorce may be final. Absolute. A reconciliation would be unlikely,’ he says, echoing the words that he had used during the Scottish referendum. Whereas the populations of some European countries were falling, Major observes that Britain’s population has risen by 7% in the last decade putting ‘strains on our health, welfare, housing and education services that we struggle to meet’. He predicts there is a 50% chance that Britain may end up leaving the EU. The speech is a plea to the EU to wake up to the British problem and reach out and help it reach a resolution.19 It is seen as an indicator of where Cameron’s and Number 10’s thinking now stands.

  The timing of Cameron’s own speech is pushed back several times in November. ‘Three times Ameet Gill scheduled it in the grid: three times it was uprooted,’ says one insider. A resolution comes only in the last few days before the speech is delivered. Craig Oliver produces a formulation of words which says, ‘if I can’t get what I want, I don’t rule anything out’. It throws a bone to the PM’s critics on the right wing by indicating that he wouldn’t vote to remain in the EU regardless of the renegotiated terms. Ed Llewellyn is now tasked by Cameron to cobble the ideas together into a coherent speech. He has been arguing strongly to delay it for a further two weeks to ensure ‘every single operative sentence in the speech could be stress-tested’. He knows, though, that he lacks the luxury of time. The speech has to be well received by four separate and highly divergent audiences: the British public, the Conservative Party, the media and the EU, principally the Commission in Brussels and the Chancellery in Berlin. Llewellyn has just one chance to get it right. He locks himself away in an attic near the Policy Unit at the front of Number 10 and spends several hours drafting it. He speaks to Cameron who is on his way back from Australia to tune the message, as it is clear it is still not right. Llewellyn has been in constant contact with Berlin and Brussels, as he had been when drafting the Bloomberg speech. ‘If the speech gets a complete raspberry from Berlin and Brussels, it will go nowhere,’ a senior aide admits. Llewellyn worries that a wrongly calibrated speech will affect the British government’s reputation for competence in Europe. But Cameron has had enough. He is fed up with the whole topic, and wants it buried before Osborne’s Autumn Statement on 3 December, which he hopes will act as a firewall on discussion about it.

  On 28 November, Cameron delivers the second most anticipated speech of his premiership (to Bloomberg in January 2013), at a JCB factory in Staffordshire. It opens with praise for how immigration has benefited Britain: ‘It clearly couldn’t be a UKIP speech, hence the paean of praise for immigration,’ says one aide. His determination to curb immigration through more stringent controls is made clear. Specifically he proposes prohibiting claiming of in-work benefits for the first four years of residence in the UK and removal from the country if employment has not been found after six months.20 But there are no ultimatums. No threats. To the right, it is tame stuff.

  Number 10 is more than usually apprehensive about the reception of the speech. The immediate reaction is predictable. Farage quickly criticises Cameron for failing to apologise for his lax immigration policy over the previous four and a half years, castigating him for taking ten years to realise the extent of the problem: ‘It’s a cynical attempt to kick the issue into the long grass until after the election,’ the UKIP leader says.21 Miliband homes in on Cameron’s failure to reduce immigration to the ‘tens of thousands’, highlighting Cameron’s ill-fated statement in 2010: ‘kick us out in five years if we don’t deliver on immigration’.22 Green Party leader Natalie Bennett argues that benefit and health tourism are ‘non-existent problems’ for which Cameron has been unable to produce evidence.23 When they review the speech forty-eight hours later, however, Cameron’s team are pleased. Reports come in that it has been greeted relatively well in capitals across the EU, above all in Germany.24 The Daily Mail regard it as generally sensible, realistic and ‘full of common sense’.25 The right wing in the Conservative Party is not happy, but they were never going to be. They put down a marker that, if the general election is lost, the speech will be seen as a key missed opportunity when Cameron failed to exercise leadership in the national interest. But for the time being, the boil does indeed appear to have been lanced. When interviewed by Marr on 30 November, Osborne doesn’t face a single question on immigration: the economy dominates. Even those in Number 10 who had questioned Cameron’s judgement on the timing and content of the speech can see that he was right.

  Lynton Crosby’s directive that, the speech over, the leadership should avoid speaking about immigration is thwarted when, on Monday 13 April 2015, a boat carrying 550 migrants capsizes in the Mediterranean killing some 400, and the following week an estimated 800 are killed in another capsizing. As the destination for boats departing from Libya, Italy is the country most directly affected. Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi is on the telephone whipping up support among European leaders to deal with the crisis. Both he and Donald Tusk, who has now succeeded Herman Van Rompuy as president of the EU Council, seek solidarity from the EU in response. An emergency summit is called in Brussels on 23 April. Cameron, mid-election campaign, is clear that Britain has to make a contribution but is equally adamant, given the toxicity of the debate in Britain, that it will not be able to offer large numbers of places to asylum seekers. Instead, he offers military assets, including HMS Bulwark, to help with search-and-rescue missions, and pushes for further action against the networks of human traffickers in North Africa.

  No issue so skewered Cameron over his five years in government as immigration. He felt strongly that something had to be done. He found it hard to find an effective re
sponse, aware perhaps of the paradox that the economic recovery was largely responsible for the rise in immigration from EU countries still caught in the doldrums. He refused to resort to the jingoism or gung-ho rhetoric that parts of the press – and indeed some in his own team – wished to use. Strongly though he felt about the need to address concerns over immigration, he blankly refused the nuclear options the right wanted.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Farewell Washington

  January 2015

  The debacle of the Syria vote in August 2013 caused the relationship between the White House and Number 10, apparently impregnable, to fracture. Mistakes had been made by both sides. Number 10 had overstated their capacity to win a majority for action, and hadn’t communicated their concern early enough to Washington. The White House had its parallel problem with Congress, and was overly engrossed in the rapidly unfolding situation to communicate fully with London. Both leaders were damaged by the way events played out: they had talked tough, only to pull back from the brink. Strong feelings against the other administration were held in some quarters of each leader’s teams, but they passed amid a general acceptance that neither had handled it well. Meanwhile, for a critical ten-month period from September 2013–July 2014, Putin is causing mayhem in Ukraine, and ISIS are advancing in Syria and Iraq.

  The White House primarily blames Ed Miliband and Labour for the Syria vote fiasco. Obama’s team lobbied Miliband hard to support the government, assuming he and his party would be behind the action, but he refused to do so. ‘We just couldn’t see how the Labour Party could oppose military action against such a regime for using chemical weapons,’ was their response. They suspect Miliband of prioritising political advantage over national security. Obama’s team respond to ‘personalities and stature’: they don’t regard Miliband as impressive on either. By the summer of 2014, they conclude they would sooner see Cameron win the general election, even if it means a referendum on British membership of the EU, than have Miliband in Downing Street.

  Miliband has a far from successful meeting with Obama in Washington on 21 July, described as ‘awkward’ by many, which further underlines the Labour leader’s lack of gravitas.1 A starker contrast with Blair’s pre-election visit to see President Clinton in 1996 could hardly be made. In April 1996, John Kerr, the British ambassador, said: ‘There is no doubt that Blair had the scent of victory about him, and he was already the big draw in Washington.’2 Miliband’s trip, however, is a paltry affair, involving little more than a ‘brush-by’, as Americans describe it, with Obama.3 Miliband has already hired as his senior election aide David Axelrod, Obama’s influential adviser for the 2008 election, though it does little to warm up relations with Washington. Miliband’s team expect much more help and understanding, believing there to be a special bond between the Labour Party and the Democrats. The White House is not impressed either by Labour’s subsequent reaction to the visit. For Miliband, it is a signal failure for a man desperate to acquire the credibility of a prime minister in waiting.

  Cameron’s team seize on the idea of their own pre-election visit, to publicise their man’s credentials and stature ahead of the campaign. One of his senior aides is deputed to open up discussions, mentioning it first to Obama’s team during the NATO summit in Wales in early September, which he follows up at the G20 in Australia in mid-November. Cameron’s National Security Adviser Kim Darroch flies out to Washington to finalise the plan with Peter Westmacott, the British ambassador. The White House are wary of leaving it as late as February, as ‘it will look too nakedly like a pre-election boost’. True, Cameron had gone to Washington in March 2012 and given Obama his whole-hearted support, which ‘verged on endorsing him for a second term’. The White House sees the need for reciprocity: ‘It is right for us to be doing our bit for him.’

  A plan for Cameron to address a joint session of Congress during the visit, which will provide strong images on television news, is dropped because Congress is not in session on the favoured date in mid-January: the Republicans are having a retreat in Hershey, Pennsylvania. The White House nevertheless are happy to offer two slots to Cameron rather than the usual one: a full-length bilateral meeting with the president, and a working dinner. When Miliband’s team hear about it, they are incandescent, but powerless. They complain to the media, which is exactly what Cameron’s team had hoped for, as they know it will backfire. Cameron’s aides are cock-a-hoop at the messages flowing in from a particularly effusive White House, who bill the trip as an ‘official visit’, and invite Cameron to stay overnight in Blair House, which carries more prestige than staying at the British Embassy. On 15 January 2015, the day that they fly over, a joint article by both leaders appears in The Times, committing them to work together to spur growth against a future economic downturn, against terrorist organisations, including al-Qaeda, ISIS and Boko Haram, and to stand up to Russia in Ukraine.4

  Cameron’s party visit the FBI and the National Cyber Investigative facility in Virginia. Cyber terrorism and cyber security are a focus of discussion, especially in the face of increasing domestic concerns about the intrusiveness of proposed new measures. The White House issues a statement saying that ‘every day foreign governments, criminals and hackers are attempting to probe, intrude into, and attack government and private sector systems in both of our countries’.5

  The White House certainly are laying out the red carpet. Photographers capture the leaders walking amiably from the residence to the West Wing. After drinks, Obama leads both teams into the Blue Room for lunch, where he suggests removing jackets, before making remarks about how much he has enjoyed working with Cameron and his team over the last four and a half years. ‘We have done a lot of work together’ and built good relationships he says, and ‘he wants to place that appreciation on the record’. Cameron’s team glow at the warmth of the mood music. Then they get down to business. The conversation revolves around US–UK trade, Greece, climate change and Ebola. ‘We got the impression from the president’s team that they hoped for a much stronger international presence from the UK after the general election,’ recalls one official.

  The president picks this up again at the two-hour meeting in the Oval Office the following day. Obama describes the UK as a ‘remarkable partner’. He is sympathetic that Britain has not felt able to do more in Iraq, though he acknowledges British support for the Kurds, and the RAF flying more sorties to Iraq than any country bar the US. ‘I totally understand your position, but I’d really value more action from you if you win the election,’ he says. He is most concerned about Britain maintaining the NATO commitment to spending 2% of GDP on defence, and raises it again that morning. If Britain fails to do so, what hope is there for other NATO countries, he wonders. Cameron replies: ‘We are looking at it, but I cannot commit to it until after the election.’ Discussion then ranges over Syria, internet security and encryption, Russia and Ukraine. The president’s team also hopes in the future Britain will commit to air strikes in Syria, do more to fight Boko Haram in Nigeria, and stop Libya falling into the hands of Islamic extremists. Cameron’s team anticipate Obama will raise his concern about the EU referendum: they know he is worried at the prospect of Britain leaving. But he remains silent on this. It is a long list. Cameron can, however, help the president on Iran, where Obama is experiencing difficulties. Congress has invited Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address them on 3 March, and have no faith in his policy. Cameron selects a handful of key senators to lobby. The British voice, as a joint negotiator in the talks with Iran, carries some weight on Capitol Hill. Obama appreciates Cameron’s intervention. It is evident to them he would prefer a Cameron victory in four months’ time. As the party are leaving to return to the UK, one of Obama’s senior team says, ‘We are rooting for you guys.’ Even those apt to find the president aloof are pleasantly surprised by how personable he is on the trip.

  Obama’s relationship with Cameron is as close as he gets to overseas leaders, which the White House takes pains to hi
ghlight. No other relationship, and no other single country, ranks as highly in the White House’s priorities as Cameron and Britain. But that is more revealing about Obama’s priority and style with fellow leaders. Blair would talk weekly or more to Clinton and George W. Bush. ‘I was surprised at how thin the relationship is,’ commented a senior British diplomat responsible for relations between both countries under Cameron.

  Below the prime ministerial and presidential level, William Hague enjoys a very close relationship with Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State until February 2013, both on a political level – they instinctively feel the same way on many global issues – and on a personal level (he hosts a dinner for her at the British Embassy to mark her retirement from the post in early 2013). Hague rapidly forges a good relationship with her successor, John Kerry, but Philip Hammond, who becomes Foreign Secretary in July 2014, for all his proficiency, lacks the benefit of Hague’s experience and gravitas as a former Conservative leader and long-serving Foreign Secretary. The Pentagon become frustrated for a while by what it sees as Britain’s lack of activism and willingness to commit more assets to fighting ISIS in Iraq. From early 2014, disenchantment with Britain is being heard from some of the think-tanks that are so influential in Washington. Fundamental questions are asked about the UK’s future: will there be another Scottish referendum, and will independence follow? Will Britain break away from the EU, and where will that leave the UK/US relationship if Britain no longer plays the traditional role as the bridge between Washington and Europe? If Britain has lost the appetite for it, does the US now need a special relationship with another country? Such questions do the rounds every few years: they were heard for a time when John Major’s government overlapped with Clinton’s first administration. France is anxious to fill the slot, but there is no vacancy: the White House knows that no other country has the historical or cultural links that exist between the US and Britain.