For the Record. David Cameron
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truth. No cheap champagne. No cigarettes. And no prostitutes.
But even with all this evidence, the press didn’t want to believe it. My final memory of the saga is wandering into the press gallery with a colleague and saying, ‘For heaven’s sake, who do you believe – the Chancellor of the Exchequer of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, or Mr Onanugu?’ The unanimous cry came back: ‘Mr Onanugu!’ Today we would call it ‘post-truth politics’. Back then it was the moment I should have known we were sunk.
Eventually the summons for Norman did come. In May 1993, John Major said he was having a reshuffle, and wanted to move Norman to be secretary of state for the environment. Norman was livid. I briefly tried to persuade him to stay on and rebuild, but it was no use. He would rather let it be known that he had been sacked by Major.
The end of Norman Lamont meant the end of my time as a special adviser at the Treasury. Terry Burns and Jeremy Heywood put in a good word for me with the new chancellor, Ken Clarke, and I joined his meetings on his first day, and even wrote part of his speech in the House of Commons debate that Labour had called following Norman’s defenestration. But Ken’s two special advisers, Tessa Keswick and David Ruffley, were keen to have complete control of the political side of the Treasury. So I was summoned to Ken’s office and politely fired.
Ken was thoughtful about my future career, and had called up his old friend Michael Howard, now the new home secretary, and secured me a job as one of his advisers.
Michael was a man on a mission to reform the criminal justice system. His analysis, which I came to share, was pretty simple. More work was needed to prevent crime. The police needed to be freed from red tape to catch more criminals. The courts needed reform, so that there were more convictions. And sentences needed to be tougher, to send a clear message of deterrence. So he set us to work.
Patrick Rock was the senior special adviser, and we held meeting after meeting with experts and officials looking through every area where we could change the country’s approach to crime. What came out of this was a package of measures that Michael announced in his party conference speech. It was a radical departure. Juvenile detention centres. Reforms to the right to silence. Proper use of DNA evidence. Restrictions on bail. Longer sentencing options. And far greater use of closed-circuit television cameras. These ideas led to an effective period of change which future home secretaries, Labour and Conservative, have generally stuck to. It ushered in a prolonged period of falling crime rates.
It’s undoubtedly true that some of the motivation for this frenetic activity was the arrival of a new political figure as the Labour Party’s shadow home secretary: Tony Blair.
I remember my first meeting with him. He had proposed an amendment to our criminal justice Bill on so-called ‘video nasties’. He clearly cared about the issue, but also recognised that it was a brilliant ‘wedge’ issue: a Labour politician grabbing a small ‘c’ conservative theme and using it against a big ‘C’ Conservative government.
Meeting Tony Blair for the first time, I instantly realised that we were dealing with a different sort of politician. It wasn’t just his mixture of charm, intelligence and a touch of star quality; he also struck me as a man with the common touch, full of common sense. This was to prove a lethal combination for the Conservative Party.
I remember exactly where I was on the evening of the day Blair’s predecessor as Labour leader John Smith died. I was having an after-work pint outside the Two Chairmen pub in Westminster with Patrick Rock. The news had been shocking and tragic, but the political implications were clear. We looked at each other and said almost simultaneously, ‘That’s it. Tony Blair will become leader and we’re stuffed.’
5
Something else happened while I was a special adviser: properly meeting the love of my life – and my wife for the past twenty-three years – Samantha.
I say ‘properly’ because Samantha was a friend of my younger sister Clare, and we first met when she was just seventeen. I remember being struck by this laid-back, almost silent, waif-like thing lying on my parents’ sofa, smoking rolled-up cigarettes and sniggering gently as my sister took the piss out of me.
We met properly on a holiday organised by my father four years later. Dad, who was always incredibly generous, decided to celebrate his and Mum’s thirtieth wedding anniversary by inviting some of his best friends to a hotel in southern Italy, and he allowed each of us children to ask three friends along. Samantha was invited by Clare, who warned her in advance, ‘Watch out – I think my brother fancies you.’
I did. And it was a blissful week.
I realise that what is meant to follow is a story about love at first sight. Neither of us being in any doubt. An instant recognition that we were partners for life. The truth is that neither of us felt like that. We had a lovely, romantic holiday amidst sunshine, friends, laughter and free-flowing cocktails. But when we got home neither of us was quite sure what would happen next.
Of course we were similar in some ways: brought up only twenty miles apart, with parents who, while of slightly different ages, moved in similar social circles. But our friends on both sides couldn’t really understand what we were up to. I was the ambitious Tory apparatchik. She was the hippie-like art student. I was working in the Treasury for Norman Lamont. She was living in a Bristol flat with people who would have happily wrung his neck. I was trying to get invited to highbrow political dinner parties in Westminster. She was playing pool with the rapper Tricky in the trendiest part of Bristol.
Norman would frequently ring up early on a Saturday morning wanting to know what was in the papers. On more than one occasion Samantha, used to a student-style lie-in, would shout from under her pillow, ‘If that’s Norman asking about the newspapers, tell him to fuck off and buy them himself.’ I would call him back, cramming 20p pieces into the student payphone to avoid being cut off.
Our courtship was a long one. Our first New Year was spent driving around Morocco in a battered Renault 5. The first night in Marrakesh was so cold and damp we slept with our clothes on. While there was a bit of an age gap, as well as the contrasts in our friends and our politics, there was something that kept bringing us together and helping us get to know and love each other more.
Part of that something was food. We are both greedy and somewhat obsessive. Restaurants, cooking, shopping, growing: all are part of that obsessiveness, as long as they end in eating.
It was in those early years that I first witnessed the ‘Sam food panic’ which has since become something of a family joke. When she is hungry she has an irrational fear that the restaurant, pub or shop we are heading to is about to close or run out of food. The panic won’t end until I have called ahead to check that the kitchens are still open or the shelves aren’t empty. Now at least I have the children on my side: as Sam shouts at us to check that the ice cream shop hasn’t run out of ice cream, or the fish and chip shop hasn’t run out of chips (both genuine recent ‘food panic’ examples) we all fall about laughing.
So we fell in love – and it was the deepest love I will ever know. But the falling took months and years, not days and nights; and I suspect it was longer for Sam than it was for me. But I believe the result has been something much stronger than either of us could ever have believed when we first got together under that powerful Italian sun. And it wouldn’t just survive everything political life would throw at us, but also the worst fear of any parent, losing our beloved first-born child.
It wasn’t until 1994 that I summoned the courage to propose. While Sam said yes, we decided to keep it secret for almost a year. I think she wanted some time to get used to the idea. She was still only twenty-three, so I thought it was only fair.
As our relationship developed, I decided to leave the Home Office and to go and work for the media company Carlton Communications plc. By this point I had applied to be on the Conservative Party’s candidates’ list,