For the Record. David Cameron
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Blue, Go Green’ message, our slogan for the local elections taking place that very week. And I’ve never lived it down.
Presentation is important, but prioritising the environment through my trip to the Arctic really was as much about substance. We had to take a boat to visit the British Arctic Survey team, and I asked one of its members why they’d put their station somewhere that was surrounded by water. ‘Well, the water wasn’t there until last year,’ he said. It was a profound moment. Global warming was real, and it was happening before our very eyes.
So what was the governing philosophy of my leadership of the Conservative Party in opposition?
Two big things had changed.
First, at the time it seemed as if the great ideological battle of the twentieth century – right versus left, capitalism versus communism – was over. We had won. Labour now accepted the need for a market economy to help deliver the good society, and it appeared that full-blooded socialism was dead. The Conservative Party needed to take a new tack. We shouldn’t give up on our belief in enterprise and market economics, but it was time to bring Conservative thinking and solutions to new problems.
The second thing that had changed was the electorate. Over the previous twenty years Britain had become more prosperous, somewhat more urban and much more ethnically diverse. Gay people were coming out, more women were going to work and taking senior jobs, social attitudes and customs were changing. And all of this, it seemed to me, had left the Conservative Party, one of the most adaptable parties in the world, behind.
I saw myself, however new and inexperienced, as inheriting the mantle of great leaders like Peel, Disraeli, Salisbury and Baldwin, who had adapted the party. To achieve that, I wanted Conservative means to achieve progressive ends. Using prices and markets, and encouraging personal and corporate responsibility, could help our environment by cutting pollution and greenhouse gases. Stronger families and more rigorous school standards could help reduce inter-generational poverty. Trusting the professionals in our NHS, rather than smothering them with bureaucracy, could build a stronger health service.
The Conservative Party, in my view, had got into a rut of tired and easy thinking. We had a tendency to trot out the same old answers. Want social mobility? Open more grammar schools. Want lower crime? Put more bobbies on the beat. Want a more competitive economy? Just cut taxes.
We had another, even more profound, problem. People didn’t trust our motives. Whenever we suggested something, people seemed almost automatically to add their own mistrustful explanation of our motives. When we said, ‘Let’s reduce taxes,’ they added, ‘to help the rich’. When we said, ‘Let’s start up new schools,’ they added, ‘for your kids, not ours.’
Part of this was a hangover from the end of the last period of Conservative rule, when Tony Blair and New Labour had caricatured Conservatives as uncaring. But some of it was our own fault. It was part of what I called – or more accurately what Samantha called – the ‘man under the car bonnet’ syndrome. We approached every problem or issue with a mechanical, process-driven response rather than a more emotional, values-driven answer about the ends we were aiming to achieve.
At the same time as the new approach and new policies, I was determined that the Conservative Party should make its peace with the modern world. Our opposition to, or sometimes grudging acceptance of, a whole range of social reforms, from lowering the age of consent for gay men to positive action to close the gender pay gap, made us look and sound like a party that was stuck in the past, and didn’t like the modern country we aspired to govern.
I wanted the Conservative Party to be more liberal on these social issues. I felt passionately that morally it was the right thing to do, and I thought it would help us to get a hearing from some people who had written us off. It seemed to me an embarrassment, really just awful in every possible way, that someone who shared our values might be put off voting Conservative because they thought we disapproved of their sexuality, or looked down on their ethnicity, or didn’t want them to achieve because of their gender.
Part of the problem was our personnel. We were the oldest political party in the world – and we looked it. Just seventeen of the 198 Tory MPs elected in 2005 were women. That was an improvement of four. Since 1931.
Totally unacceptable. We were, after all, the party of the first woman MP to take her seat in the Commons. We gave the country its first female prime minister. Up and down Britain, women were among our finest councillors and our fiercest campaigners. But it just didn’t show on our green benches, which were, by and large, male, middle-aged, southern, wealthy and white.
By day four of the job I had appointed all my shadow ministers. I thought it was important to bring my leadership rivals into the fold, so David Davis and Liam Fox shadowed the home and defence departments. I thought I’d got a good mix, but I ended up with more people called David in the shadow cabinet (five) than women (four). There simply wasn’t the range from which to choose.
Come day seven I was at the Met Hotel in Leeds unveiling a plan to elect more women and ethnic minority MPs (of whom we had, shamefully, just two). It was imperative that we started to look more like the country we hoped to govern.
The candidates’ list was immediately frozen. A new Priority List of 150 candidates, people we thought the cream of the crop, and better reflecting the make-up of modern Britain, was drawn up from the larger main list. All associations in winnable seats would have to choose from this so-called ‘A-List’.
It caused uproar. Uproar so furious and so persistent that a year later I ended up agreeing that associations could pick their candidates from the full list, but half of the interviewees had to be women, thereby superseding the A-List.
But the ambition never wavered. We carried on exerting pressure more informally, promoting the candidates we wanted. I knew this required action at every level. More women applying to be candidates. More women getting interviews in safe seats. More procedures during the selection process that emphasised the full set of skills required to be an MP, not just the big speech in front of the full membership. All this was very much driven from the centre.
One of the greatest things about our election victory in 2015 was the seventeen non-white and sixty-eight women MPs elected to our benches, quadrupling the intake of a decade earlier. Indeed, as I write, there are six women MPs in the cabinet, four of whom were on that original A-List.
It was worth the row.
I was learning a great deal on the job. But as I cleared each hurdle – the hiring and firing of shadow ministers, the weekly bout of PMQs, the response to the Queen’s Speech – there was one that loomed larger than all the others: party funding.
Long before we inherited a country in debt, we inherited a party in debt by £30 million, largely as a result of the 2005 general election campaign. The funding crisis had a wider significance. Before they let you run the country, people want to see that you are able to run your party.
While donations to political parties had to be declared publicly, loans did not. So wealthy individuals preferred to make loans, and both the Labour and the Conservative parties succumbed to the temptation of this route. This led to the so-called cash-for-honours scandal, and Tony Blair being interviewed by police. Those responsible for Conservative fundraising were called in too. The case for the defence was clear: taking loans was within the rules, and there was a proper vetting process for awarding life peerages. Contributors to party funds shouldn’t be excluded, but it should never be the reason for their appointment. The problem was that while the vetting body – the House of Lords Appointments Commission – was told the details of the loans, the public and the media had not known about them.
I resolved that we should stop taking these loans, and should pay off, or convert to genuine declarable donations, those we already had. I also decided that we needed to stop being so reliant on a small number of wealthy individuals. Even if they didn’t exercise undue influence over the party – and as far as I was concerned they didn’t – it would always look as if they could. For a time I even flirted with the idea of