For the Record. David Cameron
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able to expand, and in the same vein, that new ones could be built in areas where they were already established and population growth required it. I clarified this, but it looked like a climbdown.
And it came at a bad moment. We were just about to have a change of prime minister. Within a few days of the grammar school row it was Tony Blair’s final PMQs.
After he had spoken his final words from the despatch box, the Labour benches stood and applauded. I too stood up, and gestured to my own side to join in. They did.
Cherie Blair came and thanked me afterwards. She is another person who is quite unlike her public caricature. I’ll never forget, when I took Ivan to the premiere of the children’s film Ben 10, Cherie bending down to his wheelchair, looking him in the eye and speaking to him with great kindness and compassion.
I thought it was important to pay tribute to her husband in his last Commons appearance. For good and ill, he had changed British politics forever. And as I applauded, I felt a small inner thrill at the knowledge that a big obstacle on our path to victory had toppled. We were on our way.
But of course, it wasn’t to prove that simple.
10
Cliff Edge, Collapse and Scandal
It’s June 2007, Gordon Brown is prime minister, and it does not stop raining.
There was something apt about the ex-chancellor’s premiership beginning with the wettest weather in decades.
I had – and still have – huge respect for Brown’s intellect and his appetite for hard work. And mutual friends have told me how charming and entertaining he can be in private. But in public he seemed to have only one character setting: dour.
And when it came to Parliament, he had only one political setting: everything was about killing the Tories. While other Labour frontbenchers would build relationships with their opposite numbers, Brown would have absolutely nothing to do with his. The one time he did reach out to his shadow George Osborne, George and I were having dinner in Pizza Express in Notting Hill Gate. Brown wanted to ‘pair’ – i.e. agree that neither of them would vote in an important forthcoming debate. When George very politely explained that he couldn’t do this without consulting our chief whip, Brown simply shouted and swore at him, before slamming down the phone.
So when he succeeded Tony Blair, I was rejoicing. We were ahead in the polls. And I was up against someone who hadn’t been elected, who had some real flaws – and who I thought it was possible to beat.
But initially things didn’t work out that way. As ever, ‘events’ intervened.
On Brown’s second full day in the job, there was an attempted bomb attack in London’s Haymarket, and then, the day after, terrorists drove a jeep laden with gas cylinders into Glasgow Airport. Brown reacted swiftly and effectively – and struck exactly the right tone about the threat we faced and how we should meet it.
The non-stop rain led to non-stop floods, affecting first one part of the country and then another. Brown immediately toured the affected areas, pledging money to flooded-out communities and families.
Then, after plagues of fire and rain, came disease. Foot-and-mouth was discovered on several Surrey farms. Having spent little more than a day on holiday, the new prime minister darted back.
And as his side of the political seesaw rose, mine began to sink.
First, Quentin Davies, a pinstripe-suited Tory MP, defected to Labour with a resignation letter of pure vitriol. His criticism of the modernisation project was very personal.
Then came a by-election in Ealing Southall. Our candidate was a successful and engaging British Sikh called Tony Lit, and although we were never going to win in the London borough, we wanted to put up a good fight. But in doing so we ended up setting expectations in the wrong place. I had also agreed to the idea of the candidate running on the ballot paper under the description ‘David Cameron’s Conservatives’. This looked arrogant and hubristic. I campaigned hard, visiting the seat five times – and we came a dismal third.
I had a chance to seize back the initiative. Social action – our policy of backing volunteering at home and abroad – was a strand of modern, compassionate conservatism we were determined to demonstrate. Project Umubano, led by the MP Andrew Mitchell, was to bring together forty enthusiastic party volunteers in Rwanda that summer, and I was to join them for a night.
The problem was that parts of Witney were still flooded. But I had visited the flood victims, and I was absolutely determined that the Conservative Party would not be a follower on overseas aid, but a leader.
Nevertheless, the visit was dogged by questions about why I was in Africa when my own constituency was under water. That night I looked out from the Christian mission where we were staying, gazing over the lights of Kigali, reflecting on the critical coverage. I knew that it had been a mistake to come. But sometimes there are mistakes in politics you’re glad to have made, and this was one of them.
When Brown overtook us in the polls, rumours began swirling around about an impending vote of no confidence in my leadership. It really was personal.
Brown summed up the mood at PMQs with a rare quip (that’s how bad things were – Gordon Brown was making effective jokes): ‘The wheels are falling off the Tory bicycle, and it is just as well that he has got a car following him when he goes out on his rounds.’
William Hague was emphatic that if Brown was thinking straight, he would call an immediate general election, before the party conference season even began. That way, he would give us no chance to make up the ground we’d lost. I knew that we had just one chance: we had to deliver a Conservative Party conference in October that would metaphorically blow the doors off.
Though our policy-review teams hadn’t even reported back yet, we cobbled together a bumper series of announcements for each day of conference, from cutting stamp duty to introducing new cancer treatments. The Friday before conference, the whole lot – every single policy – was emailed to George’s chief of staff, Matt Hancock.
But Matt’s email address included his middle initial. We had inadvertently sent the full Tory plans to eccentric Lib Dem MP Mike Hancock.
The sender was mortified. The press officers were up in arms. I, however, was sanguine. ‘They’re great policies,’ I said. ‘If they leak, they leak. I’m off home.’ So many things in politics are seen as a calamity. Very few actually are.
However, we would spend the whole conference somewhat on tenterhooks, wondering on which day our precious policies were going to be published before we announced them. To this day I still don’t know why they weren’t.
Labour had a successful conference in Bournemouth, where Brown’s chief bruiser Ed Balls was briefing that there would be an election.
Then came our turn in Blackpool. A cliff-edge moment for our party – and for me.
William opened with a cracker of a speech, chastising Brown for hosting Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street the previous month (a move he must have hated but which made him look both magnanimous and bold).
George then unveiled what I termed his ‘hammock idea’, the conference announcement he’d always dream up while reclining somewhere hot over the summer. This year was the biggest yet: raising the inheritance tax threshold to £1 million. It was deeply Conservative, rewarding people who worked hard, saved and wanted to pass something on.
The finale of the conference, as always, was the leader’s speech. It would be back in the Empress Ballroom in Blackpool’s Winter Gardens where I’d delivered that leadership-winning, no-notes speech two years earlier. I had been pondering whether I could repeat the feat, not as a stunt, but because I was genuinely frustrated by my seeming inability to get across who I was, what I thought and what I wanted to do