For the Record. David Cameron
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rent or mortgage interest payments or the odd piece of IKEA furniture, and had been urged by the authorities to claim even more. The colourful examples stood out, showing a world of ride-on mowers, moats and mole-free lawns.
Of course, I had a colourful example of my own – violet-coloured, to be specific.
I had only ever claimed for the mortgage interest on my constituency home. It was a simple approach, specifically permitted by the rules, and seemed to me to be clearly within the spirit of what was intended. But one year I had an extra bill, which I handed to the Fees Office. Ordinarily this would have been logged as ‘maintenance’, and would have attracted absolutely no attention. Except, like a good West Oxfordshire tradesman, my builder had detailed the work he had done: ‘Cleared Vine and Wisteria off of the chimney to free fan.’ As with so many other claims, it was the detail that did for me. People still ask me how my wisteria is doing today.
Every party was embroiled. Which meant we could only fix the broken system if we worked together.
In fact, before the scandal broke I went to see Gordon Brown in his Commons office with Nick Clegg to see what the three main party leaders could do. He gave us a take-it-or-leave-it proposal: a per-day allowance for MPs – not all bad, but far from right.
Had we been with Tony Blair, the three of us could have thrashed out something workable. With Brown, it was pointless. He was sullen and stubborn, and couldn’t hide his contempt. Clegg and I both concluded that it was impossible – he was impossible.
What were the long-term implications of the expenses scandal?
We lost a lot of good MPs, as people who weren’t even guilty of any wrongdoing, such as Paul Goodman, left Parliament.
The British Parliament is one of the least corrupt in the world, but it would be forever tainted. I believe deeply that people go into it to make a difference and to serve, not to see what they can get out of it. Yet ever since 2009, my postbag has been full of letters about how venal our MPs are.
It left many Tory MPs feeling aggrieved with me. They felt that the system I had set up to clean house made them look as though they had done something wrong, when they felt they hadn’t. At one point Andy walked into my office and said there was a serious chance of rebellion. I said I didn’t care. ‘This is the right thing to do – if it’s going to take me down, then so be it.’
So while it stored up bad feeling between me and some in the party, I don’t regret the position I took. Politics ended up with a model that was more transparent and that cost far less, and our party drove that.
In the normal course of things the searchlight might land on politicians once or twice a year, but its harshest glare is saved for momentous events like the financial crash and the expenses scandal. Under that intense scrutiny, I thought we had demonstrated that we were the party with the answers not just to a broken society, but to a broken economy and broken politics too.
But we were also suffering from our own broken – a broken promise.
In 2004, Tony Blair had pledged to hold a referendum on a proposed European Constitution, but it was rejected at plebiscites in France and the Netherlands.
The European powers went back to the drawing board and came back with the Lisbon Treaty, which retained many of the elements of the constitution – creating an EU Council president, foreign minister and diplomatic service, eliminating national vetoes in many areas, and paving the way for more vetoes to be eliminated.
We argued straight away that if the government had said it was going to have a vote on the constitution, it must have one on this treaty – especially since it was more significant and far-reaching than its immediate predecessors, Nice and Amsterdam. I was clear about the lessons from Maastricht: it was right to give people their say on such important changes.
I thought – I still think – that Labour’s failure to hold the referendum it had promised in 2004 was outrageous. It had managed to avoid all questioning on the European constitution during the 2005 election campaign by saying it would be subject to a separate vote. And then it didn’t hold one. So in the Sun in 2007, as the treaty was still being negotiated, I gave a ‘cast-iron guarantee’ that a Conservative government would hold a referendum on any EU treaty that emerged from the negotiations.
In 2007 it seemed entirely likely that we would be able to fulfil this if we entered government, since we all thought that the Parliament wouldn’t run its full course to 2010. But as Brown delayed, member states had the time to ratify and implement the treaty – including the UK, which did so in July 2008.
By 2009, our last hope was the Czech Republic. I wrote to the president, Václav Klaus, pleading with him to wait until after a UK general election before he ratified the treaty. But he replied that he could not hold out that long – another eight months – without creating a constitutional crisis. The Czech Constitutional Court ruled against the one remaining challenge to the treaty, and Klaus signed it that November. On 1 December the treaty was passed into law. Our promise to hold a referendum on it was redundant.
I gave a speech declaring that a Conservative government would never again transfer power to the EU without the say of the British people, and that any future treaty would be put to a vote. (True to our word, we made this ‘referendum lock’ law in 2011.) In that speech I talked about ‘the steady and unaccountable intrusion of the European Union into almost every aspect of our lives’. I said: ‘We would not rule out a referendum on a wider package of guarantees to protect our democratic decision-making, while remaining, of course, a member of the EU.’
I could feel the pressure on Europe quietly building. The anger at the powers ceded at Maastricht and since was reawakened by the denial of a referendum on Lisbon. The anger was not just coming from the usual suspects and the Eurosceptic press, but from constituents and moderate MPs. I felt it too. I was thinking intensively about the issue, and about how to make this organisation work better for us. And I was clearly stating that a referendum of some sort might be on the cards at some point in the future.
11
There haven’t been many general elections in this country at which voters have shifted en masse from one party to another. The Liberal landslide of 1906, Clement Attlee’s triumph in 1945, Margaret Thatcher’s victory in 1979, the rush to New Labour in 1997 – these are remembered as some of Britain’s great swing elections, whose winning governments went on to change the course of our history.
As 2010 approached, I knew I needed to perform a similar feat. It wouldn’t be enough just to take a few extra constituencies. We would have to win 120 more seats, and retain all our existing ones, if we were to have any hope of a majority. No Conservative had achieved anything like it since Churchill in 1950, and even he fell short of an outright majority and needed another election to return to Downing Street. We had a mountain to climb.
I may have had Everest in front of me, but I had the best sherpas by my side.
Thanks to Andrew Feldman we were going into the election in the strongest financial position in our history.
Stephen Gilbert, the thoughtful and reserved Welshman and campaigning powerhouse, already had our target seats identified, our candidates selected, and the volunteers geared up, ready to fight the ground war.
Andy Coulson had transformed my relationship with the media and translated the theory of modern, compassionate conservatism into something tangible and exciting.
Ed and Kate remained by my side. Gabby was joined by Caroline Preston and Alan ‘Senders’ Sendorek handling the media. Oliver Letwin was still coordinating policy, and Steve still adding his brains and buzz.
Meanwhile, Liz Sugg was poised to turn our plans into practice. At the drop of a hat she could pull together visits, rallies, interviews, drop-ins, walkabouts, anything. Haranguers were kept