For the Record. David Cameron
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2010. The Sunday Times front page read: ‘Brown on Course to Win the Election.’
As an opposition leader, you embark upon the final few weeks before a general election – the so-called short campaign – with exhilaration and dread.
The dread comes from the constant possibility of screwing up. The whole process of a campaign is very presidential, and the result very personal. The exhilaration comes from the fact that you’re able to break out of the media cycle and parliamentary timetable and get on an equal footing with the government.
For five years the media cycle had been a source of great frustration. In opposition, we worked hard to research and develop strong policy. If it was about schools, for instance, we would meet and talk with heads, teachers, governors, parents, academics and think-tanks. We would research what had been tried overseas, prepare policy papers, lay out the costs and the sources of funding – and then perhaps arrange a visit to something equivalent that already existed in order to accompany the announcement. It’s really strong, exciting stuff – and you set out the steps for how it’s going to change the country.
Then you switch on the news that evening and find you’ve been given twenty seconds to explain it. What follows is analysis – often reporters interviewing other reporters – not about the policy itself, but about what political advantage you are seeking by coming up with this new idea and whether or not it’s an election winner. And, of course, all this is combined with the latest plot twist of who is up or down in the great parliamentary soap opera.
On 6 April, Gordon Brown fired the starting gun for a 6 May election. I was sitting in my glass-walled office in CCHQ after our first 7 a.m. daily election meeting. Officers from the Met were on their way to give me police protection throughout the campaign. If we won, they’d probably be with me for the rest of my life. (They are the most wonderfully kind and dedicated people. And they do try to give you as much personal space as possible. A week after the election, Sam and I were out for dinner and she leaned over to me and whispered, ‘Those people on that table there – I’ve seen them before.’ ‘Yes, darling,’ I said. ‘They’re from the protection team.’)
Off we went to Birmingham, then Leeds, then seventy-three other constituencies in just four weeks. For years I’d done my Cameron Direct events, letting the public fire questions at me on any subject. It was exactly where I wanted to be, on a little stage we were carting around the country, not much more sophisticated than the soapbox John Major had taken around eighteen years earlier.
What Major didn’t have, though, was a man dressed as a chicken following him everywhere. Tony Blair did – one of CCHQ’s apparently. But what goes around comes around, and now I had a chicken of my own, this time from the Daily Mirror.
To begin with it was funny having this birdman on my tail. But the novelty wore off, and I finally decided to confront the stooge, unmasking him by lifting the head off his costume. It turned out that he was called Tristan, and he was left completely speechless when I asked what it was he was so keen to ask me. The next day, in Saltash in Cornwall, I was hit by an egg, enabling me to finally answer the question of which came first.
By this point I felt we were really getting somewhere with our economic message. Leaders from great British brands like Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury’s and Corus steel were coming out to condemn Labour’s proposed National Insurance rise, branded a ‘jobs tax’.
It’s important to emphasise what a shift this was. Since Black Wednesday, New Labour had courted Britain’s businesses effectively. Now we could claim to be the party of business once again.
We were making progress on our society messaging too. With the help of Michael Caine we launched the centrepiece of the Big Society, the National Citizen Service, or NCS. Expressions of interest in setting up Free Schools were coming in from around the country. And our pitch to public-sector workers about cutting bureaucracy and enhancing local control was a vast improvement on our efforts in 2001 and 2005.
A few days later, I launched our manifesto at Battersea Power Station. The manifesto was a blue hardback book titled ‘An Invitation to Join the Government of Great Britain’, which emphasised the Big Society theme.
But all the usual election paraphernalia – posters, chickens, eggs and manifestos – was about to be eclipsed by something completely new.
Ever since 1964, when Harold Wilson challenged prime minister Alec Douglas-Home to appear in a TV debate, there had been a similar call from someone during general election campaigns. In the past, it had always been the underdog doing the calling, and the favourite refusing (and in recent years that favourite had been followed around by a chicken – because they’d ‘chickened out’).
Until now.
I had decided back in 2005 that I wasn’t going to fit into the normal pattern of resisting debates if I was in the lead, or of calling for them if I was falling behind. I was going to go for it. I liked TV. I liked debating, although perhaps I hadn’t paid enough attention to the fact that when I’d debated on TV during the party leadership campaign it hadn’t gone well. Anyway, I always felt that TV debates were coming. The UK’s first general election leaders’ debates would take place in 2010 because, for the first time, the front-runner was calling for them.
Bill Knapp and Anita Dunn, the US experts I had hired to help me prepare for the coming ordeal, were brutally frank about the reality I was about to encounter: to my disappointment they told me that these wouldn’t really be debates at all. You don’t want to engage with your opponents’ argument, you just want to put your own point across. You should focus your efforts on delivering your pre-prepared soundbite down the camera lens. Avoid too much spontaneity in taking apart opponents’ arguments; it’s far too risky. Just get your ‘zinger’ – a one-liner destined for the headlines on the news programmes after the show – ready beforehand, and deploy it as soon as you can.
My disappointment quickly turned to worry. We did some practices in Millbank, with Damian Green (and sometimes Olive Dowden) playing Gordon Brown, and Jeremy Hunt as Nick Clegg. Halfway through, I threw down my notes. ‘It’s hopeless. Clegg will win hands-down. It’s easy. He can just say “A plague on both your houses.”’ Even if I’d been Demosthenes or Cicero, he was going to win.
Before that first debate, history in the making, I’d never been so nervous in my life. The news channels covered the build-up as if it was England in the World Cup final. Brown, Clegg and I stood on a primary-coloured set like gameshow contestants. As predicted, Clegg was painting the blue and red parties as the old guard, and himself as the new kid on the block. It seemed a breeze for him. He was even using the same phrases that Jeremy Hunt had as his stand-in during our mock debates – ‘two old parties’, ‘more of the same’, ‘there is an alternative’. Nick had prepared well – and he was good.
I was bad. Not switch-off-the-telly, hide-behind-the-sofa bad. But aloof and stiff. Lacking passion. Anecdotes that were too contrived. And one bit of absolutely essential preparation that I failed to put into practice was properly looking down the camera when I spoke. Colleagues and friends were polite afterwards, because while Clegg had undoubtedly won, at least I hadn’t lost (that honour went to Brown).
But Samantha was brutal. ‘You were hopeless – and you’ve got to watch the whole thing through all over again to see just how bad it was.’ She was right – and I did.
The Lib Dems surged ahead in the polls – into the lead in some. There was even a poll that said their leader was nearly as popular as Winston Churchill. Britain was in the grip of a new phenomenon: Cleggmania.
And I took it hard. I was the one who had wanted to do these debates. I hadn’t prepared properly for them. I’d let everyone down. I lay in bed, running through a list of people in my head, friends who I thought were going to lose their seats because I’d screwed up. The feeling was worse than fear or disappointment. It was guilt.
The second debate, in Bristol, went much better. It was on foreign affairs, and Clegg was vulnerable here. His party manifesto rejected ‘like-for-like