For the Record. David Cameron
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him too much damage though – the two of us drew in the opinion poll afterwards.
Arriving in Birmingham for the third and final debate, my anxieties reached a new high. So much was riding on my performance. The future of the country. The future of my party, my team, my friends and family. My future.
What happened next wasn’t planned or predicted, but I suppose it was inevitable. Brown and I had clearly both gone away and done the same thinking about Clegg. This guy was – according to the polls – running away with the election. Yet he was inconsistent. His policies had never really been subjected to proper scrutiny. The numbers didn’t add up. His manifesto included some seriously odd ideas.
We took him to bits, starting with his pledge of an amnesty for illegal immigrants. Months afterwards Nick told me that if he’d known this policy would be so contentious he never would have let it into the manifesto.
Afterwards, I bounded back into the hotel room. A poll there and then showed that I had won the debate. The relief was enormous. Finally I could get back to the real campaign, which culminated a few days later in a twenty-four-hour sprint to the finish.
My top-to-toe tour of Britain began in a hi-fi factory in East Renfrewshire in the evening. By 10 p.m. I was in a Carlisle fire station, with officers clocking on for the night shift. At 1 a.m. I was wandering around a factory in Darwen, Lancashire, before crossing the Pennines for a 3 a.m. tour of a Morrison’s depot in Wakefield. Next was the Grimsby fish market at 5 a.m. as trawlermen delivered their morning catch, followed by the first lesson of the day at a school in Nottingham, and then an ambulance station in Dudley.
Life on the campaign bus (which is rather like a band’s tour bus, but with less booze and more journalists) tests your senses as well as your stamina. After we had boarded with wet shoes from the Grimsby fish market, Sky’s Joey Jones decided to put some roast beef in the oven that was on the bus. As we wended our way round the windy Welsh roads towards a school in Powys, surrounded by the inescapable smell of fish and beef, everyone began feeling sicker and sicker.
At long last we reached our final stop, Bristol, where supporters including Sam had gathered. I was wrung out, but I had to give a rallying cry with what felt like the last breath I had in me: ‘I want a government that makes us feel good about Britain again – all that we are, all that we’ve done, all that we can do in the future … a government that’s about hope, and optimism and change in our country, not the doom and the gloom and the depression of the Brown years, which we can, tomorrow, put behind us – forever.’
But the news bulletins were focused on something else. Athens was ablaze, and several people had been killed after protesters reacted to planned austerity measures. Economic volatility and the vulnerability of countries like Britain returned to the foreground. The world was in turmoil. Who were the public going to ask to run Britain in these uncertain times? A Conservative government? A Labour government? Or something else?
As on every previous polling day in my adult life, I got up early on 6 May to go to cast my ballot. Sadly, my early voting was delayed by four whole hours, as two jokers had scaled the roof of my local polling station, Spelsbury Memorial Hall, to erect ‘Vote for Eton’ signs and swig champagne.
It is strange voting for yourself to become an MP. It is even stranger voting for yourself to become prime minister. And whereas at previous elections I would have visited polling stations and committee rooms in my own constituency, this time I had sent all my party workers to neighbouring marginal seats. So I spent the hours that followed fiddling around in my vegetable garden and chopping logs for our fire – two of my favourite ways of dealing with stress.
Later that night, Sam, my close team and I gathered in the sitting room at Dean to watch the exit poll. I felt a mixture of fear and hope – fear that we’d fail totally, and hope that we might be about to defy expectations. But I was left with a strange, in-between feeling when at the stroke of 10 p.m. David Dimbleby announced the result of the exit poll: ‘It’s going to be a hung Parliament with the Conservatives as the largest party.’
Some of the results that followed started to point towards a majority – the swings in Sunderland, the seats we picked up in the south, our better-than-expected performance in the south-east. At 1 a.m. we won Kingswood near Bristol – and that was 135 on our target list. But the north of England and London weren’t going as we needed them to.
As the voters’ verdicts unfolded across the country, I went to Windrush Leisure Centre in Witney for my own count. Though my eyes were also on the 649 other contests taking place, I was still eager to succeed in the patch I loved so much.
I was also reminded why it’s so important that our prime ministers are also MPs. Only in Britain would the person bidding for the highest office be sitting on a plastic chair watching his party’s fate unfold on a crackly TV. It is humbling and grounding to be accountable to your own constituency. And it was with genuine pride that I increased my majority.
By 3 a.m. it was confirmed there would be a hung Parliament. I took a call from Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California, congratulating me on my win. But Arnie, I said, it wasn’t a win. In what was the most surreal moment of the whole election, there I was, in a leisure centre, in the middle of the night, explaining the first-past-the-post electoral system to the Terminator.
When I got back to London I had to go to the CCHQ party in Millbank. The atmosphere was jubilant, but I was cautious – I could see from what was on the boards of ‘results in’ and ‘results to come’ that we were unlikely to make it.
Over at the Park Plaza Hotel I attempted to grab an hour’s sleep. As I closed my eyes, I lay there pondering it all. It was looking like being the most successful Tory result in eighteen years. But I was surprised and confused about the Lib Dems. Cleggmania had well and truly faded. They had lost seats. Yet – another odd feature of our politics – he might now be kingmaker.
I steeled myself. This had been the hardest slog of my life. But what was to come might be even harder.
I am clear what it was that produced the great swing in our favour. We had changed the Conservative Party, making it appeal once more to Middle England and making people in urban, liberal Britain feel that they could vote for us.
I am also fairly sure why we didn’t win outright. There was too much ‘and’ in our campaign – the Big Society and austerity; cutting some public services and increasing others; continuing to modernise and hammering Brown and Labour.
As for the debates, they didn’t have a dramatic impact on the outcome. The Conservative share of the vote was close to where the polls were at the start of the formal campaign. The Lib Dems also ended the campaign close to where they began, though Nick Clegg gave his party a tremendous boost where otherwise it may well have been squeezed by the two bigger parties and lost even more seats.
The truth is the real benefit of the debates to the Conservatives was elsewhere, and is often overlooked. By sucking the life out of the campaign, the debates meant Labour was never able to get its powerful anti-Tory cuts campaign off the ground.
Looking back, my view is simple: in those desperate economic times, even after the changes we’d made, the Conservative Party hadn’t quite sealed the deal with the electorate. People were still uncertain about the Conservatives.
This was even more true at a moment when budget cuts were needed. As I’ve said, we’d intended to respond to voters’ concerns by matching Labour’s spending in the first two years, and by promising to share the proceeds of growth between more spending and tax cuts. This formula was easy to understand, and allowed us to reduce the relative size of the state while still increasing the amount spent on essential services.
Then came the financial crash, and these reassurances weren’t possible any more. So people were uncertain. And we had been reflecting their uncertainty rather than allaying it.
Remember also that it was Everest we were trying to climb. We were trying to win a historic number of seats, while the electoral geography massively favoured Labour.