For the Record Read online

  Most importantly, we failed to deliver effective control over levels of immigration in to our country and to convey a sense that the system we were putting in place was in the national interest.

  Those who share my enthusiasm for free markets, open economies and diverse societies have got to recognise that none of these things will endure unless we deal with the insecurities – and demonstrate that doing so is absolutely vital to making our country more prosperous. The debate now seems to be ‘pro globalisation’ versus ‘anti globalisation’. My point is that we have to listen to the genuine arguments of those who are ‘anti’ if we are to preserve what I believe we all ought to be ‘pro’.

  Readers might wonder why I have dedicated so much space to the early years of opposition and modernisation of the Conservative Party. It all seems rather distant, even irrelevant to today’s troubles – hoodies, huskies, the Big Society are literally ‘so 2008’. I disagree. It may be tempting to respond to these desperate times with desperate measures – to become louder and more extreme in our answers. But I believe the opposite is required. I look back at the approach we were taking in opposition, during the early years of this young century – moderate, rational, reasonable politics – and I realise those things are more important than ever.

  In these difficult, disputatious times, as this young century reaches its twenties, I passionately believe the centre can hold. The centre is still the right place to be – a bold, radical, exciting place to be (which is why another working title for this book was Right at the Centre).

  Winning the 2015 election after five years of coalition, difficult economic decisions and bold measures, like legislating for gay marriage, was proof that commanding the rational, centre ground can deliver good government and good politics too. It is the approach – in my view – that should be applied to Brexit. The most sensible, most rational (and the safest) approach would be to seek a very close partnership with the organisation that will remain our biggest source and destination for trade, as well as a vital partner for peace, security and development. Our aim in delivering the outcome of the referendum should be, as I put it in this book, to become contented neighbours of the EU rather than reluctant tenants.

  I have tried throughout the book to mention as many people as I can who worked with me over the years, from those who mentored me when I was a young researcher starting out in politics, to my own special advisers when I was PM. I am sorry to anyone I’ve missed. I am so proud of you all – not only of what we achieved together but what so many have gone on to do, in finding centre-right answers to the biggest problems we face, from climate change to poverty, modern slavery, an ageing society and more.

  I also want to thank those who helped me in writing this book. Danny Finkelstein, who listened to me download my thoughts over the years and helped me shape my arguments when the time came to write about it all. Jonathan Meakin, whose research and fact-checking capacity at times seemed equivalent to an entire government department. Arabella Pike at HarperCollins and the late Ed Victor, who enabled me to turn my proposal into a book and navigate what was for me a new world of publishing. Special thanks go to all those people who contributed, commented and reviewed various drafts – especially Nigel Casey, Peter Chadlington, Kate Fall, Andrew Feldman, Rupert Harrison, George Osborne, Hugh Powell, Oliver Letwin, Ed Llewellyn and Liz Sugg. The biggest thank you by far is to Jess Cunniffe, who first interviewed me on the campaign trail for a Milton Keynes newspaper, came to write my speeches in Downing Street and, eventually, helped me to write these memoirs.

  I have been so lucky in so many ways in my life – I haven’t tried to hide that in the pages that follow – but my greatest fortune has been to find a partner who has been the love of my life, my best friend and my rock. All these years on, I am still in awe of her. So I dedicate this book to Samantha. And I pay tribute at the same time to both our families and our friends. Being a spouse, friend, sibling, parent or child of someone in the public eye isn’t always easy – particularly when they’re prime minister, and even more so when they’ve held a controversial referendum. I want to recognise everyone, particularly Chris and Venetia Lockwood and Mary Wynne Finch, who have been so supportive during my time in politics, and since.

  Sometimes Sam and I talk about how things would have been different if I had stayed on as prime minister for three months after the referendum – as I intended when I announced my departure. This is something that is not really discussed by commentators, but I think it is significant. Had I stayed on for that period, I would have had the chance to explain many of the things people wanted me to explain – the things I wanted to explain. I might have been able to help set the tone for what followed and for the early stages of our departure from the EU. But the 2016 leadership contest collapsed and I didn’t get the chance to do so. Instead, it looked like I was beating a hasty retreat. Which I wasn’t. As I set out later, having campaigned so passionately to remain in the EU, I would have had no authority or credibility to deliver the result of the referendum. The country needed a new prime minister. It would have been impossible for me to do the job.

  So this book is my chance to say what I wanted to say then and what I want to say now. It is not a historical diary, or a political potboiler of who said what to whom and when. It is my take on my life and my political career done my way. It is to help us understand the past and give us some pause for the future. It is for us today, and – I hope – for posterity. It is For the Record.

  1

  Five Days in May

  On Friday, 7 May 2010 I woke up in a dark, modern hotel room opposite the Houses of Parliament feeling deeply disappointed.

  I had led the Conservative Party for half a decade, modernised it and steered it through a gruelling general election campaign. We had won more seats than any other party – more new seats than at any election for eighty years. We were the largest party in Parliament by far.

  But it wasn’t enough. For the first time in decades that glorious, golden building across the Thames was ‘hung’, because no single party had reached the absolute majority needed to form a government.

  That wasn’t just a blow to my party, it was – in my view – a blow to Britain. The country had just suffered the worst recession since the Second World War. Banks had been nationalised, businesses had folded and unemployment was climbing to a fifteen-year high. Just a few days earlier, Greece had been bailed out by the EU and the IMF. Athens was ablaze, our TV screens filled with images of protesters burning tyres and clashing with riot police in response to the austerity the bailout demanded.

  Not only was our economy entwined with those on the continent. Our budget deficit was projected to be 11 per cent of GDP – the same as Greece’s. We also needed dramatic reforms, and couldn’t go on spending as we had. A stable, decisive government was more important than ever.

  Yet we were far from that now. And while thirty million people had voted, what happened next would be largely down to just three of them: the serving Labour prime minister, Gordon Brown; the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg; and me.

  So much has been written about the days that followed that election result. Documentaries, books and even films have catalogued every meeting and every moment, every twist and every turn. What can I add? Well, the emotions I felt. The things that motivated me, and people who influenced me. An insight not just into the rooms in which events took place, but into my mind when the decisions were made. In short, what it was like to be right at the centre during that extraordinary time in British politics.

  So, Friday started with disappointment. We had failed to win some of the seats we should have won – and failed to seal the deal with the British people. Thirteen long years of opposition still weren’t over.

  Of course, there was also a sense of relief. I had travelled 10,000 miles in the past month, trying to squeeze every last vote out of every marginal constituency, culminating in a twenty-four
-hour length-and-breadth tour of Britain. I was exhausted.

  The previous day, my team and I had met at the home of Steve Hilton, not far from my constituency home in the village of Dean, West Oxfordshire, and talked about the electoral outlook. Steve and I had worked together at the party’s headquarters, Conservative Central Office, during our twenties. He had become renowned as a left-field thinker of the centre-right – passionate, bold, volatile, magnetic, and I’d made him my director of strategy. He was also a close friend to me and my wife, Samantha, and godfather to our first child, Ivan.

  The magic number was 326: that was how many seats were needed for an absolute majority. But I knew all the marginal constituencies well, and I just didn’t see us winning them all. I predicted we’d end up with between 300 and 310 seats.

  One person who had come to the same conclusion – and we often reached the same conclusion – was George Osborne, shadow chancellor and chief of our general election campaign. Five years younger than me, he was my partner in politics: urban while I was more rural, realistic where I would sometimes let ideas run away with me, and more polit­ically astute than anyone I’d ever met. He impressed me every single day.

  The final tally of Conservative MPs was 306. While that was more or less what I had expected, what did surprise me was that the Lib Dems – in many ways the stars of the campaign, after Nick Clegg’s initial success in Britain’s first-ever TV election debates – had done worse than predicted, and lost seats. Labour – despite its unpopular leader, despite being obviously tired after thirteen years in power, despite having presided over the biggest financial crash in living memory, and despite many forecasts to the contrary – had done better than predicted.

  I was surprised, too, by the ambiguity of the result. Whenever people had asked me beforehand what I would do in the event of a hung Parliament, I said I would do what democracy dictated. I thought that the result would point to an obvious outcome. If we were the largest party, we would form a minority government or – less likely – a coalition. If Labour was the largest party, it would do the same.

  But that Friday morning I realised things hadn’t turned out like that. Democracy hadn’t been decisive, so I would have to be.

  I was alone in that hotel room. Samantha, heavily pregnant with our fourth child, had gone home to get our children, Nancy and Elwen, ready for school. I ran through all the permutations. All I could think when I considered each was what my dad used to say to me: ‘If you’re not sure what to do, just do the right thing.’

  A Conservative minority government was one clear option. With the most seats, we had a real claim to govern. But it would mean six months or more of playing politics day after day, trying to create the circumstances for a successful second general election. And at a time when the global economy was in peril, I knew instinctively that it would be the wrong option.

  In any event, there was another real possibility: a ‘rainbow coalition’ of Labour, Lib Dems and other minor parties, which together constituted an anti-Tory majority. I knew that some in our party would say, let them get on with it. Wait while they forge a shaky alliance and then watch it collapse, forcing a new general election in months.

  But as the instability of that morning stretched into the distance, I felt it would be wrong to help inflict such an outcome on a country that needed direction. At this time of national need, stability was paramount.

  Another option was a Conservative minority government propped up by the Lib Dems through a ‘confidence and supply’ agreement. It would be less precarious than a minority government, but far from stable or effective. We would never be able to pass all the reforms that were so desperately needed.

  They were needed not just to fix our broken economy, but to mend our broken society. Thirteen years of Labour had left us with a school system that, despite the beginnings of worthwhile reform, encouraged mediocrity. We had a welfare system that discouraged work, a health system that was struggling under the weight of new demands and bureaucracy, and a criminal justice system that undermined social responsibility. For all the money they had thrown at problems, Labour had neglected the family, patronised the elderly, and ignored some of our most ingrained ills, from addiction to abuse. In opposition we’d spent five years preparing to put these things right, but I didn’t think a minority government with only a confidence and supply deal would be up to the task.

  The final possibility was forming a full coalition between the Conservatives and the Lib Dems. Yet the Lib Dems were ideologically and historically closer to Labour than to us. Plus, minor parties never fared well in coalitions. What Lib Dem leader would be prepared to take such a risk?

  Step forward Nick Clegg. His party, and its predecessor the Liberal Party, had been out of power for nearly a century, but his brand of sens­ible centrism and personal charisma gave it the biggest chance in decades to return to the forefront of British politics.

  And what Conservative leader would want to join forces with a party that we had just been fighting ferociously for seats across much of the country, and that was seen by Conservative Party members and MPs as both left-wing and opportunistic?

  Well, that would be me. I’d been MP for Witney in West Oxfordshire for nine years, and leader of my party for five. For most of my adult life I’d worked for the Conservative Party. I felt that my years navigating the British political system made me a match for this difficult task.

  But more than that, I felt the courage of my convictions. I’d had about three hours’ sleep over the last couple of nights, yet I saw with complete lucidity what needed to happen. It wasn’t the obvious thing to do, but it was the right thing to do. I bounded out of bed and summoned my team – not to ask them what we should do, but to tell them.

  The election result didn’t feel like an accident, I said. Something different had happened, because people wanted something different. Parliament hadn’t been hung for thirty-six years. I was advocating something that hadn’t been done in peacetime for 150 years: forming a full coalition.

  I called the ‘big beasts’ of the Conservative Party to inform them of my approach. John Major, the last Tory leader to have won an election, eighteen years previously. Former leaders like Michael Howard and Iain Duncan Smith. Party grandees, and my leadership rivals from five years earlier, Liam Fox and Ken Clarke. And the candidate who had made it into the final two with me, David Davis.

  The feedback was overwhelmingly that it would be right to reach out to the Lib Dems, although there was the odd exception. ‘Davis thinks it’s a bad idea,’ I reported to my team after I had hung up the phone. ‘Which means I’m probably on the right track.’

  Then Nick Clegg appeared briefly on the TV. He had led his party to new heights in the polls, and then, as I have said, lost seats. Still – and politics can be so strange like this – he found himself holding the balance of power. He stayed true to what he had said before the election: that if there was a hung Parliament he would talk first to the party with the largest number of seats. The door to power opened a crack.

  Soon afterwards, the actual door to power – the big, black one with ‘10’ on it – was flung open and Gordon Brown came out into Downing Street. He was ready, he said, to talk to the Lib Dems once they had spoken to us. I had thought that he would in some way concede that Labour had lost the election, and set the scene for his departure. George laughed at the suggestion: Brown, he said, would have to be prised out of No. 10 as he clung to the railings by his fingernails. He was right.

  Fortunately, some of the spadework for a possible coalition with the Lib Dems had already been done. Before the election I had sanctioned George to compare our manifestos and prepare the ground for a deal with the potential kingmakers alongside my chief of staff, Ed Llewellyn. Diminutive and quietly spoken, Ed derived his authority from his intellect, decency and experience, having been chief of staff to Chris Patten in Hong Kong before the handover, and to Paddy Ashdown
in Bosnia after the war.

  They would work on this with Oliver Letwin, the West Dorset MP and the party’s policy chief. Oliver was kind, endearing and clever. He may have looked like an old-fashioned Tory MP, with red corduroy trousers and matching complexion, but no one had been more influential in helping me develop my brand of ‘modern, compassionate conservatism’ over the past five years.

  I hadn’t taken part in any of the coalition preparation. I wanted to be single-minded about winning, and not to dissemble if people asked me what I had done to prepare for a coalition.

  A huge amount would rest on the speech I would give, and we chose St Stephen’s Club as the venue. Commentators made much of the fact that overlooking me was a portrait of Winston Churchill, the last prime minister to lead a coalition, in his case during the Second World War. But it was the ghost of another great PM, the club’s first patron, Benjamin Disraeli, whose presence I really felt.

  ‘England does not love coalitions,’ Disraeli famously said. In many ways, I agreed. I had made endless speeches about supporting our electoral system because it produced decisive results and strong governments. In Europe it often took months to form a government – months of political instability that recession-battered Britain could not afford. But I felt that, given our circumstances, coalition really was the right choice – and I believed I could make it work.

  I stepped up to the lectern to make my pitch. A strong, stable government that had the support of the public to take the difficult decisions was, I said, needed to put the country back on track. I didn’t use the word ‘coalition’ – I didn’t have to. It was clear that a coalition was on the table from the fact that I specifically talked about going beyond a confidence and supply deal.

  I went through the key elements of the Lib Dem manifesto, and set out where we could ‘give ground’ and ‘change priorities’, giving prominence to cutting carbon emissions, raising the tax threshold for the lowest-paid and speeding up the introduction of a ‘pupil premium’, so schools with children from the poorest homes would receive more money. I indicated that we were also open to political and constitutional reform, which was hugely important to the Lib Dems, who had long campaigned for changes to the voting system.