Whereas Number 10 damages many PM’s marriages, his relationship with Samantha became stronger. He leant on her throughout for emotional and practical support. The job of prime minister’s consort is little understood: they rank amongst the most influential and least studied of any in the PM’s inner court. Samantha was no exception. Although a strong personality, she could be overwhelmed by the grandeur of the role, especially in the early years. She kept her husband grounded, although he too recognised the importance of spending time with family and with old friends unrelated to politics. As a couple, they remained pleasantly unimpressed by the impressive people who constantly seek to flatter a prime minister and consort.
Cameron is a proficient public speaker, mastering information quickly and able to speak off the cuff. His most accomplished performances came when responding to the report on Bloody Sunday in June 2010 and at the party conferences in 2012 and 2014. Prime ministers need to remain focused and decisive during crises. Even when under intense and multiple pressures, he was the calmest in the room. He dominated Cabinet and its committees, including the National Security Council which he set up, conducted tight meetings and summed up succinctly. He was too decisive for some, who felt meetings were superfluous because he had already decided his own mind beforehand, if not always with a full assimilation of the issues, especially on foreign affairs. Over the five years, no one in Cabinet emerged as a serious threat to him, or made him look as if he was not in command. Though weakened by a parliamentary party intent on rebelling over Europe and other issues at critical points, he managed to survive, thanks in large part to the cushion of a coalition majority of over seventy in the House of Commons. In the chamber itself, he was effective at the despatch box and could rise to the occasion, if rarely to the same degree as Baldwin.
What of Cameron’s team, and how did he manage them? His Cabinet was not full of big beasts, as had been Clement Attlee’s (1945–51), Harold Wilson’s (1964–70), or even Margaret Thatcher’s after 1979. His only real stars in these five years were George Osborne and Michael Gove, with steely Theresa May not far behind. Cameron had no mentor figure in Cabinet, as Thatcher had with Willie Whitelaw from 1979–87 and Blair had, less successfully, with Derry Irvine from 1997–2003, and he hung on to Kenneth Clarke until 2014 partly because he offered some of their wisdom and experience. William Hague and Oliver Letwin provided some of the ballast a PM needs behind the scenes. Equally, and indicatively, he had no intellectual gurus to guide him, as Thatcher had in Milton Friedman and F. A. Hayek, though he liked to see himself in Disraeli’s ‘One Nation’ tradition. Blair was almost as big an influence on him as Thatcher; but laying too much stress on either influence misses the point about Cameron. As prime minister, he travelled lightly, guided by his own convictions, largely unaffected by voices from history or academe.
Cameron’s reading of political history taught him the pointlessness of frequent Cabinet reshuffles. He oversaw only two, in September 2012 and July 2014, with a minor one in October 2013, mainly for the Lib Dems. He strove to keep key ministers in place throughout, notably Osborne and May at the Treasury and Home Office, and William Hague remained at the Foreign Office until the July 2014 reshuffle when he was replaced by Defence Secretary Philip Hammond. Cameron’s most controversial move of the five years by far was demoting Gove from Education Secretary to chief whip, which brought enduring ire from the right and bafflement from many commentators. His final coalition Cabinet in April 2015 contained all except a handful of the ministers present at the first Cabinet meeting in May 2010; many of the changes that had occurred had been forced upon him. He stuck by ministers even when under fire, such as Eric Pickles and Iain Duncan Smith. Prime ministers need to be effective at both appointments and dismissals. Better at the former than the latter, Cameron nevertheless should not have appointed the tarnished Andy Coulson to Number 10 as communications director, and then hung on to him for too long when the phone-hacking saga exploded in 2010–11, nor retained some ministers when it could have been politic to have dismissed them earlier, such as Andrew Lansley at Health. Cameron’s skill at making appointments has been unfairly overshadowed by Osborne’s undoubted ability in this regard: the latter’s recruitments included Mark Carney to the Bank of England and, in part, Lynton Crosby as campaign manager in 2013.
Cameron’s preference for continuity and the familiar extended to staff at Number 10. He is extraordinarily loyal to those he knows well. When he became PM in May 2010, in came his close advisers from Opposition: Osborne, Ed Llewellyn (chief of staff), Kate Fall (‘gatekeeper’), Steve Hilton (free-ranging policy strategist), Coulson and Rupert Harrison (Osborne’s chief of staff). Essentially the same team was in place at the end, albeit with Craig Oliver replacing Coulson, and Crosby, the Australian campaign guru, taking over some of the strategic role of Hilton, who departed midway through the government. The Number 10 staff came under extensive fire from commentators, often as lightning conductors for criticism of the PM personally, as happens in all premierships. Some criticised his court for being high-handed, reactive or incompetent, or full of yes men. Are these criticisms fair? Readers must judge, and decide whether they adopted the bunker mentality of the inner courts of Wilson, Thatcher and Blair. Cameron’s core team certainly worked with a ferocious degree of unity, had to devise how to run a coalition government for which there was no rulebook, and felt they inherited an anarchic Number 10 on which they imposed order by holding daily meetings at 8.30 a.m. and 4 p.m. in his office, which continued religiously throughout the five years. They rarely leaked information to the press and were unfailingly loyal to their boss. The attacks subsided though never disappeared. Had there not been a victory in 2015, the knives would have very swiftly come out for them, as for Cameron.
How did Cameron command ministers and the senior Civil Service, a core requirement for the PM? His style was, in the main, to let ministers get on with their jobs where they had his trust. Cameron was a laissez-faire captain of the team, not an autocratic one. He deliberately wanted his ministers to make the running in their own departments, and was equally happy for them to take the credit. The style worked most successfully when his ministers were proficient, a status not all ministers justified. He appointed Francis Maude to shake up the Civil Service, but rarely engaged with officials directly himself outside Downing Street and the Cabinet Office. Cameron as PM was unusually self-contained, knowing his own mind. ‘The real business of this government was done between 6 and 8 a.m. up in his flat, when he went meticulously through his papers in his boxes,’ said an official. By the time he came to meetings, he often knew what he wanted.
His decision to opt for a small-scale Number 10 operation militated against oversight from the centre, a deficiency he subsequently corrected. The drawback was particularly evident in 2010–12, when some avoidable oversights and policy reversals occurred. Learning from the mistakes of Blair’s oddly unambitious first administration of 1997–2001, his team planned meticulously for a burst of activity in the first eighteen months. The belief that they would probably have one term to accomplish everything was at the forefront of their minds. His team was singularly fortunate to have the services of the experienced and formidable Jeremy Heywood, initially as permanent secretary at Number 10, and from January 2012 as Cabinet Secretary. The other two officials upon whom Cameron leant most heavily were Heywood’s successor, Chris Martin, who became the senior official at Number 10, and Nicholas Macpherson, permanent secretary at the Treasury, and Whitehall’s longest-serving head of department.
Prior to 2010, Cameron lacked experience of foreign and defence policy. How did he fare in office? He established a positive and effective, if not always easy, relationship with President Obama. He maintained good relations with Vladimir Putin from 2011–13, and with the leaderships in China and several in the EU and the Gulf. Angela Merkel was his bedrock relationship of these five years. As with Obama, it took him time to gain her full trust. Did he rush the country into precipitous milita
ry involvement in Libya in 2011, and how did he manage to lose a parliamentary vote on military action in Syria in 2013, which brought his entire foreign policy strategy into question? How serious a threat did militant Islamism pose on British streets, and how well did he manage it? The book examines these questions in full. At home, his relationship with military chiefs blew hot and cold. He showed courage in confronting them over withdrawal from Afghanistan and excessive spending demands from a defence department that he and Osborne believed to be riddled with inefficiency and tired thinking. He worked conspicuously hard to maintain good relations with the Queen and the royal family, which coincided with a resurgence of enthusiasm for the royals, notably for its younger members. A traditionalist at heart, like Baldwin, he revered the royal family.
Cameron’s poll rating was regularly ahead of his party’s. So why did he not become a loved figure, as Thatcher (and to a lesser extent Major) had been, and why did so many in his parliamentary party dislike him? Like Baldwin he was no darling of the press. It is significant that Cameron did not have the support of a single broadsheet paper when he stood for the leadership in 2005, and it wasn’t until 2013–14 that the Tory press threw their weight behind him. Disappointment that he was not a visionary explains part of the froideur. Many Conservatives and commentators yearned for him to come up with a grand narrative in the sweep of history, which he felt wasn’t true to himself. He had big thoughts, certainly, and major ambitions for his country as a civilised place where all could aspire to further themselves economically. But he was always happier as a tactician than a strategist. He believed in a Conservative attachment to family, personal responsibility and patriotism. But it did not translate into an all-encompassing vision in a Thatcherite sense. The closest he came to a strapline in these five years was Hilton’s ‘Big Society’, much of which resonated with him, notably community action, entrepreneurship and volunteering. Churchill would have dismissed it all as a ‘pudding without a theme’. Is it fair, though, to dismiss Cameron for failing to articulate an all-embracing narrative and overly harsh on the man, and a misreading of the nature of Conservative history, to argue thus? Thatcher was the exception amongst Conservative leaders in being strongly ideological, and she was responding to a particular need for action after years of government failure. Cameron did not think like that. Did his preference for incremental reform, rather than national panaceas, sell the country short?
A more serious criticism, and one frequently voiced during the five years, was that he was an ‘essay crisis’ prime minister, reluctant to engage with issues until the last minute, and then overreacting when he found himself boxed into a corner. At worst, was he just a rather lazy, arrogant figure, who made it up as he went along? As we will see, tactical considerations could indeed often trump a more strategic approach to decision-making. On Europe, he pledged to pull out of the EPP group in the European Parliament to help win the leadership election in 2005, but then in office, was he bounced into calling for a referendum on Britain’s future in the EU in January 2013? He was accused of preferring short-term stances on Europe over long-term strategy, as in his exercise of the veto at the EU Council in December 2011, or his attempt to stop Jean-Claude Juncker becoming Commission president in 2014. On his response to Islamist terror abroad, is there justice in the parallel accusation of lack of long-term thought?
On the domestic front, he had enthusiastically backed the ‘detoxification’ of the Tory brand from 2005, and then abandoned it in 2008 with the economic crash. How far did his succession of approaches once in office succeed in defining a modern conservatism? In a similar vein, he is blamed for calling a referendum on Scottish independence, albeit one almost inevitable given the SNP’s success in the May 2011 Holyrood election, then for failing to negotiate the right question and being overconfident of a successful outcome until the last minute, when he panicked into making giveaway promises. Did he fatally undermine the union? All these charges are examined in the book.
Cameron sometimes betrayed his relative youth and could be chippy, as when he called UKIP supporters ‘fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists’ before he became prime minister, telling Labour frontbencher Angela Eagle to ‘calm down dear’ in April 2011 at PMQs, or too unguarded, as when he let slip in 2014 that the Queen had ‘purred’ when she heard the result of the Scottish referendum. None were capital errors.
How much did he learn as prime minister on the job over the five years? Might a steadier and maturer hand early on have helped him to deal more successfully with his backbenchers, some fifteen or twenty diehards of whom despised him and would have happily seen him toppled, and a further thirty or so of whom were regularly and openly rebellious? Rather than drawing such figures in, he could be high-handed and dismissive. Some harboured implacable resentment over his unforgiving stance on the parliamentary expenses scandal in 2009, and his failure to win a majority in 2010. He received little credit for the Conservatives gaining ninety-seven seats in 2010, the biggest increase for the party in any general election since 1931. But there were many others who felt bruised over government appointments, with fewer Conservative berths to fill as a result of the coalition, or who had legitimate objections to the coalition as well as some of its policies. Did party management in both the Commons and the Lords, especially early in his leadership, cause enduring resentment? From 2011–12, he embarked on a series of overtures to woo disaffected backbenchers and peers, culminating in the successful appointment of Gavin Williamson as his parliamentary private secretary in October 2013. Yet even the victory in May 2015 still far from convinced all of his party, some of whom argued he had only won due to fears of the SNP partnering Labour in government. But does that factor explain the result?
Anger from inside the party also stemmed from Cameron’s preference for those whom he had known for many years, some since Eton and Oxford, which gave rise to the accusations of cliquey-ness and running a ‘chumocracy’.6 His apparently charmed circle of friends in the so-called ‘Chipping Norton Set’, containing many Old Etonians, were viewed for a time with deep suspicion, especially at the height of the phone-hacking saga, which implicated Rebekah Brooks and her husband Charlie, an old school friend of Cameron (though both were subsequently cleared). The lowest point of the premiership for Cameron personally was when details of his text messages to Brooks were revealed to the Leveson Inquiry. The charge of cronyism, frequently made against the PM, would carry force if he was giving preference to individuals purely for being friends, or if friends in his team were not proficient in their job. Was he guilty?
Failing to promote women was a linked charge, as was having a patronising attitude to them in general. Some like May were in Cabinet from the start, and he brought in three women in July 2014, Nicky Morgan, Liz Truss and Baroness Stowell, but failed to achieve his promise of April 2009 that a third of his government would be female. By the time of the general election in 2015, however, almost one-third of Conservative ministers who attended Cabinet were women. His inner team contained Kate Fall, at his right hand throughout, Liz Sugg (chief of operations), Gabby Bertin (press adviser) and Clare Foges (principal speechwriter); but does their presence counter the criticism that Cameron was sexist?
These are some of the questions the book will examine. Some of our thoughts are already evident on these pages, but for the most part, we leave it to readers to make up their own minds over the forty chapters before offering our judgement in the Conclusion.
Anthony Seldon and Peter Snowdon
August 2015
ONE
First Night in Downing Street
11 May 2010
‘Snap out of it: we have a job to do,’ barks Jeremy Heywood, Number 10’s permanent secretary, the senior official, the top dog. It is 7.55 p.m. on Tuesday 11 May. Outside, dusk is descending. Staff are still dazed from Gordon and Sarah Brown’s deeply emotional departure moments before.1 They stand around the departed PM’s open-plan office torpid, drained. Many have tears in their eyes. ‘The prim
e minister will be here in half an hour.’ Heywood’s piercing voice urges them back into action.2 Tom Fletcher, Brown’s (and now about to be David Cameron’s) foreign policy adviser, changes his red and yellow striped tie to one with blue and yellow stripes. Ever the diplomat, he wants to shift emotional and political gear before his new boss arrives in the building.3 Dirty mugs and plates are spirited away, out-of-date papers removed, computer screens cleared. Here is the British Civil Service at action stations. The king is dead. Long live the king.
Just after 8 p.m., Brown delivers his farewell statement to the media circus outside Number 10. His former staff are too busy inside to notice. Three hundred yards down Whitehall, a similar riot of activity is taking place in the Leader of the Opposition’s office in Parliament in the Norman Shaw building. Ed Llewellyn, Cameron’s chief of staff, receives a call from the American ambassador: ‘It looks like you guys are going across the road. The president wants to be the first to talk to your man when he gets there.’4 Coalition conversations with Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg are still ongoing, though they are close to reaching an agreement. Cameron’s wife, Samantha, is caught off guard by the fast-flowing action. She is called in the early evening by Kate Fall, Cameron’s gatekeeper and senior female aide, at the family’s London home in Notting Hill: ‘You’re going to have to come down soon. David is about to form a government.’ ‘I don’t have to get dressed up, do I? I’m at home with the kids.’ ‘Er, not yet,’ Fall replies. Minutes later, Fall calls her back. ‘Get ready. You’ll need to put your dress on quickly.’ With moments to spare, Samantha arrives at Cameron’s office.
Cameron at 10 Page 3
