Cameron at 10

by Anthony Seldon

  David and Samantha are bundled into a car to Buckingham Palace for the Queen to invite him to become prime minister, Britain’s youngest for nearly 200 years. Their hands touch in the back of the car. Their lives are about to change forever, but the short journey gives them final moments of peace. The car sweeps through the open gates. Cameron, still calm, ascends the wide stairs to where Her Majesty awaits him. He listens with barely concealed pride as she invites him to form a government. Audience over, and now in the official prime minister’s car under police escort, they are driven the half-mile to Downing Street.

  His team have been advised by Heywood to enter Number 10 by the Cabinet Office entrance on Whitehall. Most of them have never been inside Downing Street. They walk down its long central corridor from the Cabinet Room to the front lobby in awe, before heading outside. Standing in front of the door to Number 11, they observe the lectern that Brown has just spoken from still standing on solitary duty outside the black front door of Number 10. Liz Sugg, who organises Cameron’s trips, wants to tell him not to use the lectern and where to stand for his first speech as prime minister. She knows he is on his way back from the Palace, but is unable to get through. ‘So this is what it’s going to be like now he is prime minister,’ she thinks to herself, ‘he won’t be able to take my calls.’ Then her mobile rings. It is Cameron. ‘Sorry, I was ringing my mum,’ he tells her as if they are old friends sharing a latte at Starbucks. She tells him – she is nothing if not emphatic – exactly where his car is to stop, and where he is to speak.5

  At 8.42 p.m., the prime minister’s small convoy drives into Downing Street. He steps out beside a visibly pregnant Samantha, and delivers the statement he has put the finishing touches to just moments before:

  Her Majesty the Queen has asked me to form a new government and I have accepted … our country has a hung Parliament where no party has an overall majority and we have some deep and pressing problems – a huge deficit, deep social problems, and a political system in need of reform. For those reasons I aim to form a proper and full coalition between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats … I believe that is the best way to get the strong government that we need … This is going to be hard and difficult work.

  Huddled on the pavement in front of Number 11, his aides watch anxiously. ‘I’ll never forget that evening. The sun was setting. It was twilight, adding to the magic. While he was speaking, crowds in Whitehall were shouting. Helicopters were hovering overhead. It all seemed surreal,’ recalls Cameron’s political private secretary, Laurence Mann.6 The new prime minister and Samantha walk to the front door. An official removes the microphone. Cameron poses with Samantha on the front steps, hugging her awkwardly. As the door is opened, he gives a final wave. A few chants float in from the streets: ‘Gordon out!’ vies with ‘Tories out!’ before the sounds of the outside world fall away with the closing of the door. He has arrived.

  Staff line up along the long corridor from front door to Cabinet Room, clapping him and Samantha. His small team follow on behind. One looks down at his shoes in embarrassment, overcome by the occasion. Another notices the smell of newly cleaned carpet. Cameron turns round at the end of the line and says a few words to his new staff who less than forty-five minutes before had been tearfully clapping out Gordon and Sarah. Samantha is peeled away. Kate Fall goes with her, dividing her time that first evening between looking after both of the principals.

  Inside the Cabinet Room, Cameron greets Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell and Heywood. Britain’s two top officials brief him about his most pressing tasks – some, such as procedures in the event of nuclear threats, are held over to the following morning.7 His staff are shown to their offices. They are amazed to be presented with appointment cards showing the PM’s diary neatly typed up. ‘I realised then that this is the Rolls-Royce state in action,’ recalls one.8 Cameron is escorted through the double doors at the end of the Cabinet Room into his office, which Blair used and called his ‘den’, at almost the furthest possible point in the Downing Street warren from Brown’s office in Number 12. He looks around, disconcerted to see doors on each side, the other leading on to the long room where his aides and officials will work. He wonders about having people constantly entering his office from both sides.9 Number 10 has no ideal room for a prime minister; nothing like the Oval Office. Unlike the White House, it was not purpose-built, but evolved from history. Discussions have taken place in the preceding weeks whether, should Cameron win, he would occupy the space Brown had chosen in Number 12, move upstairs in Number 10 to the office Thatcher had worked from, or use the den.10 Cameron briefly flirts with the idea of using the White Room, one of the state rooms on the first floor, with views across to St James’s Park and Horse Guards Parade. Heywood, Fall and Llewellyn later persuade him to use the den, for practical and security reasons.

  Discussions had taken place also about Heywood in the preceding weeks. Should he stay? He had been very close – perhaps too close – to Labour’s operation under both Blair and Brown. Was he a Labour man? He had been intimately involved in all Labour’s decisions for the previous few years, bar a period (2004–7) when he left the Civil Service for the private sector. Some of these decisions under Labour Cameron and George Osborne thought were disastrous. They knew Heywood believed passionately in capitalism, but was he enough of a free marketeer, enough of an enthusiast for competition and the small-enterprise initiatives they wanted to see? But it was decided before the election that Heywood, one of the most omni-competent officials since 1945, was too important to lose.

  Present in the den at nine o’clock that first evening are Llewellyn, Cameron’s chief of staff since 2005; Osborne, his master strategist; Steve Hilton, his exuberant and intellectually brilliant thinker; and Andy Coulson, his worldly-wise head of communications. It had been felt by some observers that tension between them had seriously hampered Cameron’s election campaign, but tonight their feelings are temporarily put aside.

  The den clears suddenly at 9.10 p.m. when Fletcher enters to announce the Obama call is coming through. ‘Here I am, just us in the room, less than half an hour after he’s entered the building, with the American president waiting to speak,’ Fletcher thinks to himself.11 The two national leaders barely know each other. The White House are aware they mucked up the relationship in the president’s first year by being brusque to Brown, who they found needy. Obama thus wants to get off on the right foot with the new prime minister. ‘Congratulations,’ he booms down the secure line. Cameron has not used the apparatus before and has just been briefed that officials will be listening to his every word, taking careful notes. The prime minister is businesslike, savouring the moment when he says ‘I’m speaking from Number 10’ for the first time. When he does so, he winks to his aide. ‘Come over and see me in the White House,’ Obama says. This is a big deal, and very welcome news to the team. They are delighted to hear him utter the totemic words ‘special relationship’ between the US and Britain. The call is short and to the point. As the line goes dead, Coulson is agreeing the lines to brief about it with Robert Gibbs, White House press secretary. Coulson is anxious to get it right, and not hype it beyond what the White House wants. Cameron’s team are now playing in an altogether new league.

  Llewellyn and Fletcher decide which foreign leader talks to the PM and when. Next on his list is the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. ‘Your job is to defend UK interests and my job is to defend German interests,’ she tells a dazed Cameron, who has just been given a briefing on hedge funds, an issue between both nations at the time. Her tone is polite but formal. The chancellor is still cross that he withdrew the Conservative Party from the European People’s Party (EPP) in May 2009. Their call gives no hint of the warmth that will develop after the first few months, though she invites him nevertheless to visit her in Germany. From France, President Sarkozy – always anxious for the limelight – is pressing to speak to Cameron. He will have to wait. The team debate whether Cameron should visit Germany or Fran
ce first. Stephen Harper, Canadian prime minister, gets in with a quick call: ‘Take it all in and pace yourself,’ he tells the new prime minister.12 This sounds better, Cameron thinks, sensing here is someone with whom he will be able to relate.

  He is enjoying his new toy. He looks up from the telephone to see aides anxiously pointing to their watches. He is running late for his address to the Conservative Party. He is driven the short distance to the House of Commons accompanied by the special protection officers who have been at his side in the weeks leading up to the election and will now accompany him for the remainder of his premiership, and indeed the rest of his life. His new escorts follow him up the stairs to the Grand Committee Room where he is greeted with wild cheering from Conservative parliamentarians. The chief whip, Patrick McLoughlin, calls for silence with the words ‘Colleagues, the prime minister.’ ‘I can honestly say that I was the first person to call him prime minister in public,’ McLoughlin recalls.13

  It is 10.06 p.m. The atmosphere in the cramped room is near hysterical with excitement. After the long election campaign, MPs have endured a further five days of uncertainty until it becomes clear only a couple of hours before that Cameron will be prime minister. Aides recall ‘a ferocious cheer, banging of desks and wild excitement’ after he makes a short speech about events during the historic day.14 It will not always be this cordial when Cameron meets his party’s MPs. Farewells over, the team repair to Cameron’s former office in the Norman Shaw building. Osborne’s team join them and together they tuck in to pizzas in celebration.15

  Cameron relaxes in his old haunt among old friends, but becomes aware that Llewellyn and Fall are telling him he needs to go back to Downing Street. Once there, Cameron returns to the phone, absorbing the quickest of briefings between calls. Sarkozy will be his ‘best friend and biggest rival’. ‘I need you to tell me when I get it wrong,’ Cameron says to his officials. A respectful conversation with Manmohan Singh of India follows while calls stack up with the Japanese and Chinese. Meanwhile, calls are still being put through from Number 10 to Gordon Brown, who is being driven to the airport to head north to Scotland. Obama and other leaders are keen to bid farewell to the former prime minister. At one point, Brown rings Number 10 to thank Fletcher for his assistance with the calls. It is a surreal moment. Foreign leaders would have been surprised if they knew that their words to Brown a few hours before – ‘It’s a pity you are having to leave because you were so good’ – were being noted down by the same official who heard them say to Cameron, ‘We always wanted you to win. It’ll be great and we can now reset this relationship in a much better way.’

  William Hague is present at Number 10 for much of the evening. Hillary Clinton, US Secretary of State, wants to congratulate him, but officials decide that the call should wait until the following morning as he is yet to be formally appointed Foreign Secretary. Hague, ever philosophical, accepts their advice with a smile, and walks through to Brown’s old office in Number 12 where more pizza is being shared by Cameron’s small team. With amazingly few exceptions, here are the team who will carry him through the entire five years. They are his four closest Cabinet colleagues: Osborne, Hague, fixer extraordinaire Oliver Letwin and close friend and colleague Michael Gove. His aides are Llewellyn, Hilton, Coulson, Fall, Oliver Dowden (a senior party aide), and Laurence Mann. Present too are the officials, Heywood, Fletcher, James Bowler, the PM’s principal private secretary, and Rupert Harrison, Osborne’s heavyweight economist and multi-talented chief of staff who is still only in his early thirties.

  The new incumbents notice the pen marks on the table and ask officials, ‘Is this where Gordon stubbed his pen? Is this where he threw his phone?’ Their questions are not driven by point-scoring, but more by awed curiosity: ‘There was no gloating,’ notes one. Officials’ first impressions of Cameron that night are that he is more level and composed than they had expected. Already they detect a calmer and more orderly tone to Downing Street. Cameron’s team start drifting away from 1 a.m. The adventure for which they have worked tirelessly since Cameron became party leader four and a half years before is about to begin. Llewellyn leaves at 3 a.m. ‘It was the most exciting night of my life,’ he recalls.16

  TWO

  Origin of ‘Plan A’

  September 2008–February 2010

  The most important decision to be taken by the Cameron government of 2010–15 was made before it even got into power. The decision had three distinct phases: the autumn of 2008, June 2009 and the autumn of 2009. Together they formed the building blocks of what became known as ‘Plan A’: placing deficit reduction at the very heart of their economic strategy. It provided the coalition government with its core narrative and principal claim to success, and it gave a coherent platform for the Lib Dems to sign up to and their rationale for remaining in the government. But these very decisions in 2008 and 2009 were also to cleave Cameron’s team right down the middle, to contribute to him losing his stride in the 2010 general election, and almost certainly cost the Conservatives an overall majority. It is important thus to examine this history.

  The first plank in the Plan A platform was put in place in the autumn of 2008. On 15 September, Lehman Brothers, the 158-year-old investment bank and the fourth largest in the United States, filed for bankruptcy. The shockwaves triggered the global financial crisis. Jon Cunliffe, a senior official in the Cabinet Office, sent an email around Whitehall: ‘If we don’t do something now the whole system is going to go down. We have to act.’1 That week, the survival of British banks RBS and HBOS was at stake. As Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the Labour Party gathered in Manchester for their annual conference on 20 September, Brown was brought a note to say that Goldman Sachs, the bluest of blue-chip banks, might be on the verge of going under. The British economy was in dire danger. Cameron and Osborne regarded Brown as the principal architect of the economic position the country found itself in. But it was the PM who held the initiative, and was about to absolve himself of any blame.

  Brown took the unusual step of addressing the Labour conference on the opening Saturday, speaking without notes and with gravitas about the profound problems in the global economy. It underpinned his own position in the party, as well as in the country, as the leader uniquely placed to handle the grave predicament. His main speech on Tuesday 23 September was preceded by a masterstroke. The conference expected him on the podium, but his wife Sarah walked on to the stage. ‘Every day I see him motivated to work for the best interests of the people around the country,’ she said, concluding her two minutes by introducing ‘my husband, the leader of your party, your prime minister, Gordon Brown’. It was a coup.2 He remained on a high throughout the speech. His most effective line was that it was ‘no time for a novice’, referring not only to Cameron, but also to Brown’s would-be challenger, David Miliband. The most powerful of his three conference speeches as prime minister, it further underwrote his credentials as saviour of the nation. Brown left Britain on 24 September on a much-hyped trip to New York and Washington, leaving Cameron and Osborne behind at their conference desperately trying to find a way to make an impact. As PM, he had found a role.

  Unlike Brown, whom they disliked, and the chancellor, Alistair Darling, whom they quite admired, the two leading Conservatives had neither the power of office, nor the boon of the advice and information from the Treasury, Cabinet Office and Bank of England. They were very young and inexperienced, as they were painfully aware. Cameron had more understanding of economics than Osborne. He had studied it as part of his politics, philosophy and economics (PPE) degree at Oxford, and had worked in the Treasury as a special adviser in the early 1990s.3 Osborne, who studied modern history at Oxford, had been appointed shadow chancellor in May 2005 at the age of thirty-three. Though he served briefly as shadow chief secretary, Osborne had much to learn in his new brief. ‘As shadow chancellor, my first and biggest political task was to establish economic credibility,’ he later said. ‘I did that by being a small “c” conservative
and saying that I wouldn’t promise unfunded tax cuts.’4 Like Cameron, he looked to the example of Margaret Thatcher rather than her 1980s contemporary, President Ronald Reagan, ‘who ran big deficits to pay for big tax cuts’.5 The totemic event for Cameron, as for Osborne, was Geoffrey Howe’s Budget of 1981, which raised taxes despite Britain being in a recession.6

  After Cameron was elected party leader in December 2005, seven months after Osborne’s promotion to shadow chancellor, they rapidly became the closest of allies: the closest indeed that British politics has seen at the top since the Second World War. They both yearned for credibility at a time when their youth and inexperience provoked so many questions. So in September 2007 they took a decision deliberately to imitate what New Labour had done before the 1997 general election, when Blair said he would match Tory spending plans, and promised to maintain Labour’s spending plans if elected. Osborne’s predecessor as shadow chancellor, Oliver Letwin, said Osborne ‘took the decision early on deliberately to avoid an argument with Labour on public spending, in an attempt to neutralise the issue’.7