Cameron at 10

by Anthony Seldon

  British ambassador to the US Nigel Sheinwald is asked to speak about the thinking of the Obama administration. ‘The president is very, very cautious about Afghanistan and far more reserved than his generals,’ he tells the meeting. ‘Obama isn’t going to dig deeper in Afghanistan beyond the additional 30,000 troops. There will not be a further surge: the direction of travel is they want to get out, without rush, and in an orderly way.’5 Liam Fox says, ‘It is clear that Obama wants to take the US out of two wars, Iraq and Afghanistan, and if that is what they’re going to do, Britain can hardly remain there on its own.’6

  The seminar is not intended as a decision-making forum. But it becomes painfully clear to all present the limits of what Britain could still achieve in Afghanistan, and that already some 250 British servicemen have lost their lives since 2001, compared with 179 dead in Iraq. The meeting recognises that there is no ultimate prospect of a Jeffersonian democracy in Afghanistan, as the senior diplomat Simon McDonald puts it.7 Rather, the most that can be hoped for is building up Afghanistan’s military and civil capacity, and avoiding the return of al-Qaeda and the threat that would pose to Britain’s national security. Cameron probes intensely the military’s ‘status quo’ argument, that staying on in Afghanistan will produce solutions where doing so had failed to work in the past. He is at his strongest at this kind of forensic questioning of received wisdom. He winds up the seminar, more convinced than ever in his mind that Britain must leave. He is even clearer than ever of the date: before the next general election.

  David Richards is the most vocal of the service chiefs. Setting any kind of time limit will be a big mistake, he says. The politicians must give the military more time and more money. Cameron notes what he says but will not be swayed by him. Richards is in his mind also as he decides who should succeed Stirrup as CDS. He ignores advice from Whitehall in favouring Richards over Houghton, whom he passes over (Houghton succeeds Richards in July 2014). Cameron has just finished reading Andrew Roberts’ Masters and Commanders about Churchill and Roosevelt and their relations with their military chiefs. It affects him; he wants to take on a big figure like Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff during the Second World War. Richards is known to be outspoken and with a media profile, very conscious of his image on the stage. He is exactly the big personality Cameron wants as CDS, rather than a more conventional and retiring officer type, because Cameron’s reassertion of civilian control over defence policy will be much more effective if he can show he doesn’t have a cipher in the CDS slot. In another innovation, Cameron again draws inspiration from Churchill, who was the last prime minister to have by his side in Number 10 an officer in uniform. It is indeed odd that no prime minister since has seen the need for having a serving officer on their personal staff who understands military operations and the thinking of servicemen in the field. Colonel Jim Morris is selected as the military assistant against the favoured MoD candidate because he is independent-minded, and totally trustworthy.

  Cameron surprises himself with his confidence taking decisions on defence and foreign policy. His clarity of mind and personal assuredness quickly command the respect of army chiefs, top officials and spooks. On 12 May, a few weeks before the Chequers summit in June, Cameron holds his first Cabinet, and Afghanistan is high on the agenda. Discussions had already begun earlier in the day among the new body, the National Security Council (NSC), a rare Cameron organisational innovation foreshadowed in the manifesto. Andy Coulson briefs that this is the prime minister’s first ‘War Cabinet’. This new structure, including a National Security Adviser (NSA) and secretariat, emerged from Ed Llewellyn’s and Oliver Letwin’s discussions with Pauline Neville-Jones.8 On the advice of William Hague, Cameron chooses the permanent secretary at the Foreign Office, Peter Ricketts, as his first NSA. ‘Come over the road and work with me on setting up the NSC,’ he says to Ricketts on his first day in power.9 It is an inspired choice. Cameron thinks Ricketts a ‘consummate professional’. The brand-new piece of Whitehall apparatus needs a figure of Ricketts’ authority and skill to embed it quickly, a process aided by the political capital of the incoming government. Not the least of Ricketts’ skills is to reassure Whitehall that the new PM is not setting up a PM’s office running foreign and defence policy from Downing Street. He also resists the notion that the NSC should have responsibility – as does its US counterpart – for broader economic issues.

  As Ricketts addresses the first meeting of the NSC, he gazes around the Cabinet table at the exhausted faces of newly appointed ministers, weary after weeks of an election campaign and coalition talks. ‘They were both excited and a bit disoriented to sit down as the War Cabinet within hours of walking into their ministerial offices,’ Ricketts recalls.10 Cameron, by contrast, is alert and in command of the meeting from the start. Ricketts opens his remarks with a sobering fact: ‘This is the first time a British government has come into office with the armed forces engaged in major combat operations since the Korean War in 1951.’11

  The NSC meets almost daily in the first weeks deliberating Afghanistan. The most powerful voices are Cameron’s – the body is much more successful when he is in the chair – as well as those of Osborne, Hague, Theresa May, Richards, and head of MI6 John Sawers, a voice of caution. More often than not an expert would be invited to brief the meeting before being quizzed by ministers. Indeed, Cameron encourages open debate before reaching a decision. The NSC structure achieves many of Cameron’s hopes of centralising decision-making over foreign, defence and security policy in one locus, with a fixed membership which is properly constituted and completely under his control. It addresses many of the anomalies of the Blair and Brown years, and works well because the PM chairs it, and it meets on the same morning as Cabinet so all the key people are present. It brings together homeland security and overseas intelligence. The intelligence chiefs like it because it brings them into weekly contact with the PM and senior ministers. Cameron likes it because overseas development is part of the structure, enabling him to keep an eye on the Development Secretary with his large and controversial budget. But for all its strengths, he becomes at times disappointed that it doesn’t operate like the White House Situation Room, and he finds it can be dominated by officials and chiefs not willing to engage in open-sided debate.

  Within these first few weeks, Cameron emerges as the dominant figure on foreign policy, eclipsing Foreign Secretary Hague, and even on defence, eclipsing Fox. He cannily utilises to the full the opportunities a prime minister possesses – trips, speeches, visits and PMQs – to achieve limelight to advance his agenda. He makes it clear he is not interested in maintaining relationships for the sake of relationships – a blasphemous concept to the Foreign Office – nor is he interested in strategy for the sake of having a strategy, blasphemous to the MoD. He establishes himself rapidly as sans pareil at establishing one-to-one relationships with overseas leaders. He respects Hague, and gives him wide measures of freedom on defined areas, including the Middle East Peace Process and Russia. Relations between Number 10 and the Foreign Office settle into a more harmonious rhythm than for several years, since indeed Major was PM.

  Cameron soon shows himself to be more interested in the details of foreign than domestic policy. Like many PMs, he finds it easier dealing with people on his level in other countries than with subordinates in his own. Like many PMs too, he finds himself having to spend much more time than he expects or wants talking to leaders from countries not in the front rank, and considerably more time than he wishes or expects on Europe and on national security. But much of his overseas work fascinates him: it is like being head boy of Britain, protecting its interests and citizens at home and abroad. Hence his obsession in getting Afghanistan right.

  Cameron knows he must make two particular visits before going public with his decision. First up is Afghanistan. He flies there on 10 June via Oman, where he boards a military transport aircraft. He had visited Camp Bastion several times as Leader of the Opposition, but this
is his first trip to the battle zones of Helmand Province and to Lashkar Gah. It brings home to him that ‘these guys are now here because of me, because of my policies’. On a hospital visit, he talks to British soldiers, and local civilians, as well as nurses and doctors. He addresses 400 British soldiers, some on armoured vehicles, and reads out a special message from the England football manager, Fabio Capello. When flying around Helmand, his helicopter is diverted because of an intelligence intercept that the Taliban are about to fire a surface-to-air missile at a VIP flight. When Tom Fletcher tells him of the danger, ‘He didn’t blink, didn’t miss a beat. He enjoyed a certain amount of black humour!’12

  Nick Parker is the senior British officer on the ground in his capacity as the deputy commander of International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), NATO’s forces in Afghanistan. He and the PM speak face-to-face for the first time on 11 June in Camp Bastion: ‘We touch on casualties and I am deliberately hard,’ Parker writes in his diary. ‘Casualties will get worse. You have to live with it. Our job is to keep going and retain the initiative.’ Cameron doesn’t flinch. He is frank about the political pressures he is under at home, the difficulty of finding more money for resources, and his scepticism of success in Sangin. Parker concludes, ‘Very impressive … he’s quickly brought a far greater sense of purpose. First impression, a good leader and quick to understand.’13 Cameron presses Parker and fellow officers on the ground hard about the need for an end date. He is told that if the British forces are able to concentrate their efforts on a small part of Helmand, where they can show clear progress, then it is entirely sensible to give a date for withdrawal. Cameron has heard what he needs to hear. On the return flight, Liz Sugg notes that he’s much more silent and thoughtful than usual. ‘The visit has made a big impression on him,’ she says.14

  The second journey Cameron has to make is across the Atlantic to see Obama, his first meeting with him as prime minister. He wants to make a good impression, and is fully aware that he had failed to strike up the right note with the president on their meeting in London when Leader of the Opposition. Reports that Obama thought Cameron a ‘lightweight’ at their encounter in July 2008, which Obama’s team denied, had caused embarrassment.15 In early June 2010, Obama had sacked Stanley McChrystal, commander of ISAF forces, following an article in Rolling Stone magazine quoting McChrystal criticising Obama.16 David Petraeus, who’d overseen the ‘surge’ strategy in Iraq in 2007, is the new man.

  Obama had spoken by phone to Cameron about the transition: but the PM doesn’t give any hint that he thinks the president has made the wrong call. It is suspected Obama is being weak in standing up to his military. It is thought that because he is battling to get his health-care reforms through Congress, he doesn’t wish to be accused of being anti-military or unpatriotic by the Republicans at the very moment when his domestic flagship is on the line. Number 10 suspect that deep down Obama knows that the surge will not work in the long term but he’s not prepared to say so for political reasons. Another complicating factor is BP. In April, the BP-operated Deepwater Horizon drilling rig had an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, causing the biggest accidental oil leak in the history of the petroleum industry. The White House made their fury well known. Cameron is on the back foot over this, conscious of how American hostility could impact on the share price of BP, damaging the British economy at a vulnerable time. It is a delicate situation.

  Cameron boards the plane for the G8 at Muskoka in Ontario on Friday 25 June. He is clear in his own mind that British forces will be out of Afghanistan by December 2014. He has rejected utterly the argument from the military to ‘just give us a few more years and we’ll sort it out’. In the weeks following the Chequers summit, Richards has continued to argue success is the only option: ‘Whatever it takes, whatever it costs. We’re the professionals. Leave it to us in the military; you can’t set timelines on something like this.’ Some in the military are anxious to prove to their American counterparts that the British can succeed in Afghanistan where they had failed, so the US military believed, in Iraq.

  Cameron is clear he will be the prime minister who will bring the UK troops home. A further four years seems to him a sensible timeframe. Part of him would like to leave earlier, but he needs to keep in step with the US administration, who are insistent that the drawdown be managed and orderly. He is determined that Afghan security forces be sufficiently well trained to continue after NATO has left, to maximise the chances of being able to say that the war has been worthwhile, and that it allowed the country to manage its own security. But he is aware that some are saying this is a pipe dream, and that the Afghan army, without an air force, without the logistics, without the expertise or willpower, will never succeed where the British and NATO have failed. He would ideally like to persuade Obama to engage in political negotiations with the Taliban or their associates, but he knows this is a bridge too far in Washington.

  Cameron is unusually quiet on the flight to Canada. His team have chartered an entire plane for the journey. ‘This is serious. In Opposition, it was just four or five of us on trips bundled aboard a BA flight,’ one of his staff observes. Cameron has already established a rhythm. He usually sits in seat 1B, with space for boxes by the window, and 1C free for him to call up whoever he wants to talk to. He clears the domestic papers in his box, and then at last his brief for the visit, highlighting particular sections. He wants to command the detail. He has been PM for less than seven weeks: Afghanistan is his biggest personal decision to date. He is 95% clear what to do when the plane takes off and his team have squared with the White House that Britain will be bringing its troops home by the end of 2014: he has merely to decide in his mind when to tell the world and how to present it. He takes these decisions alone, relying on his instincts. The plane touches down at Ottawa’s Macdonald–Cartier Airport and he immediately calls Llewellyn, who is for once absent because he is getting married. ‘I will talk it over with the president and then I will announce our plan,’ he tells him. Cameron announces later that day that British forces will be out of Afghanistan by 2015.

  He has thought hard about establishing his presence as the new boy with his fellow G8 and G20 leaders. He has formative relationships to build on, but his team are full of trepidation. Typically, he himself is confident. On the morning of 26 June, he goes for a pre-breakfast swim in the lake. Word is put out to G8 delegations that the youthful new British leader has been swimming. His dip becomes the talk of the morning session. The Italian prime minister and doyen of alpha males, Silvio Berlusconi, is palpably disconcerted by the attention given to another leader. The Italian delegation hastily circulate photographs of Berlusconi in Speedos as a weightlifter. Cameron begins to relax, sensing he can hold his own with these leaders. His natural confidence and height give him an easy authority. Fellow leaders express interest in the novelty of coalition in British politics. ‘I’m entirely up to it, I know that I can do this,’ he later tells a close aide. The Afghanistan announcement out of the way, there are no pressing or concerning items on the G8 agenda. There’s downtime and joking with fellow leaders. In the evening, he feels very tired. One of his aides borrows some of Obama’s Pro-Plus to perk him up.

  The next day, the G8 leaders travel south to Toronto for the larger meeting of the G20. Marine One, the president’s helicopter, is preparing to take off. When the weather closes in, the helicopter Cameron intends to use is grounded, and only Marine One has clearance to fly the short journey. There is a brief moment of panic – Cameron is stuck. Sugg asks, ‘Why can’t the PM fly with Obama?’ Fletcher goes over to talk to Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, and asks if their bosses can travel together on the helicopter. The Americans are happy to help, still influenced, the British suspect, by continuing guilt over their treatment of Brown on his visits to the US as prime minister. They have two spaces spare. Fletcher and Coulson toss a coin to see who will accompany Cameron. Coulson wins. (At Fletcher’s leaving party in 2011, he is presented with a model of M
arine One.) Once ensconced on the chopper, the PM and president talk about their young families, their jobs and US politics. It is one of the most personal conversations they are to have. Cameron tries to buckle himself into his seat: ‘We don’t need seat belts here: this is Marine One,’ the president tells him. Cameron is boyishly excited. Driving to the conference hotel afterwards, he calls up Samantha to tell her all about it. ‘We didn’t wear seat belts!’

  The World Cup is being played in South Africa, and Cameron has a bet with Obama over the match between England and the United States: a case of Chicago beer versus a crate of Hobgoblin beer from his Witney constituency. The match is a draw. A photograph is released to the press of both leaders in front of their flags toasting each other, beer bottles in hand. England play Germany in the first of the knockout rounds – England go two goals down after thirty minutes, but pull one back in the thirty-seventh minute. Moments later, England player Frank Lampard hits the ball over the German line, but the referee misses it and the goal doesn’t stand. The eventual score is 4–1 to Germany. A photo of Merkel and Cameron perched on armchairs in the conference centre at the G20, avidly watching a screen in front of them, flashes around the world.

  Cameron picks up on Afghanistan when he flies over to the US for an important visit from 19–21 July. Llewellyn and National Security Adviser Peter Ricketts visited Washington a month after the general election, saw leading figures in the administration and paved the way. Afghanistan is the biggest topic on the Washington trip. Detailed discussions take place on the pace of the British drawdown, and the political strategy. The British insist on talking to the Taliban and their associates and are sceptical about any further military upgrade by NATO forces. It is Cameron’s first visit to the Oval Office. He glances around in fascination, but his mind is calm and focused. Obama and he are more similar in personality than Obama and Brown, with his brooding passions. It is clear to their respective staffs that the president and PM are on the same wavelength. The White House are impressed by the way Cameron handles himself. They tell Sheinwald after the visit that they like him, and feel that he will be ‘someone they can do business with’.