Cameron at 10

by Anthony Seldon

  The pause succeeds in reaching consensus. Despite the changes, the bill remains substantially intact. Cameron delivers a speech on 7 June in which he promises to safeguard the integrated and universal nature of the NHS. Clegg is kept onside so the Lib Dems will support the bill through the House of Commons, and he is able to show his party that they have made a difference. The bill duly sails through the Commons receiving its third reading in the House on 7 September.

  There, one might assume, the protracted saga ends. The House of Lords will be just a formality, as on so many bills. It is debated there in the autumn of 2011, but runs headlong into the concerns of Lib Dem peers. Party grandee Shirley Williams is one of the most forthright. Week after week it is fought through clause by clause. Earl Howe, health minister in the Lords, fights to steer the bill through. But SDP founder David Owen produces, in effect, a wrecking motion. As the months drag on, they tease out some concessions. Number 10 thinks their impact is reduced by failing to agree on concrete changes. By the end, there are more than a thousand amendments which Williams claims have changed the bill ‘significantly’. From February, she becomes a supporter of the bill.16 On 19 March, the bill receives its final reading in the House of Lords and, on 27 March, Royal Assent.

  The most fraught domestic legislation of Cameron’s premiership is concluded. Number 10 are very far from happy with the political capital expended and the hit on party popularity, and blame one person alone: Lansley. They feel he has made a ‘dog’s breakfast’ of it. ‘We had pulled it back to a place in the pause where the medics, if not enthusiastic, were broadly constructive. Now we’ve tipped them all back again. We’d repaired the relationships, then Andrew started lecturing them again,’ said one insider. As early as February 2012, they are talking about a new Health Secretary being needed who is better at communications as soon as the bill is on the statute book. For the time being, Lansley stays on. The spring reshuffle is pushed back to the summer. Then to the early autumn. Cameron does not like reshuffles, nor does he relish the prospect of dismissing his former boss.

  The primary concern in Number 10 is the polls. The Conservatives had been polling 38% to Labour’s 29% since the EU veto in December until the beginning of March, but then they started dropping dramatically. By April, they had fallen to 32%. Polling begins to show a fall from the beginning of March 2012, three weeks before the Budget. As far as they can tell, it is because of the NHS bill: ‘There are weeks when its fraught final passage dominates the news. Trusted medical professionals are put up one after the other saying we are destroying the NHS.’

  Lansley is finally replaced by Jeremy Hunt in a reshuffle that comes in September. The new Health Secretary soon impresses Number 10 with his stewardship of the department. But they will have to be circumspect. The closest of watches is kept on him by Nick Seddon in the Policy Unit, Oliver Dowden, the deputy chief of staff, and Simon Case in the Private Office. The winter of 2012 passes fairly uneventfully for health. Nevertheless, from September to December 2013, Number 10 is on high alert. Cameron convenes monthly COBRA meetings in recognition that he needs Blairite-style ‘command and control’ capability to keep on top of the situation. This is the point when he says that he had never understood that in creating NHS England he would be devolving so many of the government’s levers of control over the NHS. The PM maintains a close personal interest in the leadership of NHS England: earlier in 2013 he had met Simon Stevens, who had worked on health in the Policy Unit under Blair, and warms to this doyen of the field greatly. He decides at that point that he should succeed David Nicholson, whose departure is announced in October, and Stevens becomes chief executive of NHS England in April 2014.

  ‘I was very concerned about the Lansley health reforms,’ said Cameron’s close friend Andrew Feldman. ‘After campaigning for five years building trust on the NHS, such a radical overhaul threatened to put all that at risk.’17 These concerns seem well placed. The whole episode has revealed Cameron at his most uncertain. He failed to stand back and see the political damage, given the mistrust of the Conservatives on the NHS, that would follow any attempt at major reform. ‘With hindsight, I left some ministers too much on their own, for example Health. Thinking I was the chairman and letting ministers get on with their jobs may not have been the best strategy’, admits Cameron.18

  Lansley’s bill was certainly the most acrimonious domestic legislation of the period. But was all the opprobrium heaped on him justified? Was Lansley made too much of a scapegoat? Many of his proposals were unaltered. Above all, NHS England, with its independence guaranteed by legislation, has steered the NHS through choppy waters with few of the dire consequences critics predicted. Its Five Year Forward View, published in October 2014, set out a vision for the future of the NHS which achieved widespread support.19 Contrary to fears in CCHQ and Number 10, and despite Ed Miliband’s determined campaign, neither the NHS nor the reforms became a major issue in the 2015 election.

  SIXTEEN

  Cameron and Obama

  March 2012

  ‘It’s amazing to think they are doing this for us,’ says George Osborne to Craig Oliver, as they stand on the South Lawn of the White House. In the marquee, Mumford & Sons are playing. Obama’s team are bending over backwards to tell the world that David Cameron is their friend, and that they are giving him the biggest party for an overseas leader of Obama’s first administration.

  The White House indeed are falling over themselves to play up the importance of the prime minister. During Cameron’s first five years as prime minister, a senior White House aide says, he and Obama ‘have agreed on virtually every single issue of importance to the US’. ‘David Cameron is the first person the president wants to talk to on any issue. Look at Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, Egypt or the eurozone crisis, and there is no significant difference between them.’ The White House is eager to provide visible evidence to show the closeness of their man to Cameron. Between 2010 and April 2014, they meet twenty-two times, and have forty-seven phone calls or video teleconferences. ‘The UK is our number one collaborator.’

  Number 10 didn’t always see the relationship in such roseate hues. Obama’s businesslike tone can give the impression of a lack of warmth and collegiality. If Cameron comes up with a good idea, Obama might say ‘We’ve already thought of that’, or ‘We will come back to you on it’. The White House, in contrast, makes much of the ‘instinctive understanding’ between two senior leaders: ‘No one who hasn’t held that burden can possibly understand it: it’s a complicity that exists between those who hold ultimate power in their countries.’ They point out that both Obama and Cameron regard themselves as husbands and fathers first, and president and prime minister second, that they share a pragmatic rather than doctrinaire approach to politics, a sense of fun, high intelligence and rationality. But even Cameron can find Obama too rational and considered. Obama’s love of the emotionless, logical Star Trek character Dr Spock is well known, and there is certainly more than a passing resemblance between the president and his childhood hero, so much so that his nickname at the Foreign Office had been Spock for many years.1 Cameron may well be Obama’s closest overseas ally amongst world leaders, but personal friendships are not Obama’s forte. The president is not close personally to any of the Chinese or Indian leaders, he doesn’t like Netanyahu of Israel, he fell out with Erdogan of Turkey, and he never developed a close relationship with Hollande in France. Merkel is important to him on certain issues, notably Ukraine and Russia. But again they are not close personally. There is not the warmth between Cameron and Obama that existed between Thatcher and Reagan, Major and George Bush, and Blair with both Clinton and George W. Bush.

  When Obama comes to Britain on 23–25 May 2011 for his first state visit it is a major staging post in their relationship. White House expectations are not very high, but they agree to the visit as a legacy issue to redress the way the British media portrayed Obama’s relationship with Gordon Brown, which gave the impression of the prime mi
nister being snubbed. They are very anxious to avoid the relationship with Cameron going down the same route. They thus determine to give the Brits some serious time as a sign to show how much the relationship means to them. Obama’s visit is part of a four-nation European tour, including Ireland, France and Poland. Michelle accompanies her husband throughout. As it is a state visit, they stay with his fellow head of state, the Queen, in Buckingham Palace.

  Great thought has gone into the schedule. The Obamas meet the newly married Prince William and Kate, go to the Globe Academy school in London where they play table tennis with students, and attend the mandatory white tie banquet at Buckingham Palace, where guests include film stars Kevin Spacey and Helena Bonham Carter. On the final day, Obama attends a Cabinet meeting, followed by a barbeque for servicemen in the Number 10 garden where he and Cameron dispense burgers while wearing white shirts and ties. Obama is intrigued by Number 10: he is eager to see the Camerons’ flat.

  The political centrepiece is the speech Obama gives in Westminster Hall to both Houses of Parliament, in which he lays stress on the United States and Britain relying on each other, and the world relying on both of them. He deftly touches on an issue which is widely thought to have been responsible for a certain coolness towards Britain when he first became president: ‘it is possible for hearts to change and old hatreds to pass … it is possible for the sons and daughters of former colonies to sit here as members of this great Parliament, and for the grandson of a Kenyan who served as a cook in the British army to stand before you as the president of the United States’.2

  The White House team are pleasantly surprised by how well the visit goes. Michelle is especially taken with the Queen, and both Obamas delight in the pageantry and ceremonials. Like all US presidents, Obama realises that ‘once you are in the UK, it is like being in a safe harbour, a feeling that you don’t get in any other country: it is partly about the shared language, history and culture’, a top White House aide says. ‘The trip generated tremendous goodwill.’ The Obama trip comes at a difficult period for Cameron, and its palpable success vindicates his strategy of not being seen to be overly reliant on transatlantic approbation. The idea crystallises that a return visit in the spring of 2012 would be ideal, with Obama facing re-election that year. Number 10 is absolutely delighted to accept.

  After much diary juggling, 13–15 March 2012 is fixed as the date for Cameron’s return trip. Obama has grown much more comfortable with Cameron, and the relationship with Britain generally. He is looking forward to Cameron’s visit. A difference of opinion on tackling the economy is the only cloud on the horizon. Osborne’s inclusion in the party is in part to reassure commentators that there are no fundamental differences over economic policy, though clearly there are. But he is also keen not to miss out on the fun.

  Cameron flies out by British Airways with Samantha, landing at Andrews Field air force base on 13 March to a full military reception. The mood in the front of the plane is euphoric. ‘We had got through Leveson and we were checking ourselves for contact wounds, realising that none of us were bleeding, and here we are, on this amazing visit,’ says one person on the flight. But one member of the large PM party is far from happy: Samantha. ‘It is unusual for her to go, she is very nervous because she is not a natural lover of the limelight, and particularly hates the moment when the plane door opens and all the cameras start clicking.’ Various figures on the plane reassure her. On arrival, they are whisked to Blair House, the white-painted building built in 1824 just opposite the White House reserved for prestigious visitors. They are greeted by assistant chief of protocol, Randy Bumgardner (the Guardian reports that Cameron just manages to contain his mirth).3 Generating good publicity and images is everything. Obama has a surprise in store. Later that day, Cameron flies on Marine One back to Andrews, and then by Air Force One to Dayton, Ohio for a basketball game. The White House say they want him to see the interior of the US rather than just the coastal cities overseas leaders normally visit.

  During the flight, Cameron disappears up to the front of the plane into the president’s private office where they talk alone. As the Americans hoped, he is excited and duly impressed by being on the famous plane. Of Cameron’s first five years in office, 2012 is the quietest of them on the world stage, although the Middle East as ever is still a major source of concern. They discuss whether Netanyahu will launch an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities during the window between June and September, when the Israelis will calculate that Obama is least likely to stop them because of the US elections. Advice from British officials is that Netanyahu might not risk an attack, not least because of domestic pressures from within his country.

  For Cameron, the basketball game is largely an irrelevance, but ‘for Obama, bringing in the Conservative British prime minister to Ohio – a swing state – flaunts his foreign policy credentials and underlines how he’s improved America’s image abroad,’ reports the press.4 On the British side, Craig Oliver makes the most of Cameron being the first world leader to fly on board Air Force One: the BBC’s Nick Robinson rates it even higher in PR terms than both leaders flipping burgers at the Downing Street barbeque the year before.5 On the flight back to Washington, Obama even allows the jet-lagged Cameron to curl up in the hallowed presidential bed.6

  Wednesday 14 March sees the principal events in Washington. Obama’s team are relieved that the British will not be holding talks with any Republican challengers on the visit. The day opens with a nineteen-gun salute echoing around the south lawn with the British national anthem being played. Obama makes a play of it being almost exactly 200 years since the British had come to Washington and burnt down the White House in August 1814: ‘The relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom is the strongest that it has ever been,’ he says at the press conference.

  ‘The Americans gave the PM the kind of reception normally reserved for a head of state,’ said new British ambassador to the US Peter Westmacott. The atmospherics are helped by the good weather, the roses and magnolia being in bloom, and the Marine Band creating a sense of occasion.7 The words spoken are all very warm. At the state dinner in a marquee on the White House garden, the theme is ‘America’s backyard’: guests include Richard Branson, George Clooney and Damian Lewis, star of the hit television series, Homeland. ‘I’ve learnt something about David Cameron,’ Obama says in his after-dinner speech. ‘He is just the kind of partner that you want on your side. I trust him. He says what he does, and he does what he says.’ ‘There are three things about Barack that really stand out for me,’ replies Cameron. ‘Strength, moral authority and wisdom.’8

  It clearly means much to Cameron that he and Obama spend so much time together. Number 10 estimates they have an unprecedented nine hours together on the trip. In the private flat in the White House, they discuss their families, which is a genuine shared and real bond. In formal talks, they agree that they cannot do much more to intervene in the upheavals in the Middle East and North Africa, or in Syria, where President Assad has been killing large numbers of his people. The president praises Cameron for his work in bringing the international community and aid to supporting progress in Somalia, but they barely touch on the economy. Osborne attends a dinner at the British Embassy, at which he meets his opposite numbers, and where he plays down any differences in approach. Osborne flies home that night a very contented man.

  The next day, Cameron flies to New York, where he meets Mayor Bloomberg and visits Ground Zero. Samantha had been visiting New York on 11 September 2001: Cameron had tried frantically to speak to her, but could not do so because the telephone networks were down. At Ground Zero, they pay tribute to those killed in the attacks. Oliver peels off from the prime minister’s party to see a broadcasting friend at NBC. He has only eight dollars in his pocket, not enough for a cab, but a rickshaw driver says he will take him across town for that money. As he is pedalled through Times Square, he thinks ‘what an extraordinary few days this has been, and we are even ahead of La
bour’. The trip has indeed been a spectacular success. The PM’s party are on the first high for many months.

  Oliver’s mobile rings. ‘Are you going to cut the 50p rate in the Budget?’ he is asked. He has to think very quickly. Unless he denies such a direct question, the media will know that it is true, yet he tries to brush the caller off. ‘This was precisely the time when we needed to be hammering things through on the Budget, when important things come to your attention and the Treasury tries all kinds of things on. It was incredibly unwise for Osborne to go on the trip to America,’ says Clegg’s chief of staff, Jonny Oates.9 Osborne had been in regular touch with the office from the US, but his disappearance at such a critical time did not look good. ‘What the fuck is he doing in America? The Budget is days away,’ one of the press team had said. ‘Don’t worry: it’s all fine, it’s all sorted,’ Osborne’s senior aide Rupert Harrison had replied, trying to reassure them.

  Cameron flies back that night from New York’s JFK airport. Oliver discusses the phone call with him on the plane while still on the ground. There appear to have been two separate briefings, one to the Financial Times that the top rate of income tax would be cut to 45p, another to the Guardian that it would go down to 40p. They suspect that the Lib Dems are responsible. Before the plane takes off, Cameron speaks to Osborne. ‘Let’s not add any energy to the story,’ the chancellor says. But the matter is already out of their hands.