Cameron at 10

by Anthony Seldon

  Gove may have survived the Lib Dem roadblocks were it not for an even more fundamental problem. Embedded in his very character are the seeds of his own difficulties. This is epitomised by his reliance on the mercurial if brilliant figure of Cummings, who had worked in Opposition as a special adviser for IDS, but had fallen foul of Coulson, which explains Coulson’s antipathy to him. Gove continues to draw on the advice of Cummings despite Coulson blackballing his appointment, and relies on him in the same way that Cameron relied on Hilton’s advice. Cummings is a purist with very clear ideas about education and the world. One of these is that Gove must prevail against ‘the blob’, the education establishment made up of Whitehall, local authorities, university departments and unions, which will try every trick in the book to defeat his crusade. A problem with this binary depiction of the world is that it gives such conservative forces cohesion and a venom that they might never have possessed, emboldening the very enemy which they most wanted to see pacified.

  The problems have been simmering, and extending beyond volatile advisers. Suddenly, Gove seems to be fighting on all fronts as once. In early February 2013, he has to abandon his plans for an English baccalaureate, calling it ‘just one reform too many at this time’.13 Ten days later, senior historians write to the Observer registering significant concerns about Gove’s proposals for the new history curriculum.14 In March, a hundred academics write ‘to warn of the dangers posed by Michael Gove’s new national curriculum’.15 Gove’s retort is to call his critics ‘Marxists’.16 That month, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers pass a motion of ‘no confidence’ against him. In April, the National Union of Teachers do the same unanimously, the first time in its 143-year history that it has performed such an action, and calls for his resignation.17 A low point for Gove personally is when he is booed at the National Association of Head Teachers Conference in Birmingham in May, in stark contrast to earlier appearances when he had been well received.18 In October, Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy is among nearly 200 academics and authors who write a letter to The Times, saying that they are ‘gravely concerned’ by his policies, and calling for reforms to the national curriculum and exams to be halted.19

  Number 10 is becoming alarmed at the growing noise. Gove is gently reminded about the fate of Lansley at Health who antagonised the professionals with whom he dealt. Some at such a point would have taken a pause, reflected and rethought their strategy. But Gove’s response is to be even more fired up, returning after his Christmas holidays feistier than ever. Pressure from Number 10 is a contributing factor in the departure of Cummings, who claims he left on his own timetable though Downing Street believe that they provided the decisive push. He remains, however, a close confidant of Gove. ‘He clearly has some sort of psychic hold over Gove and the Education department. He’s a street fighter: but when he talks to us, he’s utterly sycophantic,’ says one in Number 10, who adds, ‘it’s nauseating when you know he’s being so disloyal behind your back.’ Cummings turns his fire on Clegg, who he thinks is partly responsible for Number 10’s attempts to rein in Gove. He mounts a full-frontal assault, describing him as ‘dishonest’ and ‘a revolting character’ who Cameron ‘props up’ at the expense of Gove merely in case he might need him in a new coalition after the general election.20

  Rather than keep his head down, as Number 10 wants, Gove continues to make the front pages, questioning the left’s ‘Blackadder’ depiction of the First World War, and appearing to fall out with Michael Wilshaw, his chief inspector of schools. Gove and Wilshaw have been a powerful combination working together throughout the first two or three years of government, and public disagreement strikes many as unedifying and puzzling. Wilshaw, a successful state-school head before moving to Ofsted, has been talked up regularly by Gove as sharing the same determination to improve the quality of teaching and standards for all young people. Wilshaw is furious when a DfE memo about Ofsted, written by Cummings, is leaked indicating that senior department figures are ‘increasingly alarmed’, and that it is ‘worth thinking about the whole Ofsted approach with a blank sheet of paper’.21 Wilshaw lets it be known that he is ‘spitting blood’ that the department might be briefing against him. Gove continues to respect Wilshaw, though is increasingly concerned about the competence and capacity of Ofsted. Specifically, Gove recognises that the ‘Trojan Horse’ plot by Islamic extremists to take control of schools in Birmingham was missed and then mishandled. Number 10 is unhappy with Gove continuing to make headlines while Gove is equally unhappy with Wilshaw doing the same, and believes he insufficiently appreciates the impact of some of his media pronouncements on confidence in the school and inspection system.

  Differences of emphasis between them, hidden over the preceding years, now come to the surface. Gove wants ‘earned autonomy’ for free schools and academies, while Wilshaw wants to retain closer scrutiny. Wilshaw is more inclined to keep the status quo, and insufficiently in tune with aspects of the Gove philosophy. Deep inside the DfE, conversations take place about how to address the Ofsted problem. Attention turns to a new chair to work with Wilshaw. Sally Morgan, a senior figure in Blair’s Number 10 team, had been appointed chair of Ofsted by Gove in March 2011 at the high noon of bipartisanship, and is concluding her first three-year term. In January 2014, it is announced that she will not be reappointed for a second term. She is a popular and respected figure, and there is predictable outcry and claims she has been ‘sacked’. Her response is that Number 10 is now determined to appoint only Conservative supporters to public bodies.22 The DfE is not unhappy to let that interpretation spread, and there is some truth in it: Number 10 has come under pressure from the media, including the Mail, to appoint more right-inclined figures to public bodies. Bar William Shawcross at the Charity Commission, they are mostly still led by New Labour appointees.

  The decision not to reappoint Morgan lies far more in fact with the DfE team than with Cameron. Gove thinks a change in chair will help Wilshaw and Ofsted, but admires Morgan and does not like delivering bad news. He leaves others to explain and prepare the ground, which adds fuel to the fire of why he is removing a respected and effective chair. Wilshaw is furious at the intrusion and confused by the decision, and the episode adds further tensions between Gove and the Lib Dems, who think that ‘falling out with the chief inspector of schools is not necessary to the work an Education Secretary has to do’.

  Gove’s wife Sarah Vine is not as popular in all elements of Number 10 as she is with the prime minister. Some regard her as an unguided missile, especially when she enters the fray deploying her raised profile as a weekly columnist in the Daily Mail. In early March, she writes about their decision to send their daughter Beatrice to a state comprehensive, Grey Coat Hospital, a very popular girls’ school in Westminster. She praises state education as ‘a miracle’, while dismissing private schools as polarising and built on principles of snobbery.23 Her article is very badly received in Downing Street, which is hypersensitive to adverse comments about private schooling. With unfortunate timing, Gove appears to exacerbate the problem, rather than to heed the advice to cool it. A week later, quotes from an interview he had given the previous month appear in the Financial Times saying that the number of Old Etonians in Number 10 is ‘preposterous’ and the dominance in public life of just this one school is ‘ridiculous’.24 Cameron’s inner circle contains four Old Etonians: Ed Llewellyn, Oliver Letwin, Jo Johnson and Rupert Harrison. They debate whether he has done it to protect Sarah and conclude that whatever his motivation, the impact of the ‘noises off’ is damaging the old Etonian PM.

  By May, Cameron is concluding that his old friend must leave Education. For months he has heard his team complaining that Gove is no longer listening to them, that his advisers are out of control, and that he is failing to communicate his core vision: ‘He has singularly failed to get into the mindset of the British people who have no idea what a free school or an academy actually is,’ says one. Ameet Gill and Lynton Crosby try to stop him making spee
ches and to stick to the grid of government announcements, but to no avail. ‘We had come to the view that what we needed was someone who would continue the schools policy, but communicate it much better,’ says another. Crosby is left to take the public rap for the decision to move Gove. The press laps up this narrative: Tim Montgomerie writes in The Times that ‘when Crosby told the prime minister that Gove had become a politically toxic figure, he had all the polling data at his fingertips’.25

  But the decision to move Gove had been taken long before Crosby produced his polling, the conclusions of which are by this time arguably widely known: teachers have lost faith in Gove. The decision had certainly been made well before Cummings’ diatribe against Number 10 in mid-June. In the words of the FT’s Janan Ganesh, this was when Cummings – albeit no longer a special adviser – ‘turned his Gatling gun’ from Clegg in May to ‘the only man in the country with an even grander office: the prime minister’.26 In comments to The Times, Cummings dismisses Cameron as a ‘sphinx without a riddle’ whose admiration for his Old Etonian predecessor as prime minister, Harold Macmillan, is ‘all you need to know’ about him. The comments are less damaging to a Number 10 operation which has been regularly under fire in the media and from Conservative backbenchers than to Gove himself.

  In his final few months in post, frequent reports appear in the media about Gove’s ‘spats’ with other ministers. There is resentment in Cabinet and on its committees for his intervening in others’ areas with his hawkish support for action in Syria and strongly pro-Israel line. But it is a flare-up in June of his long-running spat with Theresa May that is the final straw. He blames the ‘Trojan Horse’ episode on a Home Office and security services mindset, influenced by the Prevent strategy, which he believes is intent on ‘catching crocodiles’ rather than ‘draining the swamp’ of extremists. For many years, Gove has felt passionate about taking counter-terrorism and radicalisation seriously and dealing strongly with Islamic extremism: his 2006 book Celsius 7/7, published in the wake of the bomb attacks in London in July 2005 which killed fifty-two people, likened fighting Islamists to fighting the Nazis.

  In an article in The Times in June, an ‘anonymous source’ close to Gove criticises Charles Farr, a senior government counter-terrorism official, who they say typifies the Home Office’s reactive approach to terrorism.27 Farr is the partner of Fiona Cunningham, one of May’s special advisers. May and her team are incandescent, and leak a letter from her to Gove asking, ‘why did nobody act’ from his department over the Trojan Horse affair.28 The whole spat is getting out of control. Number 10 are furious at the distraction that this argument is causing, and the perception of a Cabinet with two senior ministers squabbling with each other. ‘Michael has done this over and over again – had a row internally and then leaked it – and people are frankly fed up with it,’ says an insider.29 According to another aide, ‘he had become a liability. He was too Michael.’ The wonder is that the media are so surprised at Gove’s departure from Education.

  The right-wing commentariat as expected criticise the PM’s move. So do many educationalists and respected figures on the centre left, like former Blair speechwriter Philip Collins. They question Cameron’s judgement: of his three welfare ministers, he failed to exercise oversight of one (Lansley), put a second under regular threat (IDS), and dismissed the third (Gove). The Mail runs a five-page story attacking what it sees as Cameron’s folly on Gove, calling it ‘worse than a crime’.30 When the article is tweeted, conciliatory messages emanate from Number 10 towards the Goves. Cameron’s team know they are suffering from the move and do not want to add to their discomfort.

  Gove is not the only figure causing difficulties in the reshuffle. Cameron’s team need to find space for promotions. They ponder moving the Communities Secretary Eric Pickles, but recognise that he has done a sound job in a difficult department; moreover, his northern, ‘authentic’ accent is useful to an administration thought to be posh. Their eyes move on to Owen Paterson, Environment Secretary since the September 2012 reshuffle, and Northern Ireland Secretary before. They think that he has done well enough, but that four years as a Secretary of State has been a good innings. They have also been troubled by his gaffes and infelicities, epitomised by a row over the badger cull in parts of the West Country in October 2013 when he said ‘the badgers have moved the goalposts’, which became a national joke.31

  Paterson is deeply angry. Nobody had expressed concern to him about his performance, and he resented references in the Sunday papers to his position as being ‘vulnerable’, which he assumes comes from leaks in Downing Street.32 ‘Owen, you’ve had a jolly good run in Cabinet, but I’ve got a party to run and I’ve got to move you on,’ is how Paterson recalls his conversation with Cameron in July.

  ‘If you get rid of me, you are smashing 12 million people in the teeth, because I’m genuinely popular in the countryside,’ he responds. ‘You will never find anyone who has my rural background. I have not just done what you asked me: I have the confidence of rural people.’ He is becoming more and more angry. ‘Only I can go to Somerset and stand in a cowshed with a Liberal at five o’clock in the morning and win them over, and then confront hardcore Eurosceptic businessmen in the evening and out-UKIP UKIP. You can’t do that.’

  ‘I know, but I can handle UKIP,’ Cameron replies.

  Paterson gets up to leave Cameron’s room in the Commons. As he reaches the door he turns: ‘I think you’re making a terrible mistake.’

  The reshuffle is largely about promoting women and younger talent. Liz Truss, an education minister, is promoted to Environment Secretary. At thirty-eight, she is the youngest member of the Cabinet, and has the additional benefit of having attended a state school (more than half of Cameron’s first Cabinet were privately educated). She has been hoping for a move to Education. Paterson is beside himself when he hears the news: ‘I think it’s bloody disgraceful what the prime minister has done to you. You’ve been in Parliament for three nanoseconds. You know about education, you wanted to go to education. But here you find yourself dummied into DEFRA, where you have no background at all. This is my phone number. Ring me anytime if you want any help.’

  Nicky Morgan replaces Gove at Education. Cameron rates her highly. She is thought to be the most reliable and senior of the available women at minister-of-state level. Other women to receive promotions include Baroness Stowell as Leader of the House of Lords, and Esther McVey who becomes minister of employment. Conservatives and right-wing commentators who approved of Gove’s reforms, who are sympathetic to the rural interest, and who are not always the first in line to applaud the advancement of women, are responsible for the generally hostile reception to the reshuffle in Parliament and the media. The reshuffle is, however, well received by women, as a poll in the Daily Telegraph suggests.33

  Relatively overlooked in the reshuffle is the most senior change of all. After four years in the role, William Hague feels he has been Foreign Secretary for long enough. He had originally agreed with Cameron that he would serve in that position until the general election. In early August 2013, only a few weeks before he considered resigning from the government over the Syria vote, he told Cameron that he would stand down from Parliament at the next election. He has had differences on foreign policy, but above all wanted to have his own life back with his wife Ffion and revive his career as a successful author. Hague suggests to Cameron that he would be happy to serve as Leader of the House until the election, which would free him up to have a prominent campaigning role, and allow his successor time to settle in before the election, particularly on the sensitive subject of Europe. Jeremy Hunt is briefly considered as a replacement, but it would be too much of a risk to move him from Health, where he had impressed Cameron, in the run-up to the election. Cameron eventually decides on Philip Hammond, the Eurosceptic Defence Secretary, who had been a prominent figure as shadow Chief Secretary before the 2010 election. Also departing are the veterans Ken Clarke and George Young, both in their seven
ties.

  Cameron has always said that he doesn’t like reshuffles and thinks they create more problems than they solve, at least in the short term. If he needs vindication for this belief, the July 2014 reshuffle provides it in spades.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Scotland Decides

  September 2014

  ‘Two days before the vote, David Cameron became the most subdued I’ve ever seen him,’ says an aide. ‘He realised that his political fate hung in the balance.’ ‘It really would have broken his heart if the referendum had been lost,’ recalls another. It was his decision alone to call the referendum which could precipitate the end of the 307-year-old union. He knows about British history. He also knows that this would not be like losing a general election. It means he would be forever remembered for just one thing: the PM who broke up the UK. Comparisons are being made with Lord North, prime minister when Britain lost the North American colonies in 1776.1 ‘The only other occasion he was as worried was during the height of the Coulson saga.’

  Even among his staff, some think that he was overly hasty in calling for a referendum which even Alex Salmond wasn’t demanding, and which dominates his time in the six months leading up to the vote, to the detriment of pressing issues including the economy, UKIP and immigration. The ‘essay crisis’ jibe is back as Cameron tries desperately to avert disaster, with accusations flying around that he is doing too much, too late. Yes, he feels strongly that the SNP victory in the 2011 Scottish elections pointed towards a need to resolve the issue, but does he really need to force a referendum, and in this, the busiest of parliaments? Has he, in fact – as many in his party believe – conceded too much to Salmond, above all on the timing of polling day, and in the framing of the referendum question? How on earth has he allowed himself to get into this position? Rarely has the job of prime minister appeared lonelier.