By the time of the fourth and final television event, the Question Time debate on 30 April, Cameron has had his pump-up experience, and goes into it feeling much more confident than for the Paxman interview. The first two questions are tricky, but on the whole he manages to put across all his core lines. By this stage in the campaign, his team are thoroughly disenchanted with the BBC and are pleased that the public, rather than journalists, will be asking the questions. In a theatrical masterstroke, Cameron brings out the Liam Byrne note from 2010 (‘I’m afraid there is no money’), once again reminding voters of the perceived economic irresponsibility of Labour. ‘That is the situation I inherited,’ Cameron says. In contrast, Miliband has a poorer night, stumbling over the questions on spending, before literally stumbling as he leaves the stage. Labour’s modest improvement in the polls during the early stages of the campaign has halted.
To Crosby, Question Time is one of the pivotal moments in the campaign, because it brings Cameron and Miliband slap up against voters. Focus groups have consistently been showing the Conservative leadership that, when presented with a forced choice between a Miliband-led coalition with the SNP, and a Conservative majority government, they prefer the latter. Combined with other factors – including Miliband’s interview with comedian and self-proclaimed revolutionary Russell Brand, and the controversial ‘Ed stone’, the large stone tablet carved with Labour pledges – Miliband’s waning credibility is damaged further. The inner circle at CCHQ has not been greatly troubled by the Labour leader. ‘Whenever we reviewed the picture in our marginal seats,’ says Stephen Gilbert, ‘we could see that Miliband remained a big problem for Labour. His ratings marginally improved for a time, and then went back down again, but on the critical measure of who was the preferred PM, it was Cameron all the way.’12 Overall, even if Cameron’s television appearances do not have an unequivocally positive impact on voters, they certainly do not have the negative impact which they had in 2010. ‘We felt vindicated,’ says one of his team. ‘The television set pieces didn’t get in the way of the campaign. Even though it was a hard fight to get the outcome we did, we felt that we had called it right.’
If the television debates didn’t swing votes to the Conservatives, what did? Fears over Labour’s economic credibility and about a Labour government propped up by SNP support are key. A month after the Scottish referendum in September, an Ipsos MORI poll put Labour 29% behind the SNP in Scotland.13 As early as November 2014, Conservative focus groups are picking up concerns about a rampant SNP, and they are brought to the attention of the leadership at CCHQ. In January, however, the Conservative Party in Scotland reports that the SNP are not as strong as is being made out and might win only twelve to fifteen seats. But then the polls strengthen again for the SNP, and a wipeout for Labour in Scotland becomes increasingly likely. This is welcome news for the Conservatives: with Labour going into the election with 258 seats, they will now need to gain some one hundred seats to offset the Scottish losses if they are to gain a majority – an almost impossibly steep hill to climb.
In January, CCHQ devises a campaign to target Conservative–Labour waverers, and those considering voting UKIP, urging them to vote Conservative or risk ending up with the SNP holding the balance of power. The idea is mooted of flipping the public perception that Clegg is dancing to Cameron’s tune. Thus is spawned the poster campaign depicting Alex Salmond with a miniature Miliband sticking out of his top pocket. Digital images are created of Miliband in front of Number 10, arm in arm with Salmond. The media pounce on this negative campaigning, especially when allied to the lack of priority given to fresh policy initiatives, but high command decide this line of attack is a risk well worth taking. It meshes cleverly the Conservatives’ two core themes: Miliband’s weakness as a leader, and the damage that could be done to economic stability if a Labour/SNP coalition government were to be formed. All the economic progress made since 2010 will be put at risk, they argue. The team at CCHQ report throughout April that ‘every night on the doorsteps we are finding that the line is working in every type of target seat: the voters are very anxious about the economy, and about Ed Miliband, propped up by the SNP, putting the country back to where it was,’ says Stephen Gilbert.14
Buoyed by the success of the strategy, Crosby and Gilbert propose to Cameron that the party puts up posters of Salmond in the West Midlands and Sturgeon in West Yorkshire. They talk about it to Osborne, who thinks ‘this could be the game changer, because nothing so far seems to have made a big difference in the polls and this could shift things’.15 It forces Miliband again and again to rule out Labour forming a coalition with the SNP. To Clegg, the shift in focus to fear of a Labour/SNP coalition makes all the difference to the outcome. ‘Ten days before the election, the exam question given to the electorate changed. It was no longer “Do you favour left or right on the economy?” It was “How can we stop Salmond and Miliband?” On the doorstep it was unbelievable. Again and again and again, we saw the evidence of that plan working.’16
The other key to the Conservative victory was locked into place months before the campaign started: to hold all marginal seats vulnerable to Labour (and perhaps take a few off them), while making the principal battleground winning as many of the Lib Dem-facing seats as possible, especially in the south-west. CCHQ feed the line to the media that the party needs only twenty-three seats to win an outright majority. While technically correct, this disguises a far more sophisticated targeting strategy. The initial focus on just fifteen Lib Dem seats (where their majorities were most at risk) increases to twenty-eight in the final ten days of the campaign. Lib Dem incumbency, with strong relationships built up with constituents often over many years, is the obstacle. The tactic deployed is to target and then put the squeeze on a small number of different types of voters identified by the party’s private polling. CCHQ ensure the Conservative candidates in these seats work hard to prove their credibility with constituents and then convince them that if they don’t vote Conservative, they would end up with Miliband backed up by Salmond and the SNP. A relationship is built with those who are receptive through personalised letters and visits. Specific messages are tailored to a number of voter types in each constituency: several thousand versions of a standard letter are used to communicate with them. Labour, in contrast, invest their money into sending out vast volumes of literature to all groups without the same segmentation, and amassing an army of volunteers across the country rather than targeting particular seats.
Ten days before polling day, Crosby and Gilbert tell Osborne and Cameron that they should redouble their targeting of Lib Dem seats and should aim for the lot. ‘It was another key moment,’ says Osborne, ‘we’d always expected to pull back a bit and not go for the safe Lib Dem seats like Yeovil, Twickenham and Thornbury, and Yate. But we changed tack and started to aggressively target the Lib Dem seats across the field.’17 Old hands at CCHQ said that they had never seen such an energetic Conservative campaign on the ground: ‘You always get the candidates telling us “It’s better on the doorstep than the polls are showing.” But this was different. We knew we were doing well in the seats we needed to be winning, and all the Lib Dem seats were very much in play,’ says Gilbert.18 Cameron’s team are frustrated by reports in the media about Labour’s more energetic campaign, while giving little credit to the Tory operation.
Yet, despite the focus on the Labour/SNP coalition fear, despite the full-frontal attack on Lib Dem seats, despite even Cameron being pumped up, the headline polls on voting intention refuse to budge. The lack of reward for all the effort begins to seep into every pore in the Conservative Party, right the way up to the prime minister. ‘Every day, we looked, and it was 32 to 33, 34 to 35, 35 to 35. The polls refused to budge. I can’t claim we weren’t affected by the polls and we didn’t begin to ask “Surely, they can’t all be wrong all the time?”’ says one of the team. Sugg, who travelled every day with Cameron, admitted ‘the constant refusal of the polls to shift was demoralising. It bore down on
us. We constantly asked ourselves, “What more can we do?”’19
Criticism of the Conservative campaign is ubiquitous. Column inches are dedicated to how the focus on the economy hasn’t worked, that Miliband hasn’t imploded and that the campaign is boring and lacks flair. Osborne’s pledge on 11 April to spend an extra £8 billion on the NHS is seen as a panic measure which damages Tory credibility on the economy. But Cameron and Osborne refuse to believe Labour scaremongering on the health service. Andrew Cooper records at the end of April that Cameron is remaining ‘amazingly calm, positive, steady, not panicking, refusing to be dragged off the grid, he’s worn-out but determined’.20 But the strain is taking a toll. Craig Oliver talks about how ‘the constant mantra that the Conservative campaign isn’t working because the polls aren’t moving, was an echo chamber of self-reinforcement’.21 Some of their ire focuses on Lord Ashcroft’s detailed constituency polling: ‘His bloody polls wind everybody up. The national polls refuse to reflect our internal polls. It makes us all very nervous,’ says another in the high command. The BBC is another target of their anger. Osborne is one of those seething at the relentless BBC narrative that the Tory campaign is boring, which contrasts with everything he hears out on the stump. Constant pressure is put by CCHQ on the BBC to probe Miliband’s pledge that Labour will not form a coalition or do any deal with the SNP. ‘You are not asking him the right questions,’ CCHQ keep telling the BBC. ‘Sturgeon is clear that she will want to talk to Labour. The idea that Labour can sustain a government without a relationship with the SNP is absurd.’ The BBC are irritated by this continual barrage, but nevertheless put pressure on Labour about their intentions, who in turn keep denying they will get into bed with the SNP. Salmond and Sturgeon make Labour squirm, saying that they would put backbone into a Miliband government. Cameron’s team sense that they have Miliband on the run.
Osborne remains optimistic about the final result: ‘If you have a big lead on the economy, which increased as the election approached, and a big lead on leadership, I thought that in the end it would turn to us,’ he says.22 He and Cameron refuse to believe in the sincerity of Labour’s core argument that the Tories are out to privatise or damage the NHS. They genuinely believe that their own arguments on the economy are right and in the interests of the country. They feel that they have the better of the argument, and that Miliband failed to take on his own party in 2010 on the economy. In Carlisle, at the conclusion of his thirty-six-hour tour of Britain in the run-up to polling day, Cameron says: ‘We are not trying to cut the deficit because we are sort of demented accountants obsessed by numbers. We are doing it because we want to go home at night, look our children in the eye and say this generation did the right thing and did not leave an unsustainable debt for you to pay off because that is not the sort of people we are in this party and this country.’23
Fighting Labour is one anxiety on the final day of the campaign. Fighting the Conservative Party is another. On the evening of Wednesday 6 May, Cameron returns to his home at Dean from his final tour planning to have a long rest in anticipation of a sleepless thirty-six hours ahead. Every night during the campaign, Cameron has been receiving red boxes from Downing Street, though the paperwork inside is considerably thinner than usual, consisting of little more than intelligence reports, diplomatic telegrams and a small number of government decisions that require his consideration. But this night is different: his Private Office has put in a huge pack of papers on the EU negotiation so that he can think this stance through with colleagues on Thursday in the event of questions on Friday morning before the expected coalition talks begin. He flicks through his papers before falling into a deep sleep.
On the morning of polling day, 7 May, he goes to vote in the nearby village of Spelsbury. At 10 a.m., the praetorian guard converge on a ‘neutral house’ in Oxfordshire, undetected by the media, to plan all conceivable electoral scenarios. The PM himself has summoned the secret meeting, which includes Osborne, Hague, Letwin, Llewellyn, Oliver, Fall and Crosby. They spend the most time thinking through the scenario that they might have the most seats but fewer than Labour and the SNP combined.
The discussion flows back and forth over the different scenarios. What kind of coalition will they be able to form, the best outcome in the minds of most of them? ‘I can’t construct a scenario in which we receive over 300 seats,’ says one of his team. ‘It’s just not going to happen.’ ‘Our working assumption was that, if we manage to get back into Number 10, it would be a coalition government,’ says another. But they will need to achieve support for it from the 1922 Committee. The 1922 Executive know they have a truculent parliamentary party, whose hardliners feel they were bounced into a coalition precipitously in 2010 without due consultation, and they are simmering. The 1922 Committee, and especially chairman Graham Brady and the Executive, are very clear that they will not allow themselves to be bounced into another coalition; to be railroaded twice is more than their jobs are worth.
The SNP will not consider any deal, which leaves the Lib Dems and the Democratic Unionists from Northern Ireland. It is equally likely that they would have more seats than Labour but that Labour and SNP together would hold a working majority in the Commons. They discuss claiming that such an arrangement would lack legitimacy, given Miliband’s repeated denials of a partnership with the SNP during the campaign. Conservative fears that Labour will be forced into a deal with the SNP are underlined when, in the hour before the final opinion polls are announced, Miliband’s team begins a heavy briefing operation based on the Whitehall bible, the Cabinet Office Manual (paragraph 2.12), which they use to argue that, if the polls are correct, a Conservative government will be illegitimate because it couldn’t pass a Queen’s Speech, whereas they could, even though they will have fewer seats.24 This is seen as a tacit acceptance of Labour having to work in partnership with the SNP. Final party polling suggests the Conservatives are looking quite good against the Lib Dems, but may struggle in the seats that they are defending against Labour.
Just before lunch, they are joined by Michael Gove and Cameron’s parliamentary private secretary, Gavin Williamson, so that they can change the focus of the discussion towards party management. They agree that a leadership election will be called for, if the Conservatives do badly. There is little they can do to fend it off. The apprehension is that if the Conservative vote is low, below 32–33%, and Miliband is able to form a government, disaffected Conservative backbenchers will go on the Today programme and call for an immediate leadership election. ‘The 1922 Executive were aware of plenty of colleagues who were open in their view that if we lost the election, Cameron would obviously have to go,’ says an insider. A senior BBC figure two weeks before had said that ‘already people are lined up to go on the media on Friday morning to say he has to stand down’.
The core question on the table is how they are to respond in the event of the expected failure to win a majority. They all believed, or hoped, that the polls would improve as the crucial day approached. They have not. Over lunch, the team must now discuss delicate matters they have not wanted to touch until now, but can avoid no longer. If Cameron has to stand down, how can they head off rivals? Cameron himself has inadvertently raised the stakes on his own future in an interview six weeks before, on 24 March. James Landale, a fellow Old Etonian and the BBC deputy political editor standing in for the sick Nick Robinson, had put an awkward question to Cameron, and he had answered it. As an aide says, ‘James had been very charming and beguiling all day, and had asked him earlier by a sports pitch what his personal intentions for the future were. Cameron parried it, but when he came back to the house, Sam was there and he finds it harder not to conceal the full truth with her present.’ Cameron blurted out that ‘Terms are like Shredded Wheat – two are wonderful but three might just be too many.’25 The admission that if he wins the general election he will not stand again, even if widely known in the Westminster village, sends shock waves through the whole political system, and as a disclosure comi
ng on the eve of the campaign it is inept, if not worse. He is only being honest in admitting that he will not stand again, and feels it is the right thing to say, but it raises the question: when will he go? In 2019? 2018? 2017? He hopes his admission of the elephant in the room might reduce pressure on him to go. This is naive. It has intensified it.
Cameron has been Conservative leader for a full ten years, which is a feat in itself: only four other leaders in the twentieth century survived as long (Bonar Law, Baldwin, Churchill and Thatcher). The Conservative Party is notoriously brutal to its leaders: within the previous decade, it had effectively dismissed his four predecessors. Challenges to a Conservative leader are the norm, not the exception. His survival for so long has had as much to do with the absence of a viable successor as it has his own skills and qualities. Who might try to unseat him? David Davis, after two unsuccessful bids, is ruled out. So too is Liam Fox: the Adam Werritty episode in 2011 raised the question of confidence in his judgement and damaged his reputation. No other serious candidate on the right is evident. In the centre, the most obviously popular candidate is Boris Johnson. He could have struck in 2012–13 when Cameron and Osborne were at their most vulnerable, but his position as London mayor and the fact he isn’t an MP ruled out a challenge. Boris is quiescent from 2013 onwards, partly through the mediation of Crosby, but also because Osborne subtly lets it be known to Boris that if he wants Treasury support for his legacy as mayor, he must play by the rules. Clegg is one of those surprised at the way that when Boris asks for money for London, he is treated with kid gloves by Osborne and Cameron.26
Theresa May is the other contender from the centre. Like Boris, she is not notably popular with the parliamentary party, although she has more support now than when she had considered running for the leadership in 2005. She is believed to be raising her leadership flag over the Home Office with a speech to a ConservativeHome conference in March 2013 on her ‘three pillars of conservatism’, which provokes a vitriolic response from Osborne as well as Gove, and damages her relationship with Number 10 from that point on. This is odd, when so many of her policies and instincts, not least on immigration, chime with Cameron’s own.27 Aside from a Eurosceptic challenge from the right, which is never going to materialise, there is no clear philosophical alternative to Cameron being offered by any potential candidate. The electoral logic of the coalition would remain unaltered for the rival candidates too, and they would almost certainly have to adhere to Plan A, the central plank of the government’s policies. May’s speech arouses such indignation precisely because it appears to offer an alternative outlook for the leadership. As the parliament grinds on, the 1922 Executive becomes aware of talk of a possible challenge from the 2010 intake, though they can never assess reliably whether the support for the Adam Afriyie challenge is genuine enthusiasm for the candidate, or designed merely to prise open a serious contest.
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