Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

Copyright © David Cameron 2019

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Cover photograph © Chris Floyd

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Source ISBN: 9780008239282

Ebook Edition: September 2019 ISBN: 9780008239305

Version: 2019-10-02

Dedication

For Samantha

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Dedication

5  Contents

6  List of Illustrations

7 Foreword

8  1 Five Days in May

9 2 A Berkshire Boy

10  3 Eton, Oxford … and the Soviet Union

11  4 Getting Started

12  5 Samantha

13  6 Into Parliament

14  7 Our Darling Ivan

15  8 Men or Mice?

16  9 Hoodies and Huskies

17  10 Cliff Edge, Collapse and Scandal

18  11 Going to the Polls

19  12 Cabinet Making

20  13 Special Relationships

21  14 Afghanistan and the Armed Forces

22  15 Budgets and Banks

23  16 Nos 10 and 11 – Neighbours, Friends and Families

24  17 Progressive Conservatism in Practice

25  18 Success and Failure

26  19 Party and Parliament

27  20 Leveson

28  21 Libya and the Arab Spring

29  22 Referendum and Riots

30  23 Better Together

31  24 Treaties and Treadmills

32  25 Omnishambles

33  26 Coalition and Other Blues

34  27 Wedding Rings, Olympic Rings

35  28 Resignations and Reshuffles

36  29 Bloomberg

37  30 The Gravest Threat

38  31 Sticking to ‘Plan A’

39  32 Love is Love

40  33 A Slow-Moving Tragedy

41  34 Leading for the Long Term

42  35 A Distinctive Foreign Policy

43  36 The Long Road to 2015

44  37 Junckernaut

45  38 A ‘Small Island’ in a Small World

46  39 Back to Iraq

47  40 Scotland Remains

48  41 The Sweetest Victory

49  42 A Conservative Future?

50  43 Rolling Back the Islamic State

51  44 Trouble Ahead

52  45 Renegotiation

53  46 Referendum

54  47 The End

55  Picture Section

56  Index

57  About the Author

58  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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List of Illustrations

With John Major (Neil Libbert)

Norman Lamont gives a press conference on Black Wednesday (Bott/Mirrorpix/Getty Images)

Campaign in Witney for leader of the Conservative Party (Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

With Samantha, Ivan, Elwen, Nancy (Tom Stoddart/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Conservative party conference in Blackpool (Jeff Overs/BBC News & Current Affairs/Getty Images)

Press conference after the second ballot for the 2005 leadership contest (Bruno Vincent/Getty Images)

Leadership election win (Bruno Vincent/Getty Images)

Sudan visit (Andrew Parsons/PA Images)

With George Osborne (Andrew Parsons)

Dog sled in Svalbard, Norway (Andrew Parsons/PA Images)

Speaking on Big Society (Andrew Parsons)

In Balsall Heath with Abdullah Rehman (James Fletcher)

With Boris Johnson (Andrew Parsons)

Statement at St Stephen’s Club on the possibility of a hung Parliament (Lefteris Pitarakis/WPA Pool/Getty Images)

Watching Gordon Brown’s resignation (Andrew Parsons)

Arrival in Downing Street with George Osborne and William Hague (Andrew Parsons)

First press conference with Nick Clegg after the coalition agreement (Andrew Parsons)

The door of Number 10 with Margaret Thatcher (Andrew Parsons)

Afghanistan visit (Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images)

Hamid Karzai’s visit to Chequers (Andrew Parsons)

Bloody Sunday inquiry statement (Peter Muhly/AFP/Getty Images)

Signing the independence referendum agreement with Alex Salmond (Gordon Terris/Pool/Getty Images)

Speaking in Benghazi (Philippe Wojazer/AFP/Getty Images)

Meeting local residents in Benghazi (Stefan Rousseau/AFP/Getty Images)

Queen Elizabeth II attends the government’s weekly cabinet meeting (Jeremy Selwyn/WPA Pool/Getty Images)

The Olympic torch arrives in Downing Street (Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

Florence at the Alternative Vote referendum campaign (Andrew Parsons)

Barack Obama meeting Larry the cat (White House/Alamy)

Meeting with Barack Obama at the Camp David G8 (Obama White House)

G8 and EU leaders at the Britain G8 Summit (Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images)

With Vladimir Putin at the Olympics (Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

With Angela Merkel at Chequers (Justin Tallis/Pool/Getty Images)

The G7 participants in Bavaria (A.v.Stocki/ullstein bild/Getty Images)

Working on the contents of the red box (Tom Stoddart/Getty Images)

Holding the letter left by Liam Byrne reading ‘I’m afraid there is no money’ (Andrew Parsons)

Campaigning for the 2015 election (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

Writing the losing speech ahead of the 2015 general election (Andrew Parsons)

Visiting the Sikh festival of Vaisakhi in Gravesend (WENN Rights Ltd/Alamy)

Celebrating the winning count during the 2015 general election (Andrew Parsons)

Returning to Downing Street (Arron Hoare/MOD, Crown Copyright © 2015)

With Angela Merkel, Fredrik Reinfeldt and Mark Rutte in a boat in Harpsund (Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP/Getty Images)

With Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov at the border iron fence (NurPhoto/Getty Images)

At Wembley Stadium with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi (Justin Tallis/WPA Pool/Getty Images)

Drinking a beer with China’s president Xi Jinping (Kirsty Wigglesworth/WPA Pool/Getty Images)

Meeting Donald Tusk and Jean-Claude Juncker (Yves Herman/AFP/Getty Images)

Inspecting the renegotiation documents with Tom Scholar and Ivan Rogers (Liz Sugg)

Addressing students and pro-EU ‘Vote Remain’ supporters (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

Watching the EU referendum results come in (Ramsay Jones)

Nancy, Elwen and Florence Cameron writing a letter for the incoming prime minister (Andrew Parsons)

Preparation for the final appearance at Prime Minister’s Questions (Andrew Parsons)

The last official visit as prime minister (Chris J Ratcliffe/WPA Pool/Getty Images)

With family before leaving Downing Street (Andrew Parsons)

Visit to Alzheimer’s UK (Edward Starr)

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. Where not explicitly referenced, the pictures are sourced from the author’s personal archive. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future editions of this book.

Foreword

It is three years since the referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. Not a day has passed that I haven’t thought about my decision to hold that vote, and the consequences of doing so.

Yet during that time I have barely spoken publicly about it, or about any issues around my premiership. The reason is that I wanted to let my successor get on with the job. It is hard enough being prime minister – let alone one who has the momentous task of delivering Brexit – without your immediate predecessor giving a running commentary.

That silence has inevitably let certain narratives develop, for example about my motivations for holding the referendum and about my departure from Downing Street. There has been analysis of aspects of my premiership – from the campaign in Libya to the schemes that have helped so many people to buy their own home – with which I have disagreed deeply.

But my discomfort at not being able to respond to these things is nothing compared to the pain I have felt at seeing our politics paralysed and our people divided. It has been a bruising time for Britain, and I feel that keenly.

Yet just as I believe it is right for prime ministers to be allowed to get on with their job without interference, I also believe it’s right for former prime ministers to set out what they did and why – and to correct the record where they think it is wrong.

Fortunately, I kept a record during my time in the job. Every month or so, my friend and adviser, the journalist Danny Finkelstein, would come to the flat above 11 Downing Street where I lived with my wife Samantha and our three young children. Danny and I would sit on the sofas in the bright sitting room that overlooked St James’s Park, as he gently quizzed me about recent events.

Those recordings have helped me write this memoir, just as scribbles in a notebook or recordings on a dictaphone have assisted others. I sometimes quote directly from the recordings because they provide such an insight into how I felt at the time. Hearing them back – and writing this book – has helped me to understand how I feel about it all now.

A friend once asked Margaret Thatcher what, if she had her time again, she would do differently. There was a thoughtful pause, then she answered: ‘I think I did pretty well the first time.’ I don’t feel quite the same. When I look back at my career in politics, I do have regrets. Lots. Not every choice we made during our economic programme was correct. There were many things that could have been handled better, like the health reforms. What happened after we prevented Gaddafi slaughtering his people in Benghazi was far from the outcome I’d have liked. The first parliamentary vote on intervention in Syria was a disaster.

And around the EU referendum I have many regrets. From the timing of the vote to the expectations I allowed to build about the renegotiation, there are many things I would do differently. I am very frank about all of that in the pages that follow. I did not fully anticipate the strength of feeling that would be unleashed both during the referendum and afterwards, and I am truly sorry to have seen the country I love so much suffer uncertainty and division in the years sincethen.

But on the central question of whether it was right to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with the EU and give people the chance to have their say on it, my view remains that this was the right approach to take. I believe that, particularly with the Eurozone crisis, the organisation was changing before our very eyes, and our already precarious place in it was becoming harder to sustain. Renegotiating our position was my attempt to address that, and putting the outcome to a public vote was not just fair and not just overdue, but necessary and, I believe, ultimately inevitable. I know others may take a different view, but I couldn’t see a future where Britain didn’t hold a referendum. So many treaties had been agreed, so many powers transferred and so many promises about public votes made and then not fulfilled. With all that was happening in the EU, this could not be sustained.

Of course there are many who welcomed the referendum – and that was reflected in the overwhelming vote for it in Parliament and in the high public turnout when the time came. Far from being a flash in the pan, the referendum was announced more than a year before the 2014 European elections and more than two years before the general election. It was set out clearly in a manifesto that delivered an overall majority in the House of Commons.

But I know there are those who will never forgive me for holding it, or for failing to deliver the outcome – Britain staying in a reformed EU – that I sought. I deeply regret the outcome and accept that my approach failed. The decisions I took contributed to that failure. I failed. But, in my defence, I would make the case, as I think all prime ministers have, that especially when you are in the top job, not doing something, or putting something off, is also a decision.

And that is the thing that stands out for me when I look back over this time: decision-making. A prime minister these days is constantly in contact with their office by email, text and messenger services and is therefore making decisions, large and small, almost by the minute. They also, as I did over the EU referendum, consider the biggest decisions over months, even years. It’s the most difficult, most stressful, yet most rewarding part of the job. In many ways, it is the job (and I almost called this book Decisions for that very reason).

Indeed, so many of Britain’s problems we found when we came to power in 2010 were a result of decisions that had been put off. The government had spent and spent while the deficit and debt were left to grow and grow. Low pay and high taxes had been plugged by an ever increasing benefits system. Educational standards were sliding, but masked by increasingly generous grades. More and more people were going to university, but the system was becoming unsustainable. Big calls on infrastructure were avoided while new superpowers raced ahead. Immigration went up and up but without the control, integration and public consent that is needed to sustain such rapid changes to our society. Businesses were hamstrung by regulation and economic growth was excessively concentrated in the south-east. And yes, as I’ve said, Britain’s unstable position in a changing EU was the biggest can kicked down the longest road.

In order to confront these issues we had to do several bold things. We had to modernise the party and make it electable once again – not with a modest change to our image but a full-blown overhaul of who we were, the issues we addressed, how we conducted ourselves and what we had to say to people in twenty-first-century Britain.

Then we had to do something just as bold: form the first coalition government since the Second World War (unpalatable for many in our party) and make it endure (impossible, according to many commentators). We then had to fix the country’s finances after the worst crash in living memory. At the same time, we were bringing troops home from Afghanistan, while facing down security threats at home and around the globe.

None of these things was inevitable. They happened because we made them happen. Indeed, many things happened – as this book will show – simply because I got a bee in my bonnet about an issue and got the bit between my teeth (and like most modern politicians, mixed my metaphors along the way).

The youth volunteering programme National Citizen Service is something I am often stopped about in the street – and it was an idea I dreamt up many years ago. Technology is changing our world for the better in healthcare, finance, development, transport, the environment and much else besides, and – partly because of the support we gave in government – the UK is in the vanguard of all things ‘tech’. The UK is also leading the world in dementia research and care – and putting it on the global agenda all started when, as an MP, I realised the extent and implications of diseases like Alzheimer’s. Britain is one of the few countries to meet and keep its promise to the poorest in the world by spending 0.7 per cent of its national income on international aid and development. It’s something I’ve always felt passionately about and wouldn’t relent on in government. In fact, these four things – volunteering, tech, dementia and aid – have been my focus outside politics over the last few years.

For all the dissatisfaction with the futility of politics and the failures of politicians, the progress we made on them in government proves you can make a difference.

We were practising politics in the early twenty-first century, at a time when that dissatisfaction – with politics, with an entire global system – was on the rise. 9/11 and 7/7 led to a sense of physical and cultural insecurity. The 2008 financial crash led to economic insecurity. People looked to those in authority for answers. But all they saw were people in power failing – from MPs fiddling expenses to journalists hacking phones and bankers gambling on our global economy.

Much of what we did in government was focused on combatting economic insecurity. We helped create a record number of jobs, cut taxes for the lowest paid and substantially increased the minimum wage.To address security concerns we established the National Security Council, backed our intelligence and security services and sharpened the focus on combatting all forms of Islamist extremism. Not just the appalling violence, but the poisonous narratives of exclusion and difference on which it feeds.

However, it was in the field of dealing with the sense of cultural insecurity that we failed most seriously. I support a world with global institutions and rules, and fundamentally believe that – on the whole – this is in Britain’s interests. But an impression has grown that the interests of our country, our nation state, are on occasion secondary to some wider global or institutional goal. Most of the time this is nonsense. Occasionally – and the European Court of Human Rights is the most prolific offender here – it is correct. We should have done more to override this when true, and challenge it when not.

Most importantly, we failed to deliver effective control over levels of immigration in to our country and to convey a sense that the system we were putting in place was in the national interest.

Those who share my enthusiasm for free markets, open economies and diverse societies have got to recognise that none of these things will endure unless we deal with the insecurities – and demonstrate that doing so is absolutely vital to making our country more prosperous. The debate now seems to be ‘pro globalisation’ versus ‘anti globalisation’. My point is that we have to listen to the genuine arguments of those who are ‘anti’ if we are to preserve what I believe we all ought to be ‘pro’.

Readers might wonder why I have dedicated so much space to the early years of opposition and modernisation of the Conservative Party. It all seems rather distant, even irrelevant to today’s troubles – hoodies, huskies, the Big Society are literally ‘so 2008’. I disagree. It may be tempting to respond to these desperate times with desperate measures – to become louder and more extreme in our answers. But I believe the opposite is required. I look back at the approach we were taking in opposition, during the early years of this young century – moderate, rational, reasonable politics – and I realise those things are more important than ever.

In these difficult, disputatious times, as this young century reaches its twenties, I passionately believe the centre can hold. The centre is still the right place to be – a bold, radical, exciting place to be (which is why another working title for this book was Right at the Centre).

Winning the 2015 election after five years of coalition, difficult economic decisions and bold measures, like legislating for gay marriage, was proof that commanding the rational, centre ground can deliver good government and good politics too. It is the approach – in my view – that should be applied to Brexit. The most sensible, most rational (and the safest) approach would be to seek a very close partnership with the organisation that will remain our biggest source and destination for trade, as well as a vital partner for peace, security and development. Our aim in delivering the outcome of the referendum should be, as I put it in this book, to become contented neighbours of the EU rather than reluctant tenants.

I have tried throughout the book to mention as many people as I can who worked with me over the years, from those who mentored me when I was a young researcher starting out in politics, to my own special advisers when I was PM. I am sorry to anyone I’ve missed. I am so proud of you all – not only of what we achieved together but what so many have gone on to do, in finding centre-right answers to the biggest problems we face, from climate change to poverty, modern slavery, an ageing society and more.

I also want to thank those who helped me in writing this book. Danny Finkelstein, who listened to me download my thoughts over the years and helped me shape my arguments when the time came to write about it all. Jonathan Meakin, whose research and fact-checking capacity at times seemed equivalent to an entire government department. Arabella Pike at HarperCollins and the late Ed Victor, who enabled me to turn my proposal into a book and navigate what was for me a new world of publishing. Special thanks go to all those people who contributed, commented and reviewed various drafts – especially Nigel Casey, Peter Chadlington, Kate Fall, Andrew Feldman, Rupert Harrison, George Osborne, Hugh Powell, Oliver Letwin, Ed Llewellyn and Liz Sugg. The biggest thank you by far is to Jess Cunniffe, who first interviewed me on the campaign trail for a Milton Keynes newspaper, came to write my speeches in Downing Street and, eventually, helped me to write these memoirs.

I have been so lucky in so many ways in my life – I haven’t tried to hide that in the pages that follow – but my greatest fortune has been to find a partner who has been the love of my life, my best friend and my rock. All these years on, I am still in awe of her. So I dedicate this book to Samantha. And I pay tribute at the same time to both our families and our friends. Being a spouse, friend, sibling, parent or child of someone in the public eye isn’t always easy – particularly when they’re prime minister, and even more so when they’ve held a controversial referendum. I want to recognise everyone, particularly Chris and Venetia Lockwood and Mary Wynne Finch, who have been so supportive during my time in politics, and since.

Sometimes Sam and I talk about how things would have been different if I had stayed on as prime minister for three months after the referendum – as I intended when I announced my departure. This is something that is not really discussed by commentators, but I think it is significant. Had I stayed on for that period, I would have had the chance to explain many of the things people wanted me to explain – the things I wanted to explain. I might have been able to help set the tone for what followed and for the early stages of our departure from the EU. But the 2016 leadership contest collapsed and I didn’t get the chance to do so. Instead, it looked like I was beating a hasty retreat. Which I wasn’t. As I set out later, having campaigned so passionately to remain in the EU, I would have had no authority or credibility to deliver the result of the referendum. The country needed a new prime minister. It would have been impossible for me to do the job.

So this book is my chance to say what I wanted to say then and what I want to say now. It is not a historical diary, or a political potboiler of who said what to whom and when. It is my take on my life and my political career done my way. It is to help us understand the past and give us some pause for the future. It is for us today, and – I hope – for posterity. It is For the Record.

1

Five Days in May

On Friday, 7 May 2010 I woke up in a dark, modern hotel room opposite the Houses of Parliament feeling deeply disappointed.

I had led the Conservative Party for half a decade, modernised it and steered it through a gruelling general election campaign. We had won more seats than any other party – more new seats than at any election for eighty years. We were the largest party in Parliament by far.

But it wasn’t enough. For the first time in decades that glorious, golden building across the Thames was ‘hung’, because no single party had reached the absolute majority needed to form a government.

That wasn’t just a blow to my party, it was – in my view – a blow to Britain. The country had just suffered the worst recession since the Second World War. Banks had been nationalised, businesses had folded and unemployment was climbing to a fifteen-year high. Just a few days earlier, Greece had been bailed out by the EU and the IMF. Athens was ablaze, our TV screens filled with images of protesters burning tyres and clashing with riot police in response to the austerity the bailout demanded.

Not only was our economy entwined with those on the continent. Our budget deficit was projected to be 11 per cent of GDP – the same as Greece’s. We also needed dramatic reforms, and couldn’t go on spending as we had. A stable, decisive government was more important than ever.

Yet we were far from that now. And while thirty million people had voted, what happened next would be largely down to just three of them: the serving Labour prime minister, Gordon Brown; the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg; and me.

So much has been written about the days that followed that election result. Documentaries, books and even films have catalogued every meeting and every moment, every twist and every turn. What can I add? Well, the emotions I felt. The things that motivated me, and people who influenced me. An insight not just into the rooms in which events took place, but into my mind when the decisions were made. In short, what it was like to be right at the centre during that extraordinary time in British politics.

So, Friday started with disappointment. We had failed to win some of the seats we should have won – and failed to seal the deal with the British people. Thirteen long years of opposition still weren’t over.

Of course, there was also a sense of relief. I had travelled 10,000 miles in the past month, trying to squeeze every last vote out of every marginal constituency, culminating in a twenty-four-hour length-and-breadth tour of Britain. I was exhausted.

The previous day, my team and I had met at the home of Steve Hilton, not far from my constituency home in the village of Dean, West Oxfordshire, and talked about the electoral outlook. Steve and I had worked together at the party’s headquarters, Conservative Central Office, during our twenties. He had become renowned as a left-field thinker of the centre-right – passionate, bold, volatile, magnetic, and I’d made him my director of strategy. He was also a close friend to me and my wife, Samantha, and godfather to our first child, Ivan.

The magic number was 326: that was how many seats were needed for an absolute majority. But I knew all the marginal constituencies well, and I just didn’t see us winning them all. I predicted we’d end up with between 300 and 310 seats.

One person who had come to the same conclusion – and we often reached the same conclusion – was George Osborne, shadow chancellor and chief of our general election campaign. Five years younger than me, he was my partner in politics: urban while I was more rural, realistic where I would sometimes let ideas run away with me, and more politically astute than anyone I’d ever met. He impressed me every single day.

The final tally of Conservative MPs was 306. While that was more or less what I had expected, what did surprise me was that the Lib Dems – in many ways the stars of the campaign, after Nick Clegg’s initial success in Britain’s first-ever TV election debates – had done worse than predicted, and lost seats. Labour – despite its unpopular leader, despite being obviously tired after thirteen years in power, despite having presided over the biggest financial crash in living memory, and despite many forecasts to the contrary – had done better than predicted.

I was surprised, too, by the ambiguity of the result. Whenever people had asked me beforehand what I would do in the event of a hung Parliament, I said I would do what democracy dictated. I thought that the result would point to an obvious outcome. If we were the largest party, we would form a minority government or – less likely – a coalition. If Labour was the largest party, it would do the same.

But that Friday morning I realised things hadn’t turned out like that. Democracy hadn’t been decisive, so I would have to be.

I was alone in that hotel room. Samantha, heavily pregnant with our fourth child, had gone home to get our children, Nancy and Elwen, ready for school. I ran through all the permutations. All I could think when I considered each was what my dad used to say to me: ‘If you’re not sure what to do, just do the right thing.’

A Conservative minority government was one clear option. With the most seats, we had a real claim to govern. But it would mean six months or more of playing politics day after day, trying to create the circumstances for a successful second general election. And at a time when the global economy was in peril, I knew instinctively that it would be the wrong option.

In any event, there was another real possibility: a ‘rainbow coalition’ of Labour, Lib Dems and other minor parties, which together constituted an anti-Tory majority. I knew that some in our party would say, let them get on with it. Wait while they forge a shaky alliance and then watch it collapse, forcing a new general election in months.

But as the instability of that morning stretched into the distance, I felt it would be wrong to help inflict such an outcome on a country that needed direction. At this time of national need, stability was paramount.

Another option was a Conservative minority government propped up by the Lib Dems through a ‘confidence and supply’ agreement. It would be less precarious than a minority government, but far from stable or effective. We would never be able to pass all the reforms that were so desperately needed.

They were needed not just to fix our broken economy, but to mend our broken society. Thirteen years of Labour had left us with a school system that, despite the beginnings of worthwhile reform, encouraged mediocrity. We had a welfare system that discouraged work, a health system that was struggling under the weight of new demands and bureaucracy, and a criminal justice system that undermined social responsibility. For all the money they had thrown at problems, Labour had neglected the family, patronised the elderly, and ignored some of our most ingrained ills, from addiction to abuse. In opposition we’d spent five years preparing to put these things right, but I didn’t think a minority government with only a confidence and supply deal would be up to the task.

The final possibility was forming a full coalition between the Conservatives and the Lib Dems. Yet the Lib Dems were ideologically and historically closer to Labour than to us. Plus, minor parties never fared well in coalitions. What Lib Dem leader would be prepared to take such a risk?

Step forward Nick Clegg. His party, and its predecessor the Liberal Party, had been out of power for nearly a century, but his brand of sensible centrism and personal charisma gave it the biggest chance in decades to return to the forefront of British politics.

And what Conservative leader would want to join forces with a party that we had just been fighting ferociously for seats across much of the country, and that was seen by Conservative Party members and MPs as both left-wing and opportunistic?

Well, that would be me. I’d been MP for Witney in West Oxfordshire for nine years, and leader of my party for five. For most of my adult life I’d worked for the Conservative Party. I felt that my years navigating the British political system made me a match for this difficult task.

But more than that, I felt the courage of my convictions. I’d had about three hours’ sleep over the last couple of nights, yet I saw with complete lucidity what needed to happen. It wasn’t the obvious thing to do, but it was the right thing to do. I bounded out of bed and summoned my team – not to ask them what we should do, but to tell them.

The election result didn’t feel like an accident, I said. Something different had happened, because people wanted something different. Parliament hadn’t been hung for thirty-six years. I was advocating something that hadn’t been done in peacetime for 150 years: forming a full coalition.

I called the ‘big beasts’ of the Conservative Party to inform them of my approach. John Major, the last Tory leader to have won an election, eighteen years previously. Former leaders like Michael Howard and Iain Duncan Smith. Party grandees, and my leadership rivals from five years earlier, Liam Fox and Ken Clarke. And the candidate who had made it into the final two with me, David Davis.

The feedback was overwhelmingly that it would be right to reach out to the Lib Dems, although there was the odd exception. ‘Davis thinks it’s a bad idea,’ I reported to my team after I had hung up the phone. ‘Which means I’m probably on the right track.’

Then Nick Clegg appeared briefly on the TV. He had led his party to new heights in the polls, and then, as I have said, lost seats. Still – and politics can be so strange like this – he found himself holding the balance of power. He stayed true to what he had said before the election: that if there was a hung Parliament he would talk first to the party with the largest number of seats. The door to power opened a crack.

Soon afterwards, the actual door to power – the big, black one with ‘10’ on it – was flung open and Gordon Brown came out into Downing Street. He was ready, he said, to talk to the Lib Dems once they had spoken to us. I had thought that he would in some way concede that Labour had lost the election, and set the scene for his departure. George laughed at the suggestion: Brown, he said, would have to be prised out of No. 10 as he clung to the railings by his fingernails. He was right.

Fortunately, some of the spadework for a possible coalition with the Lib Dems had already been done. Before the election I had sanctioned George to compare our manifestos and prepare the ground for a deal with the potential kingmakers alongside my chief of staff, Ed Llewellyn. Diminutive and quietly spoken, Ed derived his authority from his intellect, decency and experience, having been chief of staff to Chris Patten in Hong Kong before the handover, and to Paddy Ashdown in Bosnia after the war.

They would work on this with Oliver Letwin, the West Dorset MP and the party’s policy chief. Oliver was kind, endearing and clever. He may have looked like an old-fashioned Tory MP, with red corduroy trousers and matching complexion, but no one had been more influential in helping me develop my brand of ‘modern, compassionate conservatism’ over the past five years.

I hadn’t taken part in any of the coalition preparation. I wanted to be single-minded about winning, and not to dissemble if people asked me what I had done to prepare for a coalition.

A huge amount would rest on the speech I would give, and we chose St Stephen’s Club as the venue. Commentators made much of the fact that overlooking me was a portrait of Winston Churchill, the last prime minister to lead a coalition, in his case during the Second World War. But it was the ghost of another great PM, the club’s first patron, Benjamin Disraeli, whose presence I really felt.

‘England does not love coalitions,’ Disraeli famously said. In many ways, I agreed. I had made endless speeches about supporting our electoral system because it produced decisive results and strong governments. In Europe it often took months to form a government – months of political instability that recession-battered Britain could not afford. But I felt that, given our circumstances, coalition really was the right choice – and I believed I could make it work.

I stepped up to the lectern to make my pitch. A strong, stable government that had the support of the public to take the difficult decisions was, I said, needed to put the country back on track. I didn’t use the word ‘coalition’ – I didn’t have to. It was clear that a coalition was on the table from the fact that I specifically talked about going beyond a confidence and supply deal.

I went through the key elements of the Lib Dem manifesto, and set out where we could ‘give ground’ and ‘change priorities’, giving prominence to cutting carbon emissions, raising the tax threshold for the lowest-paid and speeding up the introduction of a ‘pupil premium’, so schools with children from the poorest homes would receive more money. I indicated that we were also open to political and constitutional reform, which was hugely important to the Lib Dems, who had long campaigned for changes to the voting system.

The approach was generous and front-footed. We were making concessions before discussions had even started – and we were doing so in public.

I phoned Nick Clegg from our party’s base, now known as Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ). He was keen to progress. He told me his four negotiators, and I named mine. William Hague had morphed from a much-caricatured party leader into a heavyweight shadow foreign secretary and an indispensable sage in my inner team. He would be joined by George Osborne, Ed Llewellyn and Oliver Letwin, making up the perfect quartet to secure a deal.

The first talks took place that evening in the Cabinet Office at 70 Whitehall – tantalisingly, tauntingly close to 10 Downing Street, where Gordon Brown was still holding firm. It was a key decision not to include civil servants in the discussions, as we thought that would enable us to get a deal without getting lost in problems and details.

Ed would call and update me with his usual cloak-and-dagger whispers that I could only half-hear. It turned out the Lib Dem team was pleasantly surprised by our concessions, and our team was pleasantly surprised at their willingness to go for a full coalition.

From then on there was a permanent pack outside 70 Whitehall: cameras, reporters, protesters, and the odd bemused tourist. The world was watching too. The pound had plummeted that day to a one-year low, and the markets wanted reassurance.

It was like waiting for a new Pope. When would the next signal come? What colour would the smoke be? Blue and yellow? Red and yellow? I had absolutely no idea.

The next morning, Saturday, I woke up at our home in North Kensington feeling positive. I weaved through the throng of cameras outside my house and went to buy the papers from the local shop. ‘Squatter Holed Up in No. 10’, said the Sun, depicting Brown as a fifty-nine-year-old man refusing to leave the central London property.

In an awkward twist, I came face-to-face with Brown and Clegg later that day as we marked the anniversary of VE Day. It was sixty-five years since the veterans lining Whitehall in their berets and bowler hats had liberated Europe and democracy had triumphed. And here the three of us were, the embodiment of democracy in its messiest form. As a testament to the confusion, some of the veterans even greeted me as ‘Prime Minister’.

Before we were led to the Cenotaph to lay our wreaths, Brown started to engage Clegg about the discussions they had clearly already begun over the telephone. It felt inappropriate. ‘He’s still having a go at me,’ Clegg whispered to me.

Our own conversation came later in the day. It wouldn’t be our first interaction. Purely by accident, we had a good talk at the opening ceremony of the new Supreme Court in 2009. While Brown and the Queen undertook the formalities, Nick and I talked politics, families and life. He was only three months younger than me, and our lives were very similar. We shared a liberal outlook and an easy manner. I left thinking, what a reasonable, rational, decent guy.

As we sat down that Saturday night in a dingy room in Admiralty House, one of the government buildings on Whitehall, we discussed how we’d given the press the slip. Underground car park, I said. Switching cars outside the Home Office, he said.

We went through our two manifestos, and talked about compromises. But the detail was for the negotiators. For us, it was about the bigger picture – and it was about trust. We agreed that we could and should work together. There was a mutual recognition that we would both be judged forever on whether we could make something unprecedented work at a time when our nation needed it most.

We were both taking a big risk. For me, the risk would be angering those in my party who would not tolerate being in coalition, and might turn against me. But given the history of coalitions for minor parties, he was taking a greater risk.

‘If we go for this I’ll make it work,’ I said to him. ‘I’ll make the deal a success, and I’ll make it last.’ I meant it, and I think he could see that.

Not only were the negotiations going well, but I felt confident in our position. If anyone had won the election, we had. We were the open ones, the democratic ones, the ones who were reading the national mood and responding to the public’s wishes. A full coalition remained the lead option. A confidence and supply deal was just a fallback. That’s why my mood the next day, Sunday, was calm.

Because I wasn’t in the negotiating team, I tried to do some of the ordinary things I would do on a Sunday to get a sense of normality back into my life. I played tennis. I went shopping. I cooked for Sam and the kids while getting updates from that day’s negotiations.

The updates were relatively reassuring. Crucially, it seemed the Lib Dems were willing to support a programme of spending cuts, including immediate ones. Without that, it would have been hard to form a stable government with clear purpose. The Budget affects every policy decision, and you have to see eye-to-eye on that. But given their voter base among public-sector workers, particularly in education, this willingness would damage the Lib Dems enormously.

In the early stages, the decisions for us weren’t as difficult. We dropped our pledge to cut inheritance tax, something we could reluctantly but easily sacrifice. The hard stuff was still to come.

With things going well, I held a drop-in session for MPs. Some were less than keen on the idea of coalition. A group of backbench Tory MPs who tended to be on the anti-modernising end of the spectrum – I referred to them as ‘the usual suspects’, because you were never surprised if they rejected any move to modernise, or rebelled on votes in Parliament – urged me to go into minority government and call a general election as soon as possible. Others simply said I should let the opposition parties form a rainbow coalition. I was undeterred: a full coalition was the right thing to do.

But when I met Clegg in my office that evening, something had changed. Though the negotiations were progressing, voting reform remained an obstacle. I had been offering an inquiry, but that wasn’t enough for the Lib Dems, and the teams were now talking about the whole deal only in terms of confidence and supply. Perhaps that was the best we could do. I signed off on the wording of such a deal that Sunday night.

Then, at 11 p.m. I called Clegg from my Commons office. He’d had a meeting with the prime minister. Brown had made an offer on voting reform – to hold a referendum on implementing the Alternative Vote (AV) system, a sort of halfway house between the current first-past-the-post system and full proportional representation, where voters would rank candidates. AV did avoid the biggest problems with PR. Under it, every constituency would still have an MP, and every MP a constituency. But my party would find it extremely hard to stomach, and so would I. Most importantly, I didn’t think the public wanted it either.

However, I realised that if we were asking the Lib Dems to make a political move they wouldn’t have imagined possible, we would have to consider things we didn’t imagine possible. Legislating directly for AV, of course not. But a referendum? That might be possible. After all, if one of my primary objections to AV was that the public didn’t want it, a referendum would test that.

That late-night phone call had been set up by our aides to confirm that a full coalition was off the table, and we were now only looking at confidence and supply. But Clegg and I both went off script. ‘Why are we doing this?’ we asked each other. We agreed that we should try again to go the whole hog. I said I would have another look at an AV referendum, and push my party towards a full coalition.

By Monday, though, I was utterly dejected. The soaring hopes of the morning before had been trampled, as the Lib Dems signalled their annoyance at the lack of movement on voting reform.

Worse was to come. When I met Clegg again in Parliament he said that Brown had now offered him a deal that was better than a referendum on AV. This confirmed what I had been hearing from colleagues and press contacts: Labour was throwing everything at staying in power, even talking to the Lib Dems about changing the country’s voting system to AV without asking the country.

I knew how hard it would be for Clegg to resist a full coalition and AV. But I also knew that Brown himself remained a huge barrier to a Lib–Lab deal. I appealed to Clegg as a democrat: ‘You can’t go with the guy who’s just been voted out.’ And I appealed to him as a rational human being: ‘You know you can’t work with him, but you know you can work with me.’

I gathered the shadow ministerial team in my Commons office for the second time that day. We hadn’t met in the nearby Shadow Cabinet Room since before the election, because I said we’d never go in there again. I am not a superstitious person, but we needed all the luck we could get, even if it did force party grandees to perch on chair arms and tables.

I outlined the Lib Dem proposals for a referendum and a deal. ‘We’ve got to offer something substantial on voting reform,’ I said. ‘And we’ve got to offer a full coalition.’

As we talked, Brown appeared on the television screen behind us. He said he would step down before the Labour conference in the autumn if that was what it would take for the Lib Dems to agree to a deal. It was a kamikaze mission. He was taking away one of the biggest obstacles to a Lib Dem deal with Labour.

Now it was clear what was at stake if we didn’t move.

Still, Chris Grayling, the shadow home secretary, and Theresa Villiers, shadow transport, said that we shouldn’t go ahead with the Lib Dems. But Andrew Lansley, the shadow health secretary, Theresa May, the shadow work and pensions secretary – even David Mundell, who said he would lose his seat under AV – spoke in favour. Eric Pickles, the Conservative Party chairman, said in his laconic Yorkshire voice, ‘Go for it.’ He was echoed by the education spokesman and former journalist Michael Gove, an intellectual force in my inner team and a close friend. George Osborne agreed, adding that an AV referendum was essential if we were to persuade the Lib Dems to support us.

The chief whip, Patrick McLoughlin, a former miner and a veteran of the Margaret Thatcher and John Major governments, put it bluntly: ‘We have to live in the real world. Labour and the Lib Dems would be a legitimate government, and would command support in the country, especially with a new leader. We need to grasp this opportunity with both hands.’

I agreed. And I felt we had enough agreement round the room to proceed.

But I remained dejected. Brown’s gambit had changed everything. By sacrificing himself, I felt a Lib–Lab coalition was becoming inevitable. And while I was winning round my shadow cabinet over an AV promise, I wasn’t sure I could win over the party. ‘Put the pictures back up on the wall,’ I said as I walked out of my office, where everything had been packed up in bubble wrap, ready to be taken across the road to Downing Street. ‘It’s not going to happen.’

But even when things looked as hopeless as they did then, I knew I mustn’t stop trying. I went for one final push by paying a visit to our backbenchers’ forum, the 1922 Committee.

Along with the florist, the hair salon and the shooting gallery, the 22, as it is known, is one of many surprising features of Parliament: a trade-union-style meeting comprising, of all people, Tory MPs. Rather ominously for what we were about to embark on, it was named after the year Tory backbenchers decided to end the Lloyd George-led Liberal–Conservative alliance. It can often be a leader’s toughest audience.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘Brown’s going. And they’re offering a full coalition. And they’ll go all the way on voting reform. The very least we can offer is a referendum on AV. It is the price of power. Are you willing to pay the price?’

I went home with the party’s backing for what I was contemplating, but I still felt that it wasn’t going to go our way.

‘Would you mind if I went on leading the party in opposition?’ I asked Sam. We had been talking about how a rainbow coalition would barely have a majority, and a shambolic government with a short shelf-life would need to be held to account.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘You must carry on.’

On Tuesday I woke to a text from Ed, telling me to call him. He informed me of the latest – maybe even the final – twist: the talks between Labour and the Lib Dems had broken down. We were back in the game. The negotiators got back to work, this time armed with our final big concession. My mood shifted once again, this time to anticipation. This might actually come off.

Things moved fast. That afternoon I was in my Commons office thrashing out the details with Clegg. We were still trying to establish how we’d reconcile our parties’ very different approaches to Britain’s nuclear deterrent, Trident. The word then came from the cabinet secretary that Brown wasn’t leaving No. 10 tomorrow, he was going right now.

Before the sun went down – he hadn’t wanted to leave in the dark – Brown resigned. I watched him addressing the cameras in Downing Street on the TV in my office, knowing that the time had come.

As I left Parliament for the final time as leader of the opposition, it wasn’t my car waiting outside the Commons to take me to Buckingham Palace, but the prime ministerial Jaguar. ‘You’ve worked so hard,’ Sam said as she and I got in. We were both emotional. I was trying to savour the moment when my phone rang.

It was Gwen Hoare, my childhood nanny. Now eighty-nine, Gwen remained very much part of the family. ‘How are you getting on, dear?’ she asked. ‘Well,’ I said. ‘I’m actually on my way to see the Queen.’ Sam and I burst out laughing at the wonderful timing of it all.

I’d been to the palace in the past, but its splendour seemed brighter than ever as I arrived for this moment. I had met the Queen, too, and this time I was as awestruck as ever. However, she put me at ease immediately. Then came the formalities. I said I’d like to form a government, but I wasn’t entirely sure what type of government it would be. I hoped, I added, that it would be a coalition.

She had seen it all during her fifty-eight-year reign – wars, crises, scandals, new dawns. But she had never seen the sort of five-day delay that had preceded her twelfth prime minister’s entrance to this ceremony of ‘kissing hands’ (no hands are actually kissed). I promised to report back on the true nature of the new government as soon as I could.

As our car pulled into Downing Street the sky was getting dark, but the street was lit up by camera flashes. A rainbow formed over us – welcoming not a rainbow coalition but the first Conservative-led government for thirteen years, and the first coalition government in seventy years.

There aren’t many things that make me nervous, but this bank of cameras outside No. 10, the fact that this was No. 10, the fact I was now prime minister, was suddenly overwhelming. But Sam’s presence calmed me. Also calming were the people who were on the street but out of shot: my team.

There was Ed Llewellyn and his deputy, Kate Fall, who had worked with me at the party in our twenties and joined me when I was an MP campaigning for the leadership. I valued her emotional intelligence and judgement more than anyone’s.

There was Steve Hilton and his sparring partner Andy Coulson, the former News of the World editor who I’d appointed communications chief three years earlier. A question mark remained over whether he’d join us at No. 10 or move on. I very much hoped he would come.

There were Liz Sugg and Gabby Bertin, who had got me from A to B, fended off the press and made everything happen over the past five years. Laurence Mann, Kate Marley and Tim Chatwin had served me loyally for much of my leadership, and they were there too.

I made my way to the microphone stand in front of the famous black door. As on many previous occasions, I was going to deliver my words without notes.

‘Compared with a decade ago, this country is more open at home and more compassionate abroad,’ I began, wanting to strike a different, magnanimous tone by paying tribute to the good things Labour had achieved. ‘I think the service our country needs right now is to face up to our really big challenges,’ I went on, bracing people for the measures that were urgently needed to fix the economy. ‘Real change is not what government can do on its own. Real change is when everyone pulls together.’ This was the Big Society, the idea from which all our reforms would flow, being put front and centre of our programme. And I finished with a defining principle: ‘Those who can, should, and those who can’t, we will always help.’ I had come up with this earlier, while talking with Steve. I would end up using it as a guide for much that I tried to do in that building, repeating it in my head like a mantra during those lonely moments when I was forced to make the most difficult decisions about people’s lives.

Sam and I stepped through the big black door, passing between the civil servants lining the hallway and applauding – the traditional ‘clapping in’ – as we walked through to the prime minister’s office. I felt exhausted, elated – but strangely at ease.

Not at ease in an entitled, born-to-rule sense. But because there is such a warmth from all the people in that building – and, for me, at least some familiarity. I’d been in No. 10 in my twenties as a young researcher and a special adviser. I had returned in my thirties for briefings on urgent issues as an MP and leader of the opposition. Now I was back, aged forty-three, as the youngest prime minister since Lord Liverpool in 1812.

But it was time to return to the 1922. As our backbench MPs clustered in the huge committee room, Samantha and I were led in by Patrick McLoughlin. ‘Colleagues, the prime minister,’ he said. There was an eruption of clapping, stamping and cheering.

Afterwards, I went back to my Commons office to thank the wider team.

I never did go back into the Shadow Cabinet Room.

In many ways, those five days in May were the most surreal and tense of my five years as opposition leader. But looking back, some of the things that looked as if they would hinder our path to power actually smoothed the way.

Take Nick Clegg. During the election campaign he had seemed like a big obstacle: the insurgent with a message of change. But the fact that we had similar temperaments and values, and were thinking the same way when crunch time came, meant that we were able to form this historic union when we had to.

And take Gordon Brown, with his determination to cling on in No. 10. While it seemed like another roadblock to us at the time, his stubbornness pushed us harder towards coalition, and bought us time to thrash things out with the Lib Dems. Had he gone straight away, we would have been forced into power in a minority arrangement that could well have failed.

People have since questioned whether I exaggerated the threat of AV being imposed without a referendum in order to get Tory MPs to agree to offer the Lib Dems something on voting reform. The truth is that I was absolutely convinced that Labour had put it on the table. Why wouldn’t they? Brown was willing to sacrifice himself, so surely they were willing to do whatever it took.

Even if they hadn’t offered AV without a referendum, they definitely were offering it with one. We would have had to match that anyway. Eventually it emerged that what had happened was somewhere between the two. Brown had said that, in the circumstances of an AV referendum, he would throw the full resources of Labour behind a ‘yes’ campaign. That was more than I was offering, and perhaps accounts for the confusing signals we were receiving at the time.

I am in no doubt that our flexibility and the concessions we were willing to make, combined with the tone we adopted from the outset, made a huge difference in bringing our two parties together.

In many ways, the boldest move wasn’t the decision to form a coalition; it was the decision to make it work. There would be many difficult arguments and painful compromises to come. Sometimes there were full-on shouting matches and accusations of bad faith. Like all governments we made mistakes and missteps. But it was to prove one of the most stable – and, I would argue, most successful – governments anywhere in Europe. And I never once regretted the course we had taken.

2

A Berkshire Boy

So let’s go back to the beginning.

I suppose every child grows up in his or her own world. You think that what you have is just, well, normal. I wasn’t much different. Yet I think I did always know there was something special about it – that I was lucky.

My early years were ones of great privilege and comfort. My parents, Ian and Mary, inherited money and my dad worked hard to make us all comfortable. But the privilege wasn’t solely material – it wasn’t the wealth that determined the happy childhood, but the warmth. My parents and I shared an uncomplicated and unconditional love, and the simple values they taught me – to have respect for others, to understand the responsibility to contribute, or to ‘put back in’, as they would say – remain the cornerstone of my outlook on life.

I was born in London on 9 October 1966, and lived as a small child in Kensington’s Phillimore Gardens. And then, in 1969, my father bought the Old Rectory, Peasemore, in Berkshire, which I’ve always thought of as my family home and still do. My older brother Alex lives there now with his family, and my mother lives in a cottage next door.

The schools I attended read like an English upper-middle-class cliché: Miss Emm’s Nursery School, housed on a nearby country estate, Lockinge, outside Wantage. Greenwood private preparatory school near Newbury. Then Heatherdown – a classic boys’ boarding school, where I went at the age of seven. Then, of course, Eton College. I was following my father, his father and his grandfather … as well as my mother’s father, and his father … you get the picture.

My dad was an extraordinary man, and a huge influence on me. He was born with a pretty odd deformity. Legs that were far shorter than they should have been, no heels and three toes on one foot and four on the other. Sitting down, you would have thought he was well over six foot. Standing up, he was just over five.

Obviously, we children never knew any different, so it didn’t seem odd at all. It was only as we got older that we started to understand what a stigma had been attached to disability when Dad was growing up. I remember the shock when he told me as a teenager that his father Donald was so ashamed about the disability that he had forbidden his wife, Dad’s mother Enid, from having any more children. Much later, my father’s aunt, a wonderfully eccentric woman we called ‘Gav’ – short for Great-Aunt Violet – told us that after Dad was born she had sat outside the hospital room night after night, worried that one of the other relatives would sneak in and ‘snuff him out with a pillow over the head’.

As a result, Dad grew up an only child, with a father who struggled to love him and who would leave his mother for a beautiful Austrian aristocrat, who, just to make things complicated, was married to Great-Aunt Violet’s brother-in-law. None of us children ever met our grandfather. Severely diabetic, possibly depressive and quite probably an alcoholic, he died in 1958.

Dad’s stories of playing sport at school, determined not to be held back by his disability, were both inspiring and amusing. As hooker in a rugby scrum – or in the similar position, ‘post’, in the Eton Field Game – he would grab the ball between his short legs, heave himself up with his incredibly strong arms and shout at the rest of the pack to carry him over the line.

Looking back, you wouldn’t have had to be a psychoanalyst to predict that his condition, his start in life and his subsequent success would make him the most wonderful ‘can-do’ optimist. And so they did. He was a glass-half-full man, normally with something pretty alcoholic in it. We all inherited his optimism – and his love of a good drink. But he taught us all more than optimism and a sunny outlook. He believed in hard work and responsibility. I recall him telling me that one of his proudest moments was looking after his mum and buying her a car after she was deserted by his father.

He worked for the same firm, the stockbrokers Panmure Gordon, for over forty years. While ‘PG’, as he called it, was a partnership, it was also something of a family firm: his father and grandfather had been senior partners before him. Dad himself became senior partner, built the business up and oversaw the company’s successful takeover by the US giant NationsBank during the 1980s ‘big bang’. He never retired, and was still buying stocks and shares for a few remaining private clients just days before he died in 2010.

So, family first, hard work, do the right thing, take responsibility. These were all part of his make-up – and things he wanted us to take on too.

Us? When my parents were married they were told that they might not be able to have any children at all. The doctors didn’t know if my father’s condition was genetic, and Mum had been given warnings that she might not be able to conceive. But in the end there were four of us children. And that was a big part of the happiness: the large, argumentative but loving family. My brother Alex, three years older than me; then an eighteen-month gap to my sister Tania; then another eighteen-month gap to me; and a five-year break before my sister Clare. We were always a tight-knit set of siblings, sharing in each other’s triumphs and disasters, and we remain so today.

Dad kept us entertained with his great sense of humour and his eccentricities. He really did believe in fairies at the end of the garden. In later life he commissioned small statues of Oberon and Titania. I have a clear picture in my mind’s eye of him tottering off down the garden, even after he had lost both his legs, armed with a whisky and soda so he could spend quality time chatting to them and to any others that might turn up.

He also loved to impose obscure but apparently immovable rules, some based on his own experience, others seeming to come from nowhere. He forbade us, for instance, from becoming accountants, because he had found his own training so boring. Others were more obscure. ‘Never sleep with a virgin.’ ‘Don’t get married till you’re twenty-six.’ ‘Never eat baked beans for breakfast.’ ‘Always travel in a suit.’ And the perennial – and probably essential, in a large family – ‘Nothing in life is fair.’ They tripped off his tongue and made us all laugh, and most of us obeyed most of them, most of the time.

Politics? He followed it, and was an avid consumer of the news, but he was far from being politically active. I still remember being told to get down from the dinner table to go and ‘warm up the television’ for the 9 or 10 o’clock news. He was one of those who thought in the 1970s that Britain was so close to going to the dogs and collapsing that he started to stockpile emergency supplies in the cellar. It sounds mad now, but there were real fears of a military coup.

In the early 1980s, fears of military takeover were superseded by potential nuclear apocalypse, brought into sharper focus for us by the fact that home was pretty close to both Aldermaston, with its atomic weapons research establishment, and Greenham Common and its soon-to-arrive Cruise missiles. Dad had a theory that when the bomb went off, if you were drunk you would survive the blast and the radiation that followed, but would remain drunk in perpetuity. He loved this theory, and there were endless debates about how many people we could fit in the cellar, and what we would drink first.

I well remember watching films like Threads, a Barry Hines docudrama about the effects of a nuclear bomb being dropped on Sheffield, or When the Wind Blows, the animation of Raymond Briggs’s book about the aftermath of nuclear war. But no one in our family – me included – was ever in much doubt: the Soviet Union were the bad guys; they had a bomb, so we needed one too.

My mother inherited her love of the countryside, and her belief in looking after others and putting back in, from her parents. She combined them with a great brain and a huge sense of fun. Very few women of her generation got the education they deserved, and had the chance to go to university and make the most of their intellectual talents. Mum wasn’t one of them. Typically, she has never complained about this. After leaving school she worked at the Courtauld Institute under Anthony Blunt, whom she adored. When he was revealed as a communist spy in 1979, she was so shocked she couldn’t sleep at night, and had to resort to sleeping pills. We teased Dad about ‘reds’ in his bed, not just underneath.

She served as a magistrate in Newbury for over thirty years, coping first with the Greenham Common women and then the Newbury Bypass protesters, including the briefly notorious ‘Swampy’. On one occasion her younger sister Clare turned up in court for taking part in the anti-Cruise missile protests and Mum had to step down temporarily. The ethos of public service was something that mattered greatly to her, and I think it rubbed off on all of us. My older brother became a criminal barrister, and my younger sister has worked as a drug counsellor.

There was another key adult in our upbringing, the woman I spoke to on my way to Buckingham Palace that day in May 2010: Gwen Hoare. Yes, just to complete the picture of the old-fashioned, privileged set-up, I had a nanny. She was with our family for over seven decades. Indeed, she was still living in a small cottage in the grounds of the Old Rectory, Peasemore, when sadly she passed away in June 2019, aged ninety-eight.

To say we loved Gwen as if she was part of the family would miss the point: she was part of the family. As well as the love and devotion she had always shown us – as children we would often bump into each other as we crawled into her bed at night – Gwen was a woman of strong values. In later years I used to wind her up by saying she could write Daily Mail editorials in her sleep, and that she made Queen Victoria look like a hippy.

Looking back over what I’ve written, it all sounds slightly old-fashioned and formal, even stiff. It wasn’t like that. Unlike many fathers of his age, Dad was very physical – a hugger and kisser. He loved to talk and argue, always with a great sense of fun. The same with Mum. But they were both products of their age: born before the war, growing up during the austerity of the 1940s and 50s, and getting married at the start of the 1960s, before the sexual revolution was in full swing. Manners mattered, waste or excess were thoroughly frowned upon, and ‘doing the right thing’ was always important. These are values I still admire, and they undoubtedly shaped my politics.

When I tell my children today about the schools I went to, and some of the things that happened in them, it all seems incredibly old-fashioned. For starters, going away to boarding school aged just seven now seems brutal and bizarre. Of course I was homesick at first. I remember having one of those plastic cubes with pictures of my family on that I would look at in bed at night with tears welling up in my eyes.

Dad, as ever, was pretty phlegmatic, but Mum was torn, and later admitted that she only coped after waving me goodbye on the first day by taking a large dose of Valium. Dad would have approved – he was a famous self-medicator, and always had a squash bag full of various pills and potions. He even gave Samantha two Valium the night before our wedding, and advised her to ‘Wash one down with a large gin and tonic – and if you don’t pass out, have the other one tomorrow.’ She happily followed his advice, and sailed serenely through the whole thing.

To say that Heatherdown was antiquated would be underplaying it. At bath time we had to line up naked in front of a row of Victorian metal baths and wait for the headmaster, James Edwards, to blow a whistle before we got in. Another whistle would indicate that it was time to get out. In between we would have to cope with clouds of smoke from the omnipresent foul-smelling pipe clenched between his teeth.

The school was tiny – fewer than a hundred boys – and the gene pool of those attending was even smaller. One contemporary of mine recalls that his ‘dorm captains’ (yes, we had those too) were the Duke of Bedford and Prince Edward.

The food was spartan. I lost a stone in weight during a single term. There was one meal that consisted of curry, rice – and maggots. In the school grounds were woods and a lake where we could play unsupervised in green boilersuits – it is something of a miracle that no one drowned.

Punishments were also old-fashioned. They included frequent beatings with the smooth side of an ebony clothes brush. If I shut my eyes I can see myself standing outside the headmaster’s study, hearing the ticking of the grandfather clock and the thwack of the clothes brush on the backside of the boy in front of me, and feeling the dread of what was to follow.

Prince Edward was an exact contemporary of my brother, and I overlapped with both of them. Alex and Edward became friends, and Alex went to stay at Windsor Castle, even having breakfast once on the Queen’s bed. I was madly jealous.

My own first brush with royalty was rather less successful. I was asked to read one of the lessons at our carol service – Isaiah, I think – and Her Majesty was in the front row. I did OK, but crucially forgot to say ‘Thanks be to God’ at the end. I remembered as I stepped away from the lectern, started to turn back, then realised it was too late to go back, panicked, and said, ‘Oh shit.’

When I mentioned this to Her Majesty forty years later, she laughed, but fortunately said she had absolutely no recollection of the incident.

3

Eton, Oxford … and the Soviet Union

And then came Eton.

Eton and freedom. This may seem odd when you consider that you are away from home, dressed in a tailcoat, looking like a penguin, and punished severely for any wrongdoing. But when you arrive, the feeling – of having your own room, being allowed to walk around the small town from class to class, cooking your own tea and using your large amounts of free time as you choose – is enormously refreshing.

Another surprising thing about Eton is the extent to which you are able to find your own way. The teaching is first-class, and there is strong academic pressure to be a success in the classroom, and powerful social pressure to be a success on the playing field. But it is – or at least it was – a school that genuinely lets you, indeed encourages you to, forge your own path. The arts school, design studios, music facilities: they are all there for you. For someone like me – a jack of all trades – it suited me perfectly. I loved the place. I made friends. I was happy.

But it was far from all plain sailing. Trouble started brewing for me in my third year due to my growing sense of being slightly mediocre, a mild obsession about being trapped in my big brother’s shadow, and a weakness for going with the crowd, even when the crowd was heading in the wrong direction. These things, combined with the temptations of drinking, smoking and thrill-seeking, nearly led to me being thrown out of school altogether.

In my political career I answered questions about drug use in my earlier life by saying ‘Everyone is entitled to a private past,’ and leaving it at that. But what happened did have a material effect on my career: not so much later, but when I was sixteen. A few friends had started getting hold of cannabis. In those days it was mostly in the form of hash, typically dark brown and crumbly, although occasionally some ‘Red Leb’, supposedly from the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, would show up. Instead of popping behind the school theatre for a fag, we started going for a joint.

In my case – comically, as I now look back on it – three of us used to hire one of the school’s double scull rowing boats and head off to a small island in the middle of the Thames called Queen’s Eyot. Being quite small back then, I was the cox. Once there, we would roll up and spend a summer’s afternoon gently off our heads.

This all came crashing down when the ‘ringleaders’ and so-called ‘dealers’ – the boys who had brought the drugs into the school – were caught and expelled. My two rowing friends were the first out of the door. I am not naming them now, not least because they’ve endured repeated approaches and entreaties from journalists to spill the beans on me. They never have.

I was one of the last to be rounded up. Boy after boy had been interrogated. It was getting close to half-term. As a minor offender, maybe I had got away with it? Not a bit of it.

I can still remember where I was sitting – in Jo Bradley’s maths class – when the door opened and I was summoned to see my housemaster, John Faulkner, in the middle of the day. This was without doubt the worst moment of my life so far. The housemaster gave me no chance for weak excuses: ‘It’s no use denying it, David, we have signed confessions from others, and we know about at least one occasion when you took drugs.’ The next stage was going to see the headmaster, Eric Anderson.

Eric is a wonderful man who has the probably unique distinction of having taught two prime ministers – Tony Blair at Fettes and me at Eton – and an heir to the throne – Prince Charles at Gordonstoun. He now lives in my old constituency, and we sometimes bump into each other in Chipping Norton or in his village of Kingham, where he lives opposite a pub I am particularly fond of.

The strange thing about that interview was that he seemed more nervous than me. I think he found the whole episode shocking, and he was clearly still coming to terms with the words for various drug paraphernalia. Because I was so keen not to implicate anyone else, I claimed – totally falsely – that I had only smoked cannabis once at Eton, and all the other times were ‘at home in the village’. This involved me telling a more and more elaborate set of lies. I am not sure he believed a word I said, but my abiding memory is the moment he asked, ‘Yes, Cameron, but who rolled the joint?’

The short-term consequences of my crime were tiresome, but I was so relieved at not being expelled that I would have been happy to accept any punishment. In the event I was ‘gated’ (restricted to within the school grounds), fined £20 for the smoking element, and made to write out one of Virgil’s Georgics on the morning of the school’s open day, 4 June. This involved copying out line after line of – as far as I was concerned – untranslatable Latin verse

The real punishment was telling my parents. During the course of the 4 June celebrations, which I joined late after having completed my Georgic, Mum could hardly look at me, while Dad simply said, in a rather British way, that it would not be mentioned that day, but he would have a serious talk to me in the morning. When morning came he was nursing a hangover, and made rather a mess of it all.

The long-term consequences of my drugs bust, however, were wholly beneficial. This was the shock I needed. First, I knew that one more misdemeanour would mean curtains for my time at Eton. Next, I realised that I needed to stop moping about lagging behind my brother and make my own way. Crucially, instead of drifting academically I needed to make a greater effort. It was time to pull my finger out.

My O-level results were, for Eton, distinctly mediocre. But as soon as I got going in the lower sixth year – ‘B block’ at Eton – I was a student transformed. I loved my subjects (history, economics and history of art), I adored my teachers, and my results started to improve rapidly.

Great teachers are the secret to any great school, and Eton is particularly blessed. The reason for singling a few out is that they so inspired me – including when it came to politics – that they really changed my life.

Michael Kidson, a wood-block-throwing eccentric, was a superb history teacher who rejected all forms of Marxist determinism and unashamedly taught the ‘great men’ version of history. He brought the nineteenth century alive. Brilliant but biased, he thought Disraeli was an utter charlatan and all politicians after the fall of Lloyd George, with the exception of Churchill, pygmies. His love for Gladstone was such that when he read the account of the grand old man’s death in Philip Magnus’s biography, tears streamed down his cheeks.

But while history was a subject I loved, and history of art the one from which I remember most, it was economics and politics that really set me alight. Here was something that was relevant, exciting, intellectually stimulating, and really seemed to matter. Instead of learning about past problems, you could learn the tools to solve new ones. And this was the era of mass unemployment, high inflation and persistent British economic underperformance. More than almost anything, studying what has wrongly been called the dismal science put me on the path to a life in politics.

To me at least, right from the start it was the radical monetarists and free marketeers who seemed to have the new and exciting ideas. There was a radical Institute of Economic Affairs pamphlet we were encouraged to read, ‘What Price Unemployment?’, which rejected all the old ideas about pumping more government spending into the economy and trying to control wages and prices. I think we were told to read it so that we could critique what was seen at the time as dangerous nonsense. I thought it made pretty good sense.

And so the mediocre sixteen-year-old became a good enough pupil to be awarded an exhibition to Brasenose College, Oxford, in the autumn of 1985 to study politics, philosophy and economics.

There are moments of life you never forget, such as your wedding day and the birth of your first child. To them I would add another: if you are ever in the fortunate position of having one, an Oxbridge interview belongs with those indelible moments. I still shiver at the memory. Three badly dressed and dishevelled dons sitting in front of you and trying to work out whether you are just the product of a good education, or genuinely bright. They were pretty convinced that I was the former, and had a really good go at me.

‘Tell us which philosophers you have read.’ I reeled off the very few I had read something about: Marx, Descartes and John Stuart Mill. ‘Yes, and what others?’ They waited until I had got to the end of my list, then started grilling me on the last name I had thought of, Immanuel Kant. It was agony.

Where did my fascination with politics come from? There was certainly plenty of politics on both sides of the family. My mother’s forebears, ‘the Mounts of Wasing’, had served in Parliament for over a hundred years, starting off with a seat in the Isle of Wight before moving to Berkshire in the 1800s, where one of them became Newbury’s first MP in 1885.

But I don’t believe I inherited any political genes. I was influenced instead by what was happening as I came of age.

For anyone who was a teenager in the 1980s, the influence of ‘Mrs Thatcher’, as we always referred to her, was massive. You couldn’t be neutral about her. In simplistic terms, my generation was divided into those who hated her bourgeois capitalism, her slavish devotion to the US and the warmonger Ronald Reagan and her brutal suppression of the miners’ strike, and those who saw her as a brave fighter for economic and political freedom who was determined to modernise Britain and free us from the grip of over-mighty trade unions.

I was securely in the second camp. I believed that what was being done by Thatcher was essential.

In 1984 I took a year off between school and university, during which I worked in the House of Commons for my godfather, the Conservative MP Tim Rathbone. Tim was what was then called ‘a dripping wet’, a Tory opponent of Margaret Thatcher. He was a great lover of the Conservative Party, Parliament and public service, with a passion for Europe and our membership of what was then the EEC. He had a deep interest in reforming British drug policy and the provision of nursery education. He asked me to carry out research for him on these two subjects, which I found very stimulating.

As well as doing research, Tim let me roam around the House of Commons and the House of Lords, attending select committees, watching what happened in the chambers, and absorbing the atmosphere of the place as it was in the middle of the Thatcher years. I remember the booming voice of Ian Paisley as I got into a lift with him. I recall going to watch Harold Macmillan’s maiden speech in the House of Lords, in which he criticised Thatcher’s handling of the miners’ strike.

From the House of Commons I went to Hong Kong. I was determined to work abroad rather than just travel, and was fortunate in having connections through my father with the Keswick family and the age-old Far East trading company Jardine Matheson. Jardines had made its first fortune selling opium to the Chinese in the 1840s. That association would complicate some of my first visits to China as leader of the Conservative Party and as prime minister. In November 2010 the Chinese were incensed that my team and I were wearing poppies for Remembrance Sunday, suspecting that they symbolised the opium trade, and the two wars Britain fought to keep that trade open, with which they believed my family was personally associated. They insisted that we remove them before our meetings with the president and the premier in the Great Hall of the People. The official Foreign Office advice, delivered at the embassy in whispers accompanied by loud music, under the assumption that the Chinese were listening in to what was being said, was that we should acquiesce. We refused, and there was a brief stand-off during which it looked as if the entire trip would be cancelled. In the end they relented: the poppies stayed on, and the visit went ahead. The Chinese have very long memories.

Hong Kong in 1985 was a pretty nervous place. The joint declaration with China securing the end of British rule in 1997 had recently been signed, and Jardine Matheson had announced the transfer of its headquarters from Hong Kong to Bermuda. I was sent to the Jardine Shipping Agency, where I found myself the only Westerner in an office of over a hundred Hong Kong Chinese. Our job was to book cargo onto container and other ships, and to look after the ships and their captains as they came into the harbour. My role was that of ‘ship jumper’, sent out in a small boat, or ‘lighter’, to board the big liners, meet the captain and ensure that everything went smoothly. It was an interesting job for someone who was only eighteen, and I learned a lot.

From Hong Kong I travelled to Japan, and then to the Soviet Union. Ever since hearing the Russian Nobel Prize-winning author and dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn speak, I had wanted to visit the country. I had read about the Trans-Siberian Railway, and thought that would be a good way of doing so. The trip had a profound effect on me.

The train did not set off from its traditional starting point, the historic port of Vladivostok, which back then was a military base and closed to tourists. Instead we began our journey in a dreary grey town called Nakhodka, and joined the traditional route at Khabarovsk. I spent the next six days in ‘hard class’, sharing a compartment with two male students from East Germany and Russia, and a female student from Japan.

It’s hard to convey now just how grim the Soviet Union looked and felt in the mid-1980s. I boarded the train full of excitement about this epic journey, but at the first stop most of the food disappeared as local people rushed on board and bought or bartered everything they possibly could. I had brought some oranges from Japan, as I’d been warned about the shortage of fruit and vegetables. I remember people on the train watching me with fascination as I peeled and ate them, as if they’d never seen these things before.

The well-worn clichés that young Russians and East Europeans were desperate for Western music and jeans turned out to be absolutely true, and these were the first subject of conversation with my two east European travelling companions. But the thing I will never forget is the stories they told me about just how grey and oppressive life was in East Germany and Russia, and how jealous they were of the West. How they knew that their leaders were lying to them, and that the propaganda about their countries’ success was nonsense. My new East German friend flicked through my cassette collection and announced that, ‘While you have great music records we just have tractor-production records, and they’re all lies.’

I was a George Orwell junky, having read Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Homage to Catalonia several times over. I knew the history and the theory, and here was the living proof of communism’s total failure. When, a couple of years earlier, Ronald Reagan had called the Soviet Union an ‘evil empire’, many people in the West had thought he was guilty of crass overstatement. I came firmly to the conclusion that he was totally right. From that train ride onwards I was never in any doubt that in the battle between the democratic, capitalist West and the communist, state-controlled East, we were on the right side. For my political generation the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was a seminal moment, and for those of us who distrusted socialism, and hated what communism had done to eastern and central Europe, it was a moment of great ideological confirmation.

At the end of the epic railway journey – day upon day of mountains, rivers and never-ending silver birches – I met my friend Anthony Griffith in Moscow, and we travelled together around the Soviet Union. Most visitors at that time would be part of an official Intourist-organised group, and because we were travelling on our own we attracted quite a lot of interest from the authorities. We hadn’t booked transfers from trains to hotels or anything like that, yet we tended to be met at every station or airport by a man in a long dark overcoat who already seemed to know where we were going.

Our itinerary caused me to make a diplomatic gaffe many years later. I was making small talk with Vladimir Putin at the G8, and told him about my extensive travels around his country. As I reeled off the list of cities I had visited – Moscow, Leningrad, Yalta, Kiev … – he stopped me to say, ‘Yalta and Kiev are no longer part of my country.’ In that moment I glimpsed the intense personal pain that the break-up of the Soviet Union had caused this old-fashioned Russian nationalist.

And it was in what is now Ukraine, on the beach at the Black Sea resort of Yalta, that Anthony and I were approached by two young men. One of them spoke perfect English, the other spoke French and some English. We never discovered what they were doing on a beach that was reserved for foreigners, but we didn’t see any harm in accepting their invitation to have lunch and then dinner with them. They lavished vodka, sturgeon and caviar on us. We weren’t naïve, and our suspicions increased when they started trying to goad us into criticising Britain and the British government. We made our excuses and left.

Later, when I arrived at university, I asked my politics tutor and mentor Vernon Bogdanor whether I had been right to be suspicious, and he was pretty convinced it was an attempt to recruit us.

As we crossed into a bleak and depressed Romania, most of my books about politics were confiscated by a bad-tempered border guard as ‘inappropriate’. We then meandered our way through Transylvania to Hungary, and on to Vienna and Salzburg, where I was finally able to meet the Austrian woman, Marie Helene Schlumberger, who had run off with my now long-dead grandfather. She regaled us with stories of Austria before the war, the Russian occupation (which was only lifted in 1955) and my grandfather – ‘my darling Donald’ – while plying us with schnapps.

I was happy to be back in the West. It was time to go home, and then to university.

Although I went to Oxford frequently as a child, and although it is the capital of the county I represented in Parliament for fifteen years, I still feel a huge buzz every time I set foot back in the university part of the city.

I felt a great sense of privilege at being able to walk Oxford’s streets, study in the university’s great libraries and live in a magnificent and historic college. The college system brings people together in a way some other universities fail to do. The tutorial system means you have direct access, either on your own or in a very small group, to some of the finest minds in the world.

When people ask me what I most loved about being at Oxford, it wasn’t the politics. I hardly took part. My fascination with politics was developing, but for some reason I didn’t want to play at it. I visited the Oxford Union a few times, and saw stars like Boris Johnson, already a very funny speaker, and masters of debate like Nick Robinson, who would later become political editor of the BBC.

It wasn’t the sport that made Oxford special either. I briefly captained the Brasenose tennis team, and we reached the university finals. But the truth is that my teammates were so much better than me that I often had to drop myself from the squad.

My partner as third pair was a law student, Andrew Feldman, who became a lifelong friend. Andrew would raise the money for my 2005 leadership bid, and became chief fundraiser for the party, then its chief executive and finally party chairman. I would argue that he is the best chairman the Conservative Party has had in its entire history. The figures certainly back that up: we took over a party with £30 million of debt and handed it over eleven years later debt-free and with cash in the bank.

In Downing Street I kept reading that I was ‘the essay-crisis prime minister’, leaving vital work until the very last minute. I will come to how I made decisions as PM a bit later, but that certainly wasn’t how I worked at Oxford. While most of my friends had late-night essay crises fuelled with black coffee and cigarettes, I hardly ever worked in the evening, and almost never at night. But I loved the life. I was fascinated by my studies. I made friends. I had fun. I argued. I gossiped. And I fell in love. Lots of times.

I can’t, of course, write about Oxford without three dreaded words that haunted me for most of my political life: the Bullingdon Club.

When I look now at the much-reproduced photograph taken of our group of appallingly over-self-confident ‘sons of privilege’, I cringe. If I had known at the time the grief I would get for that picture, of course I would never have joined. But life isn’t like that.

At the time I took the opposite view to Groucho Marx, and wanted to join pretty much any club that would have me. And this one was raffish and notorious. These were also the years after the ITV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, when quite a few of us were carried away by the fantasy of an Evelyn Waugh-like Oxford existence.

The stories of excessive drunkenness, restaurant trashing … all these things are exaggerated. I was never arrested. I was never completely insensible from drink. However, it is true that the election ritual was being woken up in the middle of the night by a group of extremely rowdy men turning your rooms upside down. In my case this was made worse by the fact that I had had a party the night before, and there were dozens of empty wine bottles just outside my door. I have a pretty clear memory of walking from my bedroom into my sitting room to find a group of people making a terrible racket, with one of them standing on the legs of an upended table, using a golf club to smash bottles as they were thrown at him.

I can’t swear that one of these people was Boris Johnson, but he was certainly a member at the time. Boris has claimed subsequently that he was unable to climb over the wall into my college. I’m not sure I believe his story. But I’m not totally certain of my own, either. So perhaps I should leave it there.

What did I love most about Oxford? I did love the work.

Vernon Bogdanor was, and still is, one of the leading experts on the UK constitution, electoral systems and – interestingly – referendums. The opposite of the fusty don in an ivory tower separated from the real world, he was always making us relate political history and constitutional theory to present-day politics.

I was taught economics by the brilliant Peter Sinclair, who could write simultaneous equations on a blackboard using both hands at the same time. His lectures were always packed, as he knew better than anyone how to bring the subject to life. Years later he surprised me by turning up unannounced to help me canvass when I first stood for Parliament, in Stafford in 1997. Peter bounded up to the first door, and told the unsuspecting inhabitant, ‘I was your candidate’s tutor at Oxford and he really is very clever.’ Needless to say, the voter was both baffled and unmoved. I, on the other hand, was very touched.

One of the many things Oxford taught me was how to handle stress. Looking back, it seems unfair that we had just eight three-hour exams, squeezed into little more than a week, to justify our entire three years’ work as an undergraduate. In my case there was no dissertation, no coursework, no pre-marking – nothing except for those exams. The stress was quite extraordinary.

Talking about getting a first at Oxford is probably almost as annoying as talking about going to the university in the first place. But psychologically it was an important moment for me.

I had absolutely no idea of what I wanted to do once I left. I certainly hadn’t fixed on a political career. Like many others I did the so-called ‘milk round’, and was interviewed by management consultants, accountancy practices and a few City firms, although as this was the year after the great stock-market crash of 1987, most of them had pretty much stopped recruiting. One interview was with a young management consultant working for McKinsey called William Hague. He didn’t offer me a job – and neither did any of the other leading companies.

Jardines in Hong Kong were keen to have me back, but while I was considering this I saw an advertisement for the Conservative Research Department (CRD), and remembered coming across it when I was working with Tim Rathbone. There is no doubt that the interview that followed, and taking the job that was offered, changed my life even more than going to Oxford. It set me on the path of the political career that the rest of this book describes.

I only really knew I wanted to dedicate myself to politics and pursue a political career once I started working in it. But after that I was in absolutely no doubt. It was a vocation, the only thing I really wanted to do. I wanted to serve. I cared deeply about my country. I believed in public service. And I came to see – and to believe profoundly – that it is through political service that you can make the greatest difference.

4

Getting Started

It is one of the most famous moments in modern British politics. The chancellor of the exchequer is standing outside the Treasury, in front of the cameras, explaining that despite all his efforts and all his promises, Britain is suspending its membership of the Exchange Rate Mechanism of the European Monetary System.

It was a full-scale political disaster. And behind Norman Lamont’s right shoulder, there I am.

So how did I come to be there?

If you want to learn about Conservative politics at the national level, there is no better place to be than the CRD. Neville Chamberlain founded it in 1929, and put it under the directorship of a most unusual man: Joseph Ball, half politician, half secret agent. Ever since, it has been a strange mixture of political intelligence service, policy workshop and finishing school for future politicians. Iain Macleod, Reginald Maudling, Enoch Powell, Douglas Hurd, then later Chris Patten and Michael Portillo, were all graduates of this academy. So were three members of my first cabinet: Andrew Lansley, George Osborne and me.

I was hired in the autumn of 1988 to cover trade, industry and energy, which meant following two government departments: the DTI, which was led by David Young, and the Department of Energy, where Cecil Parkinson was making a comeback after resigning over his affair with Sara Keays in 1983.

I liked Cecil enormously. He was a true believer in what Margaret Thatcher was doing, but he also believed politics should be engaging and fun. He asked me to help with his speeches, including the 1988 conference speech that pledged the privatisation of the coal industry.

David Young invited me to his weekly ‘ministerial prayers’ meeting, where his team gathered without civil servants present to talk about the challenges ahead. This was a great introduction to the many faces of the Tory party. The aggressively Thatcherite (Eric Forth), the ambitious and mainstream (Francis Maude), as well as the unassuming (Tony Newton), the affable (Robert Atkins) and the downright eccentric (Alan Clark). The meetings were a riot of argument and entertainment. When anyone reported back on bad news from the part of the country they represented, Alan Clark would tell them it was their fault for visiting their constituencies and listening to ‘real people’ in the first place.

It was a great pleasure – and a good decision, given his extraordinary dynamism – to welcome David to No. 10 as an adviser on business and enterprise twenty-two years later when I became prime minister. He was instrumental in delivering the ‘Start-Up Loans’ proposal that has created thousands of successful new businesses.

While a CRD desk officer learns a great deal about specialised areas of policy, one of the advantages, and challenges, of working there is that before long you have to be an expert on everything the government is doing. And in the process you become professional. Indeed, the things I learned in those years are, I think, part of the answer to the charge that we have too many ‘professional politicians’ in British politics.

Yes, we need people in Parliament from all walks of life, and with many different life experiences. And the Conservative parliamentary party is far broader in its make-up today than it was ten or twenty years ago. And yes, I gained hugely from the seven years I spent in business, outside the political world. But while politics is a vocation, it is also a profession. There are tools and skills that you need to master. Not just the speech-making, press handling or campaigning, but how you get things done in a political system, how you make change happen.

In my case, it wasn’t long before I was briefing ministers for vital media appearances. It staggers me today to think of the access to senior cabinet ministers that I had when I was still in my twenties.

Most of the ‘big beasts’ lived up to their public images. Ken Clarke would spend most of the meeting telling you why the specific government policy you were pleading with him to defend was ‘absolutely bonkers’. He would challenge the entire concept of a government ‘line to take’, and say pretty much what he liked. Twenty years later, when I asked him to join the shadow cabinet, not much had changed.

Michael Portillo – something of a hero to many of us in the CRD, as an alumnus with an apparently glittering future ahead of him – was both ferociously bright and warmly encouraging, as he had done the same briefing job himself. He once told me his key to success on BBC radio’s Any Questions. Instead of being polite to your fellow guests at the dinner beforehand, and then fighting with them on the airwaves, do it the other way round. Be argumentative and objectionable in private, and then as soon as the microphones are switched on, be the voice of reason and consensus. Meanwhile, your fellow panellists are so steamed up and angry they come across on air as partisan and divisive.

I arrived at the CRD at the high-water mark of Thatcherism. The Conservative Party had won its third consecutive general election victory under her leadership, and she seemed to be at the height of her powers.

We viewed her with a mixture of admiration and terror. The first time I met her was at the CRD Christmas party, when she fixed me with a laser-like stare and asked what I did. After I had answered, she asked about the trade-deficit figures, which had come out that day. I hadn’t seen them. At that moment, instant death – or even a lingering painful one – would have been a merciful release.

At around this time Robin Harris, CRD’s staunchly Thatcherite director, told us that as there was so little effective opposition from Labour, we would have to provide it ourselves. He meant critique our own work, but it was a moment of supreme hubris. The party did provide opposition to itself, but not in quite the way Robin had envisaged. Within two years Margaret Thatcher was gone.

The history of this period has been written about extensively. An apparently cloudless sky in 1988 soon turned dark. It was the result of an overheated economy and the return of inflation, courtesy of shadowing the deutschmark, keeping interest rates too low for too long, and the encouragement of an unsustainable boom in house prices, partly through Nigel Lawson’s 1988 Budget.

Then followed rows over Europe, with Thatcher’s Bruges speech – which we in the CRD all applauded – the resignation of Lawson and the fateful decision to join the Exchange Rate Mechanism.

Then the dénouement. The resignation of Geoffrey Howe and the fall of Thatcher. In the middle of all this, there was the Poll Tax. And believe me, I was right in the middle of it all. Europe was the occasion of the Lady’s fall, but the Poll Tax was the reason she couldn’t get up again.

So many of the team that worked together at the CRD all those years ago ended up, twenty years later, in prominent positions in my government, including Ed Llewellyn, Kate Fall, Steve Hilton, Ed Vaizey and Jonathan Caine. All of us worked for Thatcher and then John Major. The late 1980s and early 1990s shaped us and our thinking. First we were labelled ‘the brat pack’, because of our age. Later ‘the Notting Hill set’, even though most of us didn’t live there. Inasmuch as there was a clique – and I would argue that every successful politician needs a team – it was a CRD clique.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 confirmed us in the view that, with our beliefs in democratic politics and market economics, we were on the right side of history. The fall of Thatcher showed us that even the most successful authors of that history were mortal. It was an early experience of profound political trauma. She was the reason most of us were there in the first place.

My own view of her and the situation was nuanced. I was a supporter, but I did feel that ‘late Thatcher’ began to believe her own propaganda and somewhat lost touch with reality. I was a tremendous admirer of Nigel Lawson, and wanted those two titans to get over their differences.

Most supporters of Thatcher couldn’t abide Michael Heseltine. Again, I took a different view. I didn’t agree with his views on Europe, but I admired the muscular action he took to back British industry and to transform Liverpool and the inner cities. I liked the One Nation approach on poverty. And frankly, it looked as if he was being proved right on local government and the hated Poll Tax. If we were going to lose the Great One, wouldn’t it be better if her replacement was someone with a plan, with passion and with election-winning charisma?

When I became prime minister twenty years later, few people were more helpful to me than Michael Heseltine. He backed the coalition. He gave strength to our regional policy, particularly through his unstinting support for elected mayors and the real devolution to our cities of both money and powers. He rolled up his sleeves, occupied an office in the Business Department, and, in his inimitable way, he got things done.

But back then, when Mrs Thatcher was on the brink, I felt that one of the reasons he didn’t make it was a peculiar lack of charm. Not that he doesn’t have any – he certainly does – but that he didn’t always take the trouble to show it.

When the leadership challenge began, we at party headquarters were all supposed to be neutral. This order was not taken very seriously: most were passionate supporters of Mrs T. But by the end, while I was still loyal, I was unenthusiastic. I could see that her position was becoming untenable. When the new leadership campaign began after her fall, I was content to stay out of it altogether. What mattered, I thought a little piously, was continuing to implement Conservative ideas.

Despite my view that the end would come, when it did, the fall of Mrs Thatcher was still a political tragedy, one that affected all of us. More profound than personal feelings was the political impact: the leader of our country had been treated in a shabby and disloyal way by the very people she had helped to get elected in the first place. The resentments and divisions that this act of regicide created would affect Conservative politics for the next two decades. In fact, they still resonate.

Some of the lessons we learned from her fall were obvious: the importance of loyalty and teamwork; that leaders – particularly in our party – can never take their positions for granted. But there was something more subtle. We revered the reality of Thatcher, not the mythology.

The reality was a brilliantly effective prime minister who changed her country for the better, but who lost touch towards the end and was, in part, the author of her own downfall.

The mythology that grew and grew, particularly after her fall, was that she alone was ideologically pure; that she was always right and everyone else wrong; that she never compromised or backed down; and that she only ever did what was right, and never calculated what was politically deliverable.

This, of course, was nonsense. She backed down over many issues, like university tuition fees. She knew when to back off, as when giving in to the miners’ demands in the early 1980s. She was a master of political calculation.

The subsequent problem for the Conservative Party in general, and for future Conservative leaders in particular, is simply put. Not only were we following a hugely successful, epoch-defining leader. Not only did we need to heal the divide between those who supported her to the end and those who brought about her fall. We were also being compared to the mythical Thatcher, rather than the real one.

At about this time, the ageing doyen of Fleet Street, Sir John Junor, asked me to supply him with political gossip for his Mail on Sunday column, and I duly obliged, seeing it as part of my efforts to expose splits in the Labour Party. He frequently took me to lunch, at which the exchange of information would all be in the other direction. I would sit back and listen to his stories of Beaverbrook, Churchill and Fleet Street before Murdoch, together with his personal obsessions with Princess Diana and Selina Scott.

The journalist Bruce Anderson would fill in for Sir John when he was away, and I continued the service for him, starting what would become a lifelong friendship. Bruce was close to John Major, and recommended to him that he bring me into No. 10 to help sharpen up his performances at Prime Minister’s Questions.

This was the big call I had been waiting for, and I can still remember the thrill of walking through the famous black door to join the team that briefed the prime minister for what was then a twice-weekly encounter.

My partner in this endeavour was a rising star in the whips’ office, the Boothferry MP David Davis. Fifteen years later we would become rivals for the leadership, but in 1990 he would come to my office very early on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, and we would discuss what bullets we could put into John Major’s gun. We worked together well.

Some people look at Prime Minister’s Questions, with all its noise, poor behaviour and often heavy-handed prepared jokes, and think it is somewhere between a national embarrassment and a complete waste of time. They miss the point. In our system, prime ministers have to be on top of their game and across every subject. PMQs exposes them if they are not. Weaknesses, failings, uncertainties, lack of knowledge – all these things and more are found out.

Not only does it help hold prime ministers to account; it gives them more power and control by enabling them to hold Whitehall to account. While serving in No. 10, I saw policy being either determined in double-quick time, or fundamentally changed, on many occasions because the spotlight was suddenly shining brightly on a particular area, and credible answers were urgently required. It is one of the mechanisms that makes our system so responsive. You can use it to change policy and override other ministers and departments. I did this a number of times when I became prime minister.

I got to know and like, and admire enormously, John Major. He was a passionate Conservative, but a practical one, not an ideologue. If he was unsure about how he should act on a particular issue, he seemed almost always to default to the decent thing. He had a temper, to be sure – and I was on the rough end of it once or twice – and parts of the job clearly weighed heavily on him. But he was a fundamentally good man.

He was also a very tactile one. I used to arrive early for the briefing sessions and sit at the bottom of the narrow flight of stairs that led to his No. 10 flat, just outside the door to the study where we held the briefing meeting. John had a habit of bounding down the stairs and, with a cheery hello, ruffling my hair.

My main job as leader of the political section of the CRD was taking apart the Labour opposition and preparing for the 1992 general election.

The tale of that election is extraordinary. The Conservative Party had ditched its most successful ever leader, caused inflation to rise, put up interest rates, seen the property market crash and the country tip headlong into recession. Meanwhile, the Labour Party under Neil Kinnock had scrapped some of its most unpopular policies, such as unilateral nuclear disarmament, and seemed hungry for, and perhaps even ready for, power.

Yet we won. And the scale of the victory should not be measured by the small parliamentary majority – twenty-one seats – that John Major achieved. The true scale of his victory was the fact that we were almost eight percentage points ahead of Labour, and he had attracted more votes than any other prime minister in British political history.

To be sure, we didn’t expect it. I had a strong sense then that the only person who really thought we would win was John Major himself. He seemed to have an innate confidence that when given the choice, the British people would stick with him.

No one should underestimate the personal triumph for John Major. In the head-to-head with Neil Kinnock, people knew who they wanted as prime minister. But allied to this was the most systematic destruction of opposition policy that I have ever seen in a campaign. The mantra that ‘Oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them’ was turned on its head. The hubris of Labour’s pre-polling day Sheffield rally, and the self-inflicted wound of its shadow Budget, in which Labour promised to raise taxes on people who saw themselves as middle-earners, are well documented. But those of us who were in the campaign team would argue that the costing of Labour’s spending pledges, together with the blunderbuss of our advertising campaign, were what made the biggest difference. By polling day everyone knew that a Labour government meant higher taxes.

Norman Lamont’s pre-election Budget was a political masterstroke: by stealing Labour’s plan for a 20p starting rate of income tax he pushed them into making new tax proposals. So just at the moment they should have been talking about anything other than tax, they walked into our trap.

Election night, when predictions of Labour victory turned to the reality of a Conservative majority, was a moment of pure political joy. While I would experience the excitement of getting elected to Parliament in 2001, and the topsy-turvy night in 2010, the exhilaration of 1992 wouldn’t really be matched until May 2015, twenty-three years later.

Victory in the general election, and my relationship with Norman Lamont, provided me with the chance to take the next step in my political career – becoming a special adviser, or ‘spad’, at the Treasury.

The Treasury today retains much of the power and aura it had back then, but the place I worked in nevertheless seems a world away. Women in white coats would wheel tea trolleys around the so-called ‘magic circle’ on the principal floor of the Treasury building in Whitehall where the key officials and spads sat. The office I had then – all to myself – was substantially bigger than the one I would have as prime minister.

And many of the rooms – particularly the chancellor’s – were genuinely ‘smoke-filled’. Norman smoked an endless succession of small cigars. His principal private secretary, later to become my cabinet secretary, Jeremy Heywood was rarely without a cigarette between his fingers. Chief economist Alan Budd and specialist economic adviser Bill Robinson were constantly puffing away. When the deputy governor of the Bank of England, Eddie George, came to see the chancellor he would light up too. Back then I was smoking twenty Marlboro Lights a day, and would happily join in. There were times when you couldn’t see the other side of the room.

Going to the Treasury also introduced me properly to William Hague. Elected at a by-election in 1989, he was Lamont’s parliamentary private secretary, the first rung on the ladder for a new MP.

William immediately struck me as one of the brightest and most talented Members of Parliament I’d ever come across. He had a huge understanding of the economic and other policy challenges we faced, while knowing his parliamentary colleagues and the complexity of Conservative politics back to front. We formed a friendship that has lasted ever since.

Seismic events were ahead for all of us. The decision to join the ERM – a fixed exchange rate between European currencies – was made by John Major and Margaret Thatcher in October 1990, before Norman Lamont arrived at the Treasury. Our task was to try to make the policy work. We failed.

The story of the end of Britain’s membership of the ERM is simply told. Following reunification, the German economy required high interest rates. Following the Lawson boom, the United Kingdom economy was in recession and required low interest rates. It was Germany that drove the European economy, and the mighty Bundesbank had a critical say in the ERM. Naturally, they prioritised German domestic policy. In the end the ERM could not contain this fundamental structural imbalance. That, above all, is what lay behind Britain’s exit.

But the ERM wasn’t just a story about Britain’s economic circumstances. It became an essential proxy in the Conservative war over the burgeoning European Union. Pro-Europeans made the argument then – and some still do now – that Britain joined at the wrong time and at the wrong rate, and if only different decisions had been made,the ERM might have worked. They also argue that leaving it so dramatically was unnecessary, that there was some middle way by which Britain could have been part of a realignment of Europe’s currencies, thus avoiding the humiliation of either a very public devaluation of the pound, or the exit that eventually took place. Some anti-Europeans claimed then – and still claim now – that the ERM actually caused the British recession, and was therefore responsible for all the pain it would cause in terms of job losses and house repossessions.

Both these views are, in my view, wrong.

The pro-Europeans miss the real point. Of course it might have been better if Britain had joined the ERM at a different time or at a lower rate, but in the end what did so much damage to the British economy was not the precise exchange rate, but the high interest rates, and therefore high mortgage rates, required by the ERM because of what was happening in Germany. No country ever managed for any sustained period to have interest rates below those prevailing in Germany. So even if we had joined at a lower exchange rate, those high interest rates would still have been necessary.

The argument that a ‘middle way’, with a more general currency realignment, was possible simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. All that was effectively on offer was a substantial British devaluation. Economists will continue to argue about whether that could have prevented our forced exit from the ERM. I would simply point out that several other countries had devalued more than once. The problem was interest rates.

The anti-European argument was equally bogus. The ERM did not cause the recession in Britain. It was caused by a rise in inflation at the end of Lawson’s period as chancellor, and the need to raise interest rates to bring it under control. It is true that the ERM resulted in high interest rates for longer than was necessary, but most economists agree that that was for a matter of months, not years. The ERM made the recession longer and deeper; it didn’t cause it in the first place.

The clear conclusion from all this was that fixed exchange rate systems can put huge pressures on the economies of different countries when their economies have different needs. The real lesson was that what was true for the ERM would be doubly true for a European single currency. It would be the ERM without an emergency exit route. My mantra became ‘We cannot join the single currency, because it requires a single interest rate, and sometimes that will not suit us.’

The truth turned out to be even worse. During the Eurozone crisis, effective interest rates in the struggling economies like Spain, Greece and Portugal were far higher than in Germany because, in spite of the lack of a formal exit route from the euro, markets still thought departure was possible, and demanded a premium for funding governments, in the form of much higher rates in the most stricken countries.

William Hague’s phrase describing the euro as a ‘burning building with no exits’ would prove doubly prescient.

By the time of the 1997 election I broke with the official policy that we would ‘wait and see’ on the euro, and joined the many who took a stronger position. My time in the Treasury had made me a Eurorealist, or a Eurosceptic. That did not, however, mean being anti-European. Norman Lamont and I drafted a pamphlet, ‘Europe: A Community not a Superstate’, to explain the consequences of what had happened, and the broader lessons for Britain’s European policy. Membership of the EU was necessary for trade and cooperation, but Britain had never welcomed, and would never welcome, the political aspects of the Union. We wrote: ‘No one would die for the European Union.’ No. 10 asked us to take it out. We kept it in.

By this time Norman was in deep trouble. And politicians in trouble need everything to go right for them. They cannot afford any slip-ups, whether self-imposed or externally generated. Unfortunately, the campaign to save Norman’s ministerial career got off to a bad start at the party conference in October.

We had spent too long crafting our pamphlet, and not enough time on his crucial conference speech. Getting the balance right, between a degree of contrition about the past and excitement about a future in which we could cut interest rates and generate growth, was a big challenge, which we failed. While the speech’s reception in the hall seemed all right, the reaction of even quite friendly colleagues was that it was ‘workmanlike’.

Whenever I’ve heard that word since to describe a performance, I know that what’s really meant is ‘bad’. And there’s a rule with these things: if something is seen as quite bad on day one, it’s a disaster on day two, and a career-shortening catastrophe by the end of the week.

The next task for Norman was to formulate an economic framework that would deliver the recovery the British economy so badly needed. Here he was in his element. Because he had seen that our ERM membership might well fail, he was ready to put a new policy in place. A credible domestic monetary policy to support the economy and deliver stable inflation. A tough, long-term fiscal policy to get the budget deficit under control. And supply-side reform to make our economy competitive.

This was pretty much the same medicine my government prescribed twenty years later. It worked well both times. But the right strategy needs the right implementation plan. And that is where we went wrong in 1992.

When you have to take lots of difficult and potentially unpopular decisions – including raising taxes – the trick is to separate those that are painful but deliverable from those that are potentially explosive. Step forward the proposal to put VAT on domestic heating bills. This was a mistake; and in many ways it was my mistake. We took the view then, just as we would in 2010, that we could not fairly and credibly reduce the budget deficit by cutting spending alone. Some tax increases would be needed. I looked carefully at all of the options, and came to the view that some of the zero rates on VAT were ripe for change. Energy prices were low, environmental concerns were growing, and we could protect the vulnerable from price increases through the benefits system.

Not for the last time in my political career, I had failed to spot the essential political equation: rational case versus emotional argument equals political disaster. And it was a disaster. We were defeated in the Commons, and had to revert to the much simpler (and less politically toxic) move of a small across-the-board increase in VAT. That taught me a lesson for the future – but it was another nail in Norman’s coffin.

Meanwhile, the economic medicine was working. Cheap money, fiscal discipline and competitiveness ushered in a period of growth that would continue throughout the decade.

And so yet another lesson was learned: while, all things being equal, reductions in public spending can have an effect on the overall level of demand in an economy, in practice other things are not equal. Controlling public spending, in an open economy like the UK, helps to lower the exchange rate and support exports, and even more importantly it frees up monetary policy to support the economy.

The most powerful memory of my time in the Treasury is of course watching – and failing to prevent – the end of the chancellor’s career.

I liked Norman Lamont immensely, and I still do. He was a thoughtful, intelligent, decent man. But he was also deeply sensitive, with a skin too thin for this sort of politics. We subsequently fell out over Brexit, of course. When I heard that he was coming out for the Leave campaign, I pleaded with him that while I had stayed true to the pamphlet we had written together all those years ago, knowing it was in the national interest to stay and fight, he – outside the responsibilities of office – was now arguing a more populist and easy case.

After the disasters of what became known as Black Wednesday and our departure from the ERM, Norman had travelled to America. When he returned he asked William Hague and me what we thought he should do. One of the reasons he was so against resigning was that he felt – rightly in some regards – that he had seen what was coming, and was warning others about it. And, more than anyone else, once we had left the ERM, he knew what needed to be done.

Could he have recovered his position without the other slips that took place: the reports of singing in the bath, the ‘Je ne regrette rien’ remark at the Newbury by-election and the other controversies? Frankly, I doubt it. The truth, as we were all to learn, was that ERM membership may not have been a policy Norman invented, but he was responsible for it – and it failed. And above all, when the ‘narrative’ in the press changes so fundamentally, it is hard to fight against it.

I tended to be the bearer of the bad news. Indeed, I had to call Norman late one night to tell him about a call I had received from a deputy editor at the Sun: ‘The good news is that your boss’s picture is on the front page of tomorrow’s newspaper. The bad news is that his head is in the middle of a cut-out-and-keep dartboard.’

Without going into all the horrors of the months that followed our ERM exit, one story stands out in my memory which demonstrates just how bad things had got. The suffix ‘-gate’ is now appended to almost every so-called ‘political crisis’, no matter how minor or short-lived. My first serious ‘gate’ was the so-called ‘Threshergate’ affair, when the chancellor of the exchequer was basically accused of consorting with prostitutes and lying.

In November 1992 the Sun managed to get the details of Norman’s credit card. It had – big deal – an outstanding balance. Along with whatever negative coverage could be squeezed out of such an unremarkable fact, one other thing caught the interest of the press: he had spent a small amount of money at a Threshers off-licence in Paddington. The hacks descended on what they assumed was the right shop in Praed Street, where an assistant, a Mr Onanugu, happily told them that the chancellor had popped in to buy some cheap champagne and Raffles cigarettes before heading out into the night in what was then, in part, a red-light district. The newspapers had a field day, with innuendos galore and cartoons featuring champagne bottles and ladies of the night.

After a day of stonewalling we decided we had to get to the truth. Norman told us he had been shopping in Paddington, but had only bought two bottles of wine for his family to drink at home. All Treasury business came to a complete halt as Norman hunted through his wallet in search of the receipt, while his wife Rosemary tried to find the bottles of wine in the No. 11 flat. All this time the shop was sticking rigidly to its story. And then came the moment of truth: Norman told us that the Threshers he went to wasn’t in Praed Street. The only trouble was that he couldn’t remember where it was.

By this stage he was at a European Council meeting in Edinburgh. I recall the absurdity of telephoning to pull him out of important discussions so he could describe the route he had taken that night, and where he had gone into the shop. I followed his directions with my finger on an A–Z, and we both concluded that it must have been in Connaught Street. I despatched an official in a taxi, and hallelujah – there was a Threshers in Connaught Street.

After the full pressure of the government was applied – I think it even took a call from the permanent secretary to the Treasury, Sir Terence Burns, to the head of the company that owned Threshers – finally the receipts were found and the puzzle solved. Norman was telling the truth. No cheap champagne. No cigarettes. And no prostitutes.

But even with all this evidence, the press didn’t want to believe it. My final memory of the saga is wandering into the press gallery with a colleague and saying, ‘For heaven’s sake, who do you believe – the Chancellor of the Exchequer of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, or Mr Onanugu?’ The unanimous cry came back: ‘Mr Onanugu!’ Today we would call it ‘post-truth politics’. Back then it was the moment I should have known we were sunk.

Eventually the summons for Norman did come. In May 1993, John Major said he was having a reshuffle, and wanted to move Norman to be secretary of state for the environment. Norman was livid. I briefly tried to persuade him to stay on and rebuild, but it was no use. He would rather let it be known that he had been sacked by Major.

The end of Norman Lamont meant the end of my time as a special adviser at the Treasury. Terry Burns and Jeremy Heywood put in a good word for me with the new chancellor, Ken Clarke, and I joined his meetings on his first day, and even wrote part of his speech in the House of Commons debate that Labour had called following Norman’s defenestration. But Ken’s two special advisers, Tessa Keswick and David Ruffley, were keen to have complete control of the political side of the Treasury. So I was summoned to Ken’s office and politely fired.

Ken was thoughtful about my future career, and had called up his old friend Michael Howard, now the new home secretary, and secured me a job as one of his advisers.

Michael was a man on a mission to reform the criminal justice system. His analysis, which I came to share, was pretty simple. More work was needed to prevent crime. The police needed to be freed from red tape to catch more criminals. The courts needed reform, so that there were more convictions. And sentences needed to be tougher, to send a clear message of deterrence. So he set us to work.

Patrick Rock was the senior special adviser, and we held meeting after meeting with experts and officials looking through every area where we could change the country’s approach to crime. What came out of this was a package of measures that Michael announced in his party conference speech. It was a radical departure. Juvenile detention centres. Reforms to the right to silence. Proper use of DNA evidence. Restrictions on bail. Longer sentencing options. And far greater use of closed-circuit television cameras. These ideas led to an effective period of change which future home secretaries, Labour and Conservative, have generally stuck to. It ushered in a prolonged period of falling crime rates.

It’s undoubtedly true that some of the motivation for this frenetic activity was the arrival of a new political figure as the Labour Party’s shadow home secretary: Tony Blair.

I remember my first meeting with him. He had proposed an amendment to our criminal justice Bill on so-called ‘video nasties’. He clearly cared about the issue, but also recognised that it was a brilliant ‘wedge’ issue: a Labour politician grabbing a small ‘c’ conservative theme and using it against a big ‘C’ Conservative government.

Meeting Tony Blair for the first time, I instantly realised that we were dealing with a different sort of politician. It wasn’t just his mixture of charm, intelligence and a touch of star quality; he also struck me as a man with the common touch, full of common sense. This was to prove a lethal combination for the Conservative Party.

I remember exactly where I was on the evening of the day Blair’s predecessor as Labour leader John Smith died. I was having an after-work pint outside the Two Chairmen pub in Westminster with Patrick Rock. The news had been shocking and tragic, but the political implications were clear. We looked at each other and said almost simultaneously, ‘That’s it. Tony Blair will become leader and we’re stuffed.’

5

Samantha

Something else happened while I was a special adviser: properly meeting the love of my life – and my wife for the past twenty-three years – Samantha.

I say ‘properly’ because Samantha was a friend of my younger sister Clare, and we first met when she was just seventeen. I remember being struck by this laid-back, almost silent, waif-like thing lying on my parents’ sofa, smoking rolled-up cigarettes and sniggering gently as my sister took the piss out of me.

We met properly on a holiday organised by my father four years later. Dad, who was always incredibly generous, decided to celebrate his and Mum’s thirtieth wedding anniversary by inviting some of his best friends to a hotel in southern Italy, and he allowed each of us children to ask three friends along. Samantha was invited by Clare, who warned her in advance, ‘Watch out – I think my brother fancies you.’

I did. And it was a blissful week.

I realise that what is meant to follow is a story about love at first sight. Neither of us being in any doubt. An instant recognition that we were partners for life. The truth is that neither of us felt like that. We had a lovely, romantic holiday amidst sunshine, friends, laughter and free-flowing cocktails. But when we got home neither of us was quite sure what would happen next.

Of course we were similar in some ways: brought up only twenty miles apart, with parents who, while of slightly different ages, moved in similar social circles. But our friends on both sides couldn’t really understand what we were up to. I was the ambitious Tory apparatchik. She was the hippie-like art student. I was working in the Treasury for Norman Lamont. She was living in a Bristol flat with people who would have happily wrung his neck. I was trying to get invited to highbrow political dinner parties in Westminster. She was playing pool with the rapper Tricky in the trendiest part of Bristol.

Norman would frequently ring up early on a Saturday morning wanting to know what was in the papers. On more than one occasion Samantha, used to a student-style lie-in, would shout from under her pillow, ‘If that’s Norman asking about the newspapers, tell him to fuck off and buy them himself.’ I would call him back, cramming 20p pieces into the student payphone to avoid being cut off.

Our courtship was a long one. Our first New Year was spent driving around Morocco in a battered Renault 5. The first night in Marrakesh was so cold and damp we slept with our clothes on. While there was a bit of an age gap, as well as the contrasts in our friends and our politics, there was something that kept bringing us together and helping us get to know and love each other more.

Part of that something was food. We are both greedy and somewhat obsessive. Restaurants, cooking, shopping, growing: all are part of that obsessiveness, as long as they end in eating.

It was in those early years that I first witnessed the ‘Sam food panic’ which has since become something of a family joke. When she is hungry she has an irrational fear that the restaurant, pub or shop we are heading to is about to close or run out of food. The panic won’t end until I have called ahead to check that the kitchens are still open or the shelves aren’t empty. Now at least I have the children on my side: as Sam shouts at us to check that the ice cream shop hasn’t run out of ice cream, or the fish and chip shop hasn’t run out of chips (both genuine recent ‘food panic’ examples) we all fall about laughing.

So we fell in love – and it was the deepest love I will ever know. But the falling took months and years, not days and nights; and I suspect it was longer for Sam than it was for me. But I believe the result has been something much stronger than either of us could ever have believed when we first got together under that powerful Italian sun. And it wouldn’t just survive everything political life would throw at us, but also the worst fear of any parent, losing our beloved first-born child.

It wasn’t until 1994 that I summoned the courage to propose. While Sam said yes, we decided to keep it secret for almost a year. I think she wanted some time to get used to the idea. She was still only twenty-three, so I thought it was only fair.

As our relationship developed, I decided to leave the Home Office and to go and work for the media company Carlton Communications plc. By this point I had applied to be on the Conservative Party’s candidates’ list, and after passing the assessment weekend – of interviews, practice speeches and written tests at a rather bleak hotel in Buckinghamshire – I was able to apply for parliamentary seats. For some time I had thought that getting more experience outside politics, specifically in business, would be good for me. I also needed to make some money, so my chosen career of politics would be more manageable.

Carlton fitted the bill perfectly. It was a FTSE 100 company, with all the corporate responsibilities that involved. Michael Green, its founder and chairman, was a swashbuckling entrepreneur from whom I would learn about business. The company was a part owner of ITV, and was involved in regulated industries, where my knowledge of government and Parliament would help.

I had always been clear to Samantha that my life would involve politics. I had found my calling – it was what I wanted to do. It wasn’t just an option, or a possibility: as far as I was concerned, it was a near-certainty. She was very understanding.

Did we ever argue about politics? Yes, of course. My friends would say she helped to turn a pretty traditional Home Counties Tory boy into someone a bit more rounded, more questioning and more open-minded. But many of the arguments we had about politics were actually about logistics, rather than issues. Samantha worried hugely about how it would affect our life. Where would we live? How would we stay together? How much would we see of each other? She was right to ask all these questions: politics has been a destroyer of many strong marriages. For one person in the relationship it can become an obsession; for the other a duty, or even a burden. As much as you can try to choose your constituency, in the end it chooses you. And so much follows from that choice.

My first attempt at getting selected as a Conservative candidate was in Ashford in Kent, while I was still a special adviser at the Home Office. It was my first experience of a big selection audience of four hundred people or more. Today, nerves help me speak well. Back then, I think they didn’t. In the event I was beaten by the far more experienced Damian Green. In third place – and it was the first time I had met her – was a shy yet assertive candidate called Theresa May.

I was torn between taking the traditional route of fighting a safe Labour seat first, and trying to jump straight into a Conservative one. I pursued both strategies, even applying for Doncaster North, the rock-solid Labour seat that would later select Ed Miliband as its Member of Parliament.

In the end the choice was made for me, when in January 1996 I was called up as a reserve for the selection in Stafford, whose Conservative MP Bill Cash was moving to the newly created neighbouring constituency of Stone. It was a part of the world that I didn’t really know, but something clicked. In the second round I would give my speech and take questions last. While we were waiting Samantha and I sat in the Castle Tavern opposite the constituency HQ. I fretted – and she drank. After two pints of cider we were summoned, and Samantha tripped on the way up the steps onto the stage. There was a gasp from the audience, but far from it being a disaster, it meant that everyone remembered at least something from my performance.

I was selected to be the candidate, and over the next year we worked as hard as we could, canvassing and campaigning, including Samantha’s eccentric father, Sir Reginald Sheffield, who rather spoiled his hard work by loudly shouting into a mobile phone in a pub on polling day, ‘We’re about to lose.’ But in the face of a nationwide Labour landslide, all our efforts weren’t enough. By the end of the campaign, the result – a Labour majority of 4,314 – wasn’t a surprise. While I did not have a previous election campaign to compare it with, I knew from the unanswered doors and the looks people gave me in the streets that the British people had had enough of the Conservatives.

6

Into Parliament

1997 was the start of the wilderness years for the Conservative Party. Just like Labour in 1979, we were set for a long period of opposition.

In the British system the blow of losing a general election is partly softened by becoming ‘Her Majesty’s Official Opposition’, with a privileged status in Parliament and ‘shadow’ jobs to be handed out to ambitious MPs. Pretty soon you learn what a false comfort this is. You’ve lost. You’re out of power. You don’t make the decisions or achieve any of the things that made you want to get into politics in the first place. It is difficult to set the agenda, and hard to regain power after just one Parliament. What matters is not how well you oppose, but what you learn – and how fast.

After the 1997 election I was outside Parliament. Eight years later I was leading my party. And five more years after that we were back in power. It was a slow and painful ascent for the party, but an incredibly rapid rise for me.

I wasn’t by any means the fastest to understand either the scale of our defeat or the profound nature of the change that was needed to our party. Michael Portillo and the group around him seemed to have thought more deeply than many others about this.

Nor was I the best parliamentary performer, speech-maker or even motivator of potential Conservative voters. William Hague was by far the most talented politician of my generation, and was superb at all of these vital tasks.

I wasn’t the master tactician who could best plan the strategic thinking and the tactical moves that would help take the Conservative Party back to power. In those regards, I don’t think George Osborne has an equal.

If a master strategist had sat down in 1997 to draw up the ideal sort of person to lead the Conservatives back to power, they would hardly have come up with a privileged Old Etonian who had worked for Norman Lamont when Britain was ejected from the ERM, and whose only experience outside politics was to work briefly for a London-based media conglomerate.

Good timing and good luck would combine to give me a chance after three heavy defeats. My principal opponent would change from the apparently unbeatable Tony Blair to the eminently beatable Gordon Brown. The long period of economic growth that started in 1992 would come to a juddering halt in 2008.

Added to that, I had Samantha, who humanised and rounded me. I had a constituency in Witney – both safe and close to London – that was an excellent springboard. And I had friends and supporters who were ready and able to back me. I learned a lot at Carlton about business, about management, and about people. And it may have been easier, out of Parliament, to see the big political picture.

Opinions differ about how effective Tony Blair’s team was at driving through change between 1997 and 2001. However, as a political machine it was without equal. And the truth was that Tony Blair was the post-Thatcher leader the British people wanted. He combined pro-enterprise economics with a more compassionate approach to social policy and public services. He understood that in many ways Britain is a small ‘c’ conservative country. In opposition, and in government, he rarely gave his Conservative opponents room to breathe. He talked tough on crime, looked strong on defence, seemed concerned about school discipline, even posed as passionate about business.

At a supposedly ‘off the record’ dinner with journalists in October 2005 I said that just as Tony Blair had understood that he needed to be the ‘heir to Thatcher’, so we needed to understand the need to be ‘heirs to Blair’. By this I didn’t mean that we should imitate all of his political methods or adopt all of his policies and political positions. After all, that wasn’t what Blair had done in relation to being the ‘heir’ to Thatcher. He had tossed aside many of her policies, and introduced some profound changes of his own. Out went subsidised private education for bright children from low-income homes, and tax relief for private healthcare. And in came devolution for Scotland and Wales, independence for the Bank of England, and the minimum wage.

But alongside that, he had carefully analysed and understood what had changed in the country since 1979, and therefore which elements of Thatcherism should be maintained and built on. He kept the trade-union reforms, the privatised industries, the low rates of income tax, the commitment to NATO, a largely pro-American foreign policy and a strong defence. These were natural Conservative policies, and by adopting them, Blair locked us out of Downing Street.

What were the equivalent moves for us? This was the question that Conservative Party ‘modernisers’ kept asking. Getting the answer right was an essential step in returning to power. And returning to power was what we needed to do. Despite his prowess at politics, and those reforms that had benefited Britain, Blair was, overall, taking the country in the wrong direction. It was more than just his policies – the unsustainable welfare system, the dumbing down of education standards, the neglect of some key overseas alliances, the increases in taxes, the overburdening of public finances and the failure to plan for the long-term future of everything from defence to the NHS. It was also about the culture those policies created. Something for nothing. Equality of outcome, not opportunity. Short-termism. I was absolutely not the heir to Blair in any policy or philosophical sense, and I was desperate to clear his government out.

But before I could do that I needed to find a safe parliamentary constituency. By the middle of 2000 I was heading towards the final selection rounds in Epsom, East Devon and Shaun Woodward’s seat of Witney. It was Witney that I really wanted.

I knew Shaun from working with him at Conservative Central Office during the 1992 general election. I was well aware that he was wildly ambitious for high office, but I was just as surprised as everybody else when he chose to jump ship and join the Labour Party in December 1999. Surprise soon gave way to excitement: West Oxfordshire was an area I knew quite well, and the constituency would now need a new Conservative candidate for the next election. The town itself was just thirty miles north of where I was brought up, and West Oxfordshire was very similar to West Berkshire – a combination of market towns, attractive villages, rural enterprises, growing businesses and many talented people who commuted either to the university city of Oxford or to London.

The constituency party had concluded, unsurprisingly, that they’d made a dreadful mistake in selecting Shaun Woodward, who had turned out not to be the genuine article. So in an attempt to avoid making the same sort of mistake again, they employed an interesting ruse for the first round of interviews. The mayor of Carterton – the second town of West Oxfordshire after Witney – was a West Indian called Joe Walcott. He had come over from Jamaica during the war to serve in the RAF at Brize Norton, and had stayed on to become a prominent local figure and a passionate Conservative. As the prospective candidates arrived one by one to be interviewed at a pretty manor house in the village of Bampton, they found Joe standing on his own in the garden. Those who ignored him, or assumed he was a gardener or driver, were immediately struck off the list. Fortunately I gave him a warm handshake, and we would remain good friends until he died in November 2018.

Although I was competing against the former MP and highly effective minister Andrew Mitchell, and a talented young businesswoman called Sharon Buckle, I think my passion for the place shone through, and I was selected.

Within weeks I had new friends, a new home and the makings of a strong political base. Peter Gummer, Lord Chadlington, who I knew a little from when we had both worked for John Major, became something of a mentor, renting me a cottage in Dean, near Chipping Norton, the village where we have lived ever since. Together with Christopher Shale, who also became a firm friend and adviser, Peter helped me to rebuild the local Conservative association and its finances.

And I inherited from Shaun Woodward one of the best constituency agents in the country, Barry Norton, who was also the leader of the local district council. Witney born and bred, Barry is a workaholic with a thick Oxfordshire accent, and seemed to know about absolutely everything that happened anywhere in the 250 square miles of the Witney constituency.

While it is hard to characterise a whole local party, the West Oxfordshire Conservative Association, or WOCA as I came to know it, was, rather like its last two MPs, Shaun Woodward and Douglas Hurd, at the liberal, open-minded end of the party.

The general election, which took place in June 2001, was a fairly gentle affair. I spent the campaign travelling from village to village, having lunch in any number of extremely good West Oxfordshire pubs. It was a fun month, and at the end of it I had a majority of over 7,900. I was in.

In the run-up to the election, and for some time afterwards, when people asked me about my ambitions I would say that I wanted to be a Member of Parliament because I believed it was an incredibly satisfying and worthwhile job. Serving the area, standing up for local people, getting things done, while taking part in debates about some of the big questions facing our country: that was what it was all about. Everything else beyond being a backbench MP – and I always hoped there would be more – would be a bonus.

There was soon the added stimulation and interest of sitting on the Home Affairs Select Committee. I was keen to take risks, and I fully supported the proposal that we look in depth at the issue of illegal drugs. I was later to disavow some of the most contentious conclusions we came to – downgrading ecstasy from class A to class B, for instance. It was, and remains, odd that ecstasy is in the same class as, for example, heroin. But I came to believe that the danger of signalling that certain drugs were more acceptable, or less dangerous, outweighed any benefit from being more scientifically accurate. But there is no doubt this report shifted the dial in terms of moving drugs policy away from criminalisation and towards treatment and education. This was something I would continue to promote as prime minister.

But while I loved the job, my joy at being a Member of Parliament was tempered by the hopelessness of our situation as a party. 1997 was the year of the Tory wipeout, and in 2001 we added precisely one to our historic low of 165 MPs. The Conservative parliamentary party looked very white, very rural, very male, and frankly rather irrelevant. Of the thirty-four new Tory MPs who had made it to Westminster, only one was a woman.

And during that Parliament a whole series of things happened that brought home to me just how wretched our situation was, and how simply waiting for something to happen was a useless strategy.

William Hague’s resignation as leader after the 2001 election was sad, but not surprising. He had done his best in almost impossible circumstances. Throughout his leadership the Conservative Party had been divided and fractious, and was still trying, though often failing, to come to terms with defeat. Blair was always likely to be given a second chance by the electorate. But through the force of his performances, both inside and outside Parliament, William had kept the party together and the show on the road.

Because he changed tack partway through the Parliament, backing off from modernisation and returning to more traditional Tory themes such as law and order and Europe, it is easy to represent his leadership as a false start for the modernisation of the party and its policies. I don’t think that’s fair.

Timing is everything in politics. William did not have the support in the party for modernisation, and given that Blair was then at his peak, even a changed Conservative Party couldn’t expect much reward from the electorate. Pressing on might have sacrificed core support without attracting new voters.

In any event, I can’t claim any particular foresight: I backed him strongly in both phases. And the pressure on him was spectacular. William said to me some years later, when I was trying – successfully – to tempt him back into front-line politics, that the experience of leading the party after 1997 had nearly broken him.

In the leadership election of 2001 I was a committed supporter of Michael Portillo. I had seen how good he was in office, and the unexpected loss of his seat in 1997 had clearly made him think deeply about what needed to change. Re-elected to Parliament in a by-election in 1999, it seemed that he had a clear plan for change, and for a more liberal party with greater urban support. However, he had so fallen out of love with his own party that he couldn’t really contemplate the hard work and compromises needed to reform it. Also, with his hard-man-of-the-right past, he struggled to convince all those who supported the modernising agenda.

And so we were left with Ken Clarke versus Iain Duncan Smith. It was a hopeless situation. One couldn’t unite the party; the other couldn’t win over the country.

I made what I thought was a rational choice, which was to support ‘IDS’, because I thought that if Ken won, the subsequent inevitable party split over Europe would be so bad as to make us both a laughing stock and wide open to a revolt from our right. Samantha said I was mad, and voted for Ken. Frankly, I was pretty happy that we cancelled each other out.

My only memory of the entire leadership campaign was of an event I organised in Witney for party supporters to hear John Bercow speaking for IDS and George Young speaking for Ken. Samantha asked Bercow whether he supported his candidate’s views that abortion should be restricted and the death penalty restored. It was one of the many moments in our married life when I realised that she had seen the big picture rather quicker and clearer than I had. IDS was always going to be seen as an outdated old clunker.

But two days before he won the leadership contest on 13 September 2001, the world changed.

When the first plane struck the World Trade Center I was at home in Dean doing constituency work. Samantha was in New York starting the process of setting up a new Smythson store in Manhattan. For about four hours I was unable to get in touch with her because the telephone lines were down. I sat with the TV remote control in one hand and my mobile phone in the other, watching in shock and pressing redial over and over again. By the time I got through to her that evening I was staring out of the window on the train to London. Relief.

People now tend to jump straight from 9/11 to the war in Iraq, but that is unfair. Tony Blair’s initial response to what had happened that day in New York was masterful. He moved fast, and set the agenda both at home and abroad. He correctly identified the problem of Islamist extremism, the inadequacy of our response both domestically and internationally, and supported – quite rightly in my view – the action to remove the Taliban regime from Afghanistan. Once it was clear that they would not stop al-Qaeda using the country as a safe haven, there was no realistic alternative.

Along with other relevant select committee members, I went to No. 10 for a briefing in late 2001. It was the first time I had been through the famous black door in years, and Blair impressed me then and in the many debates and statements that followed. Even as a relatively tribal Conservative, I felt strongly that at this moment Britain had the right prime minister. I even stopped Blair behind the speaker’s chair after one statement in the Commons to say that in his clarity about the threat we faced, he was speaking for the whole country.

But what of Iraq? While anyone with an ounce of reason could see that the regime in Afghanistan was a legitimate target, it was impossible to be quite as certain when it came to Iraq. As I showed in the anguished Guardian columns I wrote at the time – I had a regular spot in the paper’s online comment pages – I was a sceptic about the move to war.

Saddam Hussein’s regime was brutal. He was in breach of countless resolutions passed by the UN, an organisation for which he showed only contempt. His people would unquestionably be better off without him. There was a risk that, left in place, he might start to work more closely with the extremist groups that threatened us. And, after all, he had employed ‘weapons of mass destruction’ against his own people when he used poison gas on the Kurds.

I bought all of these arguments, and still do, but as I put it at the time: ‘We are being asked to swap deterrence with something new called pre-emptive war. I cannot be certain but I suspect that many of us will not support pre-emptive war unless Blair can produce either compelling evidence of the direct threat to the UK or a UN resolution giving it specific backing.’

As the evidence to satisfy the first condition was pretty unconvincing even at the time, and as Blair clearly failed on the second condition, why did a sceptic like me vote for military action?

The convenient answer would be to say I was ‘duped’ by the various dossiers and the claims about Britain being ‘forty-five minutes from doom’. But that’s not really the case. They only formed a small part of the reasons I gave publicly and to my many highly sceptical constituents.

I wrote at the time about the consequences of backing away. It would undermine the UK–US alliance. Saddam would win an invaluable propaganda victory. We would jeopardise any chance of a proper, multilateral approach. And, of course, while there was no ‘second resolution’ specifically mandating force, there were over a dozen resolutions dealing with Iraq, and the UN would look powerless if they weren’t enforced.

Sitting in the Commons, it was also clear that a vote against military action wouldn’t stop the war, it would just make it less of an international coalition. The Bush administration was going to have this war, the question was whether we would be involved.

And I listened to my closest colleagues and friends. Some, like George Osborne, who was a fairly enthusiastic ‘neo-con’, had no doubts. Others, like Oliver Letwin, who were wavering sceptics like me, decided on the balance of evidence to vote with Blair.

Samantha was totally opposed, and told me to stick with my initial scepticism. But this was a time in our marriage when we talked about politics very little.

Our first-born son Ivan was a year old, desperately ill and in hospital almost as much as he was at home. I would often leave his bedside in the morning after a night sleeping beside him, handing over to Samantha before heading off to the Commons for the next Iraq debate or statement. Less parenting by relay, and more time together, and she might have persuaded me.

But to be truthful, there was something else. I believed that the prime minister was entitled to something approaching the benefit of the doubt. I was all for Parliament voting on going to war – and I would subsequently help to entrench that convention as prime minister – but I don’t start from the proposition that a prime minister asks for backing for a military conflict ‘lightly or inadvisedly’. Indeed, I believe that if the prime minister comes to Parliament and says effectively, ‘We are standing with our oldest allies, fighting a dictator who has brutalised his people, and we risk humiliation or worse if we falter,’ then I would try to be supportive.

Assuming that other MPs shared this rational patriotism, or naïvety – take your pick – was to let me down several years later, in the vote on bombing Syria when I was prime minister. I regret what happened subsequently, and we will never know how things might have been if matters had been handled differently. But I take the view that if you vote for something, you should take your share of responsibility for the consequences rather than try to find some formulation to show that you were conned or misled. Without Saddam, Iraq at least has a chance of a better future; although even today it is probably still too soon to say whether that chance will be taken.

It wouldn’t be fair to write off Iain’s entire period leading the party. He understood that the Conservative Party needed fundamental change. But he wasn’t capable of some of the basic requirements of leadership in British politics – building an effective team, performing at Prime Minister’s Questions, and delivering big speeches and media interviews.

For PMQs, George Osborne and I were drafted in, together with a bright young staffer, James Cartlidge (now the MP for South Suffolk). From time to time we were joined by Boris Johnson, whose appearances grew less frequent the more obvious it became that we were marooned in the polls and heading for defeat.

They were pretty desperate sessions. Blair was at the height of his powers, and Iain was leaden and dull. Boris asked me after one particularly depressing prep session, ‘Hey Dave, what’s the plan?’ He then grabbed me by the shoulders and said, ‘Presumably it’s like carrying an injured hooker in the scrum – we know he can’t play but we just’ – at this point he grunted and heaved me off the ground – ‘pick him up and carry him over the line.’

George and Boris saw the writing on the wall much more clearly than I did. I didn’t attend either of the IDS party conferences, as on both occasions I had to be at Ivan’s bedside at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington. Despite this, I did catch his second conference speech – the one where he declared that ‘the quiet man’ was ‘turning up the volume’. I watched it on an ancient hospital television, but even I could see that the multiple standing ovations were staged and looked ridiculous.

In the end, this right-winger with the potential to unite the party was overthrown by a combination of left and right after losing a fight he didn’t need to pick. A government Bill on adoption and children was amended to enable unmarried couples to adopt children, opening the door for gay couples to adopt. It had already passed the House of Commons, but the Lords had rejected the amendment and reinstated the original ‘married-only’ rule.

Iain tried to whip the party against supporting unmarried couples’ right to adopt. A small number of MPs rebelled completely and voted with the government. A larger number ignored the three-line whip – so-called because the whips underline the vote three times on the official notice, meaning that you must support the party line – and abstained. There were only three of us from the 2001 intake who did so: me, George and Boris.

Instead of ignoring the rebellion – as I frequently chose to do as party leader – Iain’s lieutenants called an emergency press conference, telling the party to ‘Unite or die.’ IDS’s personal authority was left mortally wounded, with more or less open discussion of plots to oust him. Only the Iraq War, which soon dominated the political discourse, diverted press and political attention from the travails of the Tory leadership.

But by October 2003 the party had had enough. A major donor announced on the radio that he and others were considering abandoning ship if IDS’s leadership continued. Given the party’s precarious financial situation, this new crisis stampeded the parliamentary party into action. Shortly afterwards a vote of confidence in Iain’s leadership was triggered as the chairman of the 1922 Committee received the sufficient number of letters from Conservative MPs.

The day of the vote was also the day of PMQs. For once Boris turned up at our weekly prep meeting, and there was lots of gallows humour, including from Iain, about potential leadership bids. Afterwards, I asked to stay behind for a private word. I pleaded with Iain to resign, and not face the indignity of losing a vote of confidence. George was probably right, though, when he said the deed simply needed to be done.

The arrival of Michael Howard as leader provided yet more lessons in leading, and in losing. Michael handled the technical aspects of the job well. After two years of IDS, there was a sense that the grown-ups and the professionals were back in charge. PMQs was a fight once again. Conferences were well organised. There was a newly effective media operation.

Overall the Michael Howard leadership gave us a fighting chance. The critique of Blair was sharpened: over-regulation was holding back the economy, and over-centralisation was holding back public services. And the government was ignoring vital issues such as crime and immigration, on which Michael Howard could demonstrate both passion and expertise. And yet. Once again it didn’t work.

Did I ever believe that we could win in 2005? While I thought we could take away Labour’s majority, I was never confident that we could win outright. We simply hadn’t won the right to be heard. Nor had we developed a clear enough description of what we needed to do.

Perhaps the biggest lesson of this whole period is something that is both hard to measure, and unfair. People make up their minds about the major party leaders pretty quickly. Iain couldn’t escape his image of being old-fashioned, a hanger and flogger, and not quite up to the job. And Michael never shook off the ‘something of the night about him’ attack by Ann Widdecombe.

My view increasingly came to be blunt: a large share of the voting public had simply written off the Tories after 1997. They weren’t going to listen to what they had come to believe was an arrogant bunch of politicians who they believed were more interested in looking after their own interests than anybody else’s. And even when people did listen to something we said, they would mark it down, irrespective of whether they agreed with it or not, simply because it was ‘the effing Tories’ that were saying it.

What followed from this was that government failure, even if on an epic scale, wouldn’t see us return to power. Simply put, as bad as Labour were, the electorate thought they were better than the alternative. We needed to prove that we had listened, learned and changed.

I am saying a lot about this period because it forms the backdrop to my later decision to stand for the leadership. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had, respectively, eleven and twenty-four years in Parliament before leading their party. I had just four.

I had, however, joined the front bench, though the jobs I held before 2005 were not particularly significant. The first rung on the ladder was becoming one of several deputy chairmen of the Conservative Party. Being appointed deputy shadow leader of the House of Commons was only marginally less meaningless. After all, in opposition you have virtually no control of the parliamentary timetable, so there is little enough for the shadow leader to do, let alone their deputy.

But the non-job did give me an opportunity. My boss Eric Forth decided to take a week off one Thursday, and handed the task of Business Questions over to me. I made a reasonable fist of it, with a few funny jokes and a half-decent attack on the government. The parliamentary sketchwriters gave me the thumbs up. These things get noticed.

But the most important lessons from this period came from spending time with a very bright group of relatively young Conservative colleagues, commentators and former staffers who wanted to understand why we kept losing, and what needed to change.

Andrew Cooper, who had become the founder of the market research company Populus, and Daniel Finkelstein, now a Times columnist, had joined the CRD shortly before the 1997 debacle. After the 2001 election they had teamed up with George to begin pressing the party to change. In a series of papers, articles and polls they argued that the Tory Party would not win again unless it understood why people had turned away from it. I joined in with this group, and together with others like Michael Gove, Ed Vaizey and Nicholas Boles we began to meet, usually at Policy Exchange, the new modernising Conservative think-tank, and talk over pizzas and beer.

As a genuine, moderate and liberally minded One Nation Conservative, I was an enthusiast for change. At the time I wrote that there were three essential components for a successful modern conservatism: ‘First, we need to reclaim the full set of values that makes conservatism whole. I joined up because the Conservative Party combined a message about aspiration – that everyone should be free to do what they could and be what they could – with compassion for the weak, the vulnerable and those left behind. Second, we must look outwards and forwards, not inwards and backwards. Parties should exist to identify and address the modern challenges that our country faces. Finally … conservatism is nothing if it is not practical. We need a relentless focus on the things that people care about in their daily lives: the public services they use, the taxes they pay and their hopes and fears about the future.’

In other words, pretty much everything needed to change. Instead of tax cuts, crime and Europe, we needed to shift our focus onto the issues the Conservative Party had ignored: health, education, and tackling entrenched poverty. It simply wasn’t acceptable to have so few women MPs, so little representation from ethnic minorities, and such a poor geographical spread of Conservative seats. As I came to believe passionately, words alone do not work; you need positive action. It’s no good simply telling talented British Asians or young businesswomen just how meritocratic you are when the first meeting they attend is a sea of white male faces.

And the Conservative Party had to stop putting people off with curtain-twitching moralising. Yes, there were genuine arguments about family breakdown and behaviour that needed to be made, but we were in no position to make them. We had to earn the right to be heard on these and other subjects.

Added to this, we all agreed that it was time for the Conservative Party to make a decisive step in favour of equal treatment for gay people. In 2003, Labour had repealed the law that banned councils from ‘intentionally promoting homosexuality’. It was known as ‘Section 28’, after the clause in which it appeared in the Local Government Act 1988, passed by the Conservatives.

For me at the time, the reason this legislation had been passed was that councils were overstepping their role. What business had a local council promoting sexuality in any form? But by arguing this I was ignoring an even bigger question: what were we doing backing what looked like, and what was for many, an attack on homosexuality? As Nick Boles later put it to me, ‘It’s not about what councils should and shouldn’t do. That’s not the point. It makes gay people feel like they’re worth less.’

In all of this, there was something we agreed shouldn’t change: we were all convinced that the Conservative Party had become, and should remain, a Eurosceptic party.

While we were all at that time supporters of the UK staying in the European Union, we certainly didn’t see support for the EU, as it was currently constituted, as in any way ‘modern’. But we did believe that ‘banging on about Europe’ (a phrase I was famously to use a year later) was damaging, because while it was just about in the top ten issues for the British public, it seemed to be the only thing that the Conservative Party really cared about.

The biggest influence on me in all these discussions was George Osborne. He was the most convinced, and the most convincing, moderniser. From the very start we built a genuine partnership of a kind that I believe is very rare in modern politics. We each wanted the other to succeed. There was no senior partner and no junior partner. Above all, what mattered most was trust: we came to know that we could tell each other anything, and it would not be passed on to others, and certainly not to the press.

This relationship, and our shared view of what needed to happen, would become stronger during the general election of 2005. Michael Howard gave us both key roles and ringside seats in the last of the contests that we would fight and lose together.

7

Our Darling Ivan

‘You’re the first, the last, my everything …’ The lyrics of the Barry White song boomed across the operating theatre from a radio. I’d always been a fan of his music, but I was concerned that it was too loud, and the team of doctors and nurses hovering over Samantha wouldn’t be able to concentrate.

I needn’t have worried. Everything went smoothly. And within minutes I was holding our first-born son, Ivan.

It was 8 April 2002, and we were in Queen Charlotte’s Hospital in Hammersmith. Samantha was having an emergency caesarean, because when her contractions started it turned out that Ivan was ‘feet first’. In other words he was the wrong way round in the womb, or what they call an ‘undiagnosed breech’.

Sam and I had been married for five years, and had built our life together in our house in North Kensington. Neither of us had any regrets about waiting before having children. Sam had the job she had worked so hard for, as creative director at the Bond Street store Smythson. I had been elected to Parliament, representing a seat that suited me down to the ground. We had taken the risk of borrowing a lot of money to buy a small house in the constituency, in the hamlet of Dean, near Chipping Norton. There didn’t seem to be a cloud on the horizon. But our life was about to change in a way we never expected.

When Ivan first arrived, there didn’t seem to be anything wrong. With caesarean births, the dad is the first person to hold the baby. Bursting with pride, I squeezed him tight as we crossed the room to check his weight and carry out the initial tests. Ivan was a small baby, just over six pounds, but he passed all of them with high scores.

We were the typical proud parents. Grandmothers and grandfathers, sisters and brothers all came to visit the new arrival in a room that rather eerily overlooked the exercise yard of next-door Wormwood Scrubs prison. One of the first to come was my godfather Tim Rathbone, who was suffering from terminal cancer and was being treated at the next-door Hammersmith Hospital. I could see that he was dying, and it felt so poignant that he was there.

Once Samantha was well enough, we headed off to her mother and stepfather’s house in Oxfordshire, where we were going to spend those supposedly idyllic first few days together. But then we noticed that something was wrong. Ivan was sleepy, like many premature babies. And, again like many others, he would sometimes wake with a start, hands outstretched. But we noticed that these sudden and jerky movements were happening more and more.

The worries mounted. He wasn’t feeding properly. He was losing weight. And the movements got worse. He was tiny, but these looked like full-grown seizures. So, after a friendly but inconclusive visit from the local GP, we jumped in the car and headed for the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford.

And so the litany of specialists, children’s wards, tests and treatments began. The staff at the hospital did all they could to reassure us. But when you watch your tiny baby undergoing multiple blood tests, your heart aches. When they bend him back into the foetal position to remove fluid from the base of his spine with a long, threatening-looking needle, it almost breaks.

The meeting with the consultant, Dr Mike Pike, for the initial verdict on all these tests is etched forever in my mind. As we sat down, a box of tissues was placed on the table by our side. ‘Severely delayed development,’ he said. These words were carefully chosen, and there is a whole industry of literature and thought behind them. But they don’t mean much to the uninitiated new parent. I asked whether this meant he would struggle at sport, or spend his life in a wheelchair. ‘I’m afraid it’s more likely to be the latter,’ was the reply.

It turned out that Ivan had ‘Ohtahara Syndrome’, named after the Japanese physician who first observed it. Like many of these diagnoses, it is more a description of a set of symptoms than an explanation of how it happened or what can be done about it. Put bluntly, the cause was unknown. The treatment options were uncertain. And there was no cure.

Ohtahara Syndrome is incredibly rare, but our Ivan was a typical case. What its sufferers tend to have in common is severe and often uncontrollable epilepsy, and very poor outcomes in terms of development. Most are quadriplegic (unable to use their limbs) and suffer severe developmental delay (unable to speak, or communicate properly).

The news hit us both very hard. Like all parents, we had worried about having a healthy baby. But, also like many others, it is something you don’t think will actually happen to you. We were almost completely unprepared.

And when it does happen, the effect is sudden, deep and lasting. It takes a long time to understand what has taken place. You enter a period of mourning, trying to come to terms with the difference between the child you expected and longed for, and the reality that you now face.

But like so many things to do with the human spirit, there is a resilience that you didn’t know you had. You feel such strong bonds of love, and such desire to protect this beautiful little creature, that something inside you helps you through.

We went home to Dean, and the tears flowed. How would we manage? What would it be like? Most of all, how could we cope with seeing our precious child suffer so much?

Today, when I think of Ivan, I think of how we did cope. I think of the smiles and the holidays. Covering his legs with warm sand on the beach in Devon. Or trying to get him to sit on a pony. Or lying with him for hours on my lap or on my tummy. Having a bath with him and the other children, with Nancy and Elwen gently washing his hair. Swinging in a hammock and listening to him gurgle with pleasure. The happy memories are now at the front of my mind.

But if I think for too long, I also remember the seizures. He could have twenty or thirty in a day, lasting for minutes, or sometimes hours, his small frame racked with spasms and what looked like searing pain. By the end his clothes would be drenched in sweat and his poor little body exhausted. And so often, there was nothing we could do. It was a torture that I can hardly bear to remember. For Samantha, the mother who bore him and who loved him so deeply, it was a torture that was tearing her apart.

In those early days after Ivan’s birth we talked and talked together. On one car journey back from the John Radcliffe to Dean I remember saying, ‘We are going to make it.’ We had to. We hadn’t wanted this. We weren’t prepared for it. But we loved him, and we would find a way through. If we, with all our advantages, our security, our love for each other, couldn’t manage, then who could? There would be many times in the subsequent months and years when we felt close to collapse, and would remind each other of this conversation.

Something had happened before Ivan’s birth that did give me pause for thought – and at least some mental preparation. A constituent called Tussie Myerson who lived in a neighbouring village had asked me, as the new MP, to come and see her to talk about the care, or rather the lack of it, that her severely disabled daughter Emmy was receiving. When I arrived she sat me down at her kitchen table, wedged in with her nine-year-old daughter in a wheelchair next to me, so I couldn’t move. She told me years later that she had done this on purpose: she wanted me to see just how difficult it was to cope with someone who couldn’t feed themselves. Who couldn’t communicate. Who was in permanent danger of choking. Who was frequently ill and prone to powerful seizures. Tussie never told me whether or not I passed the test. But as I look back and remember our discussion of care packages, respite breaks and special schools, and how little I knew then, my sense is that I only narrowly avoided outright failure.

After Ivan was born, Tussie got in touch and offered much sound advice, along with huge amounts of sympathy. She said, ‘Always remember, you didn’t volunteer for this. You’re not angels, and you shouldn’t pretend that you are. Do everything you can to keep your love for each other, and your marriage and family together.’ I always remembered this, and have passed on similar advice to dozens of other parents with disabled children.

That said, we had no idea how difficult it was going to be. We soon moved from the John Radcliffe back to our home in London – and frequent visits to St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington. More tests. More drugs. More attempts to stabilise Ivan’s condition, with the aim of providing at least some limited quality of life.

From there he moved on to Great Ormond Street, which richly deserves its reputation as one of the best children’s hospitals in the world. We tried different medications. Cocktails of anti-epileptic drugs, one added to another, with dosage levels changed to try to get control of the seizures. Too strong and he was crashed out, asleep for most of the day, with his chances of developing like other children set back even further. Too weak and the seizures would return, his little body convulsing and our hearts breaking all over again.

Most of the medicines tasted disgusting, and it was often impossible to get him to keep them down. He developed ‘reflux’, where everything – milk and medicines – would come shooting back up again, sometimes accompanied by a burp and a winning smile. It was almost as if he was telling us that nothing was going to work. Even when we could get the medicines down, the epilepsy always seemed smarter than the doctors. No matter what combinations of drugs and treatments we tried, it would emerge again, the seizures often stronger than before.

We tried steroid injections, which have helped other children. They made his weight balloon and his blood pressure rise, and his kidneys came close to failing. We ended up in the renal ward of Great Ormond Street, where Sam and I took turns to sleep on the floor by his bed. Most of the other children on the ward had kidney problems, and when Ivan was asleep I would read them stories to pass the long hours they were stuck in bed waiting for the next operation or dialysis session.

We certainly saw the best of the NHS, with consultants like Mike Pike at the John Radcliffe, Diane Smythe and Mando Watson at St Mary’s and Helen Cross at Great Ormond Street. They have changed and improved the lives of so many children, and they did a lot to help Ivan. But I think they would all agree that he was one of the toughest cases they’d ever had to deal with.

We also saw at first hand how little is really known about some of these complex medical conditions. Before Ivan, I had always assumed that even if they were incurable, most diseases were correctly diagnosed, their causes were understood, and medicines could always be prescribed to ease at least some of their symptoms. But in this case of severe epilepsy, the doctors didn’t know the cause, and even if the medicines did (briefly) work, they didn’t really know why. They were basically changing dosages, hoping to make progress but with little understanding of what might work and what might not.

Wanting to know whether we could have other children, we signed up for ‘genetic counselling’, which in 2003 was very much in its infancy. This was another field in which we discovered how little is actually known. To start with, no one had any idea whether Ivan’s condition was inherited or not. If it was, there might be a one in four chance of it happening again. If it wasn’t, it was one in many thousands. So we were offered a sort of ‘blended probability’ of one in twenty. Remembering how few of my father’s 20–1 shots ever came in at the races, we decided to risk it.

It was one of the best decisions we’ve ever taken.

Nancy arrived in 2004. We were so worried something might be wrong that every movement she made was carefully watched and analysed. We needn’t have worried: she was the easiest of babies, and hit every milestone on time.

Above all, we saw the compassion that there is in the NHS. I lost count of the nurses who went above and beyond. Who would stop at nothing to try to make Ivan comfortable. They tried so hard to look after us, as well as him.

A perfect example was when Ivan went for an operation to have a feeding tube – basically a small plastic plug – inserted into his stomach, because his weight loss was getting so severe, and delivering the medicines had become so painful and so difficult. The sight of your little boy about to go under the knife, even for a relatively straightforward operation like this, is hard to bear. I’ll never forget the warm-hearted nurse, originally from Zambia, who held my hand as I watched Ivan go under the anaesthetic, tears streaming down my face as I wondered if he would ever wake up again. The tube feeding helped us control his weight and measure the drugs more precisely. Sam and I became expert with the tubes, valves, syringes and measurements.

We were always determined not to hide Ivan away. While he could never tell us his likes and dislikes, we sensed that he liked the stimulation of being out and about in the fresh air. So he would be fed on trains and planes, in pubs and restaurants, usually with a gaggle of other people’s children watching. Occasionally one of them would ask if the tube was there because he had been naughty and not eaten his tea.

Just as we experienced a new world of hospitals and tests, so we had to build a new and very different life at home. Looking after someone with Ivan’s condition – unable to move or communicate, doubly incontinent and prone to massive and prolonged seizures – meant huge changes. We needed a hospital bed, syringes, tubes, oxygen, suction pumps, sterilisation equipment and a range of controlled drugs, including powerful benzodiazepines and barbiturates. But above all we needed Olympian levels of stamina, patience and love. We did our best, but after a few months we were close to collapse. We tried to cope mostly on our own, but we simply couldn’t.

I found the phone number of Kensington and Chelsea council’s social workers, and soon, to my great relief, one of them was sitting in our kitchen, notepad in hand, talking about the help that was available.

The list of people who assisted us, in both London and Oxfordshire, is a long one. Children’s hospices like Helen House and Shooting Star, and dedicated public servants like the community nursing team, who Samantha would say did more than anyone to save her life and her sanity.

At the moment of greatest crisis, when we were near to breaking point, I found someone who would become very special in the life of our family. Gita Lama, a young Nepalese woman, had worked for a diplomatic family in London and subsequently registered with an organisation that represented domestic workers at risk of abuse and helped them find new work. She became Ivan’s night carer, and would later help us to look after him at the weekends at Dean. She loved Ivan as if he were her own, and went on to look after our other children in Downing Street. Now with a son of her own, she remains a good friend of the family.

Kensington and Chelsea were incredibly helpful, and gave us carers who stayed in with Ivan several nights a week. Again, these amazing women – the main two were Shree and Michelle – became devoted to him, and close to us.

Yet for all this help, the emergencies continued. We would often exhaust the range of drugs we were allowed to administer at home, and have to drive at breakneck speed to hospital. Children’s A&E at St Mary’s became something of a second home: we would arrive and say a familiar ‘Hello’ to the doctors and nurses. Then the desperate ritual of what became known as ‘the protocols’ – the administration of a range of ever-stronger drugs to control the seizures – would begin.

The last-but-one stage was a drug called Phenytoin, which was administered rectally. The chemical smelt so strong, you could hardly breathe. A glass test tube had to be used because it could melt plastic. What it did to our little boy I could hardly bear to think of, but it worked. From violent spasms, he would go limp and floppy, and we would hold him in our arms, thankful that the ordeal was over.

The final protocol was for him to be rendered entirely unconscious and put on a ventilator. Once this happened there was no guarantee he would regain consciousness. While we came close at times, we never reached this stage.

We learned a lot about navigating the system to try to get the best for your child. When dealing with epileptic seizures in the A&E department, watch out for the four-hour waiting target: there is a danger of an entirely unnecessary hospital admission. (Once you get close to the deadline the staff, quite understandably, want to shunt you onto a ward, whereas it may be that after just a few more minutes in A&E things will be good enough for you to go home.)

Once your child is in a hospital ward, try to order your next batch of drugs hours before you’re due to leave, as they take forever to come. (I used to joke that hospitals were easy to get into, but impossible to get out of.)

When the doctors begin their ward rounds, never leave your child’s bedside; it is the only time you have a real chance to find out what on earth is going on.

Nowhere was parental navigation more essential than in the highly charged world of special-needs education. I had already seen as a constituency MP that special schools were struggling, partly because of their high costs, but principally because of the doctrine of inclusion. At its most extreme, this held that all children, whatever their needs, whatever their disability, should be taught in mainstream schools. Of course it is right that children with special needs who can be integrated into mainstream schools should be able to be, but some children are undoubtedly better off in a special school. In any event, parents should be able to make informed choices. Far too often they simply weren’t being told about what was available. Even though I had seen this happen to others, I rather irrationally didn’t see it coming. But of course it did.

We had heard about an amazing special school called the Cheyne Day Centre, attached to the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. But when the education adviser from the council came around to talk about Ivan’s schooling they failed to mention it. We then began a battle to get him in; and once he was, we found ourselves having to fight another battle to keep it open. For a time we were successful, and he received the best possible start. Care, stimulation, therapy and education, all in a place where we knew he was safe and where the staff could cope.

After his fifth birthday Ivan needed to move on. While we had fought valiantly, the cost of Cheyne was too great, and a new special school was being built next to Queen’s Park Rangers’ Loftus Road ground, which was near where we lived. We accepted the inevitable and agreed to a place at this school, Jack Tizard, which in the end turned out well.

My friends say that the experience of having Ivan and helping to care for him changed me a lot. I am sure they are right. A world in which things had always previously gone right for me suddenly gave me an immense shock and challenge. I tried to rise to it, but am very conscious of the ways in which I failed. I was always there for the emergencies, good at the technical things, never one to hold back when nappies needed changing or drugs delivered. And I loved Ivan with all my heart. I adored bathtime, bedtime, walks, wheeling him everywhere and nowhere. As he got older I would throw him over my shoulder and make sure he was part of everything we did together as a family. But I know that I lacked the real patience and selflessness that are required to be a truly great carer. And that is the truth about accidental carers: we are not perfect, and there is a lot of muddling through. No wonder so many marriages break down when challenges like this come along.

Yet perhaps that was the greatest discovery of all. While I can think of ways in which I failed, I cannot think of a single way Samantha did. I still marvel when I think of how she managed and cared and loved and coped, not just with Ivan but with the rest of our growing family.

The end is almost too painful to relate, even to recall.

We had had some scares and close shaves. Seizures that never seemed to end. Chest infections that he would struggle to shake off. And then one night, 24 February 2009, Shree woke us to say that Ivan’s stomach had become badly swollen and he was in terrible pain.

This time Sam said she would take him to hospital, and I should stay with the other children. I will never forget holding Ivan in my arms in the cold night air as Sam threw some clothes and blankets on the back seat and started the car.

As soon as they were gone, I started worrying that this time it was different. So I too dashed to the hospital. When I got there the situation had deteriorated badly. A team was standing over Ivan in the emergency room, working desperately to resuscitate him. But he had gone. Adrenalin injections. Defibrillator pads. Nothing worked. He had suffered a massive organ failure. Sam and I were left holding him as the team, visibly moved, backed away to give us some space. We had always known this might happen, but nothing, absolutely nothing, can prepare you for the reality of losing your darling boy in this way.

It was as if the world stopped turning. Explaining what had happened to the children was so hard, because they were so young. And I had to call Gita, who was visiting her family in Nepal; she was desperate to be there with the child she loved so deeply. I called Ed Llewellyn and told him what had happened and that I would be staying at home. I was leader of the opposition at this point and, as it was a Wednesday morning, I was meant to be at Prime Minister’s Questions. What happened later, when Gordon Brown led tributes and the House adjourned for the day, meant a lot to us. It was much more than I had expected, and it showed the real warmth and humanity of Gordon Brown, who had of course suffered in a similar way with his daughter Jennifer Jane, who died shortly after she was born.

The next few days before the funeral were a blur. At least we had to focus on the songs and poems we wanted to remember him by. A friend of Sam’s called Damian Katkhuda, who had a band called Obi, sang and played his guitar in St Nicholas church, Chadlington. It was a beautiful service, with our closest friends and family around us. But there was nothing but darkness for us.

You never fully recover from the loss of a child. But you can steadily learn to cope. I threw myself back into my work as a way of trying to manage. When I look back, I realise that I started working again too quickly. For a while I was too fragile and not in the right state of mind to make decisions. Nothing else seemed to matter alongside what we had lost.

But what is often said about grief I found to be true. While at first you think the gloom will never lift, there comes a time – and for me it was many months later – when some of the happy memories start to break through and you remember what you had, not only what you have lost.

And having Ivan taught us so much. About unconditional love. About our total devotion to each other. About the extraordinary compassion in our health service and the lengths that people go to in order to help. We learned about our strengths, but also our limitations.

Ivan lies buried opposite the church in Chadlington. We take the children there, and tell him how things are going and how much we still miss him. Sam found an inscription from Wordsworth for the headstone that sums up so much of what we feel.

I loved the Boy with the utmost love of which my soul is capable, and he is taken from me – yet in the agony of my spirit in surrendering such a treasure I feel a thousand times richer than if I had never possessed it.

8

Men or Mice?

At the time, Michael Howard’s 2005 general election campaign was seen as slick and professional. But it was also too right-wing and rather mean-spirited, putting people off rather than turning them towards us. It resulted in another disastrous defeat for the Tories.

I had been responsible for policy coordination, writing the manifesto and acting as one of the party’s principal spokesmen around the country. I saw the campaign close-up. Yet just a few weeks after it was over, I was planning an aggressive leadership campaign in favour of a more modern and liberal Conservative message.

How does all that make sense?

The short answer is that in modern politics the tone and content of a manifesto and a campaign are predominantly set by the party leader. Michael Howard was sure that if we were robust and effective, we could make a fairly traditional Conservative message work. He also felt he had to be true to himself. I was already convinced that we had to change, but I understood Michael’s position. I owed a lot to him, and wanted to help him make his chosen strategy as successful as possible.

The manifesto itself was short and focused, but it was lacking in policy detail. With Michael’s permission I drafted in Michael Gove – who I had helped to persuade out of journalism and into politics, and who was standing in the super-safe Conservative seat of Surrey Heath. We sat in my pokey House of Commons office for several days, dividing the chapters up between us and writing one each before passing what we had done to the other for polishing and improving. We were already friends, and this work brought us closer.

The policies may have been rather workmanlike, but they did actually work. We know this because, while Labour derided our manifesto at the time, they copied and implemented many of its most significant proposals straight after the election. The points system for immigration; the proposals on school discipline. Tony Blair pursued his usual tactic of trashing his opposition, and then coopting any idea that was halfway sensible.

But in modern elections the campaign itself is what matters, and the tone of ours was set not only by Michael Howard, but also by someone I’ve come to admire as one of the great political campaigners: the Australian Lynton Crosby.

Lynton’s hard work is combined with great leadership skills. Twice – in 2005 and 2015 – I’ve seen him build the happiest, most cohesive, most hard-working teams in Conservative Central Office that I have ever known. His strongest weapon is plain common sense. What’s the target? What are your strengths and weaknesses? What are those of your opponents? What, given those things, is the best route to victory? Above all, what’s the plan?

In 2005, Lynton came in at a relatively late stage. His view was that the best chance Michael had to win the election, or at least to deprive Tony Blair of another massive victory, was to focus on some straightforward issues that people cared about, while encouraging them to take out their frustrations with the government by voting for the Conservatives.

The famous poster slogan ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’ fitted with this strategy. It was punchy, and it channelled frustration with Labour. It focused minds on down-to-earth-issues: clean hospitals, more police, ‘It’s time to put a limit on immigration,’ and so on. But the tone reinforced the problem with the Conservative image. It was mean-spirited. Too many people answered the question ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’ with ‘Well, even if I am, I’m not voting for you lot.’

Added to that, in my view the campaigning on immigration went too far. The message wasn’t an unreasonable one. Indeed, I was a strong supporter of immigration control, and had been closely involved in drafting the proposals we put forward. And you could argue that, in the light of what subsequently happened, the decision to make this issue a central one was prescient. But its domination of the early part of our campaign was too much. It felt wrong. It appealed to voters we already had, but made some of those we needed to attract feel uncomfortable – even those who agreed with the policy itself.

The result was the fourth-worst Conservative performance for a hundred years. While we gained thirty-three seats, we only increased our share of the vote by 0.7 per cent, a smaller increase than William Hague had achieved in 2001. Overall, we got fewer votes in 2005 than we did in 1997 – 8.8 million versus 9.6. We won some of our target seats, but even then more than half of those only came to us because of Labour voters switching to the Liberal Democrats, rather than directly from Labour to us.

One other polling figure tells the true story. When people were asked whether a party ‘shares your values’, the Conservatives came off worst, at around 36 per cent, while Labour and the Lib Dems were at around 50 per cent. Maurice Saatchi put it crisply when he said: ‘More anger at the problems of the world we live in is not enough to convince voters that the Conservative Party is fit to solve them.’ The problem went much deeper. We needed to change.

Michael announced that he wouldn’t stand down until there had been a review of the leadership rules. He favoured a system where if more than half of the parliamentary party settled on one candidate, there would not be a vote of the party membership. In the event this proposal went down badly with both the membership and a significant number of MPs, and wasn’t adopted. But the delay in the leadership election that it caused would make all the difference.

If it had taken place sooner after the general election, there can be little doubt that the favourite, David Davis, would have been elected. He had a machine in the parliamentary party, and something of a public profile. There wasn’t an obvious challenger. Before one arose, the contest would have been over.

Instead, the party would wait until just before the party conference in the autumn before candidates’ declarations were made. A formal campaign would then be held during and after the conference, with the results in December.

But before any of this got under way, Michael needed to appoint a new shadow cabinet. He wanted to give newer MPs a chance, and sounded out both George Osborne and me about what jobs we most wanted to do. I was in no doubt: I wanted to be the shadow secretary of state for education. It might not have been seen as one of the ‘big jobs’, but for me it stood out above all others. So much depended on it: the life chances of our young people, the future of our country. Our party’s prospects too rested on the answers we came up with on such policy challenges, and I wanted to be one of the people driving them.

But choosing the education role wasn’t, of course, the most important decision I took after the election.

Slightly to my surprise, and certainly to the surprise of many others, I found myself running for the leadership.

Perhaps for others, deciding to run for such an office comes swiftly, and with few doubts. That is not how it happened for me. Everyone said that I was too young. That I had no ministerial experience. And that I had only been in Parliament for four years. I could be a candidate, maybe a credible candidate, but would I be a credible leader? Would I be part of the party’s problems rather than a solution?

During those pizza evenings in Policy Exchange before the election, one of the things our small group of modernisers had discussed was how we might persuade our future leader to act. But nothing we came up with had seemed convincing. We knew, partly from experience with Michael Howard, that it wouldn’t be enough to persuade a new leader to mouth words about modernisation. We needed someone who really believed in it, and embodied it in the way they talked and acted and felt.

Gradually some of the group began to feel that maybe the answer was to try to capture the leadership rather than merely influence it. We didn’t spend a lot of time on what, at that stage, seemed a little presumptuous and some way off. The moment the election was over, however, it all suddenly seemed more real, and more possible. But was it right?

George’s wife Frances was particularly outspoken. The daughter of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet minister David Howell, she knew the brutality of modern politics, but wasn’t in any doubt. The four of us were having dinner together at our house in North Kensington shortly after the general election when she looked at her husband and me and asked, ‘Well, are you men or are you mice?’

From the moment I really looked at it properly, I thought that I could win. Not because of any special brilliance or powers I possessed; I just saw that all the other potential candidates had flaws that made them eminently beatable.

Ken Clarke had popular appeal, but as the Conservative Party had become a Eurosceptic party, he would find it very hard to win.

Liam Fox, a strong speaker and media performer, was, when you scratched the surface, a pretty unreconstructed Thatcherite. I was fairly sure the party was looking for something else.

That left the favourite, David Davis. He had a great back story, growing up on a council estate, brought up by a single mother and making his own way through business and the Territorial Army to Parliament. He was Conservative aspiration personified. Yet he was another relatively unreconstructed right-winger who would think that the combination of his candidature and another coat of paint would change the party’s fortunes.

I knew this wasn’t the case. Davis wouldn’t be the one to get the Tory car out of the ditch, and I thought the party agreed with me. He had surrounded himself with a rather thuggish crew of former whips from the John Major era, and I rather suspected that a Davis leadership would be like life in a Hobbesian state of nature: ‘nasty, brutish and short’. While he was the front-runner he could win adherents who feared being on the wrong side of him, but the moment people began to suspect he might not win, that fear would go, leaving him a much less formidable candidate.

But I still had doubts. Not so much about getting the job, but about myself and the pressures it would bring, not just on me but also on my family. I was still very young, with much to learn. Could I really do all the different elements of the job? Decisions that would put people’s lives at risk. Coping with the pressure. Prime Minister’s Questions. There were many moments of indecision before the choice was finally made.

My old friend Andrew Feldman played a key role. He told me that I could and should do it. There were also one or two – and it was pretty much one or two – MPs who were similarly convinced. Former SAS officer Andrew Robathan appeared in my office and said that I had to do it. He knew the parliamentary party, and said he was looking at a winning candidate with a winning strategy. Greg Barker, the MP for Bexhill and Battle who had come into the House with me in 2001, was similarly enthusiastic. So was my friend Hugo Swire. Boris was also keen, and generous in coming out for me quite quickly. In a characteristic intervention, he told the newspapers: ‘I hope that David Cameron removes his hat from wherever he has got it, and chucks it firmly in the ring. That hat has got to simultaneously decapitate his competitors and land in the ring.’

Yet in the end it was those closest to me who were the most influential in helping me make up my mind. Most friends were enthusiastic. They could all see that the Tory Party needed a new approach, and they thought I should go for it. The only exception was Michael Gove, who called me one weekend at Dean and pleaded with me not to do it. He was worried about the effect on me, on Samantha and the family. For all the subsequent drama in our relationship, I think he had nothing but the best of intentions in making the call.

My mother and father were nervous. I don’t remember them ever saying ‘Don’t,’ but my dad in particular was not an enthusiast. He was delighted that I was doing the education job, and thought that I should take one thing at a time. But my brother Alex told me to go for it. This meant a lot.

The most important, of course, was Samantha. Just as she had been worried about the effect on our life of me becoming an MP, she was worried about what being leader would mean. She could see why that side of it worried me, but she was also in many ways the ultimate Tory moderniser. It was a crisp spring day in the garden at Dean when she said words to the effect of, ‘What is the point of spending your life in a Tory Party that can’t achieve any of the things that you believe this country needs to do?’ That was what I really needed, and after her words the decision was made. I was running.

To start with, things came together well. George and I met and talked frankly about the situation. He was being encouraged to consider standing, but he thought he was too young, and hadn’t had enough time to develop the sort of story and profile he’d need to succeed as leader if he won. And anyway, his new job as shadow chancellor was a huge challenge. At just thirty-three years old, he was the youngest person in history to hold that role, and he didn’t want to be distracted.

But he did offer to run my campaign. There was no pact, no deal, no agreement about anything, including future jobs; but there was something much stronger. A shared view of the challenge, and an understanding that we would stand together and work together come what may.

The rest of the team was small but professional.

Andrew Feldman was the natural treasurer, and he set about raising the necessary funds, starting with the businessman Phil Harris. My old Carlton boss Michael Green chipped in. We wanted a good range of donors, not to rely too much on any one individual.

Ed Llewellyn, who was working in Sarajevo at the time, took unpaid leave to come and lead my team. Kate Fall, who had worked for Michael Howard, came to work as his deputy. They teamed up with my press officer Gabby Bertin and an events team led by Liz Sugg. All would still be with me when I left Downing Street eleven years later.

Steve Hilton, who had been running his own business after leaving Central Office, and had then gone to Saatchi & Saatchi and M&C Saatchi, would play a key role in working with me to put together the case for change.

Meanwhile, in the House of Commons, I started to sound out MPs. The good news was that the early adopters were just the sort of people I wanted: bright, sane, forward-looking, and popular with other colleagues. The less good news was that there weren’t very many of them. When we first got together in my office in 343 Portcullis House on 13 June there were just fifteen MPs present: Greg Barker, Richard Benyon, John Butterfill, Michael Gove, Boris Johnson, Oliver Letwin, Peter Luff, George Osborne, Andrew Robathan, Hugh Robertson, Nicholas Soames, Hugo Swire, Ed Vaizey, Peter Viggers, and of course me.

We agreed to spend the summer setting out policies and ideas: we could only beat the Davis bandwagon if there was real substance in what we were saying. When it came to parliamentary colleagues, no jobs would be offered, no future roles dangled in front of them as inducements for support. And we would be unfailingly polite and correct. This was a complete contrast to the Davis operation, which used a combination of brutal arm-twisting (‘Support the front-runner or your career is over, matey’) and ludicrous promises (by the end, I heard, he had amassed several chancellors and foreign secretaries).

The early campaign was very heavy going. We couldn’t get more MPs to declare their support. None of the newspapers were backing us. And I was worried that my freshness, a central part of my pitch, might go stale.

The first parliamentary hustings in July didn’t go all that well. The star performer was Liam Fox, who spoke forcefully about the need for change in Europe. And a new issue emerged that was to last throughout the contest – drugs. The MP Mark Pritchard was persuaded (by someone in the Davis camp, we were told) to ask one candidate – Ken Clarke – directly, ‘Have you ever taken class-A drugs?’ Naturally the spotlight fell on the rest of us to answer. I declined to do so, and while many colleagues groaned when the question was asked, there probably was some damage done.

The Daily Mail became quite hysterical about it, publishing a full-page editorial: ‘David Cameron, Drugs and the Truth’. I refused to yield, and declined to answer the question about drug use in the past, saying that ‘Everyone is entitled to a private past.’ My stubbornness won some admirers, and proved that I wouldn’t be pushed around.

On Question Time I answered a question about whether I had ever taken drugs as an MP by saying, truthfully, that I had not, because ‘law-makers shouldn’t be law-breakers’. The more difficult question was whether I had ever done so when I was a special adviser, or between being a special adviser and becoming an MP. I simply didn’t answer it. Frankly, I didn’t want to tell a lie by saying no. Stories began circulating that I had avoided the question because drug use among my friends was commonplace and excessive. This was nonsense. But had I smoked the odd joint with Sam’s friends before being elected? Yes. Not at all frequently, but yes.

All in all, it felt as if the campaign was stuck, and outside our small core there were few who thought we could win. But I knew we had one weapon more powerful than those possessed by any other candidate. A clear, powerful and persuasive political message that I was sure the party was ready for: Change to Win.

This oughtn’t to have seemed as radical as it sounded. After all, the essence of conservatism, and central to the success of the party, is that it adapts. Far from being the ones trashing the Conservative brand and the Conservative Party, we were absolutely convinced that we were the ones who could save them.

Our goal – which became my mantra – was a modern, compassionate Conservative Party. Modern, because we needed to look more like the country we aspired to govern. Compassionate, because our politics was about extending opportunity to those who had the least. And Conservative, because we believed that timeless Conservative principles – strong families, personal responsibility, free enterprise – were as important as ever.

The speech I made that June, effectively starting my leadership bid, included a strident defence of families and marriage. Some saw this as rather an old-fashioned note in an otherwise modernising score. I saw it as essential to building a stronger and more compassionate society.

In August 2005, I delivered a comprehensive speech on the right approach to tackling the rise of Islamist extremist terror. I made the case for tougher security measures, including action to deport hate preachers and potential terrorists, and arguing that, if necessary, we would have to leave the European Convention on Human Rights. But the real point of the speech was to make clear that I believed we were involved in an ideological struggle that could last for a generation or more. There was no point trying to tiptoe around what we were up against.

And then there was Europe. I thought, naïvely perhaps, that I had the right formula. In line with my own beliefs, we would be genuine Eurosceptics. Not arguing for Britain to leave the EU altogether, but arguing consistently and cogently for reform. Integration had gone too far. Brussels was too bureaucratic. Britain needed greater protections. Far from rejecting referendums on future treaties, the public should have its say.

Crucially, we had to get away from the ‘doublespeak’ of the past. Margaret Thatcher had railed against Brussels, yet took the country into the Exchange Rate Mechanism. John Major had attacked the single currency, yet said he wanted Britain at ‘the heart of Europe’. The Conservative government had opposed a referendum on the Maastricht Treaty, yet most ministers privately prayed for the Dutch and Danish populations to reject it when they were given the chance in referendums of their own. So, above all, we needed to be clear and consistent.

To me, it followed logically that the Conservatives couldn’t continue to sit as part of the European People’s Party (EPP) group in the European Parliament. The EPP wanted more integration and more political union; the Conservative Party wanted less of both. Yet William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard had all fudged this issue. In my view we had to act and speak in the same way whether we were in London, Brussels or Strasbourg. Thus my pledge to leave the EPP and establish a new centre-right group.

Some have said that this pledge was made purely for opportunistic reasons – to win the support of Conservative backbenchers. Others that I did not fully believe in what I was doing. I totally reject those criticisms. I was in Conservative Central Office when Margaret Thatcher was persuaded to join the EPP. I thought it was wrong at the time, and I never changed my mind. We agreed with the mainly Christian Democrat parties about many things, but not the future direction of Europe. That should have been a deal-breaker right from the start.

But would leaving the EPP do us harm with our allies? This was a stronger argument, and I suspect it was the one that encouraged my predecessors to pull back from making the full break. But our allies needed to know we were serious about reform. And I was convinced that it would be better for all of us if we were outside the EPP, while cooperating with its members on shared endeavours. This indeed turned out to be the case – we established what rapidly became the third-largest group in the European Parliament after the socialists and the EPP: the European Conservatives and Reformists Group.

Undoubtedly the move helped me win support from Eurosceptic MPs. But many of them had few other options. When it came to Europe, Ken Clarke was already the Antichrist to many. And David Davis was the Maastricht whip who had twisted arms and made MPs vote for a treaty they hated. Meanwhile Liam Fox’s bandwagon had limited momentum. So I didn’t need to make pledges on the EPP to win the leadership, or even to win the votes of the bulk of the most committed Eurosceptics. What I said to those MPs was what I believed – and I delivered the promise that I made in full.

But still there wasn’t enough support. It felt as if there were only two people – David Davis and Ken Clarke – in the race. On one occasion in my office just before summer recess, George said I needed to start thinking about packing it in. He was frank, as always: ‘Look, I don’t think you’re going to win. You’ve had a good run, made some good points, put down some strong markers – why not leave it at that for now?’

But I still thought the contest was wide open. I was more certain than ever that the party needed to change, and that change wasn’t being offered by anyone else. Yet I had a sense that for all my hard work, perhaps I was holding something back. Perhaps I was still trying to temper my radical aims, for fear of scaring too many people off. I knew now that the only way I had a hope of winning was by being true to myself, getting everything out there and going for broke on modernisation.

We had £10,000 left in the kitty, and we would blow it all on the launch, at which we would set out in even clearer terms what was on offer and what was at stake. At least then, even if I lost, I’d have nothing to reproach myself for.

Launch day turned out to be a day that changed my life.

Steve and I spent a lot of time thinking and writing, and then polishing and rewriting, the speech. Steve also spent a lot of time getting the look and feel of the launch right: he wanted it to be as different from the usual Tory leadership launches as it could possibly be. These tended to take place in a House of Commons committee room, or at least in a room that looked like one. They would involve lots of men in suits standing around, sometimes looking faintly deranged and saying ‘Hear, hear’ too loudly whenever their man (and it usually was a man) said something vaguely right-wing.

We picked a date for our launch, but soon found out that it was the same day the Davis camp had chosen. Instead of changing the date, we hoped that the contrast between the launches would demonstrate new versus old, change versus more of the same. And that’s pretty much what happened.

Sure enough, the Davis launch was in an oak-panelled room. Veterans of past Tory leadership elections said that they felt they’d seen and heard it all before.

We rented a bright and open space, with a stage and no lectern. Instead of journalists and MPs we invited friends and supporters. And instead of tea and biscuits it was fruit smoothies and chocolate brownies. Sam asked lots of our friends, some of whom, like her, were pregnant or had recently had babies.

As I stood before the crowd, I felt that this was my chance to say as directly as possible what I wanted to do, and why. I might have been timid at the start of the leadership campaign, but I would be bold when it mattered. Everything had to change. It wasn’t enough just to oppose Labour with more vigour. Nor was it enough to produce even more rad-ical policies and push them with even more gusto. ‘We can win,’ I told the audience. ‘We can make this country better, but we can only win if we change. That’s the question I’m asking the Conservative Party. Don’t put it off for four years. Go for someone who believes it to the core of their being. Change to win – and we will win.’

In one step I had gone from being the outsider to a real contender. And the stage was set for the party conference in Blackpool in just four days’ time.

The attention of the press, which had died off over the summer, was suddenly intense, and Gabby Bertin went into overdrive fixing interviews and profiles. She was joined by George Eustice, who came highly recommended having worked for the organisation Business for Sterling, which campaigned against the UK joining the euro. He was a gentle, thoughtful strawberry farmer from Cornwall, as keen as the rest of us to see the Conservative Party change. We quickly became good friends.

The week in Blackpool was undoubtedly one of the most exciting of my life. I could feel the momentum. Every day we were winning more support from MPs and candidates. Every party or event we held or at which I spoke saw more and more people turn up.

Standing in the wings of the Winter Gardens waiting to make your speech is an extraordinary feeling. Even back in 2005 the place was crumbling, but it still had some of its old magic. The acoustics were good, the hall was packed, and the audience was close to the stage. The atmosphere and the potential were tangible.

My speech was not as good as the one at the launch, but many more people saw it, as it was carried live on television and reprised on the evening news. What impressed many people was that I delivered it without notes, having memorised it as we drafted it. Watching it now I find it rather wooden, but it worked.

Within a single day, the polls were transformed: support for me surged from 16 to 39 per cent, while for Davis it collapsed from 30 to 14. Between the conference in October and the ballot in December there appeared to be nothing that might shift the dial back in Davis’s favour. And I was going to make sure of it. I resolved to go to as many places as I could, and speak to as many members as possible. For five weeks, life for Liz Sugg and me was spent on the road. Speaking at members’ meetings, sometimes with only a dozen people in the room. McDonald’s drive-throughs for lunch, a cigarette and a glass of wine for dinner at whichever Travelodge we were staying in.

Politically the only events that came near to attaining significance were television encounters. There were my first two TV debates, one on ITV, the other on the BBC. And I think it is fair to say that I lost both of them.

The face-off with Jeremy Paxman was, by contrast, something of a triumph. I enjoyed his books, his humour, and watching the spectator sport of his political interviews. But as an interviewer I thought that most of the time he was a self-indulgent monster. He wasn’t trying to get answers or inform viewers, he was just trying to make his victim look like a crook while he looked like a hero. To reverse Noël Coward’s dictum about television, I thought that Newsnight was a programme for politicians to watch rather than to appear on. Not least because hardly anyone actually watched it. I could see absolutely no point in doing an interview with Paxman: it would never be an attempt to examine policies or priorities, just an opportunity for him to show off and try to take me down at the same time.

This infuriated my team. There is nothing a press officer hates more than their boss refusing to do an interview. Eventually they wore me down, and I relented. But I was prepared to turn the tables on Paxman.

In spite of endless promises by the BBC about a neutral venue, the interview was staged at some lush wine emporium. And it soon became clear that the whole thing had been set up to try to make me look like a rich, spoilt child of Bacchus. I was a non-executive director of a company, Urbium, that owned and ran bars and nightclubs. And I should have predicted what was coming.

The first question was, ‘Who or what is a Pink Pussy?’

I paused and gulped. The only ‘Pink Pussy’ I had heard of was the notorious nightclub in Ibiza. In a split second I decided – thank God – that no answer was best.

‘What about a Slippery Nipple?’

Now I knew where he was going: Pink Pussies and Slippery Nipples were both cocktails. He wanted to get stuck into outside interests and the responsibility of drinks companies. But before he had the chance to get going, I decided to unleash my own Paxman-like rant.

‘This is the trouble with these interviews, Jeremy. You come in, sit someone down and treat them like they are some cross between a fake or a hypocrite. You give no time to anyone to answer any of your questions. It does your profession no favours at all, and it’s no good for political discourse.’

That, combined with teasing him about interrupting himself, put Paxman off his stride. He got nothing out of me, and I avoided interviews with him for the next five years. I was happy to leave it at played 1, won 1.

And then the campaign was over.

On 6 December 2005 I made my way to the Royal Academy of Arts on Piccadilly for the announcement of the count. The results were read out at 3 p.m. – and the victory was comprehensive. I had won over twice as many votes as my opponent. I had the mandate. I could get down to work.

I went straight from a celebration party for MPs at the ICA on The Mall to the rather grim green office occupied by the leader of the opposition. By the desk at one end of the room is a pair of double doors leading out to a small balcony. I sat down on the ledge and smoked a cigarette as I thought about the day ahead, which would, dauntingly, feature my first Prime Minister’s Questions.

The team met to discuss the task. We had talked a lot about supporting the government when it did the right thing, so I was fairly sure that I should make a start on education, promising to support Tony Blair in his desire to give schools more independence, particularly if he faced down the union-inspired opposition on his own benches.

I suggested that if he brought up our approach in the past, I would say, ‘Never mind the past, I want to talk about the future. He was the future once.’ George said, ‘Never mind what he says, just say that line – it’s brilliant.’ I did. I had only ever spoken from the despatch box three times in my life. The backbenchers cheered behind me.

First hurdle jumped. Many more hurdles to come.

9

Hoodies and Huskies

It was minus 20 degrees. All I could see for miles was snow. Standing on a sled, I clung to the reins of several barking huskies. ‘Mush!’ I shouted, and we hurtled across the glacier.

It had been four months since I’d taken the reins of a rather different beast. And I had decided to make Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, the destination for one of my first foreign trips as Conservative Party leader. It was dismissed by many as style over substance. But, like all the significant decisions during those early days of my leadership, it was part of a serious, thought-through political strategy.

We wanted to demonstrate in the clearest possible way that this was a new leader, a changed political party, and – above all – that the environment and climate change were issues we were determined to lead on. They were personally important to me, but they also helped to define my sort of conservatism. Concerned about preserving our heritage, aware of the responsibilities (not just the limits) of the state, able to talk confidently about new issues that might not have arisen in earlier general elections, and respectful of scientific evidence.

Yet in opposition it is hard to get across who you are, and to talk about the things you want to talk about. The government can just waltz onto the 10 o’clock news and talk about its latest plan of action, while you have to work relentlessly to try to set the agenda – but with what? Something you might do, if there is an election, if you win it and if the issue is still relevant in n years’ time.

So we were prepared to take risks. And Svalbard really was a risk. For a start, it nearly resulted in images very different from the photos of me gliding along behind the huskies. I was given a whole load of instructions about how to operate the sled. I ignored all of them, and disaster nearly struck. The cameras were set up for a dynamic, fast-moving shot of me steering the sled. I managed to turn the whole thing over at high speed, and collapsed in a ball of snow, ice and, from everyone around me, hysterical laughter.

These weren’t quite the pictures we wanted – I kept thinking of another opposition leader, Neil Kinnock, falling over on Brighton beach. Mercifully, these career-maiming shots never made it onto viewers’ screens.

Later, as we clambered into a cave, everyone was asked to wear protective helmets. I resisted, remembering William Hague’s baseball cap embarrassment as leader of the opposition. As a politician, you’re haunted by the ghosts of gaffes past.

It wasn’t long before I patented my own.

A leader of the opposition has a car from the Government Car Service to ferry them around, at least partly because they have a number of official responsibilities, and a big case of confidential papers to carry with them. I was allotted Terry Burton, who had driven some of my predecessors.

For years as an MP I had cycled to Parliament, often with George. I didn’t want to stop now that I was party leader, and very occasionally Terry would bring this case, and sometimes my work clothes, including my shoes, in to the office for me. Soon the Daily Mirror was onto me, exposing the eco-mad Tory leader’s ‘flunky following behind in a gas-guzzling motor’. The Guardian dubbed Terry a ‘shoe chauffeur’. I was truly sad that the episode had tarnished our genuine ‘Vote Blue, Go Green’ message, our slogan for the local elections taking place that very week. And I’ve never lived it down.

Presentation is important, but prioritising the environment through my trip to the Arctic really was as much about substance. We had to take a boat to visit the British Arctic Survey team, and I asked one of its members why they’d put their station somewhere that was surrounded by water. ‘Well, the water wasn’t there until last year,’ he said. It was a profound moment. Global warming was real, and it was happening before our very eyes.

So what was the governing philosophy of my leadership of the Conservative Party in opposition?

Two big things had changed.

First, at the time it seemed as if the great ideological battle of the twentieth century – right versus left, capitalism versus communism – was over. We had won. Labour now accepted the need for a market economy to help deliver the good society, and it appeared that full-blooded socialism was dead. The Conservative Party needed to take a new tack. We shouldn’t give up on our belief in enterprise and market economics, but it was time to bring Conservative thinking and solutions to new problems.

The second thing that had changed was the electorate. Over the previous twenty years Britain had become more prosperous, somewhat more urban and much more ethnically diverse. Gay people were coming out, more women were going to work and taking senior jobs, social attitudes and customs were changing. And all of this, it seemed to me, had left the Conservative Party, one of the most adaptable parties in the world, behind.

I saw myself, however new and inexperienced, as inheriting the mantle of great leaders like Peel, Disraeli, Salisbury and Baldwin, who had adapted the party. To achieve that, I wanted Conservative means to achieve progressive ends. Using prices and markets, and encouraging personal and corporate responsibility, could help our environment by cutting pollution and greenhouse gases. Stronger families and more rigorous school standards could help reduce inter-generational poverty. Trusting the professionals in our NHS, rather than smothering them with bureaucracy, could build a stronger health service.

The Conservative Party, in my view, had got into a rut of tired and easy thinking. We had a tendency to trot out the same old answers. Want social mobility? Open more grammar schools. Want lower crime? Put more bobbies on the beat. Want a more competitive economy? Just cut taxes.

We had another, even more profound, problem. People didn’t trust our motives. Whenever we suggested something, people seemed almost automatically to add their own mistrustful explanation of our motives. When we said, ‘Let’s reduce taxes,’ they added, ‘to help the rich’. When we said, ‘Let’s start up new schools,’ they added, ‘for your kids, not ours.’

Part of this was a hangover from the end of the last period of Conservative rule, when Tony Blair and New Labour had caricatured Conservatives as uncaring. But some of it was our own fault. It was part of what I called – or more accurately what Samantha called – the ‘man under the car bonnet’ syndrome. We approached every problem or issue with a mechanical, process-driven response rather than a more emotional, values-driven answer about the ends we were aiming to achieve.

At the same time as the new approach and new policies, I was determined that the Conservative Party should make its peace with the modern world. Our opposition to, or sometimes grudging acceptance of, a whole range of social reforms, from lowering the age of consent for gay men to positive action to close the gender pay gap, made us look and sound like a party that was stuck in the past, and didn’t like the modern country we aspired to govern.

I wanted the Conservative Party to be more liberal on these social issues. I felt passionately that morally it was the right thing to do, and I thought it would help us to get a hearing from some people who had written us off. It seemed to me an embarrassment, really just awful in every possible way, that someone who shared our values might be put off voting Conservative because they thought we disapproved of their sexuality, or looked down on their ethnicity, or didn’t want them to achieve because of their gender.

Part of the problem was our personnel. We were the oldest political party in the world – and we looked it. Just seventeen of the 198 Tory MPs elected in 2005 were women. That was an improvement of four. Since 1931.

Totally unacceptable. We were, after all, the party of the first woman MP to take her seat in the Commons. We gave the country its first female prime minister. Up and down Britain, women were among our finest councillors and our fiercest campaigners. But it just didn’t show on our green benches, which were, by and large, male, middle-aged, southern, wealthy and white.

By day four of the job I had appointed all my shadow ministers. I thought it was important to bring my leadership rivals into the fold, so David Davis and Liam Fox shadowed the home and defence departments. I thought I’d got a good mix, but I ended up with more people called David in the shadow cabinet (five) than women (four). There simply wasn’t the range from which to choose.

Come day seven I was at the Met Hotel in Leeds unveiling a plan to elect more women and ethnic minority MPs (of whom we had, shamefully, just two). It was imperative that we started to look more like the country we hoped to govern.

The candidates’ list was immediately frozen. A new Priority List of 150 candidates, people we thought the cream of the crop, and better reflecting the make-up of modern Britain, was drawn up from the larger main list. All associations in winnable seats would have to choose from this so-called ‘A-List’.

It caused uproar. Uproar so furious and so persistent that a year later I ended up agreeing that associations could pick their candidates from the full list, but half of the interviewees had to be women, thereby superseding the A-List.

But the ambition never wavered. We carried on exerting pressure more informally, promoting the candidates we wanted. I knew this required action at every level. More women applying to be candidates. More women getting interviews in safe seats. More procedures during the selection process that emphasised the full set of skills required to be an MP, not just the big speech in front of the full membership. All this was very much driven from the centre.

One of the greatest things about our election victory in 2015 was the seventeen non-white and sixty-eight women MPs elected to our benches, quadrupling the intake of a decade earlier. Indeed, as I write, there are six women MPs in the cabinet, four of whom were on that original A-List.

It was worth the row.

I was learning a great deal on the job. But as I cleared each hurdle – the hiring and firing of shadow ministers, the weekly bout of PMQs, the response to the Queen’s Speech – there was one that loomed larger than all the others: party funding.

Long before we inherited a country in debt, we inherited a party in debt by £30 million, largely as a result of the 2005 general election campaign. The funding crisis had a wider significance. Before they let you run the country, people want to see that you are able to run your party.

While donations to political parties had to be declared publicly, loans did not. So wealthy individuals preferred to make loans, and both the Labour and the Conservative parties succumbed to the temptation of this route. This led to the so-called cash-for-honours scandal, and Tony Blair being interviewed by police. Those responsible for Conservative fundraising were called in too. The case for the defence was clear: taking loans was within the rules, and there was a proper vetting process for awarding life peerages. Contributors to party funds shouldn’t be excluded, but it should never be the reason for their appointment. The problem was that while the vetting body – the House of Lords Appointments Commission – was told the details of the loans, the public and the media had not known about them.

I resolved that we should stop taking these loans, and should pay off, or convert to genuine declarable donations, those we already had. I also decided that we needed to stop being so reliant on a small number of wealthy individuals. Even if they didn’t exercise undue influence over the party – and as far as I was concerned they didn’t – it would always look as if they could. For a time I even flirted with the idea of increased state funding for political parties, in some form or other. While I instinctively disliked the idea of taking more taxpayers’ money, there seemed to be a recurring problem with our system.

Apart from big individual donors, of course, the whole system of trade union funding of the Labour Party was antiquated and wrong. Whatever people might say about the closeness of business or wealthy individuals to the Conservatives, the unions’ funding of Labour gave them votes at the party conference, votes to choose candidates and the leader, and votes to determine policy. They owned Labour lock, stock and block vote.

Throughout the time I was party leader and prime minister there were talks between the parties to try to find a solution. I was prepared to go along with a cap of £50,000, or possibly less, on donations from individuals, as long as it was accompanied by a cap on union donations and the reform of Labour’s union links. I supported the idea of tax relief on donations, to ensure that parties had to fundraise properly and listen to their members, not just wait for the next dollop of taxpayer cash to arrive. But the talks always broke down. The caps we were prepared to accept were seen by the other parties as too high, and Labour was never truly prepared to break the union link.

In any event, we were proving, step by step, that party funding through donor clubs, big one-off events and the party conference was possible. We established the ‘Leader’s Group’ of large donors, each committed to giving the party £50,000 a year. While this is a huge amount by any normal measure, it was a great improvement on passing the hat around to a very small number of multi-millionaires for a few massive, often multi-million-pound, donations. At its peak, the Leader’s Group grew to over two hundred people, and became the mainstay of our funding.

While the press was determined to paint it as a ‘cash for access’ organisation, I was very proud of what we had built. We had shown that, even without extra state funding, our party could be properly funded. There were enough members for it to be clear that no individual would have undue influence. The dinners we had were informal and fun. And while there was no improper influence, as the financial and economic crisis hit, we had instant access to some of the best financial brains in the country.

With Andrew Feldman as chief executive and then chairman, we bridged the gap between the person who raised the money and the person who decided how it should be spent, ensuring real commercial control; and from 2006 onwards the party never ran a deficit, and even had a surplus after both the 2010 and 2015 election campaigns, something which is unprecedented in modern party history. We sold our historic headquarters in Smith Square, and even the loss-making annual party conference started to make money: by the time I left office it was making close to £2 million a year. The party was debt-free, and there was around £2 million cash in the bank.

Of course, the most important question in terms of preparing for power was what to do about our policies. A new focus on the environment was one important element. Mending our broken society would be another. On my first full day of leadership I launched one of our new policy review teams alongside Iain Duncan Smith, whose Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) think-tank was pioneering a radical approach towards tackling the cycle of social deprivation. IDS’s review, and a speech I delivered on it a few months later, would prove the most controversial of the period. I wanted us to admit that although we had talked about aspiration a good deal, Conservatives had not done enough thinking about those for whom the bottom rungs of the ladder of opportunity just weren’t there, or had been smashed before they’d had a chance to climb them.

The speech I made at the CSJ reasserted the Conservative mantra, which I fully subscribed to, that poverty or deprivation were never an excuse for crime. But, I added, there was a context, a background, that we needed to understand better. So, as I put it, when people crossed the line and committed a crime, the response needed to be rapid and tough. But to help more of them stay inside that line, we needed more understanding, more help – even more love. I homed in on ‘hoodies’, the name for both the hooded sweatshirts teens wore and the teens themselves: ‘When you see a child walking down the road, hoodie up, head down, moody, swaggering, dominating the pavement – think what has brought that child to that moment,’ I said.

We needed to deal with the background issues that led some towards a life of crime, like family breakdown, unemployment, drug addiction, children growing up in care, and educational underachievement. It was a classic compassionate Conservative speech and series of remedies. But the combination of hoodies and love outraged some in the press: ‘Hug a Hoodie’ was the News of the World’s take on the intervention.

I don’t regret the speech. It set the context for a new approach: committed to backing the police and supporting tough penalties in our courts, but tackling the failures of the care system, reforming adoption, targeting family breakdown and chaotic families, and beginning the long process of reforming our prisons. These were to be some of our most important achievements in government, and their genesis was in a speech that many at the time said would herald our defeat.

As part of the same train of thought, even before I became party leader I had been developing the idea of a school-age programme that would help our children – all children, not just a privileged few – gain the skills they would need for adulthood, such as resilience, confidence, teamwork, respect and responsibility.

I came up with the idea after talking to those who had taken part in National Service, the period of compulsory post-war service in the forces which ended in the 1960s. The main thing that came across from those conversations was that everyone had been in it together. It didn’t matter who you were, rich or poor, white or from an ethnic minority, academic or not – you forged a common identity. That’s why I wanted there to be a residential element in this new programme, to take teenagers out of their comfort zones and put them into groups with others of different backgrounds, and also a volunteering element, teaching them the value of putting something back into their community.

National Citizen Service was, I believed, the answer to many questions of our age. The education system was failing to equip children with the skills for adulthood; NCS could help fill in the gaps. Our society was broken; NCS could teach the respect that was so lacking. Integration hadn’t worked – we were still too segregated, too suspicious of each other; NCS would bring people together, and prove that ultimately we had so much in common. Although it was never made compulsory, NCS would end up as a rite of passage for every teenager who wanted to take part. Today, more than 500,000 have done so, and it is the largest and fastest-growing youth volunteering project of its kind in Europe.

As we developed individual policies, a theme was emerging. This was helped along by another moment that would have a profound impact on me, and as a result, on the future direction of the party.

Balsall Heath was a neighbourhood in Birmingham that had been blighted by crime, prostitution and antisocial behaviour. House prices fell. The middle classes moved out. But a group of people who remained had got together and taken matters into their own hands. They tore down the escorts’ fliers, harassed kerb crawlers and reported the drug dealers to the police. They started taking better care of the parks and public spaces, planting shrubs and trees.

I was so taken by this story that I went to stay with one of the residents, Abdullah Rehman, and his family. I ate with them, slept in their spare room, and walked their children to school with them. Interestingly for a British Muslim family, they had chosen the King David Jewish faith school, on the basis that it had a good ethos and understood the importance of faith. ‘We all believe in Abraham,’ Abdullah told me as we dropped the children off, before showing me around the community he had helped to transform.

Here, in this Midlands suburb, society was proving more effective than the state. Bit by bit, the idea of government nurturing a stronger, better, bigger society was forming in my mind.

So in those first few months there was a lot to sort out: the political strategy, the governing philosophy, the personnel, the purse strings and the policies. But those aren’t the only demands on a new opposition leader.

If you have any hope of being an effective prime minister, and of looking like a credible candidate for the job, you need a crash course in diplomacy, and foreign and security policy. My early overseas trips did a lot to shape my world view.

The first was to Paris to see Nicolas Sarkozy, before his run for the French presidency. He was the interior minister at the time, and famous for his fiery personality. My first taste of this was waiting outside his office door with Ed as he shouted at someone. ‘Imbécile! Imbécile!’ was all we could hear.

Sarkozy was captivating – small, wiry and full of energy. He was always accompanied by an equally energetic translator, who spoke at a hundred miles an hour. He told me how he admired the British economic reforms, and wanted to be the Thatcher of France. He clearly believed in the ‘great man’ theory of history – muscular leaders making bold decisions and changing the world – and wanted to be one of them. I later came to feel that Sarko, as he was known, was less radical in reality. But an incredible act of kindness towards me in later years would make me grateful to him for the rest of my life.

I first saw Angela Merkel at an election rally in Stuttgart, when she walked on to the stage to the Rolling Stones song ‘Angie’. In her speech she complained about the interference of the European Commission, which had told barmaids in Bavarian beer cellars what they could and couldn’t wear. I would use this for years afterwards to persuade her that there was a Eurosceptic lurking inside her too.

My decision to leave the EPP rankled with her, but it didn’t affect the close partnership we went on to form. While she profoundly disagreed with the move, she could see that I was a conservative who took a different view to her on the vital issue of European integration.

When we met I could see that she was, as Margaret Thatcher had been, the best-briefed person in the room, able to work out in advance other people’s negotiating needs and strategies. I immediately saw that she was someone I could work well with. She has a sense of humour, and is an anglophile. From behind the Berlin Wall she had admired British science and British democracy. She saw us as natural allies when it came to vital issues such as support for NATO, backing fiscal prudence and a belief in free trade. Above all, I liked her down-to-earth, straightforward manner. There was no flummery or flattery – she liked to get on and talk about the things that mattered. And, again like Thatcher, she used her charm to get her own way. But Merkel is not a Thatcher. Her favourite expression is ‘step by step’. This was to be disastrous for the Eurozone, which needed bold reform but got incrementalism.

It was in America that I met the forty-third president, George W. Bush. He was charming, intelligent and conviction-driven, quite unlike his caricature, and I admired what he was doing in the fight to combat AIDS and malaria. Yet I had tried to set myself apart from his neo-conservatism in a way that maintained Britain’s strong bonds with the United States. On the fifth anniversary of 9/11 I made a speech whose most reported line was that liberty couldn’t be dropped from the air by an unmanned drone. This was a criticism of unbridled neo-con interventionism, not a call for the unbridled American isolationism we are seeing a decade on. I didn’t believe you could have global US and UK leadership if you point-blank refused to intervene anywhere.

While these were all standard stop-offs, I also strayed dramatically from the path usually trodden by party leaders: India.

As I said in a blog I wrote at the time, we couldn’t afford to carry on obsessing about Europe and America while ignoring the fresh new forces that were shaping our world. It was an amazing visit. I travelled around Delhi in a tuk tuk, and walked through the Mumbai slums in the pouring rain to visit a community project, shocked at how starkly poverty and wealth sat side by side. While Tony Blair was fending off an attempted coup at home, I looked as if I was on a prime-ministerial visit. The contrast was helpful.

Sudan was a trickier visit, for here was the humanitarian crisis of our time. In Khartoum we met President Omar al-Bashir, a pariah who was later indicted by the ICC. When I mentioned an attack on a town in Darfur, in western Sudan, he claimed that it had actually taken place in the neighbouring country of Chad. Infuriated, I told him to look at a map. It was my first experience of how some of these leaders brazenly just lie.

The refugee camp itself was unforgettable. The sight of tents and huts stretching for miles, a city in the desert. The families who had lost everything, and had seen loved ones mown down by the Janjaweed militia as Sudanese soldiers looked on. The women, many of whom had been raped, telling me their harrowing stories. The only light relief came when we were sitting around talking through a translator, me bouncing one of the babies on my knee, and the baby decided to wee on me. Everyone laughed. Some things are universal.

In the middle of this hell was a literal oasis – a fifty-foot corrugated-iron tank, providing clean water for thousands of refugees. British aid sustaining and saving people’s lives.

Much of my approach towards development in later years could be traced back to that time, and to the pride I felt in the aid workers from the charity Oxfam – based just down the road from my constituency – who we stayed with during that visit.

While some of these visits broke with tradition, my next, the following year, broke with much of the international community.

In August 2008, Georgia, a sovereign country that had every right to regard its borders as inviolable, had been invaded by Russia on behalf of two Russian-backed but unrecognised statelets, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. It was a clear case of illegal aggression and occupation, and I believed the world’s oldest democracy had a duty to stand with one of the youngest and say so. I went to see President Mikheil Saakashvili, who I had met before and who I admired for his efforts to eradicate corruption, attract investment and get people to pay their taxes, a problem many leaders fail to crack.

He was under huge pressure, but was just about coping. There was tension in the air. Russian tanks were just twenty-five miles from the capital, Tbilisi. No one was quite certain if the ceasefire would hold, or the Russian tanks would start moving again.

‘History has shown that if you leave aggression to go unchecked, greater crises will only emerge in the future,’ I wrote in one article. ‘Today, Russia says it is defending its citizens in South Ossetia. Where tomorrow? In Ukraine? In central Asia? In Latvia?’

They say you shouldn’t make predictions in politics, but sometimes you do without realising it.

While modernisation was still being criticised by some in the press and the party, the public gave its verdict at the ballot box.

In the 2007 local elections we gained nearly a thousand new councillors and thirty-nine new councils. That represented 40 per cent of the vote, with Labour and the Lib Dems on 26 and 24 respectively. We were on track, edging closer to power. But there were rows ahead that threatened to throw us off course.

David Willetts, my shadow education secretary, whose vast intellect led to his nickname ‘Two Brains’, had given a speech on freeing schools from local authority control. In an aside, he talked about the evidence against grammar schools aiding social mobility, and said that a Conservative government wouldn’t open any more of them. Fine – that was our stated policy. I had said from the outset that there would be no going back to the 11-plus on a national basis. I was happy for the 164 existing grammar schools to continue, and to be allowed to expand, as we wanted other good schools to be able to do; but our focus was on improving standards for all 3,000 state schools.

Cue unprecedented uproar when the Today programme covered the speech. Shadow Europe minister Graham Brady was enraged. The Telegraph was incensed. The 1922 Committee was in revolt. Meanwhile, I was in Hull, spending three days at a school as a teaching assistant, and hearing all this down the phone from Ed.

On the subject of grammar schools, I reached for a new medium to set the record straight. I wasn’t just a blogger, I was a vlogger, recording a series of ‘WebCameron’ videos that were uploaded online.

I felt that the call to ‘bring back grammars’ was an anti-modernisation proxy, and I wasn’t going to stand for it. I looked down the lens and said: ‘It is a classic example of fighting a battle of the past rather than meeting the challenges of the future … The way to win the fight for aspiration is to put those things that worked in grammars – aggressive setting to stretch bright pupils, whole-class teaching, strong discipline, to name but three – in all schools.’ In fact my position was more nuanced than I made it sound. I still believed existing grammars should be able to expand, and in the same vein, that new ones could be built in areas where they were already established and population growth required it. I clarified this, but it looked like a climbdown.

And it came at a bad moment. We were just about to have a change of prime minister. Within a few days of the grammar school row it was Tony Blair’s final PMQs.

After he had spoken his final words from the despatch box, the Labour benches stood and applauded. I too stood up, and gestured to my own side to join in. They did.

Cherie Blair came and thanked me afterwards. She is another person who is quite unlike her public caricature. I’ll never forget, when I took Ivan to the premiere of the children’s film Ben 10, Cherie bending down to his wheelchair, looking him in the eye and speaking to him with great kindness and compassion.

I thought it was important to pay tribute to her husband in his last Commons appearance. For good and ill, he had changed British politics forever. And as I applauded, I felt a small inner thrill at the knowledge that a big obstacle on our path to victory had toppled. We were on our way.

But of course, it wasn’t to prove that simple.

10

Cliff Edge, Collapse and Scandal

It’s June 2007, Gordon Brown is prime minister, and it does not stop raining.

There was something apt about the ex-chancellor’s premiership beginning with the wettest weather in decades.

I had – and still have – huge respect for Brown’s intellect and his appetite for hard work. And mutual friends have told me how charming and entertaining he can be in private. But in public he seemed to have only one character setting: dour.

And when it came to Parliament, he had only one political setting: everything was about killing the Tories. While other Labour frontbenchers would build relationships with their opposite numbers, Brown would have absolutely nothing to do with his. The one time he did reach out to his shadow George Osborne, George and I were having dinner in Pizza Express in Notting Hill Gate. Brown wanted to ‘pair’ – i.e. agree that neither of them would vote in an important forthcoming debate. When George very politely explained that he couldn’t do this without consulting our chief whip, Brown simply shouted and swore at him, before slamming down the phone.

So when he succeeded Tony Blair, I was rejoicing. We were ahead in the polls. And I was up against someone who hadn’t been elected, who had some real flaws – and who I thought it was possible to beat.

But initially things didn’t work out that way. As ever, ‘events’ intervened.

On Brown’s second full day in the job, there was an attempted bomb attack in London’s Haymarket, and then, the day after, terrorists drove a jeep laden with gas cylinders into Glasgow Airport. Brown reacted swiftly and effectively – and struck exactly the right tone about the threat we faced and how we should meet it.

The non-stop rain led to non-stop floods, affecting first one part of the country and then another. Brown immediately toured the affected areas, pledging money to flooded-out communities and families.

Then, after plagues of fire and rain, came disease. Foot-and-mouth was discovered on several Surrey farms. Having spent little more than a day on holiday, the new prime minister darted back.

And as his side of the political seesaw rose, mine began to sink.

First, Quentin Davies, a pinstripe-suited Tory MP, defected to Labour with a resignation letter of pure vitriol. His criticism of the modernisation project was very personal.

Then came a by-election in Ealing Southall. Our candidate was a successful and engaging British Sikh called Tony Lit, and although we were never going to win in the London borough, we wanted to put up a good fight. But in doing so we ended up setting expectations in the wrong place. I had also agreed to the idea of the candidate running on the ballot paper under the description ‘David Cameron’s Conservatives’. This looked arrogant and hubristic. I campaigned hard, visiting the seat five times – and we came a dismal third.

I had a chance to seize back the initiative. Social action – our policy of backing volunteering at home and abroad – was a strand of modern, compassionate conservatism we were determined to demonstrate. Project Umubano, led by the MP Andrew Mitchell, was to bring together forty enthusiastic party volunteers in Rwanda that summer, and I was to join them for a night.

The problem was that parts of Witney were still flooded. But I had visited the flood victims, and I was absolutely determined that the Conservative Party would not be a follower on overseas aid, but a leader.

Nevertheless, the visit was dogged by questions about why I was in Africa when my own constituency was under water. That night I looked out from the Christian mission where we were staying, gazing over the lights of Kigali, reflecting on the critical coverage. I knew that it had been a mistake to come. But sometimes there are mistakes in politics you’re glad to have made, and this was one of them.

When Brown overtook us in the polls, rumours began swirling around about an impending vote of no confidence in my leadership. It really was personal.

Brown summed up the mood at PMQs with a rare quip (that’s how bad things were – Gordon Brown was making effective jokes): ‘The wheels are falling off the Tory bicycle, and it is just as well that he has got a car following him when he goes out on his rounds.’

William Hague was emphatic that if Brown was thinking straight, he would call an immediate general election, before the party conference season even began. That way, he would give us no chance to make up the ground we’d lost. I knew that we had just one chance: we had to deliver a Conservative Party conference in October that would metaphorically blow the doors off.

Though our policy-review teams hadn’t even reported back yet, we cobbled together a bumper series of announcements for each day of conference, from cutting stamp duty to introducing new cancer treatments. The Friday before conference, the whole lot – every single policy – was emailed to George’s chief of staff, Matt Hancock.

But Matt’s email address included his middle initial. We had inadvertently sent the full Tory plans to eccentric Lib Dem MP Mike Hancock.

The sender was mortified. The press officers were up in arms. I, however, was sanguine. ‘They’re great policies,’ I said. ‘If they leak, they leak. I’m off home.’ So many things in politics are seen as a calamity. Very few actually are.

However, we would spend the whole conference somewhat on tenterhooks, wondering on which day our precious policies were going to be published before we announced them. To this day I still don’t know why they weren’t.

Labour had a successful conference in Bournemouth, where Brown’s chief bruiser Ed Balls was briefing that there would be an election.

Then came our turn in Blackpool. A cliff-edge moment for our party – and for me.

William opened with a cracker of a speech, chastising Brown for hosting Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street the previous month (a move he must have hated but which made him look both magnanimous and bold).

George then unveiled what I termed his ‘hammock idea’, the conference announcement he’d always dream up while reclining somewhere hot over the summer. This year was the biggest yet: raising the inheritance tax threshold to £1 million. It was deeply Conservative, rewarding people who worked hard, saved and wanted to pass something on.

The finale of the conference, as always, was the leader’s speech. It would be back in the Empress Ballroom in Blackpool’s Winter Gardens where I’d delivered that leadership-winning, no-notes speech two years earlier. I had been pondering whether I could repeat the feat, not as a stunt, but because I was genuinely frustrated by my seeming inability to get across who I was, what I thought and what I wanted to do for Britain.

The lecterns I spoke behind felt like a barrier between me and the audience, distorting what I was saying and what people were hearing. Steve Hilton agreed. Sam told me to go for it. But last time was just ten minutes, I said. This is an hour. I have to cover everything. And it’s my political life on the line now.

But I knew what I wanted to say. It would be me up there, no artifice, no barrier. So in the run-up to the conference I was not just working on my speech with Ameet Gill, but secretly learning its structure, key points and key phrases as we went along.

Come the morning of the speech, I had rehearsed sections but never practised the whole thing in one go. Sam and I snuck out early for a walk on Blackpool beach. I bounded back, full of vim.

As I walked out onto the stage, I knew it was do or die. ‘It might be messy, but it will be me,’ I told the packed hall. As well as being ‘me’, it was terrifying, exhilarating – and knackering. After an hour, I reached the peroration. ‘So, Mr Brown, what’s it going to be? Why don’t you go ahead and call that election? … Let people decide who can make the changes that we really need in our country. Call that election. We will fight. Britain will win.’

I wish I could say I owed it to Cicero. In fact, it was inspired by the moment that David Niven loses his temper with Gregory Peck at the end of one of my favourite films, The Guns of Navarone. All that classical education gone to waste.

Before the conference began we had commissioned a ‘tracker’ or daily poll to see if anything we were doing was shifting the dial in terms of what the public thought. And we decided to continue the poll as the conference came to an end. It was money well spent. Our poll ratings ticked up daily through the conference – and then shot up at the end. I watched the news that evening and thought that I could see – for once – that I had really made that vital connection: from the hall, through the television, to the viewer at home.

But the country’s cameras were now trained once again on Gordon Brown: will he or won’t he?

The next day we were straight back into election planning meetings, as the tracker revealed we were neck and neck with Labour.

Then on Friday, as I drove to Dean, Andy phoned to tell me about a significant opinion poll which would be in that Sunday’s News of the World. It had been carried out only in marginal seats, and it showed, pretty comprehensively, that Labour would not win an election. Far from extending their majority, they would be losing seats to us. It was the final – and in my view, the key – factor that caused Gordon Brown to decide not to hold an election.

Brown argued that his decision had nothing to do with the polls. This enabled us to get the narrative going that as well as being indecisive and temperamental, he was taking people for fools. Andy came up with the refrain ‘Brown’s bottled it’, and we even had bottles of Brown ale made.

A word on being indecisive. The previous year, February 2006 had brought Elwen into our lives. Like Nancy, he was born under C-section at St Mary’s, Paddington.

Normally, parents can discuss baby names at their leisure. But we didn’t have that luxury. Gabby burst in soon after the birth telling us we had to come up with a name now, otherwise I’d look indecisive. I liked Arthur. Boring, said Sam. She sent me out to buy a book of names, and decided on Elwen – not the Welsh Elwyn, but the J.R.R. Tolkien version, meaning ‘friend of the elves’. So Elwen he became (but Arthur Elwen on his birth certificate).

Everyone who was there during the summer and autumn of 2007 remarked on how calm I was. Calm on the eve of the make-or-break conference. Calm when I was told about the accidental email leak. Ed found it infuriating that, just as I didn’t overreact to bad news, I was often disappointingly unimpressed when he brought me good news – treating triumph and disaster just the same.

People may interpret that as being indifferent, or ‘chillaxed’. It’s not. It’s because I know that bollocking people, blowing your top, throwing tantrums, doesn’t get you anywhere. It didn’t help Gordon Brown.

But Brown had helped us. By flirting with an election, then pulling out, then denying his reasons for doing so, he exposed his weaknesses. At the same time, he had brought out our strengths – our ability to refuel, to recalibrate, to come together as a team when we were under assault, to stick to the course even when events were trying to divert us. And the fact that our modernisation was working.

Brown continued to demonstrate his tin ear when he stuck with his plans to abolish the 10p rate of income tax for some of the lowest earners in Britain, in order to reduce the overall rate from 22p to 20p. Labour MPs were in full cry on behalf of all those who were going to lose out. There didn’t seem to be any way of compensating them without either reversing the policy in its entirety or spending a vast sum of money. It was to have a big impact on the electoral battles ahead.

Conventional wisdom holds – and my experience so far had proved – that there are two days that matter more to an opposition than all the others: local election day and party conference speech day. These are the moments – sometimes the only moments – when the searchlight beam catches you, and people focus briefly on politics and consider whether your party is up or down, and whether you look like a prime minister or a duffer.

I became increasingly obsessed with this theory, and knew that the London mayoral election in May 2008 was another such moment. We would only win in London if we could find a candidate who could reach out beyond our Conservative-voting base.

Boris Johnson likes to say he was my last choice, but it’s not true. George and I were keen to persuade him, and we worked hard to do so. One of the promises we made was that we would do everything to help him run the best-financed and organised campaign that money could buy. We made good on this promise by delivering to him the best campaigner on the planet: Lynton Crosby.

On election night, when it became clear the Conservatives were going to have their first London mayor, Boris arrived at the party at Millbank. As we walked in together, we joined hands and raised them in the air. A great pic. But Boris didn’t let go. So, rather strangely, we walked into Millbank Tower hand in hand. ‘I told you: hold, lift, drop,’ Andy chastised us. ‘Where was the drop?’ Of course, the drop came much later.

A fortnight afterwards we faced a by-election in Crewe and Nantwich, following the death of Labour stalwart Gwyneth Dunwoody. I threw myself into the campaign, visiting the constituency several times. Standing on a bench in the high street, giving an impromptu speech, I looked around at all the support – sometimes you don’t need tracker polls, you can just sense it – and I thought: we’re going to win this.

We did – the first by-election win from Labour since 1982. Ed Timpson became the first Tory in Crewe since the 1930s. The tide was turning.

But despite being on a roll, news of another by-election was much less welcome.

The shadow home secretary David Davis had decided, bizarrely, to force a contest in his Yorkshire constituency in protest at Labour’s increase of the maximum period of detention without trial from twenty-eight days to forty-two. This was a policy our party was vigorously opposing in Parliament, so the only conclusion I could reach was that the whole thing was a vain – and potentially damaging – ego trip.

William – yet more William wisdom – made me promise that I would not guarantee David his job back once the by-election was over. ‘It’s a team game, and he’s decided to leave the team,’ was his blunt assessment.

I called David and explained that if he insisted on the by-election, we would support him in the campaign. But I needed a full-time shadow home secretary, and could not guarantee him a return to the role. The truth was that I was delighted to have this unexpected opportunity to dispense with him, without anyone being able to say I was to blame.

I played it safe with his replacement as shadow home secretary, appointing Dominic Grieve, the shadow attorney general and a top Commons performer. While his views on combatting terror were similar to David’s, they were a little more nuanced, and I felt he would give more priority to concerns about national security.

In the end, the division between civil liberty Conservatives like him and national security Conservatives like me was to prove fatal, as we were later to clash over the European Court of Human Rights. These tensions paved the way for Theresa May. One of the reasons I thought she’d make a great home secretary was that we agreed on these issues and many more.

All my woes during the beginning of Gordon Brown’s premiership were about to pale, however, as two meteorites hit British politics in quick succession: the financial crash and the MPs’ expenses scandal. Both would shake people’s faith in the establishment, shape politics – and in the case of the crash have a huge impact on people’s lives for many years to come.

Brown was right to say that the economic crisis ‘started in America’, because it was there that subprime mortgage lenders had been providing credit to people who hadn’t a hope of paying the money back. Other financial institutions sliced and diced these loans into toxic bonds that were bought worldwide as investors searched for high yields.

And, of course, it was in 2008 that American investment bank Lehman Brothers fell, dragging the world’s financial markets down with it. But it was a crisis to which Britain was particularly exposed. Our lending and banking practices had been infected with similar over-exuberance. One of our largest mortgage lenders, Northern Rock, was among the first victims of the credit crunch, and faced collapse in 2007. Our banks were some of the most over-leveraged (indeed, the later bailout of the Royal Bank of Scotland remains the biggest rescue of a bank ever). And – absolutely crucially – our economy was built on a mountain of debt. Not just private sector debt, but rising government debt from an administration that hadn’t adequately used the good years to run surpluses and pay down debt.

So yes, the fire began in America. But Britain had been piling up kindling for many years.

Being the opposition party at this moment left us with a difficult balancing act. Hold the government to account, but don’t damage the national interest. Support the government in its necessary action, but make sure you don’t become an irrelevant echo. Think through the policies needed for the future in a way that convinces people, while avoiding populist kneejerks. An additional complication was that we were the party that had championed the deregulation that some were arguing had allowed the bad banking practices to take place. We were up against a prime minister who had been chancellor for a decade, and who believed he understood the complexities of the international financial system better than anyone.

And then there was the most difficult thing. We had agreed – and announced back in September 2007 – to match Labour’s public spending plans.

Governments determine the base line of arguments about tax and spending. If you depart from it, you end up vulnerable (as we had been in 2001 and 2005) to being described as vicious cutters or, as in Labour’s case, big taxers.

Labour had solved that problem in 1997 by offering voters a period of stability in which they would match our plans. After that, all bets were off. We had been critical in the 2005 election of Labour’s borrowing and spending, and remained critical, but we had lost the argument. We had had to make a decision when a possible 2007 election loomed, and had decided to use Labour’s 1997 technique. We would match their plans for a couple of years, allowing us the freedom to impose better control after that.

In the light of the 2008 crash, this was clearly a policy mistake, if not a political one, and we needed to change our approach. So we tried to do three things in framing our response.

First, we would be constructive. As Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, moments of national crisis demand that you put the emphasis on the word ‘loyal’. Over in America we were seeing the damage that could be caused by political wrangling, with the rejection by Congress on 29 September 2008 of the Troubled Asset Relief Program. It sent the markets into free fall.

I was in Birmingham at our party conference, and decided to make an emergency statement on the penultimate day. In that, and in my main speech on the final day, I struck a constructive tone. Not only should we be working with the government, but with the financial services industry. I knew instinctively that this was what was needed to meet our short-term priority: preventing a rapid banking collapse and thereby protecting people’s jobs, homes and businesses. And I knew it was necessary to meet our long-term aim: fixing the free enterprise system so that never again could it inflict this damage.

That’s why we supported Brown’s plans for the recapitalisation of the banks, for example when the government bought 58 per cent of RBS in November 2008. There was a strong argument for stripping the most damaged assets out of the banks and creating a ‘Bad Bank’, as other countries had done in previous crises, but ultimately we backed the injection of public funds to prevent their collapse.

Second, we took our time. We formed a council of advisers, comprising former banking chiefs, top civil servants, Conservative chancellors and others, to guide our approach. Sir Brian Pitman, former head of Lloyds Bank, who I had got to know when I was at Carlton, was a regular visitor. Terry Burns, former Treasury permanent secretary, was key, as was Ken Clarke, who we soon brought back into the fold as shadow business secretary.

They were unanimous that, while it felt as if we were facing a totally new and potentially terrifying set of economic circumstances, there were lessons to learn from history. The Wall Street Crash hadn’t caused the Great Depression, it was the banking crisis that came after it, and the policy response to that crisis, which let bank after bank close, taking with them savings, credit and any chance of recovery.

Those who argued that all we needed was tighter financial controls and more government spending were wrong: this was a monetary crisis, and the most important part of the solution was monetary action: flooding the system with liquidity, preventing the collapse of systemic financial institutions, establishing new sources of finance – government ones, if necessary – to lend money to small businesses now starved of cash.

Confident of this analysis, the third thing we had to do was to be bold. In November 2008, we announced that we would move away from Labour’s spending plans. Championing prudence was particularly brave at a time when the whole world was fixated on a Keynesian ‘spend, spend, spend’ solution to the crash. But we genuinely believed that the government’s fiscal position was so precarious that it could not afford to go beyond the ‘automatic stabilisers’ of higher benefit bills and lower tax receipts that in any event push up the budget deficit when the economy stops growing.

Discretionary increases in government spending and tax cuts were all right for those countries that could afford them; those that couldn’t were playing with fire. So, in another bold step – particularly for a party that prided itself on supporting low taxes – when Labour announced a temporary cut in VAT, we voted against it.

The real boldness, however, was in directly advocating a policy of austerity in terms of cutting government spending for the future. After all, what party goes into a general election talking about cuts? And we were using that crucial word: cuts.

This caused more trouble for Gordon Brown, who, after having mistakenly declared himself to have ended the b-words – boom and bust – simply refused for weeks and weeks to use the c-word.

Some critics say that we were as naïve as Brown – and that we never saw the bust coming. But it was before the crunch and crash that I’d given a speech at KPMG warning about Labour’s unsustainable deficit and debt. We knew their overspending would come to bear on us all. We knew the economy was built on sand. We just didn’t know the meteorite would hit when it did.

Other critics say that we were desperate to cut public spending in order to dismantle public services. Well, since we’d promised in 2007 to match Labour’s spending plans, clearly that wasn’t the case. The reality was, in the phrase George coined and then made famous through endless repetition, they hadn’t fixed the roof when the sun was shining.

The reason for cutting was therefore the total opposite. It was to save public services. The greater the debt, the more money we would be spending on repayments. The weaker the economy, the less to spend on public services. We saw this clear as day, and I suspected that working people would see it too. They knew the UK hadn’t been living within its means, and that that needed to change.

We were making some tangible policies in order to prevent such a situation occurring ever again. That included another bold step, which was to give away a power that chancellors had long held.

I had some experience of the stringency with which annual accounts and results were published when I worked at Carlton. Lawyers and auditors would pore over every word to check for accuracy. But that was business. In politics, it seemed to be totally different. It was up to the Treasury to predict future growth on which its spending plans would be based. That gave it the opportunity to manipulate the growth forecasts and fiddle tax receipts, which Labour took full advantage of.

Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling’s forecasts became works of fiction. At every Budget and Pre-Budget Report they would become increasingly optimistic. When better estimates or true figures emerged, there were wild disparities. George and I proposed that an independent Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) should make those predictions instead. Of course it wasn’t easy for anyone to guess how much the economy would grow (or, at this point, contract). But by removing the potential for bias, we could prevent figures being massaged to justify spending increases our country couldn’t afford.

That Christmas of 2008, shops like Woolworths and MFI were disappearing from our high streets. The New Year, 2009, brought confirmation of Britain’s first recession since 1991. What concerned people wasn’t just how the deficit would affect them today. It was how this ‘spend today, pay tomorrow’ culture was saddling the next generation with debt. How wrong it was – morally – to make our children pay for our excesses. This was perfectly captured in our poster that January – a picture of a baby with the line: ‘Dad’s nose. Mum’s eyes. Gordon Brown’s debt.’

Brown’s favourite insult to hurl at me was ‘This is no time for a novice.’ I worried deeply that, at this time of great financial turbulence, it would become especially potent. After all, George and I had never held ministerial office. And we did make mistakes.

But we had carefully thought out our strategy. We stuck to our instincts – instincts we believed the public would share – that a crisis caused by recklessness and secrecy should be met with prudence and honesty. And we ended the period with more people trusting us than the government on the crucial issue of managing the economy – the first time we had had a consistent lead over Labour since the 1990s.

But the second meteorite was about to hit.

Great political controversies tend to drive us all to think in simple headlines. This one seemed like a straightforward story: brave campaigner sets out on a mission to unearth grave wrongdoing; Parliament resists releasing information it ought to; the information comes out anyway, and it reveals appalling practices, illegality and corruption.

All those things are true of the expenses scandal, but the full truth is more complex. And I didn’t just have a front-row seat, I was on the judge’s bench – and in the dock myself. And what I saw from that unique position was, yes, wrongdoing that needed unearthing, but also unfairness, heartbreak and lots and lots of grey areas.

The context was this. MPs were entitled to claim an ‘Additional Cost Allowance’ (ACA) of up to £24,000 per year for running a second home, because they have to be based in Westminster for part of the week and in their constituency for the rest of it. There was also £22,000 of ‘Incidental Expenses Provision’ for office expenses, over and above the salaries for staff. Rules about employing relatives as members of staff were virtually non-existent.

The ACA in particular was treated by many as if it should be claimed automatically. Over many years the salaries of MPs had been held back – usually for political reasons – and their allowances increased instead. Often, MPs would just send a load of receipts in to the Commons Fees Office and let them decide what household expenditures or repairs should qualify.

Our party had a taste of what was coming when it was revealed that there was little evidence of what MP Derek Conway’s researcher, his son, had done to earn the thousands of pounds he’d received at the taxpayer’s expense.

Labour experienced its own preview of the scandal when some receipts for which home secretary Jacqui Smith had been reimbursed were published. They included two pay-per-view pornographic films, which her husband soon owned up to.

I knew I had to act fast. I made sure all our MPs filled out a ‘Right to Know’ form that provided the basic details of their expenses claim and whether they employed any relatives. These would be made public.

Labour’s reaction was to continue to attempt to keep the problem under wraps. Leader of the House of Commons Harriet Harman wanted the House to vote to ensure that MPs’ expenses were exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. But it was too late. The Daily Telegraph bought a stolen disc with every MP’s expenses claims set out in full, receipts and all. Day after day it published the details. Determined to remain ahead of the game, I called a press conference at the St Stephen’s Club. My response included an apology and a roadmap – and I didn’t conceal my anger about what had been going on: ‘Politicians have done things that are unethical and wrong. I don’t care if they were within the rules – they were wrong.’

I set up an internal scrutiny panel, a so-called Star Chamber, including my aide Oliver Dowden, known as ‘Olive’, who I also called ‘the undertaker’, since he so frequently brought me the bad news. The panel, assisted by a team that was combing through all the information, would examine the expenses claims of every Tory MP, and would decide who had to pay money back. Anyone who refused to comply would lose the whip. This was faster and firmer than the Parliament-wide independent inquiry that Brown would set up, and showed that we had understood the severity of the situation and had gripped it early.

The whole thing became a daily ordeal. The Telegraph would call up in the morning, give us details about whose expenses they were going to expose the next day, and allow us until 5 p.m. to respond. Ultimately the call – both the judgement call and the phone call to the MP – had to be made by me.

The calls included some of the strangest conversations. ‘Your entire family were working for you?’ ‘Why do you need a ride-on lawnmower?’ ‘What does your swimming pool have to do with your parliamentary duties?’

As before and since, I always tried to give people a chance to explain their situation, rather than being driven by arbitrary deadlines. But it was hard. Some colleagues didn’t help themselves by taking to the airwaves. Anthony Steen became one of the most famous examples. Having claimed over £80,000 for the upkeep of his country house, including rabbit fencing and tree surgery, he insisted to BBC radio that he had behaved impeccably: ‘I’ve done nothing criminal, that’s the most awful thing, and do you know what it’s about? Jealousy. I’ve got a very, very large house. Some people say it looks like Balmoral …’

He had to go.

I had to deal with Peter Viggers, who had claimed, among £30,000 of gardening expenses, for a £1,600 ‘floating duck island’. With Michael Ancram, whose swimming-pool boiler was serviced at taxpayers’ expense. With Douglas Carswell, who put a ‘love seat’ on expenses. With John Gummer, whose moles were removed from his lawn using public funds. It just seemed to go on and on, and to get weirder and weirder.

Then there was Douglas Hogg, who was, according to reports, reimbursed by the taxpayer for having his moat – yes, moat – cleaned. To be fair to him, he had never actually claimed for this directly. He had given all his receipts to the Fees Office and, satisfied that they added up to far more than the ACA, they had just given him the full amount. I could see his point. He was doing what he had been told to do. It was all within the rules. But, as Andy put it, the point was that he had a bloody moat.

There were some heart-rending examples at the other end of the spectrum. One MP who was asked to pay back thousands of pounds was desperate not to do so, both because it would look as if he was admitting guilt when there was no impropriety, and because as a young MP with a large family he genuinely couldn’t afford to.

The sheer, granular detail being unearthed made the scandal run and run. Receipt by receipt, the Telegraph gave an insight into MPs’ lives – and revealed a class that seemed completely out of touch with normal people. Never mind that most MPs had claimed only for rent or mortgage interest payments or the odd piece of IKEA furniture, and had been urged by the authorities to claim even more. The colourful examples stood out, showing a world of ride-on mowers, moats and mole-free lawns.

Of course, I had a colourful example of my own – violet-coloured, to be specific.

I had only ever claimed for the mortgage interest on my constituency home. It was a simple approach, specifically permitted by the rules, and seemed to me to be clearly within the spirit of what was intended. But one year I had an extra bill, which I handed to the Fees Office. Ordinarily this would have been logged as ‘maintenance’, and would have attracted absolutely no attention. Except, like a good West Oxfordshire tradesman, my builder had detailed the work he had done: ‘Cleared Vine and Wisteria off of the chimney to free fan.’ As with so many other claims, it was the detail that did for me. People still ask me how my wisteria is doing today.

Every party was embroiled. Which meant we could only fix the broken system if we worked together.

In fact, before the scandal broke I went to see Gordon Brown in his Commons office with Nick Clegg to see what the three main party leaders could do. He gave us a take-it-or-leave-it proposal: a per-day allowance for MPs – not all bad, but far from right.

Had we been with Tony Blair, the three of us could have thrashed out something workable. With Brown, it was pointless. He was sullen and stubborn, and couldn’t hide his contempt. Clegg and I both concluded that it was impossible – he was impossible.

What were the long-term implications of the expenses scandal?

We lost a lot of good MPs, as people who weren’t even guilty of any wrongdoing, such as Paul Goodman, left Parliament.

The British Parliament is one of the least corrupt in the world, but it would be forever tainted. I believe deeply that people go into it to make a difference and to serve, not to see what they can get out of it. Yet ever since 2009, my postbag has been full of letters about how venal our MPs are.

It left many Tory MPs feeling aggrieved with me. They felt that the system I had set up to clean house made them look as though they had done something wrong, when they felt they hadn’t. At one point Andy walked into my office and said there was a serious chance of rebellion. I said I didn’t care. ‘This is the right thing to do – if it’s going to take me down, then so be it.’

So while it stored up bad feeling between me and some in the party, I don’t regret the position I took. Politics ended up with a model that was more transparent and that cost far less, and our party drove that.

In the normal course of things the searchlight might land on politicians once or twice a year, but its harshest glare is saved for momentous events like the financial crash and the expenses scandal. Under that intense scrutiny, I thought we had demonstrated that we were the party with the answers not just to a broken society, but to a broken economy and broken politics too.

But we were also suffering from our own broken – a broken promise.

In 2004, Tony Blair had pledged to hold a referendum on a proposed European Constitution, but it was rejected at plebiscites in France and the Netherlands.

The European powers went back to the drawing board and came back with the Lisbon Treaty, which retained many of the elements of the constitution – creating an EU Council president, foreign minister and diplomatic service, eliminating national vetoes in many areas, and paving the way for more vetoes to be eliminated.

We argued straight away that if the government had said it was going to have a vote on the constitution, it must have one on this treaty – especially since it was more significant and far-reaching than its immediate predecessors, Nice and Amsterdam. I was clear about the lessons from Maastricht: it was right to give people their say on such important changes.

I thought – I still think – that Labour’s failure to hold the referendum it had promised in 2004 was outrageous. It had managed to avoid all questioning on the European constitution during the 2005 election campaign by saying it would be subject to a separate vote. And then it didn’t hold one. So in the Sun in 2007, as the treaty was still being negotiated, I gave a ‘cast-iron guarantee’ that a Conservative government would hold a referendum on any EU treaty that emerged from the negotiations.

In 2007 it seemed entirely likely that we would be able to fulfil this if we entered government, since we all thought that the Parliament wouldn’t run its full course to 2010. But as Brown delayed, member states had the time to ratify and implement the treaty – including the UK, which did so in July 2008.

By 2009, our last hope was the Czech Republic. I wrote to the president, Václav Klaus, pleading with him to wait until after a UK general election before he ratified the treaty. But he replied that he could not hold out that long – another eight months – without creating a constitutional crisis. The Czech Constitutional Court ruled against the one remaining challenge to the treaty, and Klaus signed it that November. On 1 December the treaty was passed into law. Our promise to hold a referendum on it was redundant.

I gave a speech declaring that a Conservative government would never again transfer power to the EU without the say of the British people, and that any future treaty would be put to a vote. (True to our word, we made this ‘referendum lock’ law in 2011.) In that speech I talked about ‘the steady and unaccountable intrusion of the European Union into almost every aspect of our lives’. I said: ‘We would not rule out a referendum on a wider package of guarantees to protect our democratic decision-making, while remaining, of course, a member of the EU.’

I could feel the pressure on Europe quietly building. The anger at the powers ceded at Maastricht and since was reawakened by the denial of a referendum on Lisbon. The anger was not just coming from the usual suspects and the Eurosceptic press, but from constituents and moderate MPs. I felt it too. I was thinking intensively about the issue, and about how to make this organisation work better for us. And I was clearly stating that a referendum of some sort might be on the cards at some point in the future.

11

Going to the Polls

There haven’t been many general elections in this country at which voters have shifted en masse from one party to another. The Liberal landslide of 1906, Clement Attlee’s triumph in 1945, Margaret Thatcher’s victory in 1979, the rush to New Labour in 1997 – these are remembered as some of Britain’s great swing elections, whose winning governments went on to change the course of our history.

As 2010 approached, I knew I needed to perform a similar feat. It wouldn’t be enough just to take a few extra constituencies. We would have to win 120 more seats, and retain all our existing ones, if we were to have any hope of a majority. No Conservative had achieved anything like it since Churchill in 1950, and even he fell short of an outright majority and needed another election to return to Downing Street. We had a mountain to climb.

I may have had Everest in front of me, but I had the best sherpas by my side.

Thanks to Andrew Feldman we were going into the election in the strongest financial position in our history.

Stephen Gilbert, the thoughtful and reserved Welshman and campaigning powerhouse, already had our target seats identified, our candidates selected, and the volunteers geared up, ready to fight the ground war.

Andy Coulson had transformed my relationship with the media and translated the theory of modern, compassionate conservatism into something tangible and exciting.

Ed and Kate remained by my side. Gabby was joined by Caroline Preston and Alan ‘Senders’ Sendorek handling the media. Oliver Letwin was still coordinating policy, and Steve still adding his brains and buzz.

Meanwhile, Liz Sugg was poised to turn our plans into practice. At the drop of a hat she could pull together visits, rallies, interviews, drop-ins, walkabouts, anything. Haranguers were kept at bay, staff were all in position, the speech was on the lectern, and there was no danger of me being snapped in front of words like ‘exit’, ‘closing down’ or ‘country’ (there’s always the danger of blocking out the ‘o’ with your head …).

But what was the message we should take to the country? We didn’t have just one answer – we had several. One focused on fixing our broken economy. Another on mending our broken society. A third was to re-emphasise how much the Conservative Party had changed. And on which of those answers should be given priority, the team was split.

George, de facto campaign chief, and I had been making a series of speeches on the dangers of debt and the need for a new economic policy. The theme was clear: the principal task of our government would be an economic rescue mission.

Combining this with our strong attack on Labour was a single, clear message: only by removing a failing Labour government could we restore Britain’s economic fortunes. This was what Andy, running the all-important communications operation, wanted front and centre.

But it was all a bit black-skies. I had been working since 2005 with the famously blue-skies Steve on a sunnier, more optimistic focus – on how we could deliver stronger public services and a fairer, more equal society. We called the organising idea ‘the Big Society’.

I loved it. Conservatism for me is as much about delivering a good society as a strong economy. And building that good society is the responsibility of everyone – government, businesses, communities and individuals – rather than the state alone.

This philosophy – Social Responsibility rather than Labour’s approach of State Control – was summed up by Samantha when we were mulling over these concepts one evening in the garden in Dean. ‘What you’re saying is there is such a thing as society,’ she said, referencing Thatcher’s famous (but often misinterpreted) quote. ‘It’s just not the same thing as the state.’ That summed up the theory perfectly. And in practice it fell into three broad categories.

First: reforming public services. We were absolutely not, whatever our critics alleged, going to dismantle taxpayer-funded public services. But to improve those services we wanted to empower the people who delivered them – trusting teachers to run schools, doctors to run GP surgeries, new elected police and crime commissioners to run police forces, and so on. Bureaucracy and centralised control would be out, local, professional delivery would be in.

This would only deliver better results if at the same time we empowered the people who used those public services, and gave patients, passengers and parents real and meaningful choices, including the ability to take their custom elsewhere. Otherwise we would simply be swapping one monopoly for another.

Just as the Thatcher governments transformed failing state industries into successful private-sector industries, we wanted to bring the same reforming vigour to enable not just the private sector but also charities, social enterprises, individuals, and even cooperatives, or mutuals, to deliver public services. That went right down to local people being able to take over community assets like post offices and pubs.

The second element was about finding new ways to increase opportunity, tackle inequality and reduce poverty.

Since the 1960s, and particularly after 1997, the size of the state had ballooned, spending had surged, more and more power had been centralised, yet the gap between the richest and the poorest had actually increased.

In a number of important ways, the Big State was sapping social responsibility, and as a result exacerbating the very problems it set out to solve. The development of the welfare system was the classic example. Some of the interventions to tackle poverty had had the opposite effect. There were perverse incentives that deterred people from finding work or from bringing children up with two parents.

It took away people’s agency. Drug-addiction programmes, for instance, focused on replacing one addictive substance – heroin – with another – methadone – rather than encouraging addicts to go clean.

We wanted to unleash the power of what we called ‘social entrepreneurs’, usually charities and social enterprises, to tackle some of our deepest problems, from drug addiction to worklessness, from poor housing to run-down communities.

I was inspired by people like Debbie Stedman-Scott. Debbie had come from a tough background, and went to work for the Salvation Army across Britain before setting up an amazing employment charity, Tomorrow’s People, which helped people in the most deprived communities to find and keep a job. I visited it several times.

I was also inspired by Nat Wei, who helped create the Future Leaders programme, which sought the best teachers to lead inner-city schools.

And there was also Helen Newlove, who had campaigned tirelessly for the victims of crime since the murder of her husband Garry in 2007. They were amazing people. The Big Society was about empowering them.

The third element was about a step change in voluntary activity and philanthropy.

We proposed that the state should act as a catalyst, boosting philanthropy and volunteering and, for example, encouraging successful social enterprises to replicate their work across the country. That is where programmes like National Citizen Service (NCS) and training a network of community organisers came in.

In the past, we claimed over and over that Labour was the big-state party and we were the free-enterprise party. But we didn’t have enough to say about how free enterprise, or indeed any of our other values – responsibility, aspiration and opportunity – could deliver the non-economic things people needed. About how we could provide better schools. Or help people off drugs. Or transform their neighbourhoods. About how Conservative means could achieve progressive ends. The radical reforms that came under this Big Society umbrella had the potential to change all that.

Like all radical proposals, it came in for criticism.

Andy feared that the combined austerity/Big Society message sounded as if we were saying to people both ‘Let us cut your public services’ and ‘Get off your arses to deliver those services yourself’ – a miser’s mixture of ‘Ask what you can do for your country’ and ‘On yer bike.’

Other critics said I was drawing too much on my rural, upper-middle-class upbringing by advocating the Big Society. Well-off people have the time, money and inclination to dedicate themselves to local causes. Those on minimum wage who are juggling two jobs and several children do not. Yet, as I had seen, some of the most deprived neighbourhoods had remarkable social entrepreneurs and community spirit, from volunteers cleaning parks in Balsall Heath in Birmingham to mothers combatting gang culture in Moss Side in Manchester.

I thought the Big Society became more, not less, necessary in a debt-ridden world. Every government in the developed world was having to learn to do more for less – and fast. We could lead the way, and by reducing the long-term cost of social failure, we could drive down the deficit in the process.

Our failure to choose between this theme and the others could be seen in our advertising, specifically our posters. ‘We can’t go on like this,’ the billboards across a thousand different marginal seats said, next to a giant headshot of me, wearing an open collar and a serious expression. ‘I’ll cut the deficit, not the NHS.’ The message didn’t land well, because it was a sort of two-in-one. Even worse, my photo had been altered so much that I ended up looking like a waxwork.

It provided an ideal canvas for idle hands. On one Herefordshire hoarding I was spray-painted with an Elvis-style quiff, and ‘We can’t go on like this’ was followed by ‘with suspicious minds’. A website was set up for people to produce their own spoof versions. Thank God my children weren’t very old at the time. They love teasing me, and they’d have made one for every day of the week.

Yet for all the derision, it was, unlike most election posters, true. In government, we did cut the deficit. We didn’t cut the NHS.

The disagreements between the team – particularly between Steve and Andy – were never fully solved. By this point the fire-and-ice pair were deliberately assigned a shared office in the middle of the open-plan Conservative HQ, dubbed ‘the love pod’.

Sadly, uncertainty and some unforced errors were to continue, and then came a jolt from the polls on 28 February 2010. The Sunday Times front page read: ‘Brown on Course to Win the Election.’

As an opposition leader, you embark upon the final few weeks before a general election – the so-called short campaign – with exhilaration and dread.

The dread comes from the constant possibility of screwing up. The whole process of a campaign is very presidential, and the result very personal. The exhilaration comes from the fact that you’re able to break out of the media cycle and parliamentary timetable and get on an equal footing with the government.

For five years the media cycle had been a source of great frustration. In opposition, we worked hard to research and develop strong policy. If it was about schools, for instance, we would meet and talk with heads, teachers, governors, parents, academics and think-tanks. We would research what had been tried overseas, prepare policy papers, lay out the costs and the sources of funding – and then perhaps arrange a visit to something equivalent that already existed in order to accompany the announcement. It’s really strong, exciting stuff – and you set out the steps for how it’s going to change the country.

Then you switch on the news that evening and find you’ve been given twenty seconds to explain it. What follows is analysis – often reporters interviewing other reporters – not about the policy itself, but about what political advantage you are seeking by coming up with this new idea and whether or not it’s an election winner. And, of course, all this is combined with the latest plot twist of who is up or down in the great parliamentary soap opera.

On 6 April, Gordon Brown fired the starting gun for a 6 May election. I was sitting in my glass-walled office in CCHQ after our first 7 a.m. daily election meeting. Officers from the Met were on their way to give me police protection throughout the campaign. If we won, they’d probably be with me for the rest of my life. (They are the most wonderfully kind and dedicated people. And they do try to give you as much personal space as possible. A week after the election, Sam and I were out for dinner and she leaned over to me and whispered, ‘Those people on that table there – I’ve seen them before.’ ‘Yes, darling,’ I said. ‘They’re from the protection team.’)

Off we went to Birmingham, then Leeds, then seventy-three other constituencies in just four weeks. For years I’d done my Cameron Direct events, letting the public fire questions at me on any subject. It was exactly where I wanted to be, on a little stage we were carting around the country, not much more sophisticated than the soapbox John Major had taken around eighteen years earlier.

What Major didn’t have, though, was a man dressed as a chicken following him everywhere. Tony Blair did – one of CCHQ’s apparently. But what goes around comes around, and now I had a chicken of my own, this time from the Daily Mirror.

To begin with it was funny having this birdman on my tail. But the novelty wore off, and I finally decided to confront the stooge, unmasking him by lifting the head off his costume. It turned out that he was called Tristan, and he was left completely speechless when I asked what it was he was so keen to ask me. The next day, in Saltash in Cornwall, I was hit by an egg, enabling me to finally answer the question of which came first.

By this point I felt we were really getting somewhere with our economic message. Leaders from great British brands like Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury’s and Corus steel were coming out to condemn Labour’s proposed National Insurance rise, branded a ‘jobs tax’.

It’s important to emphasise what a shift this was. Since Black Wednesday, New Labour had courted Britain’s businesses effectively. Now we could claim to be the party of business once again.

We were making progress on our society messaging too. With the help of Michael Caine we launched the centrepiece of the Big Society, the National Citizen Service, or NCS. Expressions of interest in setting up Free Schools were coming in from around the country. And our pitch to public-sector workers about cutting bureaucracy and enhancing local control was a vast improvement on our efforts in 2001 and 2005.

A few days later, I launched our manifesto at Battersea Power Station. The manifesto was a blue hardback book titled ‘An Invitation to Join the Government of Great Britain’, which emphasised the Big Society theme.

But all the usual election paraphernalia – posters, chickens, eggs and manifestos – was about to be eclipsed by something completely new.

Ever since 1964, when Harold Wilson challenged prime minister Alec Douglas-Home to appear in a TV debate, there had been a similar call from someone during general election campaigns. In the past, it had always been the underdog doing the calling, and the favourite refusing (and in recent years that favourite had been followed around by a chicken – because they’d ‘chickened out’).

Until now.

I had decided back in 2005 that I wasn’t going to fit into the normal pattern of resisting debates if I was in the lead, or of calling for them if I was falling behind. I was going to go for it. I liked TV. I liked debating, although perhaps I hadn’t paid enough attention to the fact that when I’d debated on TV during the party leadership campaign it hadn’t gone well. Anyway, I always felt that TV debates were coming. The UK’s first general election leaders’ debates would take place in 2010 because, for the first time, the front-runner was calling for them.

Bill Knapp and Anita Dunn, the US experts I had hired to help me prepare for the coming ordeal, were brutally frank about the reality I was about to encounter: to my disappointment they told me that these wouldn’t really be debates at all. You don’t want to engage with your opponents’ argument, you just want to put your own point across. You should focus your efforts on delivering your pre-prepared soundbite down the camera lens. Avoid too much spontaneity in taking apart opponents’ arguments; it’s far too risky. Just get your ‘zinger’ – a one-liner destined for the headlines on the news programmes after the show – ready beforehand, and deploy it as soon as you can.

My disappointment quickly turned to worry. We did some practices in Millbank, with Damian Green (and sometimes Olive Dowden) playing Gordon Brown, and Jeremy Hunt as Nick Clegg. Halfway through, I threw down my notes. ‘It’s hopeless. Clegg will win hands-down. It’s easy. He can just say “A plague on both your houses.”’ Even if I’d been Demosthenes or Cicero, he was going to win.

Before that first debate, history in the making, I’d never been so nervous in my life. The news channels covered the build-up as if it was England in the World Cup final. Brown, Clegg and I stood on a primary-coloured set like gameshow contestants. As predicted, Clegg was painting the blue and red parties as the old guard, and himself as the new kid on the block. It seemed a breeze for him. He was even using the same phrases that Jeremy Hunt had as his stand-in during our mock debates – ‘two old parties’, ‘more of the same’, ‘there is an alternative’. Nick had prepared well – and he was good.

I was bad. Not switch-off-the-telly, hide-behind-the-sofa bad. But aloof and stiff. Lacking passion. Anecdotes that were too contrived. And one bit of absolutely essential preparation that I failed to put into practice was properly looking down the camera when I spoke. Colleagues and friends were polite afterwards, because while Clegg had undoubtedly won, at least I hadn’t lost (that honour went to Brown).

But Samantha was brutal. ‘You were hopeless – and you’ve got to watch the whole thing through all over again to see just how bad it was.’ She was right – and I did.

The Lib Dems surged ahead in the polls – into the lead in some. There was even a poll that said their leader was nearly as popular as Winston Churchill. Britain was in the grip of a new phenomenon: Cleggmania.

And I took it hard. I was the one who had wanted to do these debates. I hadn’t prepared properly for them. I’d let everyone down. I lay in bed, running through a list of people in my head, friends who I thought were going to lose their seats because I’d screwed up. The feeling was worse than fear or disappointment. It was guilt.

The second debate, in Bristol, went much better. It was on foreign affairs, and Clegg was vulnerable here. His party manifesto rejected ‘like-for-like replacement of the Trident nuclear weapons system’, thus putting our deterrent at risk. It didn’t do him too much damage though – the two of us drew in the opinion poll afterwards.

Arriving in Birmingham for the third and final debate, my anxieties reached a new high. So much was riding on my performance. The future of the country. The future of my party, my team, my friends and family. My future.

What happened next wasn’t planned or predicted, but I suppose it was inevitable. Brown and I had clearly both gone away and done the same thinking about Clegg. This guy was – according to the polls – running away with the election. Yet he was inconsistent. His policies had never really been subjected to proper scrutiny. The numbers didn’t add up. His manifesto included some seriously odd ideas.

We took him to bits, starting with his pledge of an amnesty for illegal immigrants. Months afterwards Nick told me that if he’d known this policy would be so contentious he never would have let it into the manifesto.

Afterwards, I bounded back into the hotel room. A poll there and then showed that I had won the debate. The relief was enormous. Finally I could get back to the real campaign, which culminated a few days later in a twenty-four-hour sprint to the finish.

My top-to-toe tour of Britain began in a hi-fi factory in East Renfrewshire in the evening. By 10 p.m. I was in a Carlisle fire station, with officers clocking on for the night shift. At 1 a.m. I was wandering around a factory in Darwen, Lancashire, before crossing the Pennines for a 3 a.m. tour of a Morrison’s depot in Wakefield. Next was the Grimsby fish market at 5 a.m. as trawlermen delivered their morning catch, followed by the first lesson of the day at a school in Nottingham, and then an ambulance station in Dudley.

Life on the campaign bus (which is rather like a band’s tour bus, but with less booze and more journalists) tests your senses as well as your stamina. After we had boarded with wet shoes from the Grimsby fish market, Sky’s Joey Jones decided to put some roast beef in the oven that was on the bus. As we wended our way round the windy Welsh roads towards a school in Powys, surrounded by the inescapable smell of fish and beef, everyone began feeling sicker and sicker.

At long last we reached our final stop, Bristol, where supporters including Sam had gathered. I was wrung out, but I had to give a rallying cry with what felt like the last breath I had in me: ‘I want a government that makes us feel good about Britain again – all that we are, all that we’ve done, all that we can do in the future … a government that’s about hope, and optimism and change in our country, not the doom and the gloom and the depression of the Brown years, which we can, tomorrow, put behind us – forever.’

But the news bulletins were focused on something else. Athens was ablaze, and several people had been killed after protesters reacted to planned austerity measures. Economic volatility and the vulnerability of countries like Britain returned to the foreground. The world was in turmoil. Who were the public going to ask to run Britain in these uncertain times? A Conservative government? A Labour government? Or something else?

As on every previous polling day in my adult life, I got up early on 6 May to go to cast my ballot. Sadly, my early voting was delayed by four whole hours, as two jokers had scaled the roof of my local polling station, Spelsbury Memorial Hall, to erect ‘Vote for Eton’ signs and swig champagne.

It is strange voting for yourself to become an MP. It is even stranger voting for yourself to become prime minister. And whereas at previous elections I would have visited polling stations and committee rooms in my own constituency, this time I had sent all my party workers to neighbouring marginal seats. So I spent the hours that followed fiddling around in my vegetable garden and chopping logs for our fire – two of my favourite ways of dealing with stress.

Later that night, Sam, my close team and I gathered in the sitting room at Dean to watch the exit poll. I felt a mixture of fear and hope – fear that we’d fail totally, and hope that we might be about to defy expectations. But I was left with a strange, in-between feeling when at the stroke of 10 p.m. David Dimbleby announced the result of the exit poll: ‘It’s going to be a hung Parliament with the Conservatives as the largest party.’

Some of the results that followed started to point towards a majority – the swings in Sunderland, the seats we picked up in the south, our better-than-expected performance in the south-east. At 1 a.m. we won Kingswood near Bristol – and that was 135 on our target list. But the north of England and London weren’t going as we needed them to.

As the voters’ verdicts unfolded across the country, I went to Windrush Leisure Centre in Witney for my own count. Though my eyes were also on the 649 other contests taking place, I was still eager to succeed in the patch I loved so much.

I was also reminded why it’s so important that our prime ministers are also MPs. Only in Britain would the person bidding for the highest office be sitting on a plastic chair watching his party’s fate unfold on a crackly TV. It is humbling and grounding to be accountable to your own constituency. And it was with genuine pride that I increased my majority.

By 3 a.m. it was confirmed there would be a hung Parliament. I took a call from Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California, congratulating me on my win. But Arnie, I said, it wasn’t a win. In what was the most surreal moment of the whole election, there I was, in a leisure centre, in the middle of the night, explaining the first-past-the-post electoral system to the Terminator.

When I got back to London I had to go to the CCHQ party in Millbank. The atmosphere was jubilant, but I was cautious – I could see from what was on the boards of ‘results in’ and ‘results to come’ that we were unlikely to make it.

Over at the Park Plaza Hotel I attempted to grab an hour’s sleep. As I closed my eyes, I lay there pondering it all. It was looking like being the most successful Tory result in eighteen years. But I was surprised and confused about the Lib Dems. Cleggmania had well and truly faded. They had lost seats. Yet – another odd feature of our politics – he might now be kingmaker.

I steeled myself. This had been the hardest slog of my life. But what was to come might be even harder.

I am clear what it was that produced the great swing in our favour. We had changed the Conservative Party, making it appeal once more to Middle England and making people in urban, liberal Britain feel that they could vote for us.

I am also fairly sure why we didn’t win outright. There was too much ‘and’ in our campaign – the Big Society and austerity; cutting some public services and increasing others; continuing to modernise and hammering Brown and Labour.

As for the debates, they didn’t have a dramatic impact on the outcome. The Conservative share of the vote was close to where the polls were at the start of the formal campaign. The Lib Dems also ended the campaign close to where they began, though Nick Clegg gave his party a tremendous boost where otherwise it may well have been squeezed by the two bigger parties and lost even more seats.

The truth is the real benefit of the debates to the Conservatives was elsewhere, and is often overlooked. By sucking the life out of the campaign, the debates meant Labour was never able to get its powerful anti-Tory cuts campaign off the ground.

Looking back, my view is simple: in those desperate economic times, even after the changes we’d made, the Conservative Party hadn’t quite sealed the deal with the electorate. People were still uncertain about the Conservatives.

This was even more true at a moment when budget cuts were needed. As I’ve said, we’d intended to respond to voters’ concerns by matching Labour’s spending in the first two years, and by promising to share the proceeds of growth between more spending and tax cuts. This formula was easy to understand, and allowed us to reduce the relative size of the state while still increasing the amount spent on essential services.

Then came the financial crash, and these reassurances weren’t possible any more. So people were uncertain. And we had been reflecting their uncertainty rather than allaying it.

Remember also that it was Everest we were trying to climb. We were trying to win a historic number of seats, while the electoral geography massively favoured Labour.

The data shows why. In 2005, a 35 per cent share of the vote had given Labour a majority. With our 36 per cent share in 2010 – and two million more votes than Labour – we didn’t clinch it.

So how did we measure against those great landslides of political history in the end?

The swing from government to opposition was less than Attlee had managed in 1945 or Blair in 1997, but it was on a par with Margaret Thatcher in 1979. And we had gained more seats – ninety-seven – for the Conservatives than at any election since 1931.

Yet it was what would happen next, the relationships I would forge and the decisions I would take, that was to make more significant political history.

12

Cabinet Making

‘David, congratulations!’ came the voice down the phone. It was President Barack Obama, and this was my first evening as prime minister after five tumultuous days of negotiations in May 2010. ‘Enjoy every moment,’ he said, ‘because it’s all downhill from here.’

I would often tell the story – and would use the same line when ringing other presidents and prime ministers after their election victories. But it wasn’t entirely true. The early days and weeks in government went extremely well, in a way that confounded many people’s expectations. Some thought a coalition would be unstable and prone to early collapse. In fact, at a time of great difficulty, when markets were fragile and protests were breaking out across Western capitals, the administration that I put together with Nick Clegg was to prove one of the most stable governments in Europe.

I believe the coalition succeeded in those first few weeks and months in part because our party had spent five years in opposition preparing for power. I had thought a lot about how to do the job of prime minister. I knew that the ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘where’ and ‘why’ questions would hit me the moment I walked through that big black door. And I understood that the mechanics mattered. Because of all that preparation, as well as feeling daunted, honoured and excited by the prospect of being PM, I felt ready.

In opposition we had developed a good system of short and focused daily meetings to bring the top team together and despatch the business of the day, chaired by George in my absence. The civil servants were doubtful that the routine would last, but six years later we were still assembling – PM and chancellor – for the daily ‘8.30’ and ‘4 o’clock’, as we called them.

I’ve always believed that ministers who automatically purge their predecessors’ staff are cutting off their noses to spite their faces. So I decided to keep the private secretaries I had inherited from Brown, including the smart and sardonic James Bowler as my principal private secretary, as well as cabinet secretary Gus O’Donnell and No. 10 permanent secretary Jeremy Heywood – both former colleagues from my Lamont days. Their expertise would be invaluable. ‘Your job is not to tell me when I get it right, but to tell me when I get it wrong,’ I told them.

The integration between my staff and George’s was to continue in government. We were one team, and I believe that became one of the secrets to our success, particularly as our driving mission was economic rescue.

The ‘one team’ spirit also applied to the No. 10 operation, where I wanted the political appointees and the civil servants to work together. And I wanted that open, trusting, collegiate atmosphere to flow through the coalition too. That meant, rather controversially, that our spads would work side by side, sharing offices. Sometimes people would walk into a room and find it difficult to tell who was the Tory, who was the Lib Dem and who was the civil servant.

We didn’t get it all right. The Conservative Party in opposition had tended to criticise the growth of No. 10 as making the PM’s office too ‘presidential’, and, in line with that thinking, I scrapped the PM’s ‘delivery unit’. This was a mistake – and we reversed it over time, building a similar team focused on the implementation of government policy.

Another early error was running a joint Conservative–Lib Dem Policy Unit. It soon became clear that this would be very difficult when everyone involved had loyalty to different leaders and their eye on the next party conference or general election, at which point we would be competing, not collaborating. The Policy Unit was split in April 2013.

The next question was where would I base myself in Downing Street. Margaret Thatcher had what was called her study on the first floor, by the stairs that led to her No. 10 flat. Tony Blair had his ‘den’ at the bottom of the main staircase, whose yellow walls are tiled with pictures of his – our – predecessors. Gordon Brown opted for something different – something that resembled a trading floor or newsroom.

In the end I chose the room that had been Blair’s. It was close to everyone else on the ground floor – the private secretaries, the duty clerks who staff the place night and day, the ‘garden rooms’ teams who support the PM wherever he or she is in the world, the press office, speechwriters, and events and visits team. But you could also shut the door, hold very private meetings and work, write or make telephone calls without being disturbed.

It was in that office, on my first evening, that I sat and read the letter Gordon Brown had left for me. Tony Blair’s letter of congratulations came soon afterwards. One of his pieces of advice stuck with me: however tough the job gets, remember that the British people have a grudging respect for whoever is trying their best to do it.

The one issue Sam and I had not settled was where we would live. Sam wasn’t sold on the idea of moving into either the flat above No. 10 or that in No. 11 – it was something we would have to work out. So that night, my first as PM, I went home to North Kensington.

Leaving the next morning for my first full day in my new job, I stepped out of our terraced home and into an armoured Jag. We sped off towards central London, with eight motorcycle outriders around us. Some would split off to block the junctions that fed into the main road, clearing our way. Which was incredible – until I saw the tailbacks I had caused. I felt like President Mugabe. So that was it – day one, executive decision: no outriders, except for emergencies. (I did use the Special Escort Group more and more as time went on. And they really are the most professional elite officers, protecting everyone from the royals to visiting PMs and training other forces from around the world.) The experience also made me wonder how practical our west London home might prove to be.

Then, of course, came the crucial question of who: who would I appoint to each department of government?

The art of the shuffle – and the reshuffle – was something else I had learned a lot about in opposition. But the pressure and media attention in government is many times greater. Basically, reshuffles are a nightmare. You are dealing with egos, big ones. Every move is scrutinised. Any delay is dithering. Any job rejected is a snub. End up with the wrong balance of left and right, male and female, and you are either hopelessly politically naïve or absurdly politically correct – or if you are unlucky, both at the same time.

Friends in business used to say, ‘We all have to take tough decisions to get the right top team – why all the fuss about political reshuffles?’ To which I would reply, ‘Yes, but you don’t have to appoint your entire team all on the same day, in full view of the world’s television cameras. And the ones you sack go away. The ones I sack sit behind me and plot my downfall.’

The best way is to plan reshuffles like a military operation. You need to have a strategy and stick to it. Every move is timed and scheduled. And whatever the resistance, even if you are forced to make small tactical retreats, you need to keep advancing.

Appointing your first government, though, is, relatively speaking, a pleasure. After all, you are helping colleague after colleague achieve one of their political dreams: taking office.

The first moves were obvious: making George chancellor of the exchequer and William Hague my foreign secretary. We had worked closely together over the previous five years, and I had assured them that the jobs they had in opposition would be the jobs they would take in government. I made William first secretary of state, essentially my deputy, so he could chair cabinet and take PMQs in my absence.

On that first night in Downing Street I also confirmed to Patrick McLoughlin that he would be the chief whip, and could work with the team at No. 10 to plan the cabinet and government formation that would happen the next day.

I wanted it to be straightforward. I had long believed that secretaries of state were shunted from job to job too often. Labour’s ministerial musical chairs had become increasingly absurd – they had a new home secretary every two or three years.

Most members of my shadow cabinet knew what jobs they would be doing in government because they had been shadowing them for much of the past five years. Andrew Lansley went to Health, Liam Fox to Defence, Eric Pickles to Local Government, Owen Paterson to Northern Ireland, and Andrew Mitchell to International Development.

But after the shoo-ins there were some surprises.

Theresa May stepped into the Cabinet Room and sat opposite me across the green table. She had huge experience in shadowing government departments, having covered the Education, Transport, Culture and Families portfolios over the years, as well as being the Conservatives’ first female chairman. Most recently I had appointed her to shadow Work and Pensions – and I am sure that’s what she expected to be offered.

‘I want you to be home secretary,’ I said to her. Theresa is not always the most expressive person, but she looked genuinely surprised and delighted. This may have been one of the least expected appointments – but it would turn out to be one of the best.

Another surprise was my choice for Work and Pensions. George – ironically, given their later battles – persuaded me that right-winger Iain Duncan Smith would provide balance in our cabinet.

Then there was the choice of party chairman. I wanted someone who was a loyalist and who would continue the work of delivering a modern, compassionate Conservative Party that reflected and represented all of Britain.

Sayeeda Warsi had joined the party as an adviser to Michael Howard after setting up a legal practice in her native West Yorkshire. She had been by my side through my leadership (halfway through I’d appointed her to the Lords), speaking with a no-nonsense conviction on issues domestic and foreign that I found refreshing and impressive. I told her I wanted her to be joint chairman with Andrew Feldman, who I hoped would continue his great work. She couldn’t believe it. The daughter of a textile worker from Pakistan had taken her place in a Conservative British cabinet, the first Muslim woman to do so. The partnership was a statement about how far we had come, in that we had a Muslim and a Jew jointly chairing our party.

The cabinet jobs lost to Lib Dems would upset some, but there were fortunate solutions for most of them. Ken Clarke, for example, had been shadowing Business, but Justice was a good alternative, given his legal background. Francis Maude and Oliver Letwin were happy – and extremely effective – in the Cabinet Office, which would become an engine room for both delivering savings in government spending and making the coalition work.

Of course there were some people who were disappointed. Chris Grayling and Theresa Villiers had been in the shadow cabinet. Neither made it into the cabinet at the start of the government, but both took their lesser appointments with good grace and worked to prove themselves in their new roles. Theresa later made an excellent Northern Ireland secretary, and Chris served as lord chancellor.

But there were those who were more openly upset that their shadow portfolios were taken by Liberal Democrats. There were some awkward conversations, and in one or two cases it created simmering resentments. I understood how frustrated some colleagues were. Some had shadowed a government department for years on end, asking questions in Parliament and building up their expertise, only to have their dreams of office snatched away by the arrival of an unexpected coalition.

Appointing 118 ministers across just two days, there are bound to be some slip-ups – and I made a couple of errors.

The number of full cabinet members is strictly limited – to twenty-three – and, as other PMs have done before me, I tried to make the numbers add up by having some ministers ‘attending cabinet’ but not paid the full salary. Foolishly, I included Tom Strathclyde, leader of the House of Lords, in this category.

Tom explained – rather forcefully – that it wasn’t about the money, it was that their lordships simply wouldn’t stand for their champion in cabinet having ‘lesser status’. He was right. The problem was that when he told me this I had already filled all the other posts.

Most secretaries of state have to be in the cabinet, so the only solution was to pick on the most agreeable Member of Parliament that I had already appointed and ask them to accept a downgrade. There was one outstanding candidate for this honour: my leader of the House of Commons, Sir George Young, a veteran of the Thatcher and Major governments and known as ‘Gentleman George’. He lived up to his name, and couldn’t have been nicer about the whole thing, pay cut included. All too often in politics the stubborn get rewarded and the good guys get shafted. On the other hand, George’s grace is among the reasons he has had one of the longest, most extraordinary ministerial careers of modern times.

We agreed that the Lib Dems would have five cabinet positions and a number of ministers that corresponded to their proportion of MPs. And that led to the question of what job Nick Clegg should do. I was keen that he consider holding a major office of state, such as the Home Office or Environment. But he wanted instead to be deputy prime minister.

I didn’t feel strongly about it. My priority was making the government stable at a time of such uncertainty, and I was perfectly happy with any solution that did that.

As for his choice of ministers, I insisted on formally appointing each of them as I did those from my own party. Again, I wanted to emphasise that this was one team under one prime minister.

Some of the Lib Dems on the left were sceptical but willing to make it work, like Vince Cable. Others towards the right of the party were enthusiastic, like David Laws. Another even said to me: ‘You don’t have to worry about me, I’m basically a Tory anyway.’

A few were quite emotional, even tearful, like Tom McNally. He had been elected a Labour MP in 1979, having previously worked in Jim Callaghan’s No. 10. Now a Liberal Democrat, he was the party’s leader in the Lords in a Conservative-led government. Although a left-leaning Liberal, he was determined to make it work, and did a great deal to ensure it did.

To begin with George and I were highly sceptical about whether the Lib Dems should get two big economic portfolios: chief secretary to the Treasury and business secretary. But in the end we agreed that it would be helpful to make sure there was a Lib Dem in the Treasury, and seen to be as responsible for the cuts programme as we were.

With a ministerial team in place and the mechanics whirring away, it was time to answer the most important question: why. Why was I in government, taking this approach, joining forces with a rival party? This was the most straightforward question of all to answer: we were engaged in a full-scale economic recovery job, to turn around the British economy and deal with what had become one of the largest budget deficits in the world, forecast to be over 11 per cent of our GDP.

And we were going to do it in a way that was true to the modern, compassionate Conservative message we had developed.

On our first full day, the stage was set to deliver the message. The chairs were laid out in rows on the Downing Street lawn, with an aisle down the middle. Cameras clicked, there was an expectant air, as Nick and I emerged from the Cabinet Room to stand before the gathered crowd.

The marriage metaphors used to describe the ‘Rose Garden’ press conference weren’t that far-fetched. It did look and feel a bit like a wedding. And, like a groom, I was nervous, aware of the immensity of the occasion and the need to rise to it. ‘We mustn’t come up short here,’ I said to Clegg in the Cabinet Room before we stepped outside. ‘It is one of those times when we need to give it 20 per cent more than feels appropriate.’ And that’s what we both did.

‘Today we are not just announcing a new government and new ministers,’ I said. ‘We are announcing a new politics. A new politics where the national interest is more important than party interest. Where cooperation wins out over confrontation. Where compromise, give and take, reasonable, civilised, grown-up behaviour is not a sign of weakness but of strength.’

The tone was meant to be historic, but on rereading it feels a little histrionic. These were unprecedented times, however, and I was trying to rise to them.

One consequence was that those who were disappointed that we hadn’t achieved a majority felt we were rubbing their noses in it. And that I was enjoying myself with the Lib Dems a bit too much.

But while I understand this criticism, overall I don’t regret the Rose Garden performance. The banter and bonhomie did help to set the tone for what we were about to embark on. They showed that Nick and I were confident we could work together and were clear about our task: to confront the economic challenge ahead of us.

Britain – this proud, prudent, economic powerhouse – was in deep economic trouble, and it needed a government that people had confidence in. One that would persist and could weather political storms, one that would give creditors confidence in the country they were being asked to lend to. Forming such a government was part of our solution to the problem.

The urgency of our task had been underlined on our first full day in office, when news emerged that unemployment had hit its highest level since 1994. We started work straight away on the £6 billion of in-year cuts that we had promised and that our coalition partners had now agreed to.

As politicians, we took the lead ourselves, cutting ministers’ pay by 5 per cent and freezing it for five years. We also scrapped ministers’ personal drivers.

We agreed on the importance of cutting taxes for the lowest-paid. So another early action was raising the threshold at which people started paying tax to nearly £7,500 – meaning that nearly a million more would no longer pay any income tax at all.

All this was underpinned by the ‘Coalition Agreement’ and the ‘Coalition Programme for Government’, both hastily compiled but surprisingly comprehensive combinations of our two manifestos, which became our blueprint for government. They stood the test of time.

I didn’t feel we were being constrained by the burdens of office or the addition of the Lib Dems. On the contrary. I felt liberated by office. We were finally doing the things we wanted to do, not just talking about them.

While economic policy would prove the central challenge, it naturally wasn’t the only one. Although I didn’t appreciate at this point quite how much of my time as prime minister would be consumed by foreign and security issues, I was persuaded that we should prepare properly for the work that would need to be done.

One of the big changes to the machinery of government was the inauguration of a National Security Council, which came out of our policy review, chaired by Pauline Neville-Jones, in opposition. The rationale was simple. It no longer made sense to consider foreign policy on its own. The challenges we faced required a response from across government, not just the Foreign Office. Particularly with the rise of threats from what the experts like to call ‘non-state actors’ – basically terrorists – we needed to combine diplomatic, military and counter-extremist thinking.

Afghanistan was the classic example. We could only make progress if we could deal with the poor relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan (Foreign Office), assist in the fight against the Taliban (Ministry of Defence), deal with the flow of drugs from the region (Home Office), improve the country’s potential for economic development (Department for International Development), while all the time working on the vital issue of countering Islamist extremism (Home Office again).

The National Security Council brought all of these departments together, combined with our intelligence services, MI5, SIS and GCHQ, and the armed forces, as represented by the chief of the defence staff. I appointed Peter Ricketts, who was the permanent secretary at the Foreign Office, as the first national security adviser. Coming straight from the FCO, he secured that department’s cooperation with the new arrangements and carried out his new role with huge ability. The NSC is now a vital part of the UK government – and I believe will remain so.

Of course, there was another early national security question to be settled – this one by me alone.

Every PM must decide what set of instructions to send to the commanders of the Trident submarines for use in the event of a nuclear attack on the UK that has rendered other means of communication redundant. These are the so-called ‘letters of last resort’. A senior naval commander comes to your office to brief you on the options and the process. You’re then left alone with a series of alternative letters, and you decide which instructions to give. The others you shred in a giant, industrial-sized shredder which seems to appear in your office that morning.

It is the moment when the full seriousness of your responsibilities as prime minister come home to you. I had spoken with John Major about the approach he had taken, and I had decided on what I believed to be the right course of action. But even so, I sat and stared at the cold words on the page, trying to imagine the scenario in which one of our submarine commanders had to open one of my letters.

As I handed over the chosen letters to the officer – letters I prayed would never, ever, have to be opened – one of the envelope’s seals popped open. A call for Pritt Stick and Sellotape was rapidly answered. An absurd moment in such a solemn process.

So what were my perceptions of office as the sun shone on us in those early days?

All in all, I felt we were successfully setting the scene for a long-lasting coalition, and for turning around our economic fortunes.

By the end of the first month Sam and I decided we and the children would move into Downing Street rather than staying in west London, and we brought across the entire contents of our home – bikes, beds, beanbags and, after a few months, our new baby daughter.

When we departed six years later, we left some of the furniture behind. This included an IKEA kitchen cabinet which I had assembled in the days just after Florence had been born. Nick Clegg had needed to see me, and found me in the kitchen surrounded by pages of instructions, wooden panels, nuts, bolts and screws. He immediately helped out, and we joked as we assembled the ‘coalition cabinet’. Samantha commended us on our work, but pointed out that the two doors did not quite align with each other.

For me, living in Downing Street was perfect. Whether I was upstairs in the flat or downstairs in the office, I was never far from my two enormous responsibilities, to my family and to the country.

13

Special Relationships

Within minutes of arriving at the Renaissance palace in Rome that was Silvio Berlusconi’s official residence, I was in his bedroom. The Italian prime minister was showing me an ancient two-way mirror. ‘They didn’t have porn channels in the fifteenth century,’ he explained.

During your first few weeks and months as prime minister, you must begin forging the relationships that will help advance Britain’s interests around the world. Personal bonds are vital; relations between countries really can be enhanced by the rapport between their leaders or jeopardised by the lack of it.

In the digital age, the old ways of doing things – messages passed through ambassadors or fixed times for formal telephone calls – are being augmented with new methods. I had a pretty regular text relationship with the Dutch and Swedish prime ministers and the crown prince of UAE, for instance, and I also exchanged communications with the Australian and New Zealand prime ministers.

But the traditional methods, including phone calls, formal diplomatic visits and international summits, do still matter. I had spent years laying the groundwork for these relationships. However, the amount of time I had to devote to foreign affairs as PM still surprised me. We once did a calculation which showed that a third of my time was spent on trips overseas, foreign policy meetings, hosting foreign leaders and National Security Council meetings.

My approach to foreign policy began with what I suppose might be called a patriot’s view of British history: not one that ignored its flaws, but nevertheless one that felt great pride in our role and contribution. I didn’t accept the idea that Britain was facing inevitable relative decline. Previous predictions of our demise in the 1960s and 70s had been defied by the economic success of the Thatcher years, with their global exports of privatisation, shareholder capitalism and the rule of law.

It saddened me to see some commentators talk about an inexorable waning of our influence. I understood that with the rise of India and China power was moving south and east, but I didn’t accept that Britain couldn’t forge its own important role in the world.

We still had some great advantages: our time zone placing us between Asia and the Americas, English as the global language, our universities and science base, expertise in aid and diplomacy, widely respected armed forces and an unequalled network of global alliances, including NATO, the EU, the Commonwealth, the G8, G20, IMF, and permanent membership of the UN Security Council.

The Labour governments had had some foreign policy successes. There had been the actions to save Sierra Leone and Kosovo, and Gordon Brown had used the G20 effectively to help coordinate action after the global economic crisis. But at the same time their foreign policy had been disproportionately defined by two relationships: with the US and the EU. Elsewhere, they had closed embassies and downgraded the importance of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Far too many old alliances had been allowed to slide.

It was clear to me that, alongside our economic rescue, reasserting Britain’s global status would be one of our biggest missions in government. In fact, the two were intertwined. Building a stronger economy relied upon the goods and services we sold abroad and the investment we attracted at home. And our global reputation rested upon our ability to fix our economy.

I approached our foreign policy challenges as a ‘liberal conservative’, not a ‘neo-conservative’. While I understood and sympathised with the doctrine of Bush and Blair – that spreading democracy around the world helped peace and prosperity – I felt that their rhetoric and actions didn’t reflect the difficulties of achieving such change. I wanted a foreign policy that was practical, hard-headed and realistic.

My practical approach made me sceptical of the view of some in Whitehall that the job of the politicians was simply to set the overall strategy and leave its implementation to officials. Some of the military top brass were particularly keen on this, and thoroughly disliked it when I interfered in deployments of ships, troops or submarines. But you cannot always separate tactics and strategy: the politicians need to be intricately involved in both.

The hard-headedness came from my belief that we should never be ashamed of using foreign policy to help generate prosperity at home. For too long, the FCO had neglected its economic responsibilities. India was one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, yet we had fallen from their fourth biggest source of imports to their eighteenth in just one decade. We still exported more to Ireland than to the BRICS economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

I saw an opportunity to reposition our diplomatic network as a generator of trade and inward investment. Some sneered at ‘commercial diplomacy’; I made it a key plank of my foreign policy. We had a presence in 196 countries across the world. That was 196 potential shop windows in which to advertise Britain.

The realism was evident in our recognition that democracy wouldn’t take root at the drop of a hat – or bomb. Its components – the rule of law, a fair judiciary, property rights, a free press – take time to embed. This was not a disavowal of military action. Instead, I saw it as a course correction from the excessive interventionism of the New Labour years.

I admired Tony Blair’s passion for trying to solve problems and to intervene in difficult situations. But his foreign-policy actions lacked the consideration of a good driver – too keen to keep his foot on the accelerator and insufficient in his use of either brakes or rear-view mirror. At the same time, what I didn’t want was for the pendulum to swing too far in the other direction and rule out intervention altogether. There are occasions when you have to intervene. The failure to intervene in Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s influenced the rush to intervene in Iraq. I didn’t want Iraq to stop us intervening somewhere that it was desperately needed in the future. Every case and conflict is different.

When it came to the ‘special relationship’ with the USA, I had always felt it was special to me personally: I had huge admiration for the United States, loved spending time there, and as a child of the Cold War I was clear that it was our best friend and ally. It seemed obvious that we should want to maintain, and where possible enhance, the special relationship. And I believe that word – ‘special’ – is merited. In my view, the intensity of the partnership between our intelligence services justifies the title on its own, quite aside from the powerful ties of history, language, culture, trade and values.

But it shouldn’t be our only special relationship. I wanted to carve out privileged partnerships with global giants like China and India, and to restore bonds which I felt had been weakened with Australia, Canada, New Zealand (no recent Labour foreign secretary had been to Australia, for example) and our other Commonwealth allies, like Malaysia and Singapore.

In the Gulf there was a whole series of countries that saw Britain as their oldest ally and friend – we needed to show that meant something to us too. Then there were the South American countries, many of which had long-standing historical relationships with Britain, such as Chile and Colombia, which were on the rise again, but with which Britain was not engaging properly.

The relationship-building with foreign leaders starts with the phone calls. The call with President Obama was followed by calls from all the foreign leaders over the next few days. Such conversations are useful, but it is the one-on-ones you have in which relationships are really cemented. I look back on those meetings now, and on what I was trying to achieve, and I can see them falling into four categories.

There are the agendas you began and which yielded real and lasting results. There are those you started but which got nowhere. There are those you wish you had pushed harder. And there are some you wish you had never started at all.

My first visit – and it is important which country you pick first – would be to France. With the Entente Cordiale and the fact that I knew Nicolas Sarkozy, it made sense.

There was one man who would prove essential to all this: my foreign affairs private secretary, Tom Fletcher. Tom had worked for Gordon Brown, and became my support, sounding board and source of information about virtually every country on Earth. He correctly warned me before this first trip that Sarko would be my ‘best friend and biggest rival’.

Sarkozy made great statements publicly and privately about our friendship and how well we would work together. Knowing my love of tennis, he presented me with two state-of-the-art Babolat racquets, one yellow, one blue, reflecting the coalition colours.

The truth of our relationship was slightly different. Although we were both conservative politicians, and similar in many ways, even at this early meeting I could see how divergent some of our ideas were. His criticisms of the European Union tended to be that it wasn’t doing enough, whereas in most areas I thought it was doing too much. He had the traditional Gallic and Gaullist distrust of finance and a suspicion of the City of London. I wanted a more balanced economy, for sure, but was totally opposed to harming what was a vital British asset, or sanctioning even more European action in this area.

With the warm atmospherics but the more difficult policy obstacles, I saw that our relationship was going to be strongest in terms of defence, security and countering terrorism – and therefore that we should focus as much as possible on those things. The ‘Lancaster House Agreement’ we would sign within the year was a step change in defence and security cooperation between the UK and France, including collaboration over the most sensitive of all issues, our nuclear deterrents. But this is an agenda where I wish we had gone even further.

France and Britain both share a global reach and a global ambition. We are Europe’s only nuclear powers, and have Europe’s only two properly capable armed forces. We’re both permanent members of the UN Security Council. Our relationship within NATO became stronger with Sarkozy’s brave decision to take France back into the alliance as a full political and military member. If we could bury some of the mutual suspicions about each other, the military and security cooperation could be far deeper, and could lead to great economies of scale.

Relations between us, having started so strongly, would dip during my first European Council meeting the following month. Sarko was complaining about the lack of effective action in the EU, whereas when it came to my turn to speak, I bemoaned the ongoing transfer of powers to Brussels. I could feel the room collectively sighing – particularly Sarko. It was a taste of things to come.

Contrast this with the bonhomie on display when he came to visit us later at No. 10 with his wife, the model and singer Carla Bruni. Waiting behind the famous black door before their arrival, I asked Tom, protocol-wise, whether I should kiss Carla. ‘Definitely,’ he replied. ‘How many times?’ I asked. He left his answer until the moment the door opened: ‘As many times as you can get away with, Prime Minister.’ I met them both with a huge smile on my face.

With Angela Merkel, the tone was less emotionally charged, though she put on a full military welcome for my first visit to Berlin as PM, straight after I’d been to Paris. I found her logical, sensible and focused – clear about what you wanted and what she wanted. But at the same time she was fun, and often had a mischievous twinkle in her eye.

Although we had made up over the EPP, it was still an issue of concern for her. She wanted the strongest possible conservative bloc in the European Parliament. I responded (again) that my new group would be allies rather than enemies of the EPP on most issues, while taking a different view on EU integration.

In the end, I would have a much better relationship with Merkel than with Sarkozy. I was fascinated by the dynamic between them. Despite their nickname, ‘Merkozy’ – a press confection expressing the idea that theirs was a close alliance – her real attitude to him seemed to me a mild, eye-rolling disdain. I remember suggesting to her that the three of us should do something on promoting more free-trade deals between the EU and other countries and regions. She said, ‘Let’s do that together and let’s get Nicolas along later, because he can be quite histrionic.’

A few months later at the G8 and G20 Merkel and I spent most of our time sitting next to each other. That’s where the relationship grew stronger. During one of the economic sessions at the G20 in Toronto, England and Germany were playing in the World Cup. She was getting regular text updates about the game from her team, while I was pushing the ‘refresh’ button on the BBC Sport website and getting frustrated at the slow wi-fi. At one point she leaned over and whispered, ‘I’m very sorry, David, but you’re 2–0 down.’

After the meeting broke up, we agreed to go and watch the second half together, along with our teams of advisers. We drank beer and chatted, with one or two moments relieving the gloom of the result (Germany won 4–1). At one stage the commentator said, ‘And now England makes an aggressive assault on the German defences,’ and Angela turned to me, smiling, and said, ‘We’re never allowed to say things like that at home.’

While I was to build a strong and trusting relationship with Merkel, I would also put this down as an agenda I didn’t carry far enough. Together we would chalk up some important collaborations, opposing attempts to allow protectionism at the G20, fighting off attacks on the need to cut budget deficits and achieving what many saw as impossible: cutting the EU budget. But in the end the relationship didn’t deliver everything I needed.

One diplomatic relationship that never even began was my attempt to appoint a new ambassador to the Vatican, as the current one was retiring. Who better, I thought, than Ann Widdecombe, a former Tory MP and one of Britain’s most prominent Catholics?

But when I called her from my office in No. 10, she didn’t believe it was me, and said, ‘I think this is a hoax call.’ On and on I went, trying to convince her. When she finally conceded that it was probably the PM she was speaking to, I began to tell her about the appointment I had in mind. But just as I thought I was winning her round, she apologised and said she couldn’t – she had committed to take part in Strictly Come Dancing.

Diplomatic relationships are also made and nurtured at multilateral gatherings, and there were two major ones during my earliest weeks in office. The annual summit of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the UK, the US and the European Union – the Group of Eight, or G8 – was held in Muskoka, Ontario, in June 2010, followed by the G20 in Toronto.

My overriding aims for my debut on the world stage were simple. I wanted backing for our economic strategy at home, and to defuse the ‘fiscal stimulus versus deficit reduction’ row that was brewing between the big nations. My view was straightforward: fiscal stimulus – i.e. unfunded tax cuts or additional spending paid for by more borrowing – was fine for those countries that could afford it. Britain couldn’t. The stimulus we needed was the monetary boost being provided by the Bank of England and pro-enterprise policies, as well as support for free trade and opposition to protectionist moves internationally.

The discussion I remember best from that G8 is actually a minor bust-up I caused, which had the side effect of reminding the Americans that we were their closest allies. I mentioned that part of the answer to all the things we had been talking about – the Middle East peace process, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan – was a stronger relationship with Turkey, and harnessing its support as an EU ally as well as a NATO ally.

Turkey. It sent Sarkozy off. Merkel backed Sarkozy, I think because she felt she had to. Obama backed me.

The scenery in Muskoka was incredibly beautiful – pine forests dotted with deep lakes. I have always been an enthusiastic open-water swimmer, and my prime ministerial wild-swimming career would take me – and Liz, who always joined me – from the Shetland Islands to Australia. On day one of my first G8 I started with a swim before breakfast, with two speedboats full of police bobbing around at either end of the lake.

Berlusconi got to hear of my swim and, determined not to be outdone, turned up at one of our first group meetings showing off pictures of him in his twenties standing on the shore of the Mediterranean in swimming trunks. Obama and Merkel looked perplexed, but were polite. ‘Very nice, Silvio,’ everyone was saying.

As we all prepared to leave the G8 for the far more urban setting of the G20, I was told that bad weather had grounded our helicopter, which would mean a three-hour car journey instead. My team immediately pulled some strings to get me a lift with Obama in his more robust helicopter, Marine One.

I was driven to the helipad with his team, and I used the time to explain my reasons for setting a deadline for bringing combat troops out of Afghanistan (which I’ll discuss in the next chapter). The reaction from one of Obama’s advisers was, ‘Oh, Afghanistan – we’re done with that.’

Once we were on board, Obama and I swapped stories about family and work life. He was fascinated by the fact that we were in coalition. At one stage he said, ‘David, if you were an American politician I think you would be on the soft right of the Democrat Party.’ I had been a strong supporter of George Bush Senior and a fan of Ronald Reagan. But with the changes in US politics – and the emphasis on ‘guns, gays and God’ in so much of the Republican Party – I wasn’t sure I could disagree.

In many ways the G20 is the more important of the two gatherings, bringing together the G8 nations with the new and rising giants, China and India. But with the extra size comes more formality and the tiresome reading of prepared speeches. Genuine dialogue, interaction and argument have to find their place on the ‘margins’ of the meeting, where much of the real business is done in bilateral or informal gatherings.

There was one such moment in those margins when Obama, Merkel and I were discussing the handing over of European travel data to the Americans to help in the fight against terrorism, which was being delayed by the fact that a required EU directive was being blocked by the Parliament. Merkel uttered the immortal words to Obama: ‘Well, of course we’ve given the European Parliament far too much power.’

The strength of the G20 has been (and to some extent remains) as a mechanism to agree and process better financial regulation. As with the G8, much of the discussion concerned how we should deal with the financial crisis.

I talked about the importance in our case of getting the budget deficit down, and I found lots of people willing to listen. Britain was blazing something of a trail – and this formed part of the wider debate at the G20, indeed the wider debate across the world, about deficit reduction versus stimulus.

However, the idea that there was some great division about this at the G20 was overblown. The IMF approach was clear: those countries with high budget deficits whose stability looked under threat needed to deal with their deficits; those that could afford stimulus should consider it. The IMF was more focused on trading imbalances between countries, and indeed between regions of the world.

In a meeting that brought together China, Saudi Arabia and Germany on the one hand with their enormous trade and financial surpluses, and the United States, Britain and much of Europe on the other with their significant trade deficits, it was possible to have a serious conversation about the scale of the financial imbalances in the world. To some extent these imbalances lay behind the financial crisis. The huge build-up of financial surpluses in the creditor nations, combined with the long period of low interest rates globally, had led to the ‘search for yield’ in which huge risks were taken.

Regulation of banks had become too lax, and leverage ratios too high (i.e. too much lending allowed against too little capital). This had led to the creation of too many inappropriate financial instruments, like the subprime mortgage bonds. When they turned out to be worth so much less than advertised, the world teetered on the edge of financial collapse. From this it followed that we needed, yes, to improve regulation and to ensure that banks had adequate levels of capital; but we should also deal with the underlying problem: the imbalances.

The regulatory changes that followed were sensible, but what I felt was still missing was the need for the IMF when it came to identifying financial imbalances, and for the WTO, when it came to calling out protectionist moves, to act with more vigour. They should lead the debate, and not be frightened to judge countries that were dragging their feet or heading in the wrong direction.

There was also an opportunity in this forum to build a reputation for Britain as the country that is always championing and facilitating free trade. The French were pushing back. The Indians were defensive. The Americans were saying that the Doha Round, the ongoing attempt to reduce global barriers, wouldn’t benefit them by any significant margin.

But even if we weren’t making the progress I wanted, my idea was to mark us out as the most open, globalised, free-trading, anti-protectionist nation on Earth. I was forming alliances with the Germans, Turks and Mexicans. (The full Doha package never made it, but parts of it were carved out into a Trade Facilitation Agreement that Britain championed and helped to get across the line years later, in 2014.)

Generally the summits had fallen into the ‘yielding results’ category, though there was one moment of farce, involving the colourful and volatile president of Argentina, Cristina Kirchner. Officials were worried that she was going to corner me at a drinks party and harangue me about the Falklands, and warned me that I should be robust about my deep belief in the islanders’ right to self-determination.

But when we came to meet, she didn’t even mention the British territory. ‘How can you be tough on Latin American countries’ budgets when your deficit is so high?’ was her line of attack. The only thing she seemed intent on invading was my personal space. We were locked in this Argentine tango where I kept moving backwards as she got closer and closer.

Gabby had already briefed our lobby pack that I would kick back very hard against Argentina if it raised the future of the Falkland Islands. ‘Would’ became ‘did’ as the press hurried to hit their deadlines, and the next day the Sunday Express splashed with ‘Cameron … Tells Argies: Hands Off Falklands’.

It was one occasion where, following a complete falsehood, neither I nor the press wanted to correct the record. We were genuinely all in it together.

Then, in July 2010, came my first trip to America as prime minister.

I knew that getting my relationship right with Barack Obama was essential. So many of the things I wanted to achieve in foreign policy – from bringing an end to the conflict in Afghanistan to pushing for progress on climate change – would depend on the approach taken by the US.

I had met Obama when he was a senator, and we had got on well. I remember asking him if he thought he was going to win the 2008 presidential election. He said he hoped so, but he thought he had a lot of things to get over – the ‘inexperience thing’, the ‘black thing’, the ‘Muslim thing’. I admired his frankness and candour, and we had built on our bond at the recent G8 and G20.

The protocol – bilaterals, meetings of our teams, press conferences – of that visit all went to plan, and Obama insisted on giving me a personal tour of his garden and the private apartments at the White House. He described the place as a ‘beautiful cage – but still a cage’ and showed me a bust of Churchill he had put in pride of place outside his bedroom.

The relationship was plain for all to see in the easy and instant connection we forged – one that was rooted in the values we shared.

Yes, he was a Democrat and I was a Conservative. But when it came to the issues in front of us, we didn’t need time to reach agreement. We were both committed to the defeat of the Taliban, but believed the war in Afghanistan shouldn’t go on forever. We agreed that lethal force should be used to defeat terrorism, and were passionate about progress on climate change and development. We were also pro-free trade, and wanted to counter the forces of protectionism that risked dangerous trade wars. Indeed, I always sensed that Obama was envious of our political system. I was in coalition, but still had the freedom and power to go further on these issues than he could.

My impressions on that visit were that he was a likeable, decent man with a great sense of humour and, as a former law professor, the ability to provide a brilliant analysis of the most complex situations. What a relief it was, I thought, that someone with good values and buckets of common sense was in the White House, in the most powerful job in the world.

The strength of the relationship also mattered at that first meeting, as there were some particularly tricky bilateral issues to deal with, including the horrific oil spill from BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010. This was being billed as a showdown between the US and the UK, between Obama and me. US officials continued to refer to the company as ‘British Petroleum’, though it had dropped the name in 2000 after a series of mergers and had, as I pointed out to Barack, the same percentage of American shareholders as British ones.

I accepted – as did the company – that it would pay a hefty fine in compensation, but the US system seemed to be hell-bent on breaking the business altogether. Not only would that threaten the livelihoods and pensions of many people – British and American – it would also leave this important company weak and susceptible to takeover, perhaps by a state-owned or state-controlled business from Russia or China. How could that be in our interests?

There was also an issue of basic fairness. When US-based companies – like Halliburton, which was one of the three companies involved in Deepwater Horizon’s operation – were not paying unlimited damages, why should a British-based one be singled out for such treatment?

I made all these points, but it was initially hard to tell how much impact they had. At least Obama could see how strongly we felt about the issue.

The most significant question we discussed in Washington was whether and how to talk to the Taliban. Though I was to make progress on this in the following years, it was another of the agendas I wish I had pushed harder.

After the summits and America came Turkey – not a country that is usually found on the itinerary of new prime ministers’ Grand Tours. But I was eager to change that. In a bid to reach out to the powers of the future, I wanted to go there as early as possible.

I had always believed Turkey’s success was important. It was a potentially powerful ally to Britain – vital to the Middle East peace process and in halting a nuclear Iran. It was a fast-growing economy of considerable size – ‘our Brazil’, I called it. But above all, it is one of the world’s most prosperous Muslim countries, proof that Muslim democracies and Muslim market economies can work.

For these reasons I believed that, in the long term, Turkey ought to be in the European Union. As I had said in my G8 speech – which apparently drove Sarkozy almost mad – I wanted to ‘pave the road from Ankara to Brussels’. I wasn’t saying that millions of Turks should automatically be allowed free movement across Europe (a stick I was to be thoroughly beaten with later). I was saying that in a flexible, multi-speed Europe, where membership meant different things for different countries – the Europe we wanted and would argue for – Turkey should be inside the wider tent. The EU should not be reserved for Western Christendom alone. (Incidentally, Boris Johnson thought this too.)

I spent a lot of time with prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He was canny and easy to get along with, and I was as frank as I could be. I told him I thought the Turks were in danger of going in the wrong direction. That there was a growth of Islamist sentiment which his party seemed to promote and appease, rather than challenge. If we genuinely wanted to move Turkey closer to Europe, he needed to help his friends by demonstrating the extent of reform and concern for democratic and human rights. And while Turkey had been one of the few Muslim countries to have a good dialogue with Israel, it was now leading the verbal onslaught against it.

Enhancing the British–Turkish relationship was an example of an agenda that ran into the ground. The trade issues progressed well, but the fact was that the mood in Europe was turning against any form of Turkish membership – and Erdoğan’s real ambitions were heading in a different direction.

From Ankara I flew to India to lead my first-ever trade delegation. I loaded up a plane with CEOs, cabinet ministers, top officials, heads of museums and galleries, even Olympians Kelly Holmes and Steve Redgrave.

This was commercial diplomacy in practice – and it was an agenda that yielded enormous results. We more than doubled exports to China and South Korea, and became the foreign investment capital of Europe, something that would be a key driver of the explosion in private sector jobs in the years that followed.

When it came to India, I argued that we needed a modern partnership – not one tinged with colonial guilt, but alive to the possibilities of the world’s oldest democracy and the world’s largest democracy. Many of Britain’s most successful business leaders and cultural figures are from the Indian diaspora community and would be our greatest weapons in that endeavour. I was proud to have many of them, like Priti Patel, Shailesh Vara, Alok Shama and Paul Uppal, on the Conservative benches in the House of Commons.

I got on well with prime minister Manmohan Singh. He was a saintly man, but he was robust on the threats India faced. On a later visit he told me that another terrorist attack like that in Mumbai in July 2011, and India would have to take military action against Pakistan.

Then came my curveball: Italy.

‘What’s the dress code for dinner?’ I asked one of my team before we set off for Rome. ‘A thong,’ he replied.

What a dinner it was. Everything was tricolour – mozzarella, avocado and tomato for the first course, then white, green and red pasta to follow. And so it went on. As did Berlusconi. Outrageous joke after outrageous joke – none of them funny.

Italian politics was a riddle to me. What did they see in a billionaire playboy with apparently no filter on what he said – or did? He once interrupted a long night at an EU Council by pushing the button on his microphone and announcing to the other twenty-six leaders that if the meetings were going to run on like this, ‘you should all do the same as me – and take a mistress in Brussels’.

On another occasion he walked into the room where we held the interminable meetings to find me chatting with the prime minister of one of the smaller countries whom he clearly didn’t know. When I introduced them he said, ‘You must come to Rome and meet my wife – you look just like her lover.’ That one, I confess, did make me laugh.

Over time I came to realise that, far from putting people off, Berlusconi’s unscripted brashness was part of the attraction. Italy had suffered so much from corruption in its political system that his eccentricities were a permanent reminder that he was different.

For all his loucheness, Berlusconi shared some values with me: he was pro-free market, pro-enterprise and anti-regulation. We tried to unblock a lot of foreign investments, including a BP gas terminal in Italy that had been in limbo for twenty years.

Italy was the fourth-largest European economy, a net contributor to the EU budget and a major player when it came to security. Yet it was often left out of discussions between the ‘big three’ – Germany, France and the UK. I thought we could rectify that, making Italy a big ally on NATO and on building a more flexible Europe.

There were four Italian PMs while I was in office, and I was much closer to Enrico Letta and Matteo Renzi, who followed Berlusconi and Mario Monti. But I have to accept that, while Italy was a strong NATO ally and helpful during the Libya intervention, my attempt to put rocket boosters under the Anglo–Italian relationship was an example of an agenda that didn’t get very far.

Another agenda I hoped would produce real and lasting results was China.

The country had gone from the world’s eleventh-biggest economy to the second-biggest in just twenty-one years. Eight hundred million people had been lifted out of poverty – all because this communist country had embraced the capitalist principle of liberal economics.

Not that ours was a likely alliance. For them, we were still their oppressors from the nineteenth-century Opium Wars, and awkward neighbours during the years when Hong Kong was a British territory. For us, no matter how liberal China’s economics, it was still a one-party, authoritarian, communist state, with a woeful record on human rights and a tendency to rip off intellectual property, keep its markets closed where we opened ours, censor the internet and spy on just about everyone.

Yet the advantages of a deeper connection were undeniable. Thousands of Chinese students and tourists flocked to Britain each year. Chinese people loved our history and culture. With a burgeoning Chinese middle class, there was a massive potential market there, and although Labour had made some inroads, it remained largely untapped.

So, China: opportunity or risk? The coalition was split. Nick had been campaigning on the human-rights issues for years. And William was sceptical about the Communist Party’s intentions. He wrote me a letter during our first month in office with a stark warning about China ‘free-riding on wider global public goods’ – obstructing international action if it conflicted with its own domestic imperatives.

My stance – and George’s – was more pragmatic. It wasn’t, of course, that I didn’t care about human rights, or that I trusted a party which appointed one ‘paramount leader’ every five years. It was just that I thought there was a longer game to play, and a better way of getting what we wanted.

Yes, our ambition was largely economic, but an essential outcome of that economic partnership would be the greater political leverage it would give us. In other words, the trust that we could build from doing business together could lead to trust across a whole range of areas.

Naturally, we would always be vigilant when it came to China. We were hard-headed about the threat it posed, instructing our security services to map and counter the Chinese threat. Only by understanding and guarding against that could we trade with the country.

This would be the best, the safest, way to bring China into the rules-based international system – through rules on trade, but also rules on climate change, terrorism and human rights. The more it was part of the UN, the WTO, the G20, the more cooperative our relationship would be. We could influence its views on everything from climate change to Burma to North Korea. Which was vital – China would be a linchpin in all these matters.

On my first visit to China as prime minister in November 2010, with four cabinet ministers and forty-three business leaders, I knew I’d have to walk a tightrope, on the one hand trying to strike trade deals and showcase what we had to offer investors, and on the other raising issues around human rights and democracy.

Nothing was going to stop the Chinese in their pursuit of growth – getting people out of the countryside into the cities, into employment and out of poverty. If you were useful – if you could supply inward investment, exports and scientific knowledge, as we could – then you were considered a partner. ‘Transactional’ is the FCO jargon for that sort of relationship.

But there was still a tightrope to walk. So, when I went to Beijing University, I decided to make a more wide-ranging speech, focusing on the importance of democracy and the rule of law. Given that you can be locked up in China for so much as criticising the socialist state, going further than most Western leaders in promoting democracy would, I reasoned, more than offset any perceived obsequiousness in our economic dealings.

I didn’t quite stir a revolution. But I did provoke something when I said: ‘The rise in economic freedom in China in recent years has been hugely beneficial to China and to the world. I hope that in time this will lead to a greater political opening.’ The first question from a student after my speech was about what advice I’d give to the Communist Party in China in an age when more countries were having plural politics. An amazing noise went around the room, half admiration and half shock. I gave a measured answer about our countries having two very different systems. But as I looked around at the sea of faces I thought: is this system really going to last? My conclusion was that, in its current form, it couldn’t. After all, surely this was now a consumer society in which people had increasing amounts of choice over their lives. How could the ruling party frustrate that when it came to politics?

While my fundamental view hasn’t altered – change, in some form, will come – multiple visits to China have led me to a more nuanced view. The primacy given by both government and people to economic growth. The fierce sense of pride and exceptionalism. The attention given by the nation’s rulers to emerging trends and problems across the country. All these things mean that China’s path to greater pluralism may be a very long one, with a different destination to our own.

Given that so many other countries were trying to align themselves economically with China, this incident, and the unfortunate poppy set-to, which happened on the same visit, weren’t exactly welcome. A three-day visit to the UK by Li Keqiang, who was heavily tipped to replace Wen Jiabao as premier, gave us a chance to up our game. Li, who received red-carpet treatment, made it clear that some of my comments had not been welcome. But despite that we would make real inroads.

Finally, there is an agenda I really wish I had never started. That was the British bid to host the 2018 World Cup.

Britain had a strong case: the best stadia, the most enthusiastic supporters, club teams that are followed across the world, and a football-mad culture. We had also learned a lot from our successful bid for the 2012 Olympics.

The biggest barrier to bringing the tournament home for the first time since 1966 was the notorious world football governing body, FIFA, and its susceptibility to corruption. The bid also pitched us against Russia, a country with a government quite prepared to do whatever it took to win.

We threw everything into beating Russia – and Belgium and the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain – to host the 2018 Cup. I had the FIFA president, Sepp Blatter, to No. 10. He even got to hold Florence – a privilege reserved for presidents and monarchs, I joked at the time. Looking back, knowing what I know now, it makes me wince.

Then, in December 2010, I spent three days in Zürich, where the bidding process was taking place for both the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. With Prince William and David Beckham by my side, my confidence grew. We had the best bid – and a dream team to bring it home.

The process was rather like speed dating, with an allotted amount of time with each voting nation’s representatives to try to persuade them to back our bid. The three of us pleaded with people from Cyprus to Paraguay. America’s representative, a man called Chuck Blazer, was so enormous that as he got up to leave, his chair went with him.

The corrupt undertones were all there, but, typically British, we gave it our best and got through it with jokes. Vladimir Putin’s approach was classic. He suddenly cancelled his appearance, claiming that the whole competition was riddled with corruption.

The moment of our presentation approached, and my role was to kick it off with a short, off-the-cuff speech. I confessed to Prince William that I was nervous. He told me not to be – and just to imagine Chuck Blazer naked.

The three of us stood up and gave our pitch. We were followed by a video accompanied by Elbow’s ‘One Day Like This’. It was stirring stuff, and we got a strong ovation.

Our confidence grew. Six nations promised that they would vote for us in the first round: South Korea, Trinidad and Tobago, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, USA and England.

How many votes did we end up with? Two.

Russia, whose bid was fraught with problems including racism, won the chance to host the 2018 World Cup. Forty-degree Qatar, hardly a footballing hub, got 2022. Putin didn’t need to come. The fish had been bought and sold before we’d even got to the marketplace.

David Beckham was upset and angry. ‘I don’t mind people lying to me, but not to my prime minister and future king,’ he said. Blatter said we were just ‘bad losers’.

In the years that followed, a criminal investigation into the way the hosts of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups were chosen took place. Nine of the twenty-two members of the FIFA Executive Committee who awarded them have been punished, indicted or died before facing charges, including Chuck Blazer, who admitted fraud, money laundering and taking bribes on the 1998 and 2010 World Cups. For seventeen years Sepp Blatter presided over an organisation riddled with corruption. He has been banned from football for six years, and his plaque removed from FIFA headquarters.

One issue that proved to be more prevalent than I had expected before I became prime minister was corruption. I kept on seeing it for myself: from Omar al-Bashir’s refugee camps in Sudan to Blatter’s boardroom in Zürich. Those same forces that had denied Britain the World Cup – bribery, lack of transparency, collusion, fraud – were depriving people around the world of safer, healthier, wealthier lives.

At international summits we focused on everything – security, poverty, growth, aid, the environment. But we seldom said a word about one of the biggest drivers of these things: corruption. I resolved to spend my time in government – and after it – trying to change that.

14

Afghanistan and the Armed Forces

When I took office there were more than 10,000 British troops in Afghanistan, engaged in a conflict that had lasted nearly a decade. That made me the first prime minister to come to power from a different party when the country was at war since 1951 – the year Churchill replaced Attlee while British troops were fighting in Korea.

I spent more time on Afghanistan – visiting, reading, discussing, deliberating, and yes, worrying – than on any other issue. The burden weighed heavily upon me every single day until the final British combat soldier left Camp Bastion in 2014. I still care deeply about Afghanistan’s future today. And I will always remember the families of the fallen, and those living with life-changing injuries because of their service.

Many leaders have written about what it’s like to send brave men and women into battle. My reflections are about inheriting that responsibility and handling a conflict whose aim had become ambiguous and whose unpopularity was growing.

I supported the decision to send troops to help rebels overturn the Taliban government in 2001. The ‘invasion’ of Afghanistan was justified. The brutal Taliban regime, which controlled 90 per cent of the country, was harbouring al-Qaeda, the perpetrators of 9/11. It was continuing to train jihadists and plot attacks against the West. When asked to expel Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, it had refused. The US had no sensible choice but to act. And we were right to support it. As a young backbencher, on the day after the invasion I said in the House of Commons that our actions were ‘every bit as justified as the fight against Nazism in the 1940s’.

By 2005, when I became Conservative leader, there was a growing sense that while Iraq might be the ‘wrong war’, as it had little to do with tackling Islamist extremism and might in fact be encouraging it, Afghanistan was the ‘right war’. We were at least trying to deal with one of the principal sources of the problem, and responding to a direct attack.

Come 2010, my message matched what I had said in the House of Commons almost a decade before. Our troops were combatting terrorism, with the Taliban beaten back. They were defending our security, with plots no longer coming directly out of Afghanistan (although there was still more to be done to address the threat from ungoverned parts of neighbouring Pakistan).

Sadly, like whack-a-mole, the scourge of Islamist extremism and its promotion of terror would rear its head elsewhere. Every broken or fragile state was a potential incubator, and the Afghanistan–Pakistan border was the most virulent region of all. But in tackling it there, we were tackling the motherlode.

In any case, it is true to say that Britain is safer as a result of the hard work and bloody sacrifice of our troops in Afghanistan.

That’s why the view of our intelligence experts in 2010 was clear: what we were doing remained justified. The most significant security threat to the United Kingdom remained al-Qaeda. If we left Afghanistan precipitately, it – and its training camps – could return.

But our action came at a grave cost. We were taking casualties almost every day. And, like the vast, sandy plains we were fighting over, the war seemed to have no end in sight.

What helped me now I was PM was that I’d visited Afghanistan more than any other country. I knew the drill: picking up a Hercules turboprop plane or a C17 transport jet in the Gulf to take us to Camp Bastion or the capital, Kabul. Then travelling onwards in the Americans’ Black Hawk helicopters or our own Chinooks, where I would sit upfront in the ‘jump seat’ just behind the pilots; landing to see the small fortified Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) our troops were defending, often against ferocious attack.

I knew the landscape: the way the totally dry desert merged into the lush green Helmand River valley, the beautiful blue-green water fertilising the land; the mud-brick houses that told of a deeply conservative society that hadn’t really changed for decades, even centuries.

I had seen some of the worst trouble spots, visiting the Helmandi town of Sangin in 2008 with William Hague. As we sat being briefed on the roof of the district centre under the fierce sun we could hear the crackle of small-arms fire. A local checkpoint was under attack. There was the quietest rush of air as a stray bullet passed overhead. The commanding officer gently ushered us under cover, muttering about the dangers of sunburn. Wonderfully British.

I had got to know a lot of the personnel, too. Hugh Powell, a top-rate civil servant, had served as the head of the Provincial Reconstruction Team in the capital of Helmand, Lashkar Gah, as well as being the senior Brit coordinating the UK counter-insurgency in the south of the country. One time we had breakfast together wearing our helmets because of an imminent security threat. Another, we tried on the full kit, body armour and radio of a lance corporal, jogging with a rifle around the yard of an FOB in the forty-degree heat.

When I first visited Bastion I climbed the air-traffic control tower and looked over a small camp of tents. Since then it had grown to an area the size of Reading, complete with a runway, a water-bottling plant, a medical facility as sophisticated as any district general hospital – and a KFC. Many of the pilots were from RAF Brize Norton in my constituency, and would talk candidly to me about life at the base. I heard about the problems first hand, from frustration at the lack of contact time with home to the potentially fatal shortage of helicopters and delays in getting new body armour.

Sometimes we would stay in Kandahar, the massive, mostly US, airbase covering the whole of southern Afghanistan. It was home to many of our fighter and helicopter pilots and our remarkable troops. Two miles long and right next to the city that is in some ways the spiritual home of the Taliban, it was subject to the occasional rocket attack and repeated ambushes.

I had also seen what ordinary life was like for Afghan people. I’ll never forget watching children flying kites across the river from where we were staying, or visiting a school funded by the UK’s Department for International Development.

I knew the lingo: a mixture of military-speak and banter. The heat: like a blazing fire that hits you the minute you step off the aircraft, made worse by the altitude that can leave you exhausted. The sand: it got everywhere; you’d come home with it still up your nose. The sounds at night: the constant coming and going of helicopters, the alarms when there was a threat of attack, and the endless sound of the diesel generators.

I even grew used to the tight, corkscrew take-offs and landings designed to evade rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire from the Taliban on the ground. Fortunately, I rarely had to contemplate the threat of a direct attack. My only brief taste of one was when our two helicopters were leaving the relative safety of Camp Bastion for a military outpost in the middle of Helmand. I was seated in the body of the second Chinook, looking out of the back, where the ramp is always slightly ajar, at the mountainous expanse below. Suddenly the helicopter turned back. There was good intelligence that the Taliban knew that someone senior would be coming in by helicopter.

That feeling – of being in the crosshairs of the enemy – is what our troops lived with every day. I don’t know how they did it.

I had a constant reminder of the tragic reality behind the growing death toll when I wrote by hand to bereaved families. So often were we losing men and women at the start of my premiership that I’d have one to write every few days. It was a task I would carry out at the kitchen table in the flat or in my study at Chequers. I would commend the soldier for their bravery and, carefully reading the citations made by their comrades about their service, I would take points from them. I would also use some of my own experience – particularly to parents – about losing a child. I tended to say that while there was nothing anyone could say to lessen the pain and grief, I knew that over time at least some of the clouds would part, and some of the happier memories from the past would come through. I would try to explain what we were doing in Afghanistan. It was a country far away, but the struggle against Islamist extremism and terror was something that affected us back at home.

It was this, instead of any overarching ideology, which would inform the decisions I would take. My approach was hard-headed and pragmatic. I tried to make the choices that would best guarantee the stability of Afghanistan, the security of our country and the safety of our troops.

As prime minister for less than a third of that thirteen-year war, I took some of its defining steps. There were three key things that I thought necessitated them.

The first was that the overall goal of our intervention had veered too much towards nation-building – ‘creating a Denmark in the desert’, as some put it – whereas we should be aiming for Pakistan-lite. We needed realism. A failing state would be better than a failed state. As I put it during that first visit to Afghanistan as prime minister: ‘We are not here to build the perfect society, we are here to stop the re-establishment of training camps.’

The second thing we needed was time to build up a sufficient Afghan National Security Force and government so they could handle the civil war without our help. (In fact, the size of the ANSF – army plus police – doubled between 2009 and 2012, making it strong enough to manage the fighting largely without NATO from 2015.)

The third thing was the need for a deadline. I could see the case against this. The Taliban could just wait for us to leave. But the counter-arguments appeared more compelling. Our military high command seemed to have settled on the idea of being in Afghanistan almost indefinitely. The Afghans had become far too reliant on our presence. And as we lost troops, public consent was dwindling. A date would force everyone’s hand to reach a satisfactory and stable position before support at home disappeared altogether.

One of the early defining steps I took was recommitting Britain to the war, by making sure Afghanistan was our number-one security priority. On my first full day in Downing Street, I convened the new NSC. We were a country at war, I told the assembled ministers, and this would be our war cabinet. We wouldn’t just be setting the strategy and leaving the heads of the army, navy and air force to fill in the gaps. We would seek to shape events more directly and take urgent action. We would have monthly published reports on progress and quarterly statements – by a cabinet minister – to Parliament. This would not become a forgotten war. We started with a boost for the troops, doubling the operational allowance they were paid while on tour.

I was clear where action was needed most urgently: Sangin. President Obama had rightly ordered a ‘surge’ in the number of US forces in 2009, increasing them from 30,000 to 90,000. Britain meanwhile had committed to an increase from 9,000 to 9,500 troops in Helmand, where we had taken over security in 2006.

I didn’t object to the increase; I objected to how thinly spread we would end up being in comparison to the Americans. The advice was that our numbers would be sufficient. But I commissioned some figures that revealed that while the US would now have up to twenty-five soldiers per thousand members of the Afghan population, we would have just sixteen.

Sangin demonstrated this lopsided deployment. This small town is where we sustained nearly a quarter of all our losses during the conflict. I knew that we had to match America’s densities of troops. But we had carried more than our share of the burden – we made up only a tenth of the fighting force in Afghanistan, but suffered a third of the casualties – so the option of increasing UK troop numbers seemed wrong. Taken together, this meant getting out of Sangin. I overruled the advice and secured agreement for the withdrawal.

The US Marine commander who took overall responsibility for Helmand was a splendid man called Brigadier General Larry Nicholson. As if marching straight out of Central Casting, he crushed the bones of my right hand with his handshake and declared that he had come straight from Fallujah – one of the toughest battles in Iraq – and was ready to take the fight to the Taliban. He proceeded to use a dried opium-poppy stick to point at the map on the wall and run through his plans. He recognised that our decision was a reasonable one, and US forces took over what remained one of the toughest jobs in the country.

Partly because of this redeployment, our casualty numbers fell dramatically. In 2010, 103 British troops were killed. In 2011 and 2012, that fell to forty-six and forty-four respectively. For the final three years we were in Afghanistan, the British death toll dropped to single figures each year.

The move also improved our performance in the rest of Helmand. But action wasn’t just needed in adjusting the force; it was needed on the state of our equipment, which had become something approaching a national scandal. I knew from my previous visits the key improvements needed: more helicopters, faster casualty evacuation, more rapid improvements in body armour. And, above all, better-protected vehicles.

The Taliban’s weapon of choice was the improvised explosive device (IED), which was becoming ever more sophisticated. Every time we increased the armour on our vehicles, they would find a new way of burying more explosives. Every time we developed a metal detector with more sensitive scanners, they would find a way of using fewer metallic components. IEDs became the primary instrument for killing and maiming not just our troops, but local people, including children. Our forces’ ageing Snatch Land Rovers were no match for these roadside bombs. To be fair to my predecessor, plans were in place for improvements, but I did everything I could to add to them and speed up their delivery.

The action we took in the NSC – including expanding a new system that bypassed bureaucracy and delivered equipment more quickly – aimed to give our forces what they needed. After a couple of years, no one raised concerns with me about poor vehicles or a shortage of helicopters. Some even said to me that in some regards our equipment was superior to that used by US troops.

The biggest decision, though, would be about our long-term involvement in Afghanistan. After nine years of the conflict – and four bloody years in Helmand – people were rightly asking: when will our work be completed? And when will our troops come home?

To answer those questions, we needed to be far more precise about exactly what it was we were trying to achieve. And while some elements of that nation-building would be important – getting children into school, improving healthcare, constructing infrastructure – we had to show common sense and keep a grip on what was possible.

Early on, I called a seminar in Chequers, packed with experts from the worlds of military, academia, aid and policy. There was a debate between ‘The war can’t be won’ on one side and ‘Stick with the mission’ on the other. But the seminar did point me towards a third option: concentrate more on training the Afghan army and police as the route for our exit. This was a middle way. Don’t leave immediately, job undone. Don’t stay indefinitely, a war without end. Set some sort of deadline.

So that was my decision: to withdraw from Afghanistan, but only after giving the military enough time to prepare and to hand over to the Afghan forces. I chose the end of 2014, because I thought that left us enough time to do the work we needed in order to prepare.

I set out the plan at the G8 in Muskoka. No cabinet meetings, no pre-briefings, no public rows between the military and civilians – just private agreement with George, William and Nick, and a statement to the press. To give a strong lead to our troops and change the tone, I knew it was one of the things that needed to be done quickly.

But I didn’t want us to leave and that be that. We were committed to financial contributions, both in terms of aid for economic development and funding for the Afghan security forces. Together with Obama, I would lead the charge at subsequent NATO summits – in Lisbon, Chicago, Cardiff and then finally Warsaw in July 2016 – to help secure similar commitments from other countries.

I knew my history. The Afghan government didn’t collapse in the 1990s when the Russians left; it collapsed when they withdrew funding for the military. The other way we could help make Afghanistan more stable beyond our military input would be by helping to foster a political agreement that brought at least some of the Taliban into the political settlement.

After all, the big mistake had happened at the beginning, back in 2001, when the West insisted on a settlement that was free of Taliban involvement – whereas my view is that true peace is only possible if it includes at least elements of the Taliban.

In many ways, of course, war suited both sides. The Afghan president Hamid Karzai and his allies could use war to favour their own tribes. The Taliban could use that fact to portray the government as tribalist and anti-Islamic. Plus, talking to the Taliban wasn’t exactly easy. (One fact illustrates this perfectly. We were being told repeatedly – right up to 2015 – that their willingness to cooperate depended on the permission of Mullah Omar, whereas we now know that Omar died in 2013.)

In the end it would have to be Afghan talking to Afghan, but we hoped that – with our strong relationship with Pakistan – we might be able to help get the ball rolling.

There was, however, a chronic lack of mutual trust between the two governments. The Pakistanis thought that the Afghans were too close to their rival, India. The Afghans thought that Pakistan was harbouring the Taliban, hedging its bets by allowing terrorists to weaken its neighbour, and still had designs on redrawing the border to unite all Pashtuns inside Pakistan.

I reasoned that one of the best ways to make progress would be to try to strengthen the personal relationships between the leaders and – where possible – include their military and intelligence chiefs in their discussions.

In opposition I had got to know Karzai quite well, and he was the first foreign leader I received at Chequers, shortly after taking office. He was charming and wily, and claimed to have a real affection for Britain. He believed that, because of our history, we had a greater understanding of the situation in Afghanistan than did the United States.

Part of my job, as I saw it, was to help focus him on making his government work and ensuring that the country was run properly, for example appointing governors, passing basic laws and dealing with rampant corruption. Karzai himself had been dogged by corruption claims in both the 2004 and 2009 elections: Hugh Powell had visited a polling station in Helmand with a turnout of three hundred which had reported 15,000 votes for Karzai.

One of the reasons some Afghans turned to the Taliban was because they seemed better at dispensing justice and ensuring order than the legitimate authorities. And corruption was so ingrained in the country’s culture that Karzai could never quite accept that we were there because we genuinely believed in the mission as part of an international coalition. In January 2012 I remember him asking me what was it – minerals? mining rights? – that we really wanted from Afghanistan.

He could be hard work. He would criticise the activities of British and American troops, even though they were making extraordinary sacrifices and were essential for his regime’s survival. And he found it too easy to play the nationalist card and blame all his problems on Pakistan.

But there was enough there for me to be able to use the relationship I had built up, and the fact that the Pakistanis trusted us more than the Americans, to help build the trust between Afghans and Pakistanis.

The high-water mark of my efforts came at the Chequers summit in 2013 when Karzai and President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan spent two days in talks. They slept in adjoining bedrooms, each with a guard outside sitting ramrod-straight and wide awake in his chair. I came downstairs the next morning to find the two presidents joking about which of them had been snoring the loudest.

We agreed a series of small steps to build confidence: publicly praising each other’s leadership; agreeing visits to each other’s countries; and – crucially – recognising that the security of one was the security of the other.

We aimed to move on to talk about border security and the importance of dealing with terrorist safe havens on both sides of the Durand Line (the controversial border between the two countries). We wanted to get some of their military and intelligence personnel to sit together and work together – even suggesting joint patrols. A further series of coordinated steps would then follow to help deliver a peace process: the release from Pakistani custody of potential Taliban peacemakers so they could carry out talks, hints that Afghanistan would consider constitutional reforms, and so on.

But Karzai couldn’t bring himself to trust Pakistan. Zardari was often willing, but as we know, it is really the military that makes the key decisions.

The Americans were supportive and appreciative of our efforts. They took up the cudgels for contacts with the Taliban, but ultimately the distance between the two sides, and their half-heartedness about a compromise, was too great to make meaningful progress.

This is the agenda I most wish had come off. But I am convinced that it remains crucial today, and that it can be done.

So, for all the blood spilt and treasure spent, was Britain’s involvement in the Afghan war worth it? Historians say it’s too early to say. It is incredibly depressing whenever the country slips back. Sangin is back in Taliban hands. Their flag flies over Musa Qala. Opium fields still stretch across Helmand. These are painful things to write.

But at the same time, in 2014 Afghanistan saw its first peaceful, democratic transfer of power, to the anti-corruption academic Ashraf Ghani. It now has its own police force and national army. And more than that. By 2011, 85 per cent of the country had access to basic med-ical care, compared to 9 per cent under the Taliban. Seven million more children were in school compared to one million in 2001. A third of them were girls. Not a single girl went to school in the Taliban years. As long as we go on funding the Afghan army and police (and the international community remains committed to this), the Taliban is unlikely to win the whole country, and terrorists cannot get the same foothold they had before.

The agenda is still the same. The Afghan government needs to deliver for all its people. It needs to find a way of bringing at least some elements of the Taliban into the legitimate political sphere. It will only do this if it forges a trusting partnership with Pakistan, where both accept that allowing safe havens on either side of the border for terrorists will end up destroying them both.

The difference now is that our troops are not exposed to the daily risk they once were. Arguably, it will be easier now for some sort of deal to be done because the provocative presence of foreign troops on Afghan soil is so much less.

The prevailing views are that this war was either doomed to fail or that it should have been pushed harder. I believe there is a third category, where you do the right thing and keep doing it, but it takes a very, very long time before you achieve stable and lasting success.

Samuel Beckett said, ‘Fail again. Fail better.’ Foreign troops could only ever provide a breathing space for a legitimate Afghan government to get its act together and deal with the fundamental issues.

Delivering security and some semblance of uncorrupt administration; getting the relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan right; achieving a political settlement which demonstrates that all Afghans are welcome. I believe all these things are achievable. The story isn’t over.

Afghanistan brought me into close contact with the UK’s military chiefs. While there were robust arguments and discussions, they were generally good-natured. However, my relationship with them would come under greater strain when we had to discuss another intractable challenge: how to make sense of the UK’s defence budget in an age of austerity.

I had read widely about the history of military top brass interacting with those at the top table of government – particularly the blazing rows between Churchill and General Alan Brooke in the rooms I was now so familiar with in Downing Street. I have huge respect for the chiefs of staff who head up the army, navy, air force and the armed forces as a whole. But PMs need to build up their own expertise. Like all my predecessors since James Callaghan, I didn’t have a military background, so I decided to hire a senior military adviser to be in my private office.

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