Читать книгу For the Record - David Cameron, David Cameron - Страница 24

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.