Читать книгу Remaking One Nation - Nick Timothy - Страница 12

I had first raised the question of an early election during the leadership campaign. Theresa was adamantly opposed: she wanted to use her launch speech to rule out any election before 2020. I thought that was a promise she might come to regret, because of the way Brexit divisions would inevitably cut across the parties in Parliament. Nonetheless, she made the promise, and I chose not to raise the subject again for several months.

But as time went by, the case for an election built. There was little sign of Parliament accepting the referendum result. Every vote in the Commons felt like a dangerous challenge, and we survived only through some deft tactics and the smart whipping operation led by Gavin Williamson. In February 2017, the Conservatives won Copeland, an area represented by Labour for more than eighty years, in a byelection.¹⁴ Afterwards, several Cabinet ministers pushed for an early election. And the polls continued to look good. In April 2017, we had a poll lead over Labour of 21 percentage points.¹⁵

The coalition of support for an early election grew. Inside Number Ten, JoJo Penn and Chris Wilkins joined Fiona and me in arguing we needed to go back to the country. After Copeland, Stephen Gilbert and senior staff from CCHQ joined the chorus. In March, William Hague used his Daily Telegraph column to say an election would ‘strengthen the Government’s hand at home and abroad’.¹⁶ And the pressure was not only political. Jeremy Heywood told Theresa he thought she needed a mandate and a majority to get Brexit done.

Theresa’s attitude changed quite abruptly on 29 March. On that day, she sent her letter giving formal notification to the Council of Ministers of Britain’s intention to withdraw from the EU. When she made her statement in Parliament, the mood in the Commons was uneasy. She was interrupted repeatedly, and her statement prompted jeers and sarcastic laughter from the opposition benches. She did not decide to call an early election immediately after that statement, but I could tell her judgement changed that day. I sensed she was starting to believe an election was unavoidable.

Still, she took her time to decide. Ideally, the general election would have been held on 4 May, the same day as the local and mayoral elections, but the deadline to bring about an election that day came and went. Theresa finally announced her decision on 18 April. By that time, thanks to the timetable set out by the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act and the need to conclude parliamentary business, polling day could be no earlier than 8 June. The campaign was to last seven and a half weeks. We had sacrificed the advantage of surprise and made the first of many mistakes.

It is important to remember that at this point Theresa’s leadership was still incredibly popular in the country. The political strategy we had established – framed in her original Downing Street speech and fleshed out at the party conference – was working well. She was determined to lead Britain out of the European Union, but she was just as determined to bring about lasting change to social and economic policy. She consciously put herself at the service of working- and middle-class families, and talked much more about using the power of government to change lives for the better. This was the strategy that had created her 21-point poll lead.

Yet none of us on the Downing Street staff, nor even among the senior CCHQ staff, had ever run a national election campaign. We had to bring in external support. So Stephen Gilbert returned to the fray, and so did Lynton Crosby, who had run the Tory election campaigns of 2005 and 2015. With Crosby came his business partner, Mark Textor, and the former Obama campaign adviser, Jim Messina.

Lynton was adamant we needed a completely different approach for an election campaign. Talking about workers’ rights or public services, for example, would only increase the salience of issues that make people more likely to vote Labour. Just talking about policy was a bad thing, because policies are complicated. They prompt attacks from critics and opponents, and they muddy the message. It is much better, he said, to keep finding new devices to keep repeating the core message. And the opinion research, he said, showed swing voters did not want change. They wanted stability and continuity. Out went Theresa the changemaker, and in came the soundbite that would soon be mocked mercilessly: ‘strong and stable government’. And so our answer to everything became strong and stable, strong and stable, strong and stable.

Before the campaign began, we had envisaged a campaigning style that would reflect Theresa’s more traditional, unspun manner. We talked about holding daily press conferences, like in the elections of old, in which we would announce a new policy, or highlight a particular issue, or scrutinize our opponents. We expected to use different ministers, as well as Theresa, to front up each event. But this too was rejected. Press conferences would invite the media to cause all sorts of trouble, and we would lose control of the message. And the polling showed that while Theresa was tremendously popular, other ministers were not, and the Conservative brand itself was still badly tainted. And so we ended up with Theresa, introverted and shy, leading a campaign asking people not to vote for the Conservatives but ‘Theresa May’s team’.

We could have chosen to resist these changes. We were powerful enough to do so. But we didn’t. Ironically, after being criticized as ‘control freaks’ in Number Ten, Fiona and I handed over control of the campaign to Lynton and the consultants. We knew we had never run a national campaign, and we put our trust in the people who had. Our roles would be subordinate to the consultants. Fiona took responsibility for communications. I took on policy. JoJo took on a sort of coordinating function. Chris, having been strategy director in Number Ten, was left kicking his heels as the new campaign strategists took over.

And the problems kept coming. Theresa was warm and natural when she met voters in person, on high streets, in markets and at country shows. But she was wooden on the stump and robotic in broadcast interviews. She seemed utterly terrified before her set-piece interviews and debates. And as the campaign went on, she grew increasingly tired and irritable. Interviews with print journalists were defensive and painful to watch.

The senior staff muttered and moaned about biased broadcast coverage. It is probably true that with the country expecting a Tory landslide, our plans were subjected to more scrutiny than Labour’s. But we were not generating the stories to earn good broadcast coverage. Television and radio need a proposition to argue about: a policy that can be promoted by one side and criticized by another. But all we were offering was the same old shots of Theresa saying the same things at the same old rallies of activists. They say you campaign in poetry and govern in prose, but we were campaigning in sullen, monosyllabic grunts.

And we became the victims of what Harold Macmillan called, ‘events, dear boy’. On 12 May, the NHS was struck by a massive cyber-attack, which dominated the news for days. And then, on 22 May, tragedy struck. Salman Ramadan Abedi, a suicide bomber originally from Libya, blew himself up at an Ariana Grande concert at the Manchester Arena. Twenty-two innocent victims were killed and hundreds, most of whom were children, were injured. On 3 June another attack came. Three Islamist terrorists rammed a van into pedestrians on London Bridge before stabbing people at random in bars and pubs in Borough Market. They killed eight people and injured forty-eight others. These were the second and third attacks on Britain in only three months, as they followed an earlier Islamist atrocity on Westminster Bridge, which had occurred in March.

Our response was flat-footed. Having spent years in the Home Office and Downing Street, we were used to responding to terrible crimes and terror plots. But yet again there was a split between the Downing Street team and the campaign consultants. The Australians wanted Theresa to take to Twitter and denounce what they called Islamic terror. We resisted kneejerk reactions on social media and took ourselves off to Cobra, the government emergency committee. By the time Theresa made her statements to the nation from behind the Downing Street lectern, with both Manchester and London Bridge, Labour’s narratives were taking hold. Despite Jeremy Corbyn’s long track record of appeasement and even support for terrorists, including Islamist terror groups, his claim that police cuts were to blame caught on. By the time Theresa adopted a tougher line after the second attack, we hadn’t just lost control of the narrative, she appeared to have lost control of events. Things looked very far from strong and stable.

Then came the manifesto. I had spent most of the campaign to date working on the policies we would put to the country, along with Ben Gummer and the Downing Street policy team. The product, presented to the country on 18 May, was in many respects the next iteration of the vision Theresa had set out in her original Downing Street speech.

‘Conservatism is not and never has been the philosophy described by caricaturists’, the manifesto declared. ‘We do not believe in untrammelled free markets. We reject the cult of selfish individualism. We abhor social division, injustice, unfairness and inequality. We see rigid dogma and ideology not just as needless but dangerous.’ In government, the Conservatives would ‘reject the ideological templates provided by the socialist left and the libertarian right and instead embrace the … good that government can do’.¹⁷

We sought to reconcile the conflicting judgements among the senior campaign team. Lynton hated making policy announcements, and accepted manifestos only as a grim necessity. And he maintained that the country wanted continuity, not change. But Theresa wanted an ambitious document that would give her a mandate to undertake reforms she believed were necessary. We struck on a way to emphasize both continuity and change, by making the manifesto about meeting the great long-term challenges facing the country. Mark Textor confirmed this was consistent with his understanding of voters’ concerns, and so we settled on the economy, Britain’s place in the world, social fairness, intergenerational fairness and the effects of new technologies.

In some respects, the policies lived up to the shift in values Theresa had promised in her early speeches and in the manifesto’s opening chapter. We promised a raft of new workers’ rights and changes to corporate governance laws, an industrial strategy and more research and development spending, and reduced energy prices for businesses and households. We promised a new regional development fund, reformed international aid spending, controlled immigration, and a clean Brexit. We wanted a technical education revolution, with new qualifications, institutes of technology and a promise to review tertiary education funding. We said we would reverse the bureaucratic elements of the NHS internal market and train more doctors. We promised domestic violence legislation, better mental health care, and action against various injustices. We pledged new housing, including a new generation of council houses, and more childcare support. We planned new protections for children online, a tougher approach to cyber security, and a legal framework to help Britain become a world leader in digital technologies.

There were plenty of positive stories to tell, but on the whole we did not tell them. Despite the constant worries of the consultants that we might not persuade traditional Labour voters that they could trust the Tories under Theresa’s leadership, they did not want to show our values through policy. When Fiona briefed a story about new workers’ rights, Lynton hit the roof. They wanted to reassure Labour waverers, but were never prepared to say why or how it was safe or appealing to vote for us.

The earlier failure to change fiscal policy also damaged us. In the policy team, we would have loved to announce the end of austerity. We could have gone further in increasing investment in the regional economy. We could have promised proper pay rises for public sector workers. We could have pledged increases in per pupil school spending. Instead, we promised to go on with austerity, and school funding in particular was an issue that hurt us across the country. Our intention to change pensioner benefits – in particular to means-test the winter fuel allowance – was further tough medicine, although, I would argue, still necessary regardless of the fiscal framework.

The biggest problem, however, was the manifesto’s social care policy. Since 2010, as the Government had cut local authority budgets, councils had cut back on social care services. This meant increasing numbers of old people were living in confusion, pain and squalor, and the NHS was suffering as hospitals could not discharge older patients in need of social care that could not be provided. The problem was becoming more acute as the number of older citizens grew. And the consequences were – and remain – ruinous for many families. For residential care, the costs can deplete the patient’s assets – including the value of their home – down to a floor of £23,250 and sometimes even less. Many thousands of people are forced to sell the family home to fund their care.

Our proposals were to include the value of the family home in the means test for domiciliary care – home visits and so on – as well as residential care. This would raise funds while also allowing decisions about care to be made according to the needs of the patient. But we would protect family assets by increasing the floor amount that would be protected from £23,250 to £100,000. And, of course, recovery of the costs from the value of the family home would be deferred until the end of the patient’s lifetime. Nobody would have to sell their home during their own lifetimes to pay for their care.

At first the manifesto landed well. ‘Mainstream May reaches out to Labour heartlands’, said The Times front page.¹⁸ ‘May’s manifesto for the mainstream’, declared The Daily Telegraph.¹⁹ Commentators described a ‘new Toryism’ and praised even its ‘brave and necessary social care plan’.²⁰

But quickly it all began to unravel. On the day the manifesto launched, a blogger on The Spectator website called the social care policy a ‘dementia tax’.²¹ Labour seized their opportunity, and Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell – Marxists both – took to the airwaves to defend inherited wealth. In the confusion, members of the CCHQ press team told journalists that the policy was to cap care costs at a maximum of £100,000. In fact, it was to create a floor of £100,000 below which people should not pay for their care costs. MPs and candidates struggled to explain the policy on the doorstep. Theresa herself failed to articulate it well: asked by the media how many people would have to sell their homes to pay for their care, she should have said, ‘unlike now, nobody’. But she talked around the subject and failed to answer the question directly.

After failing to fight back, or even to explain the policy properly, we all accepted we needed to execute a U-turn. Just a few days after the manifesto was launched, Theresa confirmed at a press conference that a ceiling on costs would be added to the floor proposed in the manifesto. It was a clear change, and it was obvious that we needed to be up front about that. But under pressure from journalists, Theresa’s patience – and pride – snapped. ‘Nothing has changed!’ she insisted, denying she was U-turning even as she was announcing the change in policy.²²

What little credibility the ‘strong and stable’ mantra had left was now gone for good. We had triggered a snap election that lasted for weeks and weeks. We made the campaign all about a personality who hated the exposure. We had a Chancellor who the consultants insisted – correctly, in my view – must be hidden from the cameras. We ducked the leadership debates. We responded badly to the terror attacks. We made unforced errors, like Theresa’s promise to hold a vote on overturning the ban on fox hunting. We eschewed policy announcements that might have conveyed positive and reassuring values. We screwed up the manifesto and its handling afterwards. We were talking continuity when much of the country wanted change. The campaign limped on towards 8 June.