The Gatekeeper

‘He was the future once,’ said a cocky David to Blair during their first PMQs exchange, to roars from the Tory benches. When Blair left the Commons for the last time and the Labour benches got to their feet, so too did David and George, gathering the rest behind them. Then Brown – the ‘clunking fist’ as Blair described him – arrived in No. 10 in 2007, and the polls surged to Labour.

Despite the hesitancy of some on the more traditional wing of the party, the Conservatives had been starting to look to be electable again under David’s leadership. But in light of Brown’s recent success in the polls, the chorus of discontent from parts of our own party is growing louder.

However, Brown lacks a mandate of his own from the electorate, and it makes sense for him to go to the country quickly while he looks strong and new. We fully expect an election announcement any minute.

In addition to our woes in light of the appeal of fresh-and-serious Brown (we still cannot believe this), our own party is in a bad mood with us. When David asked them to ‘Come with me’ to change first the party and then the country, he really meant it. But some have found the realities harder to bear. We are focused on social responsibility: fixing our ‘broken society’ and ‘hugging hoodies’ (as the press put it; David never actually says this). We also advocate doing our bit for the world’s poor and set about trying to get more women into Tory seats. None of these are traditional party issues, to put it mildly.

As we move the party towards the centre, it is not surprising that we annoy the ‘core’. Their aggravation grows with the daily drip, drip, drip of criticism from some of the Tory press. We’re still recovering from a row about grammar schools in May 2007, which brought things to boiling point. Since then, there have been demands to add more mentions of ‘tax cuts’ and ‘Europe’ to David’s repertoire.

We have continued to try to be fresh and modern, not just in what we have to say but in how we say it. At town hall meetings up and down the country, David likes to surprise people by answering their questions directly. We call these ‘Cameron Directs’. We video David and post them online. We call these ‘webCameron’. We have set up chances for David to work as a teacher in Hull and live with a Muslim family in Balsall Heath, Birmingham, a genuine effort to engage with people’s lives outside the SW1 bubble.

David is also the first leader of a major political party to embrace ‘green’ issues. He launches our local government campaign with the slogan ‘Vote Blue, Go Green’, and our first foreign trip was not to Washington but to the Arctic, to highlight climate change. It’s brave – and it’s brilliant politically, as it’s helping to remould the party, which has become stuck in a certain mindset, including with regards to the environment. It has been a conscious rebranding exercise in which Steve Hilton has played a crucial part.

Years later, Tom Bradby, then political editor of ITV News, tells me over lunch that he feels responsible for David’s political success on two accounts. One, because he called his speech at Blackpool in 2005. Tom was clear: David Davis flopped and David Cameron blew them away. Two, because he never reported what a ‘total dick’ David looked when he fell off his dog sled on our Arctic trip. We have been friends ever since.

Yet despite all our new ideas and thinking, the truth is that in opposition you only have the promise of change. You have no country to run, no real power. At most you have the power to influence. You are only as good as your last sound bite, at the mercy of events you largely have no control of, working against a machine of government that is much bigger and stronger than you. You have to be agile and make the most of opportunities as they arise. Government doesn’t like working on weekends, so you can make a speech on Saturday, and it will take them a week to agree a policy.

Our greatest challenge has been trying to keep momentum going, keeping the feeling alive that David encapsulates the potential for realising long-awaited change. We operate as a small, tightly knit group on permanent standby, 24/7. We must be able to react to a moving situation in real time.

So, it has been a busy time for all of us, but especially for David. For most of the pressure falls on the leader in opposition, because they are the only figure the public really knows. David has grown into the role. He is more focused, more assured, and more professional, and he looks more polished. And all this despite the fact that he is now a father of three, with the arrival of his second son on Valentine’s Day 2006.

‘You cannot call your child Elwen,’ says his bossy press secretary, Gabby Bertin. The boy is duly named Arthur, a good English name. But Arthur is quickly discarded at home and for evermore, in favour of Elwen.

Now that my own children are at school, working full-time seems more achievable. Even so, Project Cameron is less a job and more total immersion. Each of us is able to manage our family lives because David is careful to make time for his, but we are always on call. Always working, from the playground or the park. Can we try to keep the mewling and puking down, David asks, as we grapple with our young children on evening and weekend calls.

IN SUMMER 2007, WE have planned a trip to Rwanda and Pakistan. The African leg is to visit a new social project that is the brainchild of Shadow International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell. But then the rain starts to come down in buckets and the UK is covered in floods. Witney, David’s constituency, is hit especially badly. We argue amongst ourselves about whether or not David should go ahead with the trip. There is a team call to make a final decision over the weekend. I am in Devon perched on a sea wall, surrounded by water, so naturally I lean towards staying (though I am not scheduled to join them on this occasion). Others, like George Eustice, think pulling out looks panicky. We plough ahead with the trip. The result is disastrous: classic ‘leader abroad while Blighty sinks’ stuff. Then there is a power cut as David addresses the Rwandan parliament, which just about sums it all up.

George Eustice rings me regularly from the trip. ‘Things aren’t so bad,’ he says cheerily.

‘Well don’t be fooled,’ I say. ‘It’s a complete disaster back here.’

This begins a tradition, which stays with us throughout our time, of the ‘away team’ being out of sync with the ‘home team’ during foreign trips. The ‘away team’, utterly satisfied by their diet of red carpets and banquets, seems oblivious to the press coverage and always thinks the trip is going swimmingly. The ‘home team’ – which is normally me, as I try to avoid being away from my children too often – is surrounded by Daily Mail headlines that don’t make for happy reading. On the countless occasions, I try to explain this to David he says, ‘Don’t read the bloody Mail.’

The floods seem to symbolise a summer of falling polls and fading prospects. So, faced with mounting pressure from our own party and the prospect of an early election being called by a seemingly confident Brown, we start to prepare a lifesaving party conference and manifesto. Just in case.

Over the years, we will finesse our approach to party conference, building it around a strong, clear message and trying to deliver ten good announcements that fit with our big-picture narrative. It is a simple strategy: keep the predators from writing about things we don’t want them to, by giving them lots of things to write about that we do.

We need some nice, softer stories for this weekend’s interviews. A hospital visit for the Saturday. Something strong for The Andrew Marr Show.

Monday is George’s day, and he wants at least one story to brief into the morning papers as well as one for the conference hall. Tuesday is our weakest day, when things can blow off course. (In later years, it will become Boris day, and we will never have a clue what he is going to say, though we are pretty sure it will overshadow everything else.) Wednesday is David’s big speech.

We spend the week before conference in a manic series of policy meetings and speech prep while standing by on ‘election alert’. We reach Friday without Brown having called an election, to sighs of relief all around the office. We have a strong programme of policy announcements and a media plan ready to roll out. We are as ready as we are ever going to be.

Most secret of all is George’s plan to announce the abolition of inheritance tax for homes worth less than £1 million. We think this is the right thing to do, and it is also about time to throw a bit of red meat at our unhappy supporters who are tired of their menu of soya beans. This new policy is known only to David’s and George’s teams, and we trust each other completely.

Then I look up to see George’s chief of staff, Matt Hancock, approaching my desk. He has bad news: the entire conference policy package, which was due to be sent to him, has in fact been emailed by mistake to Mike Hancock, the Liberal Democrat MP whose email address is HancockM rather than Matt’s HancockMJ.

‘Fuck,’ says Andy Coulson, who has recently joined the team as the new head of communications and must now be wondering what he’s got himself into. It is what we are all thinking. We break the news to David. Over the years I learn that he always takes very bad and very good news in exactly the same way: with a calm acceptance of fate. There is a long discussion about whether we should phone this guy called Mike Hancock and beg him to be merciful. Some think a call might simply alert him to the email. We decide to leave it. We will know soon enough. After a week of waiting for an election to be called, we are now anxiously expecting the Lib Dems to reveal all our policies on the eve of the conference. We may as well pack up and go home. Which is precisely what we do. There is nothing to do but wait and hope.

By the time we arrive in Blackpool we are all nervous wrecks, watching the television anxiously. We discuss whether to bring forward any of the announcements, but decide against. It is heads down, let’s get on with the plan.

By Sunday night it’s clear there is a god – he is called Mike Hancock! – who clearly does not check his emails on a Friday afternoon. At least not on this occasion.

The week progresses as well as can be. I stand at the back of the hall with Ed to listen to George make his big announcement on inheritance tax. No one is expecting it, and there is a roar of approval from the audience. He looks so surprised and pleased with himself, we are worried he is going to burst out laughing. David joins him on the stage and pats him on the back. A gesture of pride in his friend and political ally, and also of relief. Something is going to plan.

After he won the leadership, many had urged David to move George and make way for a more experienced Shadow Chancellor, someone who might complement David’s own youth. But he did not. Instead, when the pressure mounted, he chose to appoint Ken Clarke as Shadow Business Secretary to add a bit of grey hair to the economy team. Right from the start, David embraced George as his political partner and equal.

As we approach the end of conference week, there is a growing excitement around David’s speech. This year, however, there is a twist. We’d been well into our twentieth draft when Steve had taken David aside and persuaded him he must make the speech from memory, his argument being that this was one of those moments when you need to stun the audience, and an ordinary scripted speech would not cut through. It started as their secret – David and Steve’s. Steve loves to do things secretly, which is ironic for someone who is so keen on transparency.

‘God, this is high-risk,’ said Ed, nervously, when we found out. ‘Just don’t mess up,’ George added, helpfully. Andy remained silent, probably wondering once more why he had joined this mad house.

At the Imperial, I watch David pace up and down his suite while he tries to memorise pages and pages of text.

Then Andy has a sort of ‘surrogate’ meltdown about Samantha’s outfit for the next day (he is actually anxious about David delivering his speech from memory). She is not yet in the habit of finding a ‘conference dress’. We show Andy the options, which, in his eyes, fall short. Always with an eye to the photos, he wants bright colours, and Samantha has chosen elegant black. He charges furiously down the hotel corridor and demands to see my wardrobe. I am about five inches shorter than her, but Andy is undeterred. Flicking through my dresses he turns and says: ‘That’s the one.’ And in that horrible moment I realise that he is referring to the dress I am wearing. A favourite, it is black and white with angels and hearts all over it. Apparently, I have no say in the matter. Dress duly handed over, Samantha takes to the stage, looking much better in it than me.

I wait with David in the wings for Liz Sugg to give the go-ahead. Soundtrack: The Killers. David walks onto the stage to deliver what we hope will be another career-altering speech. It is. A full fifty minutes without a single false note. He takes the conference patiently through his aspirations for the country and, hearing him addressing them so directly, his audience responds.

David leaves Blackpool with the goodwill of his party behind him. We are all so exhausted that we can hardly speak. But I am not so tired I cannot make it to my own birthday party, which my husband has arranged with my twin sister. The celebration soon evolves into a ‘We saved the day’ party, as, straight off the train from Blackpool, Team Cameron join us.

But we have not quite saved the day. The mood about us may be more positive, but there is still talk of Brown calling an early election. And everything depends on whether our conference has had any effect on the polls. Walking back from CCHQ with George and Oliver Letwin on the Friday morning after the conference, we hear rumours that the election is going ahead. We are full of despair. Oliver quickens his pace. He has a manifesto to write! It turns out to be a false alarm. A key poll comes through: we have drawn level with Labour.

In the end, Prime Minister Brown, who has waited over a decade for the crown, cannot bear to take the risk of losing it after just a few months. Gordon bottles it and we are back in business. We’ll have another chance to convince the country that we have something to say – that there is another way but Labour.

— 4 —

PLAN A

By the time we face the Tory faithful the following year, it is not our political future we are battling for, but the entire global financial system, which is in meltdown. On 15 September 2008, Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy, and there are rumours that the whole financial system is about to collapse. The US Congress is trying to vote through a rescue package, which it first rejects on 29 September – the eve of our party conference. Things feel extremely precarious. While Brown’s honeymoon period had looked to be well over, now he has been granted a second lease of life, heading off to New York to save the world while we sit in Birmingham looking like an irrelevance.

Ed Llewellyn, Andy Coulson, Matt Hancock, and I join George, David, and Samantha for our customary dinner to take stock on the eve of conference and prep David for his appearance on The Andrew Marr Show. We ponder our predicament over steak (for the boys) and Caesar salad (for Samantha and me) in David’s smart new suite, complete with a baby grand, on the twenty-first floor of the Birmingham Hyatt. After much discussion, we decide that David must address the developing financial situation at the conference the very next day. We abandon work on the main conference speech and get drafting.

David promises to work with the Labour government to ensure financial stability. George jumps on a train to London with Rupert Harrison, his economic advisor, to meet with Alistair Darling and as many other serious people as they can conjure up. The conference itself is subdued while the drama plays out elsewhere. And we are missing our usual brief moment in the sun.

Back in London, Brown continues to dominate the airwaves. ‘This is no time for a novice,’ he says pointedly. In the office, Oliver, who probably should have been a don, is giving us all seminars on economics: how to avoid a recession becoming a depression. I wipe the dust off my old economic textbooks, wishing I had listened more to my university tutors.

In early October, Brown announces a £500 billion bank bailout package, which comes on the heels of the Americans’ own package worth $700 billion. Labour’s answer to everything is to throw money at the problem. Their foot firmly on the gas, they seem unconcerned that the economy is heading off the cliff as our deficit spirals out of control, on its way to being the highest in our peacetime history. In late November, Labour launch a massive fiscal stimulus of £20 billion on top of the bank bailout.

Britain feels like it is hurtling towards economic catastrophe. And we are stuck, increasingly uncomfortable but unable to comment because, just over a year ago, we agreed to match Labour’s spending plans, a move we thought clever at the time, in order to neutralise an argument over public spending, just as Blair had done in 1997, but for opposing reasons. Our aim had been to stop Labour accusing us of being the party of cuts. Blair had been hoping to stop the Tories warning voters off a Labour spending binge.

We discuss our predicament for hours, and then decide. Enough is enough. We cannot go on like this. We oppose the stimulus. Now we have set out our own path. We will not spend our way out of the recession and risk a disastrous spiral of low or no growth, an ever-growing deficit and debt, and high interest rates, like those we’re witnessing in Greece. This is the end of our initial Team Cameron strategy and the start of ‘Plan A’.

We had begun with a political narrative largely focused on our broken society and social responsibility, only to find the landscape had radically changed. We were now grappling with a broken economy, which required a different focus. It would be this shift that created much of the disharmony in the team in the lead-up to the 2010 general election.

Steve Hilton – back from a year living with his wife, Rachel, in Palo Alto, California – is uncomfortable when he learns the economy is now taking centre stage in our messaging. It wasn’t that he had been totally off our radar whilst he was in California; when he first left, we tried to fix strategy meetings so he could Skype in. Most of us hadn’t yet heard of Skype, so the vision of Steve sipping his morning juice while wearing shorts and a T-shirt that appeared on the computer which we placed in the centre of our meeting table was a bit of a shock. We soon decided that Skyping Steve didn’t really work. We are worlds apart – literally.

Now Steve wants us to return to the emphasis on society that so dominated our earlier years. He’s worried that the messaging around the economy is too negative and that we must signal a sense of hope, not just of efficiency and sacrifice. David is sympathetic to his point of view, especially on the tone. But he is an intuitive leader and knows things have changed. We cannot ignore the central issue of the day: people are worried about their future and their jobs. Most of us feel that social policy must now take a back seat. Especially George and Andy.

Over the course of the past year, spent under the ever-expanding shadow of a mounting financial crisis, and with growing prospects for an election, there has been pressure on us to reveal more substance around our economic policies. George is very focused on the dilemma. Saying too little undermines our credibility; saying more is likely to scare the horses. In the end, George decides to lean into the ‘c’ word (‘cuts’), which we are all a little afraid of. And with good reason. After still more discussion, we decide again, and announce a programme of £23 billion of cuts, with the aim of eliminating the deficit over the lifetime of the next Parliament. Then George decides to go even further in his 2009 conference speech, promising immediate (‘in-year’) cuts if we win the 2010 election.

In his suite on the twelfth floor of the Midland Hotel, George gathers his team to comb through his speech line by line, as he always does, carefully placing policy announcements like bunnies into the hat ready for their ‘reveal’ the next day. He likes to entertain, does George, understanding that politics – amongst many things – is a show. But this year it is a deadly serious one.

I check in to see how things are going. They are hard at it – and hungry. The hotel, full to bursting, is late with room service. Poppy Mitchell-Rose, George’s right-hand woman – who is usually calm and smiley, a rock of support – looks anxious. I am due a feast from M&S courtesy of my old university friend Simone Finn, which we intend to eat together in front of Downton Abbey in my room. Always generous of spirit, she arrives with enough food for an entire army – or certainly the Shadow Treasury team. After a few mouthfuls of hummus, we repack the food guiltily and take it next door to share.

After David’s speech, we gather in a room at the back of the conference centre to celebrate and have some lunch. The week has gone as well as we could have hoped for. Both George’s and David’s speeches were well received. But it still all feels a bit risky.

We are now going into an election as the self-confessed ‘party of cuts’, giving Labour the opportunity to accuse us of undermining virtually every programme in government. We feel we need to be straight with the electorate, however. If we win, David will be handed the keys to Downing Street and expected to sort the mess out. Things will be difficult, so we need to have a mandate. We have little inkling just how defining these decisions are to be.

And then there is the wild rush for the train. Everyone is dying to get home. We charge across the station platform clutching our tickets like a rabble of unruly school children – only Steve has lost his. He rushes past the barrier anyway and is stopped by a policeman. Steve explains that he is with our party; he has a ticket but just can’t find it. The policeman won’t let him through. Steve has always had a problem with authority and I can see he is about to lose the plot. When the policeman tries to calm him down by touching him on the arm, Steve explodes. The next thing we know, Steve is being led away in handcuffs. Andy volunteers to go with him to help sort things out.

I find David and Samantha on the train. ‘By the way, Steve’s just been arrested,’ I tell them. Not exactly the headline we were looking for.

— 5 —

THE GIANT DUE DATE

All elections ultimately come down to the same questions: ‘Is it time for change?’ (essentially the argument of all challengers) vs. ‘Can you afford to change?’ (the central message of all incumbents). In 2010, we have to sell a message of change. So our first task is to explain, A change to what?

Ever since Brown bottled a general election in 2007, we have been on election footing, which looms like a giant due date. According to parliamentary rules, the last possible date that Brown can hold the general election is 3 June. There is no way out, only the certainty of sleepless nights and the prospect of success or failure lie ahead.

The first rule of planning a campaign is to decide what you are trying to say. What is your central message? This needs to be entrenched in your values. In politics, if you have no values, then you have no roots – you will sway in the wind and ultimately fail.

We know what we are about and, although sometimes we disagree with each other, we are mostly aligned. This is David’s brand of progressive Conservativism – socially liberal, fiscally conservative, tolerant, internationalist.

Strategy is drawn from your values and gives your direction of travel. From it comes your policies – or, in other words, spelling out the precise things you want to do – which are then revealed to the public through a series of announcements.