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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

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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

When the hardback edition of this book was published, there was only one issue at the top of the news agenda: Brexit. Britain’s still-unfulfilled decision to leave the European Union dominated conversations. It divided colleagues, friends, even families. It had already demanded the resignation of two successive prime ministers – me, and Theresa May – and it was, though we didn’t yet know it, about to lead to the landslide election of the next, Boris Johnson.

A year on, much has changed. Britain has left the EU, although an agreement on our future relationship with Europe has still not been reached. But that issue, like so many others, has largely been eclipsed by the deadly coronavirus that, tragically, has caused the deaths of thousands and changed everyday life for almost every person on earth.

One country’s withdrawal from a continental bloc and a pandemic engulfing every nation on the planet – the two issues might seem totally unconnected. Yet they do have something in common. They both involve the deep, tangled interdependence and interconnectedness of the modern world; one in which we trade and travel, communicate and collaborate, sharing not just the languages we speak but many of the laws we live by and the institutions that assist our cooperation. Politicians call this ‘globalisation’. And the challenges the phenomenon poses are shared by every politician in every country. That is the true common agenda.

In many ways, this book is the story of one politician in an increasingly globalised world. I had been a Member of Parliament for three months when the planes crashed into the World Trade Center, proving once again that Islamist extremism was not confined to the Islamic world. As leader of the UK Conservative Party, one of my earliests acts was to focus on climate change, the biggest, most global issue of our time. My first term as prime minister was dominated by the aftermath of the financial crash whose impact profoundly affected every developed economy.

The other issues on my desk in Downing Street were global too. They ranged from the Ebola epidemic in Africa and the Arab Spring in the Middle East to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The consequences of the global scourges of the early twenty-first century – terrorism, dictatorship, poverty, corruption – were then visited upon Europe, including Britain, in the form of the biggest migration crisis since the Second World War. Indeed, I established the cross-departmental National Security Council (NSC) for this very reason: foreign policy is domestic policy. You can’t disentangle the two. As I observe on page 533, what happens on the streets of Islamabad plays out on the streets of Bradford. Or, to bring that sentiment up to date, what’s sold in a Chinese animal market can bring the world to a standstill.

I remain a passionate globalist. The process of globalisation has helped to drive extraordinary progress for humankind, including lifting billions of people out of poverty. To be sure, a big, open, engaged world brings problems. But a big-world approach is the only way we can resolve them and continue to deliver prosperity and security for all in this still-young century.

Some might misinterpret this stance as a devotion to some warm notion of a global good over the cold, hard realities of our national interest. So it is important to clarify that one of the biggest reasons I believe in working with other nations is because it is right for our nation. I care about our relationship with other countries precisely because I care above all about our country.

I would take the argument further. As a Conservative, I believe in the nation state. In most cases, nations reflect a sense of identity, born out of a shared history. And because we feel we belong, we find it easier to share, to cooperate, to accept short-term sacrifices for long-term benefits. The nation state works. Global institutions should serve these states, not the other way round.

Of course, the arrival of the pandemic has thrown that outward, pro-globalist outlook into question. Is it still the right approach?

It has also made me read the contents of this book – and, consequently, my time in power – in a different light. So much of my premiership was dedicated to fixing the last global crisis, the 2008 financial crash. Did our remedy leave Britain better or worse prepared for this bigger shock? I went all-out pursuing strong relationships with both India and China. Was that misguided, or even counterproductive? How should we respond to the tide of populism and the demagogic leaders globalisation has brought with it? Will globalism cause the planet’s destruction or be its saviour? And, yes, there are questions about institutions: do we need to radically reform, or in some cases give up on, some of the big multilateral institutions – the United Nations, NATO, the World Health Organization … the European Union?

First, finance. A big theme of this book is the fiscal retrenchment known as austerity that was undertaken by the coalition government. Some have alleged that in the way we dealt with a crisis that pre-dated us we were storing up problems for crises that came after us. I would maintain the opposite is true.

Between 2010 and 2016 we reduced the UK’s perilously high budget deficit from a projected 11 per cent to 3 per cent of GDP (it was more or less eliminated by a Conservative government soon after). People mocked me for setting such store by this metric: the difference between what was coming into the country’s coffers and what was going out. The truth is, as I put it on page 180, ‘nothing matters more than your country having finances strong enough to be able to cope – because you don’t know whether the next crisis is twenty or five years away’. Of course, as we were still running annual deficits, the overall level of debt continued to rise, but it went up by far less than if we had done nothing. This meant that we would have more capacity to act when the next crisis hit. We did fix the roof when the sun was shining.

As it happened, that crisis came ten years later: COVID-19 was the rainy day we had been saving for. Our actions meant that the next but one administration was able to offer an unprecedented package of measures to prop up the economy (I sat watching Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s press conferences thinking how vital it was that we had taken those difficult decisions when we did).

The accusation has been made that our nation was unprepared for a pandemic. The reality is that, for a PM, the prospect is never far from your mind. Indeed a litany of what-ifs – mass terror attacks, cyber warfare, natural disasters, nuclear war and yes, pandemics – hangs over you when you’re in No. 10. As I recount in the pages that follow, officials frequently wander into your office and warn of the next Armageddon. Your job is to decide and to prioritise.

I was clear that Ebola posed a global threat, which is why when the disease struck Africa we leapt into action with America and France. It’s also why, following that outbreak, we established the government-wide International Health Risks Network to survey the world continuously for viruses heading our way.

I was also convinced of the dangers of antimicrobial resistance – the prospect of diseases no longer responding to antibiotics – and so I put the issue on the global agenda for the first time. And I knew a pandemic would come one day, possibly sooner rather than later. That’s why I made it a ‘tier one risk’ at the National Security Council. We also established a sub-committee to deal with Threats, Hazards, Resilience and Contingencies. The accusation – which is partly accurate – is that subsequently not enough was done to prepare specifically for what followed. But this is what strategists mean when they talk about ‘known unknowns’. We knew a pandemic was coming, we just didn’t know what type. It is now clear, in a way it wasn’t then, that the extensive preparations made for pandemic flu were not wholly transferable to handling a pandemic of a very different kind.

However, it is not only the vulnerabilities of individual nations that have become apparent during the events of the past year. It is, as is prefigured here, the failure of key global institutions, including the World Health Organization. (In fact, my frustration with the WHO’s sclerosis and misdirection during the Ebola outbreak, described in Chapter 38, led me to suggest after the epidemic had subsided that I should make reform of this UN agency a priority for the UK. Officials fell about laughing. ‘It would be your life’s work,’ they said. ‘And you would fail.’) If wholesale reform is impossible, we must sort out the parts that most require fixing. I have suggested elsewhere establishing a new Global Virus Surveillance Organisation to track, understand and publicise emerging viruses. This could be done through building a network of scientific and academic organisations. It should be science-led, industry-backed and non-political.

Of course, this leads me on to another multilateral reform that I did pursue in office – and which was ultimately unsuccessful. Changing the European Union.

Whether it came to calling for reform in the EU or the WHO, my feeling was generally one of being a lone voice. Leaders seemed then – and even more so now – to be divided into those so devoted to the multilateral system that they slavishly supported its institutions and those so sickened by the system that they wanted to do away with them altogether. As is so often the case in the following chapters, I fell somewhere between the two, in the pragmatic middle. I was so convinced by the importance of global cooperation that I determined we should improve the system’s institutions. Change to conserve. That has always been the Conservative way. And that was where my strategy to renegotiate Britain’s place in the European Union, and to put it to a nationwide vote, came in.

As I said in the Foreword to the first edition of this book, I have many regrets around the referendum. From the timing of the vote to the expectations I allowed to build about the renegotiation, there are many things that I would do differently.

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 correct approach to take. I believe that, particularly with the Eurozone crisis, the EU 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 fair, necessary and, I believe, ultimately inevitable. Frankly I couldn’t see a future where Britain didn’t hold a referendum. And I am a democrat. I believe people should be able to have their say – especially on an issue as important as this.

It was awful to see whole sections of society torn in two by the subject, and painful to witness three years of anguish in the effort to implement the decision. It has been traumatic for the country. And for the Conservative Party, too. It has led to the departure of talented, socially progressive, liberally minded MPs. I lament this.

Has the Conservative Party changed out of all recognition because of Brexit? No. I support much of what the government has been doing and specifically its mission to help those parts of our country that feel left behind. But there is a potential danger. There is no necessary contradiction in wanting to appeal to working-class voters in the sort of towns energised by Brexit – the current ‘levelling up’ agenda – while remaining liberal, progressive and inclusive. Indeed that’s what I tried to do, opening more good schools, reforming welfare, cutting taxes for the lowest paid, building a Northern Powerhouse, legalising gay marriage, broadening the backgrounds of our candidates and engaging voters in parts of the country that had never voted Tory before. However, there’s often a problem in politics of artificial signposting. To many, Brexit has been the signpost of a party that is less liberal. That doesn’t have to be the case. And if it was to be so, it would be a grave mistake. The Conservative Party can – and must – remain a broad church.

While the coronavirus crisis has demonstrated the importance of European-wide cooperation, it has also laid bare once again some of the divides within, and flaws of, the EU and its current structures.

Of course it’s unfair to castigate the bloc too much on this issue since health is a national responsibility, and the international bodies that should step up first are those that are worldwide and those that oversee public health. But the crisis rapidly became an economic one and the EU was slow to react.

Countries like Spain and Italy were left frustrated by the failure of European institutions to do more, by the restrictions on their fiscal space for action and by the refusal of northern countries to step in. As I repeat time and again in this book, a single currency requires at least some elements of a common fiscal policy in order to work. Just as we didn’t have to worry that Manchester would refuse to support London in its hour of need, Spain needed to see that solidarity from Germany.

If the first phase of the EU’s response demonstrated the urgency of reform, the second phase showed the huge difficulties – and profound questions – that arise as attempts are made to bring about any sort of reform.

The proposal for a €500 billion fund immediately divided those members favouring budget control from those wanting greater solidarity. Had Britain still been a member of the EU I am sure we would have argued that more funding was required but that it should be for the Eurozone countries to both fund and receive the money (so addressing one of the fundamental flaws of the single currency). And yet, as the money has to be spent on measures to improve the single market, we would have wanted some safeguards and involvement.

The Brussels officialdom would have cried ‘more opt-outs, more special treatment’ and thrown up their hands in despair. The harder end of UK Eurosceptics would have argued, once more, that the inevitable moment for UK departure had arrived.

I am sure that we could have found another UK ‘special status’ solution, but the legal arrangements and parliamentary scrutiny (and both would be necessary) would have brought forth the arguments about the UK’s position in the EU all over again. Those who believe that the reform and referendum debate in the run-up to 2016 was an unnecessary confection cooked up for political reasons are profoundly wrong. Staying in the single market while remaining out of the single currency was going to require major reform if it was to be sustainable, even in the relatively short term. Without it the question of membership would have come back again and again, leading eventually, inevitably, to a referendum.

My greatest regret remains that we couldn’t continue to find a special status that kept us in those parts of the EU that were essential to our national interest while staying out of the parts that were delivering ‘ever closer union’. John Major’s single currency and Social Chapter opt-outs, Tony Blair’s carve-outs from Justice and Home Affairs, and the decision by all recent UK prime ministers to stay out of the Schengen no-borders scheme have all been part of the same British picture.

I added opt-outs from bailing out Eurozone countries and Eurozone banks while ensuring we weren’t part of schemes to redistribute EU migrants who had already arrived in Europe. My renegotiation would have added, among other things, opting out of ‘ever closer union’ altogether, with safeguards for the pound and our position in the single market, while placing tough welfare limits on EU migrants.

All these opt-outs seem messy and complicated when set against the apparent simplicities of either full-on EU solidarity or ‘taking back control’. The pragmatic, practical path is often the hardest to take …

Of course, the pandemic puts not just multilateralism but bilateralism into the spotlight – and one relationship in particular.

I staked a lot on forging better relations with China. I believed that the more we brought the country into the rules-based international system, by trading and engaging with it, the more we could encourage it to play by those rules.

It would be tempting to say that, given China’s slowness to report what was happening in Wuhan and the fake news published since, cooperation is futile, even wrong. I am not stubborn or dogmatic in my thinking about China. Indeed, I had already modified my views on the country between my early years as a politician and the period I spent writing this book; as I describe later on, while I believe a more democratic path for China is inherently desirable, I no longer believe it is inevitable.

But then I ask myself: do I really believe that it is better to shun China? Will it cooperate with us more if we condemn it, as the US president has? By disengaging, surely we would be playing into China’s hands. After all, that would create a vacuum. The danger is that as the US stops funding the WHO, China will be seen as more of a leader. What we need is engagement combined with hard-headed realism. It is that pragmatic middle ground – so often advocated in these pages, so often a vacant space in these troubled times – once again.

Here, with China, the problems and advantages of globalisation have been encapsulated. We have become so entwined with this country that we have been both crippled by a disease that originated there and subsequently dependent on its supply chains for the medical equipment we need to fight coronavirus.

The undeniable pre-eminence of this one-party state is frequently cited as proof for the claim that liberal democracy is dying on its feet. Yet I conclude in this book that the opposite is true, that the desire for freedom is too strong and the success of open markets and open political systems too clear for the world to retreat from it. Has the arrival of the pandemic caused me to revise that? Hasn’t the coronavirus response shown autocrats to be the new role models? The argument goes that they are investing in security (when we liberal democracies aren’t), building massive infrastructure (when we aren’t), and thinking strategically and long term (ditto). Aren’t they better at dealing with this sort of crisis?

It’s true that the strongmen have been emboldened by the pandemic. Xi has used it to grab more power. Trump has used it as an excuse to enact policies and make statements that even he wouldn’t normally get away with. Yet I maintain that populists are the worst leaders in a global crisis. Presidents Trump and Bolsonaro do a fine job of proving this theory. What’s more, the countries that have dealt best with COVID-19 – Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, New Zealand – are all democracies. They have met it with leadership, boldness and clear communication with electorates. That is something we as fellow democracies are better placed to emulate. (One thing we can also note from the public response to COVID is that our assumptions about what people are prepared to sacrifice in the short term for a longer-term benefit might have been wrong.)

However, we cannot disregard the populists altogether. They have been elected for a reason. The grievances they feed off are real. Too many people have been left behind economically by globalisation, too many communities have been changed too rapidly. Immigration has been too high in too many places for too long. Meanwhile many of the multilateral organisations feel domineering yet remote. I outline in the chapters that follow how I spent a lot of time trying to deal with those things – to give our people the skills they need in the new economy; to rebalance our economy between our regions; to get a better sense of control and fairness in immigration; to reform institutions like the EU. I’ll admit now that we didn’t go far enough. But at the same time I would say we – the governments I led, and subsequent ones – must have been doing something right, since there is a case for arguing that Britain is the only country in Europe that hasn’t experienced the long-term, far-left and hard-right populist insurgencies that we’ve seen across the rest of the continent.

That balance between heeding grievances and pushing for reform must also apply to two other issues that have gained more traction since this book first came out.

The first is climate change. We are making huge progress on halting this. As I frequently point out to my teenage daughter, an enthusiastic activist, the UK’s carbon emissions are not just lower than they were in 1994, they are lower than in 1894. But the Greta Thunbergs and Extinction Rebellions of this world would tell a different story. They need to be careful they don’t mirror the populists, meeting a very real grievance (the warming of our planet) with hyperbole (‘the world will end in twenty years’), impossible solutions (‘we must end all carbon emissions tomorrow’) and tribalism (climate action is something for only certain people who subscribe to certain beliefs). None of that will lead to the rational, reasonable, open, pragmatic approach the climate crisis so obviously requires. Again, it is that approach that is needed to address so many of the problems of the day and that brand of politics that I advocate throughout this book.

The second issue is racism. The death of George Floyd in America rightly sparked a global outcry, not just against the violent racism displayed by police in Minneapolis, but against racism at every level, both outward and overt, insidious and institutional. Reforming stop and search, introducing name-blind job applications and forming the most diverse Cabinet in history were some small steps the governments I led took towards righting these wrongs. Free schools, the Pupil Premium, Start-Up Loans, Help to Buy and National Citizen Service were designed to lift everyone up, but had a disproportionate effect on minorities. Of course, there is much, much more to do. But, as with climate change, we must be careful not to undermine a genuine, heinous problem – the quality of people’s lives being dictated by the colour of their skin – by obsessing over symbols, playing identity politics and stoking culture wars. Those things not only distract. They actually entrench division – even create division – when we should be building a society rooted in the fact that, as the late MP Jo Cox is quoted as saying on page 675, ‘we are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us’.

I have tried throughout to mention as many people as I can who worked with me over the years. 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, delivering government services 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, my late agent Ed Victor and Katherine Patrick for her sterling publicity programme the first time round. Special thanks go to all those people who contributed, commented and reviewed various drafts – especially Nigel Casey, Camilla Cavendish, Peter Chadlington, Kate Fall, Andrew Feldman, Rupert Harrison, Jo Johnson, Craig Oliver, 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, became my speechwriter 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 together we want to thank those friends who have been our rocks, especially Chris and Venetia Lockwood and Mary Wynne Finch.

This book 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.

David Cameron

September 2020

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.