SIX
June 2010
Tuesday 15 May, one week in, sees Cameron’s first visit to Chequers as prime minister. His convoy slows down as it approaches the house so he can savour the full impact of the sixteenth-century mansion in Buckinghamshire, given to the prime minister in 1921 as the official country residence. Staff and the trustees present themselves formally to their new master. He is typically at ease with them. He had visited once when much younger; it is bigger than he remembered. Hamid Karzai, Afghan president since 2004, is his guest. Cameron wants to show him that he means business in Afghanistan, and is focusing his attention on it. Hence the honour, not missed on Karzai, of being his first overseas visitor to Chequers. Invited too that day are Britain’s most senior military figures, including Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS) Jock Stirrup, Vice Chief of the Defence Staff Nicholas Houghton, Chief of the General Staff (CGS) David Richards, Commander-in-Chief of Land Forces Peter Wall and First Sea Lord Mark Stanhope. Here is the cream of the British armed forces. Differences though there are between them, they are united today wanting to make a positive impression on the new prime minister, not least with the Spending Review in the offing. On the horizon too is the imminent appointment of Stirrup’s successor as CDS, with Houghton and Richards the frontrunners.
Cameron has no illusions about his own lack of experience in military and defence matters. In Opposition, he announced at the 2009 party conference that he would be taking advice from Richard Dannatt, Richards’ forceful predecessor as CGS, who had spoken out strongly in favour of more support for the British war mission in Afghanistan. The idea proved unpopular, and Cameron tried to drop it quietly. Similarly he brought into his circle Pauline Neville-Jones, a retired diplomat and past chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), whom he appointed shadow Security Minister in July 2007. She was important in giving him gravitas in this area until the authority of the PM’s office obviated the need. Cameron is now bolstered by the constant presence of Ed Llewellyn, who has worked closely with Paddy Ashdown in Bosnia and with Chris Patten when governor of Hong Kong. Cameron does not take decisions in this realm without aligning first with Llewellyn.
Cameron has never served in the armed forces, nor spent any time shadowing foreign or defence departments. The responsibility on his shoulders as prime minister to protect British lives, servicemen and women in the field and civilians on the streets of Britain weighs heavily. He is an avid imbiber of military and diplomatic history, and a serious patriot. He would have loved to have been Foreign Secretary, and he revels in broad strategic discussions about Britain’s place in the world. He enjoys talking to soldiers in the field and to his Foreign Office staff, chatting to them late into the evening after his domestic officials have gone home.
But Cameron is no romantic. Friends from Eton, Oxford and elsewhere are now in middle-ranking positions in the services. He listens carefully to what they have to tell him about the top brass. He watched with growing alarm as he saw army chiefs run circles around Brown at Number 10, colluding, as some saw it, with the Sun to whip up support for the boys at the front to gain financial leverage for more equipment and more men. His most pressing concern is the scale of the black hole in the MoD’s budget, which runs to tens of billions. Cameron is clear that civilians are going to regain control of British defence policy and its finances and that he, not the army chiefs, will decide what will happen over the biggest military decision he is likely to take as prime minister, the future of the British commitment to Afghanistan. So he is on his guard as the top brass arrive kitted out in their pristine uniforms at Chequers. They chance their luck with a couple of requests which he firmly declines with a respectful smile. An aide records that Cameron is ‘charmingly steely and quite effectively sees them off’. He knows that Afghanistan has the potential to tear his premiership apart, as it almost did Brown’s. He is painfully aware of a complete lack of consensus in Britain, and abroad, on the best way forward. Britain’s allies in Afghanistan are going in different directions. While the US commits to a surge in troops from 30,000 in mid-2009 to 90,000 in 2011, France announces in January 2010 it will send no more forces to Afghanistan, and the following month the government in the Netherlands collapses after trying to extend the mission of the Dutch forces. Simon McDonald, the senior foreign policy adviser in the Cabinet Office under Gordon Brown, writes a minute soon after the election to say that the war in Afghanistan is not being won and will never be won. Britain needs to get out.
Cameron suspects that the service chiefs are trapped into conventional ways of thinking on Afghanistan, so he decides to return to Chequers for a ‘summit’ on Tuesday 1 June where he will deliberately confront his senior military figures with some left-field thinkers to shake up their thinking. The seminar will be in two halves. The ‘wild men’, as he dubs them, will be present at the first session in the library upstairs from 9 a.m. in the morning to act as the grit in the oyster. A lunchtime session will then be held in the dining room after the outsiders have left.
Few areas have exercised his mind when Opposition leader more than Afghanistan, and he has spent many hours pondering the problem and talking to those with unorthodox outlooks. Prime among them is Sherard Cowper-Coles, the Foreign Secretary’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan who had become highly sceptical of the prospects of success of continued military engagement. Cameron talks to him on his visits to Afghanistan, where the seasoned diplomat is brutally clear that the war cannot be won.1 Rory Stewart, the intellectually brilliant former diplomat, author and now Tory MP, who had walked across Afghanistan and served as a senior official in Iraq, is another invited, as is James Fergusson, an Old Etonian and Oxford friend of Cameron’s and author of three books on Afghanistan, the third of which advocated talking to the Taliban.
The meeting begins. ‘It is pointless to put in more troops,’ Fergusson says, feeling self-conscious at finding himself placed between the head of MI6 and the chair of the JIC. ‘We have to speak to the Taliban,’ he says. ‘Oh it’s very difficult to talk to the Taliban,’ interjects Foreign Secretary William Hague. Fergusson believes that Mullah Zaeef will be an excellent intermediary: he has spent five years as a prisoner in Guantanamo, but is not bitter. Fergusson describes him as a ‘nice man’. ‘This is a unique opportunity,’ he says, ‘as the Taliban respect the British and really quite like us, as opposed to the Americans, who they regard, above all due to Guantanamo, as beyond the pale.’2 Fergusson is listened to by the great and good in respectful silence. ‘You’re not exactly on the same page as most of us,’ confides Pauline Neville-Jones to him at the coffee break.3
Graeme Lamb, who has been commander of British Special Forces and has aggressively pursued al-Qaeda operatives in Iraq, presents a sharply different view. Lamb is a no-nonsense kind of soldier who talks and looks like a battle-hardened warrior. He exudes charisma and authority. ‘Prime Minister, you have nothing to worry about with the Taliban in Kunar Province because we’ve killed them all,’ he starts. Fergusson, at the other end of the table, disagrees because he’s recently been talking to Taliban who are still ubiquitous in Kunar Province. Cameron and Clegg, in the middle of the table, turn their heads from side to side as Lamb and Fergusson testily dispute the facts, as if watching a tennis match.4 Lamb’s formula is: ‘Either we’re going to beat these guys, or we’re going to have to do a deal with them. So let’s start thinking about what that deal should be.’
Cameron asks Cowper-Coles to speak about political strategy for Afghanistan. ‘The military campaign is important, but not enough,’ he asserts; and the political strategy has to be given top priority. ‘We also need to talk to our regional partners, India, Pakistan, Russia and Iran. We’ll never solve Afghanistan unless we work with the regional powers.’ At a break, Cowper-Coles confronts Cameron: ‘We are part of an American war, this isn’t our war. You need to talk to Obama.’ Cowper-Coles knows that Obama is sympathetic to a political strategy, and had been disappointed not to have received more support for it from Brown, who had gone public about never talking to the Taliban. Cowper-Coles believes that Britain is making a mistake, as it had in Iraq, in letting the US administration think that its support was unconditional, meaning that it was taken for granted. Rory Stewart also strongly denounces Britain’s existing policy.
The ‘wild men’ depart after the morning session, leaving behind just the cool-headed men and women. They are a diverse crew – too many for Cameron’s liking, as he had wanted more of a free-thinking and less official seminar. Present are senior Cabinet ministers, service chiefs, assorted diplomats, including William Patey, the new ambassador to Afghanistan, and the ‘spooks’ (the heads of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ). At the forefront of their minds is how quickly the Afghan army can be trained to take over the security of the country. There are secondary concerns about what kind of a signal setting a date for a British departure might give to NATO allies, particularly the United States. If too early, it could damage relations with allies, undermine the progress already made, and open Britain up to the charge of cutting and running. If the departure is too late, even more lives and money will be lost.
Cameron chairs the meeting with a hint of irritation in his voice. He is being kept awake at night by the fans in Number 10. The upstairs flat is being renovated and he is not sleeping well. He is particularly testy with the service chiefs. He is very wary about the numbers of troops on the ground and of any talk of ‘mission creep’. He, Osborne and Hague will decide what is to happen with Afghanistan. Osborne recoiled in shock when he was told that the cost of the war in Afghanistan might approach £26 billion over the life of the parliament. To the chancellor, Britain can’t get out quickly enough. Even before they come to power, he and Cameron have reached a secret understanding that Britain will get out of Afghanistan; they have only to decide how and when to do it.
British ambassador to the US Nigel Sheinwald is asked to speak about the thinking of the Obama administration. ‘The president is very, very cautious about Afghanistan and far more reserved than his generals,’ he tells the meeting. ‘Obama isn’t going to dig deeper in Afghanistan beyond the additional 30,000 troops. There will not be a further surge: the direction of travel is they want to get out, without rush, and in an orderly way.’5 Liam Fox says, ‘It is clear that Obama wants to take the US out of two wars, Iraq and Afghanistan, and if that is what they’re going to do, Britain can hardly remain there on its own.’6
The seminar is not intended as a decision-making forum. But it becomes painfully clear to all present the limits of what Britain could still achieve in Afghanistan, and that already some 250 British servicemen have lost their lives since 2001, compared with 179 dead in Iraq. The meeting recognises that there is no ultimate prospect of a Jeffersonian democracy in Afghanistan, as the senior diplomat Simon McDonald puts it.7 Rather, the most that can be hoped for is building up Afghanistan’s military and civil capacity, and avoiding the return of al-Qaeda and the threat that would pose to Britain’s national security. Cameron probes intensely the military’s ‘status quo’ argument, that staying on in Afghanistan will produce solutions where doing so had failed to work in the past. He is at his strongest at this kind of forensic questioning of received wisdom. He winds up the seminar, more convinced than ever in his mind that Britain must leave. He is even clearer than ever of the date: before the next general election.
David Richards is the most vocal of the service chiefs. Setting any kind of time limit will be a big mistake, he says. The politicians must give the military more time and more money. Cameron notes what he says but will not be swayed by him. Richards is in his mind also as he decides who should succeed Stirrup as CDS. He ignores advice from Whitehall in favouring Richards over Houghton, whom he passes over (Houghton succeeds Richards in July 2014). Cameron has just finished reading Andrew Roberts’ Masters and Commanders about Churchill and Roosevelt and their relations with their military chiefs. It affects him; he wants to take on a big figure like Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff during the Second World War. Richards is known to be outspoken and with a media profile, very conscious of his image on the stage. He is exactly the big personality Cameron wants as CDS, rather than a more conventional and retiring officer type, because Cameron’s reassertion of civilian control over defence policy will be much more effective if he can show he doesn’t have a cipher in the CDS slot. In another innovation, Cameron again draws inspiration from Churchill, who was the last prime minister to have by his side in Number 10 an officer in uniform. It is indeed odd that no prime minister since has seen the need for having a serving officer on their personal staff who understands military operations and the thinking of servicemen in the field. Colonel Jim Morris is selected as the military assistant against the favoured MoD candidate because he is independent-minded, and totally trustworthy.
Cameron surprises himself with his confidence taking decisions on defence and foreign policy. His clarity of mind and personal assuredness quickly command the respect of army chiefs, top officials and spooks. On 12 May, a few weeks before the Chequers summit in June, Cameron holds his first Cabinet, and Afghanistan is high on the agenda. Discussions had already begun earlier in the day among the new body, the National Security Council (NSC), a rare Cameron organisational innovation foreshadowed in the manifesto. Andy Coulson briefs that this is the prime minister’s first ‘War Cabinet’. This new structure, including a National Security Adviser (NSA) and secretariat, emerged from Ed Llewellyn’s and Oliver Letwin’s discussions with Pauline Neville-Jones.8 On the advice of William Hague, Cameron chooses the permanent secretary at the Foreign Office, Peter Ricketts, as his first NSA. ‘Come over the road and work with me on setting up the NSC,’ he says to Ricketts on his first day in power.9 It is an inspired choice. Cameron thinks Ricketts a ‘consummate professional’. The brand-new piece of Whitehall apparatus needs a figure of Ricketts’ authority and skill to embed it quickly, a process aided by the political capital of the incoming government. Not the least of Ricketts’ skills is to reassure Whitehall that the new PM is not setting up a PM’s office running foreign and defence policy from Downing Street. He also resists the notion that the NSC should have responsibility – as does its US counterpart – for broader economic issues.
As Ricketts addresses the first meeting of the NSC, he gazes around the Cabinet table at the exhausted faces of newly appointed ministers, weary after weeks of an election campaign and coalition talks. ‘They were both excited and a bit disoriented to sit down as the War Cabinet within hours of walking into their ministerial offices,’ Ricketts recalls.10 Cameron, by contrast, is alert and in command of the meeting from the start. Ricketts opens his remarks with a sobering fact: ‘This is the first time a British government has come into office with the armed forces engaged in major combat operations since the Korean War in 1951.’11
The NSC meets almost daily in the first weeks deliberating Afghanistan. The most powerful voices are Cameron’s – the body is much more successful when he is in the chair – as well as those of Osborne, Hague, Theresa May, Richards, and head of MI6 John Sawers, a voice of caution. More often than not an expert would be invited to brief the meeting before being quizzed by ministers. Indeed, Cameron encourages open debate before reaching a decision. The NSC structure achieves many of Cameron’s hopes of centralising decision-making over foreign, defence and security policy in one locus, with a fixed membership which is properly constituted and completely under his control. It addresses many of the anomalies of the Blair and Brown years, and works well because the PM chairs it, and it meets on the same morning as Cabinet so all the key people are present. It brings together homeland security and overseas intelligence. The intelligence chiefs like it because it brings them into weekly contact with the PM and senior ministers. Cameron likes it because overseas development is part of the structure, enabling him to keep an eye on the Development Secretary with his large and controversial budget. But for all its strengths, he becomes at times disappointed that it doesn’t operate like the White House Situation Room, and he finds it can be dominated by officials and chiefs not willing to engage in open-sided debate.
Within these first few weeks, Cameron emerges as the dominant figure on foreign policy, eclipsing Foreign Secretary Hague, and even on defence, eclipsing Fox. He cannily utilises to the full the opportunities a prime minister possesses – trips, speeches, visits and PMQs – to achieve limelight to advance his agenda. He makes it clear he is not interested in maintaining relationships for the sake of relationships – a blasphemous concept to the Foreign Office – nor is he interested in strategy for the sake of having a strategy, blasphemous to the MoD. He establishes himself rapidly as sans pareil at establishing one-to-one relationships with overseas leaders. He respects Hague, and gives him wide measures of freedom on defined areas, including the Middle East Peace Process and Russia. Relations between Number 10 and the Foreign Office settle into a more harmonious rhythm than for several years, since indeed Major was PM.
Cameron soon shows himself to be more interested in the details of foreign than domestic policy. Like many PMs, he finds it easier dealing with people on his level in other countries than with subordinates in his own. Like many PMs too, he finds himself having to spend much more time than he expects or wants talking to leaders from countries not in the front rank, and considerably more time than he wishes or expects on Europe and on national security. But much of his overseas work fascinates him: it is like being head boy of Britain, protecting its interests and citizens at home and abroad. Hence his obsession in getting Afghanistan right.
Cameron knows he must make two particular visits before going public with his decision. First up is Afghanistan. He flies there on 10 June via Oman, where he boards a military transport aircraft. He had visited Camp Bastion several times as Leader of the Opposition, but this is his first trip to the battle zones of Helmand Province and to Lashkar Gah. It brings home to him that ‘these guys are now here because of me, because of my policies’. On a hospital visit, he talks to British soldiers, and local civilians, as well as nurses and doctors. He addresses 400 British soldiers, some on armoured vehicles, and reads out a special message from the England football manager, Fabio Capello. When flying around Helmand, his helicopter is diverted because of an intelligence intercept that the Taliban are about to fire a surface-to-air missile at a VIP flight. When Tom Fletcher tells him of the danger, ‘He didn’t blink, didn’t miss a beat. He enjoyed a certain amount of black humour!’12
Nick Parker is the senior British officer on the ground in his capacity as the deputy commander of International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), NATO’s forces in Afghanistan. He and the PM speak face-to-face for the first time on 11 June in Camp Bastion: ‘We touch on casualties and I am deliberately hard,’ Parker writes in his diary. ‘Casualties will get worse. You have to live with it. Our job is to keep going and retain the initiative.’ Cameron doesn’t flinch. He is frank about the political pressures he is under at home, the difficulty of finding more money for resources, and his scepticism of success in Sangin. Parker concludes, ‘Very impressive … he’s quickly brought a far greater sense of purpose. First impression, a good leader and quick to understand.’13 Cameron presses Parker and fellow officers on the ground hard about the need for an end date. He is told that if the British forces are able to concentrate their efforts on a small part of Helmand, where they can show clear progress, then it is entirely sensible to give a date for withdrawal. Cameron has heard what he needs to hear. On the return flight, Liz Sugg notes that he’s much more silent and thoughtful than usual. ‘The visit has made a big impression on him,’ she says.14
The second journey Cameron has to make is across the Atlantic to see Obama, his first meeting with him as prime minister. He wants to make a good impression, and is fully aware that he had failed to strike up the right note with the president on their meeting in London when Leader of the Opposition. Reports that Obama thought Cameron a ‘lightweight’ at their encounter in July 2008, which Obama’s team denied, had caused embarrassment.15 In early June 2010, Obama had sacked Stanley McChrystal, commander of ISAF forces, following an article in Rolling Stone magazine quoting McChrystal criticising Obama.16 David Petraeus, who’d overseen the ‘surge’ strategy in Iraq in 2007, is the new man.
Obama had spoken by phone to Cameron about the transition: but the PM doesn’t give any hint that he thinks the president has made the wrong call. It is suspected Obama is being weak in standing up to his military. It is thought that because he is battling to get his health-care reforms through Congress, he doesn’t wish to be accused of being anti-military or unpatriotic by the Republicans at the very moment when his domestic flagship is on the line. Number 10 suspect that deep down Obama knows that the surge will not work in the long term but he’s not prepared to say so for political reasons. Another complicating factor is BP. In April, the BP-operated Deepwater Horizon drilling rig had an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, causing the biggest accidental oil leak in the history of the petroleum industry. The White House made their fury well known. Cameron is on the back foot over this, conscious of how American hostility could impact on the share price of BP, damaging the British economy at a vulnerable time. It is a delicate situation.
Cameron boards the plane for the G8 at Muskoka in Ontario on Friday 25 June. He is clear in his own mind that British forces will be out of Afghanistan by December 2014. He has rejected utterly the argument from the military to ‘just give us a few more years and we’ll sort it out’. In the weeks following the Chequers summit, Richards has continued to argue success is the only option: ‘Whatever it takes, whatever it costs. We’re the professionals. Leave it to us in the military; you can’t set timelines on something like this.’ Some in the military are anxious to prove to their American counterparts that the British can succeed in Afghanistan where they had failed, so the US military believed, in Iraq.
Cameron is clear he will be the prime minister who will bring the UK troops home. A further four years seems to him a sensible timeframe. Part of him would like to leave earlier, but he needs to keep in step with the US administration, who are insistent that the drawdown be managed and orderly. He is determined that Afghan security forces be sufficiently well trained to continue after NATO has left, to maximise the chances of being able to say that the war has been worthwhile, and that it allowed the country to manage its own security. But he is aware that some are saying this is a pipe dream, and that the Afghan army, without an air force, without the logistics, without the expertise or willpower, will never succeed where the British and NATO have failed. He would ideally like to persuade Obama to engage in political negotiations with the Taliban or their associates, but he knows this is a bridge too far in Washington.
Cameron is unusually quiet on the flight to Canada. His team have chartered an entire plane for the journey. ‘This is serious. In Opposition, it was just four or five of us on trips bundled aboard a BA flight,’ one of his staff observes. Cameron has already established a rhythm. He usually sits in seat 1B, with space for boxes by the window, and 1C free for him to call up whoever he wants to talk to. He clears the domestic papers in his box, and then at last his brief for the visit, highlighting particular sections. He wants to command the detail. He has been PM for less than seven weeks: Afghanistan is his biggest personal decision to date. He is 95% clear what to do when the plane takes off and his team have squared with the White House that Britain will be bringing its troops home by the end of 2014: he has merely to decide in his mind when to tell the world and how to present it. He takes these decisions alone, relying on his instincts. The plane touches down at Ottawa’s Macdonald–Cartier Airport and he immediately calls Llewellyn, who is for once absent because he is getting married. ‘I will talk it over with the president and then I will announce our plan,’ he tells him. Cameron announces later that day that British forces will be out of Afghanistan by 2015.
He has thought hard about establishing his presence as the new boy with his fellow G8 and G20 leaders. He has formative relationships to build on, but his team are full of trepidation. Typically, he himself is confident. On the morning of 26 June, he goes for a pre-breakfast swim in the lake. Word is put out to G8 delegations that the youthful new British leader has been swimming. His dip becomes the talk of the morning session. The Italian prime minister and doyen of alpha males, Silvio Berlusconi, is palpably disconcerted by the attention given to another leader. The Italian delegation hastily circulate photographs of Berlusconi in Speedos as a weightlifter. Cameron begins to relax, sensing he can hold his own with these leaders. His natural confidence and height give him an easy authority. Fellow leaders express interest in the novelty of coalition in British politics. ‘I’m entirely up to it, I know that I can do this,’ he later tells a close aide. The Afghanistan announcement out of the way, there are no pressing or concerning items on the G8 agenda. There’s downtime and joking with fellow leaders. In the evening, he feels very tired. One of his aides borrows some of Obama’s Pro-Plus to perk him up.
The next day, the G8 leaders travel south to Toronto for the larger meeting of the G20. Marine One, the president’s helicopter, is preparing to take off. When the weather closes in, the helicopter Cameron intends to use is grounded, and only Marine One has clearance to fly the short journey. There is a brief moment of panic – Cameron is stuck. Sugg asks, ‘Why can’t the PM fly with Obama?’ Fletcher goes over to talk to Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, and asks if their bosses can travel together on the helicopter. The Americans are happy to help, still influenced, the British suspect, by continuing guilt over their treatment of Brown on his visits to the US as prime minister. They have two spaces spare. Fletcher and Coulson toss a coin to see who will accompany Cameron. Coulson wins. (At Fletcher’s leaving party in 2011, he is presented with a model of Marine One.) Once ensconced on the chopper, the PM and president talk about their young families, their jobs and US politics. It is one of the most personal conversations they are to have. Cameron tries to buckle himself into his seat: ‘We don’t need seat belts here: this is Marine One,’ the president tells him. Cameron is boyishly excited. Driving to the conference hotel afterwards, he calls up Samantha to tell her all about it. ‘We didn’t wear seat belts!’
The World Cup is being played in South Africa, and Cameron has a bet with Obama over the match between England and the United States: a case of Chicago beer versus a crate of Hobgoblin beer from his Witney constituency. The match is a draw. A photograph is released to the press of both leaders in front of their flags toasting each other, beer bottles in hand. England play Germany in the first of the knockout rounds – England go two goals down after thirty minutes, but pull one back in the thirty-seventh minute. Moments later, England player Frank Lampard hits the ball over the German line, but the referee misses it and the goal doesn’t stand. The eventual score is 4–1 to Germany. A photo of Merkel and Cameron perched on armchairs in the conference centre at the G20, avidly watching a screen in front of them, flashes around the world.
Cameron picks up on Afghanistan when he flies over to the US for an important visit from 19–21 July. Llewellyn and National Security Adviser Peter Ricketts visited Washington a month after the general election, saw leading figures in the administration and paved the way. Afghanistan is the biggest topic on the Washington trip. Detailed discussions take place on the pace of the British drawdown, and the political strategy. The British insist on talking to the Taliban and their associates and are sceptical about any further military upgrade by NATO forces. It is Cameron’s first visit to the Oval Office. He glances around in fascination, but his mind is calm and focused. Obama and he are more similar in personality than Obama and Brown, with his brooding passions. It is clear to their respective staffs that the president and PM are on the same wavelength. The White House are impressed by the way Cameron handles himself. They tell Sheinwald after the visit that they like him, and feel that he will be ‘someone they can do business with’.
This is the fourth time both leaders have met: but their personal relationship doesn’t recapture the spontaneity of their helicopter ride in Canada the month before. Cameron is naturally gregarious, but takes his cue from Obama, who settles into a businesslike, emotion-free zone, where he feels most secure. His staff too are very different from their predecessors in the days of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Indeed, Cameron’s team find the White House ‘surprisingly transactional’. They are very aware of what they can get from Cameron, and set out to get it. But the impression of the trip is encouraging, which is why Cameron’s team is so keen that it took place early into his premiership. Back home, the PM is portrayed in the British media as a heavyweight figure, parlaying and at ease with the world’s most powerful man. They have a longer than planned walk around the White House lawn, jackets on shoulders, and a surprisingly warm press conference.
The BP oil spill which threatened at one point to stain the discussions is barely mentioned. Differences emerge instead over the conduct of the economy. The Obama administration is not fond of austerity, and think Plan A is going too far too fast, and will not work. Their economic guru (and close friend of Brown’s), director of the National Economic Council, Larry Summers, is a core figure to them. On the economy, if nowhere else, the Obama White House felt happier with Brown.
Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the terminally ill Lockerbie bomber, had been the cause of considerable friction between both countries when the Scottish government released him from jail to Libya in 2009. The US administration suspects that pressure from oil companies was responsible for the release and are angry with Brown. Cameron himself can show a clean sheet. He is on record as resisting the transfer of al-Megrahi to Libya. On his first evening in Washington, he sees four senators to placate them. He impresses figures on Capitol Hill and in the White House, and helps lance the boil. Doing so clears the way for Cameron’s party offering Obama a state visit to the UK, which follows in May 2011.
Cameron is pleased to have resolved the issue of troop withdrawal from Afghanistan before the summer recess. Difficult discussions will need to take place in the autumn with NATO allies. But the British intent has been made public, and he believes that he has achieved the right balance, of a dignified rather than over-hasty exit. He has already started the sad task of writing handwritten letters, as did Blair and Brown, to the next of kin of British soldiers who have lost their lives. He shuts himself away and never wants to be hurried when he writes them. His staff always give him time, recognising that these are sensitive moments for him. The month before the Washington trip, the 300th British soldier had died in Afghanistan. A further 153 soldiers will be killed before the troops leave, and many billions of pounds will be spent. Did he struggle because in his heart he found it difficult to write that the deaths had not been in vain?