EIGHTEEN
May–September 2012
‘The game was massively up if Boris didn’t win London in May 2012,’ recalls party chairman Andrew Feldman.1 The Olympic Games are raising the stakes. To have Ken Livingstone, the Labour challenger to Boris Johnson in the mayoral election, parading endlessly before the cameras would be a considerable blow. With Conservative confidence in Cameron’s leadership so fragile, defeat for Johnson might very well mark the beginning of the end for him. Number 10 know that they are in an existential fight, and they have to win.
Boris Johnson was first elected London mayor in 2008. At the time, he was far from certain whether it was the right platform for him. But Cameron wanted a big hitter as the Conservative challenger, and there weren’t many alternatives. Sebastian Coe was a possibility, but he made it clear he wasn’t interested. Steven Norris, former vice chairman of the party, was another option, but lacked widespread appeal. Cameron and George Osborne liked and trusted Nick Boles and regarded him as a serious candidate; but while Boles was making up his mind, he developed Hodgkin’s lymphoma. So it was Boris Johnson, who had charisma and an ability to appeal to a cross-section of the electorate, essential if the Conservatives were going to win in London. Ultimately, Boris defeated Ken Livingstone by a margin of 53.2% to 46.8%. It is too close for comfort.
The job of mayor proves to be his métier, to the surprise of many, himself included. Relations with Number 10 are better than expected from 2008–12. ‘Of course Boris, being Boris, couldn’t but help criticising and jabbing periodically,’ says one insider. ‘Equally, he could claim he was standing up for London, which meant he would disagree periodically in public with what we were doing.’ A new London airport on ‘Boris Island’, as the media dubbed it, in the Thames Estuary is a big point of difference. Cameron and Osborne have never regarded it as remotely feasible financially.
Johnson is rare as a person about whom Cameron and Osborne differ. To the latter, he is, according to one former Number 10 aide, just ‘plain annoying’. ‘There was a sense in this building that the PM and the chancellor were getting on taking the difficult decisions while Boris, with his crass bumbling, was lapping it all up and loving twisting the knife,’ says another. Cameron, however, often finds Boris entertaining and funny. But when he gets under his skin, the gloves rapidly come off. After Johnson lists in print all the Old Etonians who have gone on to become prime minister, Cameron sends him a text: ‘The next PM will be Miliband if you don’t fucking shut up.’ There are other tense moments with Boris in Cameron’s first two years as PM. According to one former Number 10 aide, ‘there is a big feeling that Boris is difficult, that we cannot depend on him, that he is a fair-weather friend who strikes poses and can’t be trusted.’
Number 10, for all the ambivalence, know they have to ‘hug Boris’. Party conferences require particular stage management. Before the 2010 and 2011 conferences, Number 10 hold discussions about what will satisfy him. He is allocated a big morning slot with his media circus, giving him a place in the sun, and his exposure is very carefully managed. In 2011, he receives much more applause than Cameron on his arrival at conference, and Number 10 are relieved that he only makes one jibe at the PM, on police numbers.2 However much they resent him for being a ‘box office matinée idol’, they know spurning him would be churlish as well as dangerous.
So despite the ambivalence, backing him again for re-election in 2012 is almost inevitable. Osborne approaches the Australian political strategist Lynton Crosby to campaign again for Boris as he had in 2008. Throughout April and early May, the political side of Number 10 is reoriented to try to ensure Boris will win. The whole CCHQ machine too is thrown behind making sure he is re-elected, even at the expense of shifting resources away from supporting councillors across the country. It will be a tight election: London is not naturally a Conservative city, and with the economy still in trouble, and the polls nationally at such a low ebb, it will be an uphill struggle. The result on 3 May is very close – much closer than 2008. Johnson scrapes home with 51.5% of the vote to Livingstone’s 48.5%.
Relations between Boris’s camp and Number 10 plummet in the months following the election, with jealousy and resentment at Boris’s high profile and his effortless playing to the gallery. Cameron and Osborne, in contrast, are under great pressure and their positions precarious. Johnson’s re-election will at least bind him up in London for another four years, reducing the biggest leadership threat to Cameron. Predictably, the Conservatives do badly in the May local elections across the country, although they avoid the midterm collapses seen under both Thatcher and Major. Some 405 councillors lose their seats in May, and the Conservatives lose control of twelve councils, including their only two in Wales.
Johnson thinks seriously about taking on Cameron, but knows that his re-election in London makes it impossible. Boris aside, Cameron has no obvious challengers around the Cabinet table: Osborne, Hague and Gove will never stand against him. Liam Fox has resigned and is discredited, while no one serious is thinking that David Davis merits another stab at the leadership. Osborne remarks that it is ‘not a bad position for a prime minister to be in, if the most credible challenger is an Old Etonian who isn’t even in the House of Commons’. Number 10 nevertheless continue to watch Johnson carefully, and are never quite certain what he is up to. After the local elections, when Conservative losses are exacerbated by UKIP gains, Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 Committee, makes threatening noises that MPs are willing to put their signatures to a challenge against Cameron. Tory grandee Michael Spicer, himself a former chairman of the 1922 Committee, is encouraged to see Brady: ‘You should never look isolated – always flank yourself with named supporters. The first job of the chairman of the 1922 Committee is to represent the parliamentary party to the leadership as objectively as you can’, Spicer tells him. It is debatable whether Brady has been put back in his box. Number 10 studies intently the names of all those voting against the government. ‘We had weekly meetings convened in the utmost secrecy,’ says one. ‘We always thought he would get at least 50% in the event of a challenge, but the truth is that the party never liked him. They accepted him as long as he was a winner, but since the omnishambles he looked like a loser and that could have been fatal to him.’ They do not take suggestions of a plot by Conservative MP Adam Afriyie seriously, regarding him as something of ‘a fantasist’. The board at CCHQ, carefully watched over by Feldman, remain loyal to Cameron. Apart from the period leading up to the 2007 party conference, when Gordon Brown was on the brink of calling a snap election, his support in the parliamentary party has never been so precarious.
Relations between Number 10 and Johnson do however improve from 2013. Lynton Crosby’s arrival from January is ‘key in bringing Boris round’, says one insider. He and Johnson have a very close bond, far closer than he enjoys with Cameron and Osborne. The Australian rapidly becomes the go-to person to smooth over any difficulties that arise between Downing Street and City Hall. Jo Johnson, Boris’s brother, joins Number 10 that April as head of the Policy Unit. He is not seen to be as close to his brother as Crosby is, he hates any notion that he is an intermediary, and according to one Number 10 aide, describes his brother as a ‘colourful, local government leader’. Kate Fall puts into Cameron’s diary regular, if infrequent, dates for Cameron and Boris to have lunches at Chequers or drinks at Number 10. Cameron begins to relax more with him, seeing him ultimately not as his problem, but one for whoever wants to succeed him when he stands down, i.e. Osborne or May. When Johnson announces his intention in August 2014 to stand in the 2015 general election, Cameron tweets from holiday in Portugal: ‘I’ve always said I want my star players on the pitch.’3 He may not have totally believed his words at the time, but ‘he has increasingly come to believe it’, says one. Osborne cuts Treasury deals for Johnson – such as the extension of the Northern Line, announced in the Autumn Statement on 29 November – which keep him in his place.
Cameron has a private dinner with Boris in autumn 2013, which proves to be a turning point. Boris’s name features much less afterwards at the 8.30 a.m. and 4 p.m. daily meetings in Cameron’s room. Cameron’s aides are relaxed about his appearance at the 2013 party conference, and still more so in 2014. In November 2014, Boris is pleased when Number 10 organises a dinner for him to meet Jeb Bush, and he is flattered by the notion that the putative future US president is meeting the potential future British prime minister. But despite all this, some tensions still remain: on 25 February 2015, the headline in The Times is ‘Tories call for Boris to rescue their campaign’.4
A few days of light relief, if not sunshine, come on 2–5 June 2012 with the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Cameron loves the monarchy. Whilst still at Eton, he stayed up all night on The Mall in 1981 for the wedding of Charles and Diana. He makes it clear there will be no repetition of the tensions with the Palace that occurred under Blair, notably after the death of Diana. He is assiduous in ensuring that Number 10 keep Buckingham Palace very closely informed about matters of state, so no possible misunderstandings can occur. He is thrilled that the Queen accepts his invitation to come to Chequers (her first visit since 1996): unlike some predecessors, he loves his annual visits to Balmoral in September. He treats the royal family with utmost respect in public and in private, looks forward to his weekly audiences with the Queen, and studies the racing results before going to see her.
Cameron is boyishly pleased that the Jubilee coincides with his premiership. He wants to hold a street party as part of the ‘big Jubilee lunch’, an initiative in which the whole nation is invited to share lunch with neighbours. Rain dictates that the event moves inside. To mark the conclusion of the Jubilee year, on 18 December 2012, the Queen will attend a Cabinet meeting at Downing Street.
Johnson only just squeezing home in the mayoral election, and the very wet Diamond Jubilee, take some shine off the summer. So too does the NHS bill, causing continuing difficulties, as is proposed House of Lords reform, and the Leveson Inquiry, still in full swing. In June, Osborne goes before the inquiry and more embarrassing text messages come out about Cameron. With all these challenges, if the Olympics now go wrong, it may well spell the end for Cameron, and he knows it. The games are New Labour’s legacy to the Tories, achieved by Blair in July 2005, one day before the 7/7 terrorist attacks on London. Cameron’s own efforts to secure a major sports tournament do not go so well. He returned home empty-handed from the English bid to host the FIFA World Cup in 2018. He was deeply upset and angry about losing, and Russia being victorious. He suspects foul play. ‘We really felt we had a good shot. But we felt we had been completely misled,’ says one of his team.
Not screwing up the Olympics is thus a major preoccupation for Cameron. ‘If this goes wrong on our watch, it will be a disaster,’ he repeats regularly in the first half of the year. The consequences would be ‘absolutely dire’, confirms an official. ‘The media was just waiting for some kind of disaster.’ Cameron views the Olympics as ‘a humungous opportunity to show off the UK in the best possible light, to tell the world “we were open for business”’, as Ed Llewellyn puts it.5 In the run-up to the Olympics, two weeks of global industry conferences are planned focusing on a different sector each day, to be kicked off by a major British business promotion event. The Battersea Power Station redevelopment, to cost £8 billion and expected to create 20,000 jobs, is launched as part of ‘the biggest ever drive to attract investment into Britain’.6 Cameron is so determined nothing is going to spoil the games that he invests intensive personal time to ensure that they are a huge success.
Terrorist attacks are a principal worry in his mind. He wants the SAS brought up from their base in Hereford to minimise any possible risk. Surface-to-air missiles are placed on tower blocks in East London to shoot down incoming rockets and hijacked airplanes. The police are given greater powers to search people and property. This is the largest police operation on British soil since the 1926 General Strike. ‘Our view was that if terrorists know that we are there, and they won’t get away with anything, that will minimise the risk,’ says an official. Cyber terrorism, though, proves to be the greatest threat, with a plot to knock out the lighting for the opening ceremony.7 A police raid on a bedroom in a private house clinically eliminates the risk.
Cameron has great self-belief that his personal attention alone will maximise the chances of the Olympics being the big success he so desperately craves. He had moved into full swing in January 2012, chairing monthly meetings of the Olympic committee of Cabinet, which is serviced by the Olympic secretariat, set up the previous month. This works alongside the National Security secretariat for the duration of the Olympics, and is overseen by an official, Simon Case. Cameron is a forceful chairman of the Olympic committee, on which sit senior Cabinet ministers, heads of the security services, Seb Coe and Boris Johnson. With the possibility that Johnson might lose the mayoral election to Livingstone, officials contemplate the historically unusual possibility of having Conservatives, Lib Dems and Labour all on the same Cabinet committee. Risks it considers include immigration queues at Heathrow, London transport grinding to a halt, and government visitors from abroad not receiving requisite respect. The experience of opening the Millennium Dome on 31 December 1999, when a fifth of the 10,500-strong audience did not receive their tickets in the post, is very much on their mind.8 So too are the Beijing Olympics in 2008, with embarrassments including dubbed voices and false fireworks. Jealousy plays a part too: the team reckon more money had been spent on the opening ceremony in Beijing than they had to spend on the entire Olympics. By May, the secretariat has a hundred people, and they are operating 24/7 from their war room underneath COBRA.
Three weeks before the opening ceremony, panic sets in when G4S, the security firm brought in to staff the venues, reveals that it cannot fulfil its remit. Cameron steps in. He chairs two key meetings of the Olympic committee to arrange bringing in troops. The week before the opening ceremony, he chairs daily meetings. On the Monday, commander-in-chief of land forces General Nick Parker briefs David Richards that a further 1,200 troops are required. Richards and Jeremy Hunt persuade the PM of the case, against the advice of Theresa May. She is angry. She later comes to the operational command centre at High Wycombe and says to Parker, ‘you are the general who deployed far too many troops’. The G4S furore adds to a perception in the country that preparations are not going well. The press are having a field day: everything from G4S to concerns over temporary ‘Olympic lanes’ to speed officials through the London traffic lead to a series of negative headlines. A worried Craig Oliver calls a number of newspaper editors. ‘Look, you need to give this a fair wind. Obviously there will be teething problems, but don’t write it off as a disaster before it’s begun.’ The coverage changes.
Danny Boyle, the film and theatre director responsible for the opening ceremony, comes to show Cameron what he has planned. The PM is disconcerted by his focus on the NHS, especially given contemporary sensitivities with the bill. He would have preferred something more ‘Churchillian’ but knows he has to be very careful what he says. He makes it clear to Boyle that he would have liked the opening ceremony to be a celebration of all the UK was most proud of, not just the NHS.
Number 10 puts great thought into the events Cameron is going to see, giving due weight to the Paralympics to avoid accusations he is not taking them as seriously. The London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) advise Cameron’s team which British athletes he should see at both the Olympics and Paralympics. He is very conscious of striking the right balance and not being seen to be ‘sitting around watching sport all day’ when he should be running the country. Liz Sugg, his events and travel co-ordinator, works with LOCOG to ensure he attends the right events at the right time, and that he is in place to meet key figures from the Olympic movement as well as foreign leaders. John Casson, the foreign affairs private secretary, has a big say. He wants to ensure opportunities for bilateral meetings with foreign leaders are maximised. A ‘judo summit’ takes place with Putin. The Whitehall saying ‘don’t waste a good funeral’ morphs into ‘don’t waste a good Olympics’. Cameron has no history of interest in attending sporting events or following the Olympics. He enjoys tennis, and will keep up with news during Wimbledon fortnight: he is thrilled to be present when Andy Murray wins the Championships in 2013. He also follows Test matches, and will often have cricket on the screen when he is working in his study or listen to it on the radio when he is in the car. Nevertheless, Cameron finds himself thoroughly swept up in the Olympics, the pageant, excitement and sense of occasion.
After the euphoria of the opening ceremony, the games themselves start badly on 28 July, with criticisms of empty seats (exacerbated by officials from around the world booking mass seats but not bothering to use them in the early rounds). On the first day of competitions, Cameron goes to The Mall to see the cyclists. The expectation, on the back of Bradley Wiggins’s success in winning the Tour de France a few weeks before, is for British cyclists to triumph. When they don’t, the press write stories about the ‘curse of Cameron’.9 But then British success starts taking off. He is in the velodrome on 2 August, along with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry, to see Britain win gold in cycling. He rejoices in the success of Mo Farah, Jessica Ennis, and especially Nicola Adams, the world’s first Olympic female boxing champion. The beach volleyball is taking place on Horse Guards Parade just beyond the garden of Downing Street, and he is frustrated it isn’t visible from the upstairs rooms of Number 10 because the large stands obscure it, though he manages to attend a game with Samantha and the children.
An awkward moment comes when Cameron is booed, albeit drowned out by applause from the crowds, whilst presenting Ellie Simmonds with her second gold swimming medal of the Paralympic games;10 ‘the PM loved giving her the medal and the boos weren’t noticeable in the room so he didn’t hear them,’ explains a close aide. It pales into insignificance beside the treatment of Osborne, who is roundly booed presenting medals to the winners of the men’s 400 metres at the Paralympics.11 When Seb Coe had phoned him to ask if he would be willing to present a medal at the Paralympics, he wondered about the wisdom of doing so. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked. Osborne has taken his children to several Olympic and Paralympic events, and has an intimation of impending disaster as the time for him to present the medals approaches: ‘I thought I can’t get out of this. I am slated to present a medal. But I knew it was going to be a disaster the moment I walked out.’ He laughs it off at the time, saying it was ‘not surprising’ that the chancellor will be unpopular at a time of austerity, but afterwards describes it as ‘a pretty unpleasant experience’.12 His children are watching him, and for the first time perhaps, they realise the full enormity of the job their father does. For all his self-confidence and high intelligence, Osborne is a more sensitive and vulnerable figure than he appears. Andrew Feldman, watching the grizzly affair on television, thinks, ‘We can’t possibly win from here.’ He comments, ‘We had all hoped the Olympics, as well as the Jubilee, would give us the boost we needed. It wasn’t happening.’13
Ultimately, however, the Olympics and Paralympics prove a great sporting success: Britain comes third in both the Olympics and Paralympic gold medal tables (with twenty-nine Olympic and thirty-four Paralympic gold medals). The Olympics are also organisational and cultural successes. Politicians, officials and military combine to do a very professional job. It is a financial success too, helped by the Treasury insisting on a large contingency back in 2005–6, much-needed in view of the recession, unforeseen back in those Elysian days. GDP figures show a minor Olympic dividend, though less than hoped. Cameron soon turns his attention to the legacy. School sport is a particular opportunity, an area he knows is not the natural habitat of Michael Gove. A school sport initiative is launched in January 2013, with Jessica Ennis playing a key part, though inevitably the government is criticised over the following years for not making more of the legacy.
After a torrid 2012 to date, Cameron’s mood is lifted by the Olympics. He takes Samantha and the children to Majorca for a few days between both sets of games and is back in London on 29 August to attend the Paralympics. He then goes to Cornwall for a quick break, but is back on Monday 3 September for a government reshuffle. Planned initially for the spring, it was pushed back to July because of the fuel crisis. The stormy end of the session – ninety-one Tory MPs voted against the government on Lords Reform on 10 July – and with the Olympics imminent, Number 10 decided to push it back again until after the summer break. Neither Cameron nor Osborne are enthusiasts of reshuffles. Cameron came to power believing that they almost never resolve the problems they were designed to solve, and almost always produce fresh problems. Craig Oliver had been reading up about reshuffles under the Conservatives and Labour over the previous thirty years, which reinforces their belief that they should be minimised. A conversation with Godric Smith, one of Blair’s media team, further fortifies their prejudices.
Besides Cameron and Osborne, Llewellyn and Fall are key figures in working out the details of the 4 September reshuffle. Conservative MPs have become deeply suspicious and resentful of Osborne’s influence over appointments. Osborne prides himself on being very good at picking people. Mark Carney, appointed Bank of England governor in July 2013, and Paul Deighton, formerly chief executive of LOCOG and appointed a Treasury minister in January 2013, are two appointments with which he is especially pleased. Other figures owing their advancement to him include Matthew Hancock, Greg Hands, Sajid Javid and Paul Kirby, head of the Policy Unit.
Final touches are made over pizza in the chancellor’s dining room in Number 11. Each fresh appointment will be announced on Twitter in real time, so all have the same story at the same time. The corner piece of the reshuffle is the decision to move Andrew Lansley. He has ‘had his card marked since the spring’ and only the delayed reshuffle allows him to continue in office so long. Cameron takes time to accept Lansley has to go; their interview is particularly painful. Lansley believes that he is being offered an EU commissioner job for the next round in 2014. In the interim, to the surprise of Cameron’s team, he accepts the leadership of the House of Commons, which is widely considered a demotion.
Appointing Jeremy Hunt as his successor makes admirable sense. Cameron was first impressed by Hunt when he helped him prepare for the 2010 TV debates and liked the calm bedside manner and confidence he exuded. His opinion of Hunt rockets during the Olympics: Hunt’s loyalty, mastery of detail and ability to foresee and overcome problems persuade many in Number 10 that he can handle a much bigger brief. Getting him out of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport following the Leveson Inquiry is another reason for the move. They worry that the Murdoch press might react against his appointment because of the furore over the BSkyB bid, but no such campaign materialises.
The reshuffle tries to address Number 10’s fragile grip over the party. Sayeeda Warsi must go as party co-chairman. While many admire her resolve, she had a number of disagreements over campaign strategy in the run-up to the 2012 local elections with senior figures in CCHQ, including the director of campaigns Stephen Gilbert, a stalwart of the party machine. Cameron and Osborne want someone who will create a feeling of optimism and purpose with the party in the country. Feldman has sorted the organisational and financial side of CCHQ as co-chairman; it now needs a charismatic leader to galvanise the party. They alight on Grant Shapps as co-chairman, who has done a good job as Minister of Housing. Cameron never found it easy to find the right party chairman, but he believes Shapps, who is eager for the job, will be biddable as the election approaches.
Finding the right chief whip is another ongoing problem. Patrick McLoughlin has done the job since May 2005. He is widely liked and trusted, but with further fierce battles coming up, they need a more assertive figure. Enter Andrew Mitchell, Osborne’s idea. He had been a strong and effective International Development Secretary, had been in the Whips’ Office in the 1990s, and has a military bearing from his days in the Royal Tank Regiment. He is on the right of the party too, a benefit. Cameron’s team are desperate to put the travails with the party over the last two years firmly behind them, and they believe Mitchell will ‘sort out the party’. His assertiveness is evident from his very first minutes in his new post. Mitchell insists that Number 10 does not interfere with the running of the Whips’ Office. ‘Mitchell made clear that in recent years the Whips’ Office had been too much of a “sergeants’ mess” and it needed to revert to its previous [role] as an “officers’ mess” composed of the young and talented passing through and older more reassuring senior types,’ recalls one. Have they appointed the right man? ‘Some of us were saying: “Look, it might not be too late to review this decision.”’ McLoughlin is happy enough to leave, and is flattered by Cameron’s phone call to him the previous Friday to say, ‘I would like you to head a major department.’ He is invited to become Transport Secretary, with a clear instruction to press ahead with the high-speed rail project HS2.
Warsi’s departure, on top of widespread critical comment that Cameron has insufficient women in his government, helps explain the promotions of Maria Miller to succeed Hunt at Culture, Theresa Villiers to succeed Owen Paterson at the Northern Ireland Office, and Justine Greening to succeed Mitchell at International Development. Chris Grayling is promoted to Justice Secretary. As one of only two figures to hold positions in the shadow Cabinet but not to receive Cabinet posts in 2010 because of the Lib Dems, he has much support. Nick Herbert, the other shadow Cabinet minister to miss out, is judged not to have handled his disappointment as well. Grayling, in contrast, quietly put his head down, and did well as Minister of State for Employment. It means shifting Ken Clarke sideways to Minister without Portfolio. He is lucky to survive. He had been squabbling with May at the Home Office which created tension, and had been winding up Cameron with talk of prisoner rights and prisoner voting. Yet senior aides in Number 10 felt his ‘wise experience’, shorn of departmental responsibility, would still be of value to them.
The Justice Secretary berth had originally been cleared to make way for Iain Duncan Smith. Cameron is much more instinctively loyal to Tory grandees than Osborne, who is an iconoclast by comparison. But two years of listening to Osborne’s belittling of IDS and his reforms at the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) have left their mark. ‘You’ve been there a couple of years, would you like to move on to Justice?’ Cameron asks. ‘I’ll think about it,’ he tells the PM.14 IDS subsequently discussed the move with BBC political editor Nick Robinson, musing that he had been quite attracted to the idea because it would enable him to develop his thinking about the rehabilitation of offenders. That night, Danny Finkelstein, The Times journalist and close friend of Osborne’s, goes on BBC2’s Newsnight and speculates about the reasons for IDS moving from DWP. IDS firmly suspects Osborne’s hand behind what he is saying, although Finkelstein insists he had been thinking through the logic of the move, rather than taking any cue from his friend. IDS tells Cameron the next day that he wants to remain at DWP. ‘If he really wanted to move me, he could have done,’ insists IDS. ‘But I said that I wanted to see through the reforms.’15 Forcing a former Conservative leader to move against his will is not something Cameron wants to countenance.
Reshuffle over, and a tougher team in place, Cameron believes he can place the problems of the spring and summer squarely behind him, and look forward to a much better autumn. Cameron has had a punishing eighteen months. Osborne has been on the run since his Budget. It is vital things pick up. Even with no obvious challenges in sight, Cameron’s future is very much in the balance.