THIRTY-EIGHT
September 2014–March 2015
‘One of the rare issues on which Cameron will lose his temper is if they try challenging him over development spending,’ says an aide. At a time of austerity, Cameron comes under regular pressure about this issue. His dogged commitment to it, while refusing in the final months to commit to a similar pledge on defence, is seen in some quarters as perverse. Criticism reaches a climax on both sides of the Atlantic in late 2014 and early 2015 with even Obama expressing concern at his meeting with Cameron in the White House in January 2015, about Britain’s plans for defence spending. Why does Cameron’s lead on the world stage, so forthright in his first three and a half years, appear to have gone into reverse?
At the Gleneagles G8 summit in July 2005, chaired by Tony Blair, the G8 committed itself to spend 0.7% of gross national income on overseas development. When Cameron became Conservative Party leader in December 2005, he retained Andrew Mitchell, who was committed to the target, as shadow International Development Secretary. For five years in Opposition, he and Mitchell worked very closely to make development a priority area for the Conservatives.1 Why did Cameron give it such high standing? Christianity is not an overt force in Cameron’s life, as it is for some who are strong supporters of development. Political factors certainly played a part: the party needed to reposition itself and shed its ‘nasty’ and reactionary image, and development was an ideal symbol. But the crusade is about much more than that. He understands the benefits for Britain of the diplomatic clout and authority that an emphasis on ‘soft power’ can provide. In July 2007, he visited Rwanda when his own Witney constituency was suffering from floods, which brought him his first serious taste of adverse publicity on his development priority. Aides speak of the ‘special place that Rwanda has in his heart’, dating in part back to his sense that the party had not done enough in response to the genocide in 1994. On his 2007 visit he committed the Conservatives to achieving the Gleneagles target within six years, and spoke powerfully about his personal commitment to the cause of development. The 0.7% figure in the 2010 Conservative manifesto, a commitment eagerly supported by the Lib Dems, readily finds its way into the Coalition Agreement. Danny Alexander, in charge of the 2010 Spending Review, oversees a debate about whether the figure should apply immediately or be delayed until 2015: ‘In the end we decided that it should be met by 2013, which secured broad agreement,’ he says.2 Cameron and Mitchell, now Secretary of State, reserve a third of this budget for conflict prevention, and helping to support fragile states.
Cameron continues to invest time and political capital in this area, going far beyond support for the 0.7% figure. In 2011, he delivers a major speech in Lagos, arguing that Africa should be seen as a place of opportunity, and that democratic capitalism is superior to authoritarian capitalism (the little dig at the Chinese does not go unnoticed).3 He believes economic and political freedom, rather than aid, best lift people out of poverty, and he wants spending to focus on measurable objectives such as immunisation. Right-wing critics of development policy constantly irritate him, and shortly before his Lagos speech, he deliberately takes a question from a Daily Mail journalist at the end of the Deauville summit in May 2011, using it as a chance to attack all the reasons critics give for opposing the 0.7% figure.
The critical point on the 0.7% commitment comes in early 2012, with the economy still not responding, and further cuts to be found. Mitchell, aware of the threat, approaches Osborne to persuade the Treasury to stick to the 0.7% commitment, recognising that 2013 is the year in which the government had agreed to reach it. Throughout 2012 into 2013, the prime minister is still one of the very few to actively support 0.7%. In 2013, Justine Greening, who replaced Mitchell at International Development in September 2012, comes under intense pressure from the MoD who are quick to make their case in public. She outmanoeuvres the MoD.4 Within the Quad, even Clegg begins to say, ‘You know, it would make our lives much easier if we push back the 0.7%.’ Cameron considers this and speaks to Osborne about it, but in the end, they come out against change. Why, especially at a time of such intense pressure? The reasons include: Cameron’s personal commitment; a desire to avoid war with charities and non-governmental organisations, including with popular figures like Bob Geldof; and critically a desire not to break promises. Cameron and Osborne look to Australia, where the prime minister Kevin Rudd had received widespread opprobrium in 2010 after deferring his carbon cap-and-trade commitment. Both PM and chancellor have also absorbed the lessons of Clegg reneging on his tuition-fees pledge. ‘We won’t make any new friends by dropping it, we’ll still have the Daily Mail on our back, and we’ll look like people who have no principles’ is their view. The 0.7% target is reached in 2013, and Britain is the only G8 country to do so (the US spends less than 0.2% – although its GDP is six times greater than that of the UK), while Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Luxembourg and the UAE are the only other nations to reach it. Despite consistently meeting the target for three decades, the Netherlands falls short in 2013.5
In the summer of that year, Cameron reads Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, a book which further underpins his belief that open political and economic institutions, rather than autocracies, are the most likely to create sustainable success and prosperity. He is also persuaded by Mitchell to accept Ban Ki-moon’s invitation to co-chair the UN high-level panel on development to explore future targets after the Millennium Development Goals. While in New York in the summer of 2014 he writes an article for the Wall Street Journal, in which he argues against corruption and for greater transparency in the developing world.6 He texts Mitchell to thank him for persuading him to accept the position. Somalia is a country in which the prime minister invests a great deal of personal effort, trying against the odds to bring more stability. A conference in May, organised by Mitchell before his departure, successfully galvanises international support. Cameron takes a strong lead in July 2014 at the Girl Summit, which Justine Greening asks him to co-host, and he speaks movingly about female genital mutilation.
A difficulty had arisen at the end of June, immediately prior to this summit, when, with the support of Mitchell, the Lib Dem former Scotland Secretary Michael Moore tabled a private member’s bill to enshrine the 0.7% target into law.7 This is a moment of peril for Cameron, as it would lock the government into spending more than £12 billion annually on development. A handful of Conservatives make it noisily clear that this is a step too far. Cameron and Osborne are in a corner and know they have no way out except to support the measure, or see the Lib Dems take the credit and have opprobrium rain down on them. Instead, Parliament faces down fire from some on the right wing of the Conservative Party, notably Philip Davies and Jacob Rees-Mogg. Deft work from Greening and Conservative whips sees the bill pass the Commons by a majority of 146 to six, but passage through the House of Lords is trickier with some opposition, including from heavyweight establishment figures like former chancellor Nigel Lawson and former Cabinet Secretary, Robin Butler.
When Ebola erupts in Africa in September 2014, he again takes a lead. That month, Obama says to him: ‘Look, this really is urgent, I need you to take care of Sierra Leone, François Hollande to take care of Guinea, while we do Liberia.’ The joint effort is significant in arresting the spread of the disease. Along with his support for gay marriage, Cameron’s commitment to international development is his principal stand for liberal and humanitarian values. It wins him few friends in his party, and brings particular turbulence in the months leading up to the general election with many, not just on the right, wanting more money on defence; but his commitment is striking.
The development/defence trade-off sticks in the craw of Cameron’s right wing and the military. When the question had been raised in 2013 as to which country would host the biannual NATO summit in September 2014, Cameron willingly put up his hand: it would coincide with the end of Britain’s thirteen-year war in Afghanistan, and he is eager to show the world that Britain takes its commitments to NATO and international security very seriously. Number 10 is conscious that the country has not held a NATO summit since the last summer of the Thatcher era in July 1990, marking the end of the Cold War. With Putin on the warpath, the spectre of an aggressive leader in the Kremlin becomes a real concern. The dominant issue of the summit will inevitably now be how to deal with Russian aggression in Ukraine.
To help gain fresh perspective, Cameron convenes a meeting in late July 2014 in the large dining room at Number 10. A range of political and military figures are invited, including former Labour Defence Secretary and NATO Secretary General George Robertson, former Chief of the General Staff Mike Jackson, and former Labour Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett. Michael Fallon, who has just taken over from Philip Hammond as Defence Secretary, starts out chairing the meeting until Cameron takes over. The PM gives an overview for twenty minutes, and then listens to the range of views. One person present describes it as ‘a bit of a charm offensive to seek our views as to what might come out of the NATO summit’. Cameron is conscious of the force of history bearing down on him from the east. He wants the summit to make an impact.
Number 10, though, has become disillusioned with the official Whitehall machine’s attempts at producing the distinctive agenda Cameron wants, so Downing Street special adviser Daniel Korski and colleagues in the Policy Unit seize the initiative, collating a number of ideas. These include a joint expeditionary force for NATO, and an Armed Forces Declaration, a tribute to the sixty-fifth anniversary of NATO’s formation. Crucially, the agenda includes a fresh commitment to meet the target, first formulated in 2006, of spending a minimum of 2% of GDP on defence. The Treasury and officials in Number 10 counsel against mentioning 2%, arguing that it is unaffordable. The Whitehall machine is so sceptical about whether agreement could indeed be reached on such a broad agenda that an aide has to go round foreign leaders before the official photo, pen in hand, to get them to sign up to a presentational version of the Armed Forces Declaration.
Newport and Cardiff in South Wales provide the venue for the summit, with roads closed for weeks as part of a massive security operation, including twelve miles of security fencing acting as a ‘ring of steel’. The summit is indeed hyped as ‘the most important since [the] fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989’, which is not without foundation.8 For Number 10, a core subtext is using the summit to push the EU towards sanctions on Russia in response to its aggression in Ukraine, which again receives less media notice than they would have liked. Cameron is pleased that the summit does indeed reinvigorate a sense of collective security among member states after several years of the alliance’s focus not being on threats to Europe itself. But while many of the debates and serious-sounding resolutions quickly fade from international memory, the commitment to the 2% for defence spending does not. The 2% figure, about which Cameron feels strongly, is barely discussed in the National Security Council before the summit. As one senior British officer wondered at the time, ‘I think the PM may be painting himself into a corner on this.’ Sure enough, the commitment, hastily conceived, comes back to haunt him. The military are not going to let him forget it.
Many still have lingering resentments dating back to the 2010 Spending Review and the Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR), believing that defence has been overly clobbered in the austerity cuts. A particular cause of concern is the decision to scrap Harrier jets and decommission the Ark Royal (the Royal Navy’s sole aircraft carrier) earlier than planned, and without replacements for the best part of a decade. The military dismiss the SDSR as a mere cost-cutting exercise, and pin their hopes on a new strategic review in late 2015 properly identifying the priorities for Britain’s role in the world.9 Retired generals, admirals and air chiefs are rising out of their armchairs and finding common voice with serving officers – a dangerous alliance, especially when conjoined with right-wing Conservative backbenchers. Information starts to be dripped into the media, which is regularly reminded that in October 2010 Cameron had announced that Britain ‘will require year-on-year, in real terms, growth in the defence budget in the years beyond 2015’.10 Despite this weight of criticism, Number 10 continue to believe that it called the 2010 SDSR right: ‘We didn’t need tanks and heavy equipment as the generals wanted. We need flexible forces and linked battlefield functions such as ISTAR [information, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance systems] for today’s battles against ISIS,’ says one aide.
Are Cameron and Osborne now on different sides of the argument? They were certainly at one in the early years in power, believing that Labour had wasted billions of pounds on defence, and had run the MoD poorly. They protect the equipment programme in 2010, and appoint Hammond as Fox’s successor in October 2011, hoping his sharp financial brain will help ensure value for money. But where Cameron sees the romance of the British armed forces, and revels in being a staunch defender of his country, Osborne focuses more on the pounds and pence. He is adamant that if the government is going to make savings and complete the job of deficit reduction, cuts will have to be made in defence spending, ‘or we have no hope of balancing the budget by 2020’. Treasury officials are fiercely behind him in their belief that there is still huge wastage in defence: ‘There are too many admirals, too many generals, too many chauffeurs,’ one says. They argue forcefully in late 2014 and early 2015 that the procurement budget is excessive, and that the quality of Britain’s defence and foreign policy will not be jeopardised by planned cuts. ‘Defence is good for a billion’ is how the service chiefs characterise the Treasury’s attitude to their spending. They have read the Treasury’s steely-eyed world view perfectly. With the economy set to expand, the Treasury believe that committing to a fixed target of 2% will pin down far too much money on defence, create an awkward precedent for other departments (Education might demand protection too), and prevent the completion of deficit reduction. Osborne blankly refuses to let the 2% commitment be included in the Conservative manifesto for the 2015 election. Elections, as Crosby would agree, are not won on defence.
Month after month, the pressure mounts on Cameron. Senior backbenchers including Bernard Jenkin and Rory Stewart, chairman of the Defence Select Committee, are leading the sceptics. In February 2015, the committee criticises the ‘strikingly modest’ role that British forces are playing in fighting the ISIS.11 The military’s close connections with backbench Conservatives are now seriously fuelling the criticisms within both camps. Cameron is becoming so irritated by the barrage of criticism that it further emboldens him to resist making a definite pledge for Britain to maintain the 2% figure. He retorts that he has made a ten-year commitment to increase equipment, and to maintain the ground forces at their current level, and to stick by Trident. ‘You’ve got Putin buggering around, you’ve got ISIS, you’ve got Obama doing crazy things with Iran and we are not backing our own defence,’ retorts one former Cabinet minister, throwing up his arms in horror. Cameron succeeds in neutralising defence as an issue during the election campaign, when only UKIP and the Democratic Unionist Party commit to the 2% target. Beneath the surface, are the questions being asked about Britain’s place in the world damaging to Cameron’s leadership? Why is the media-savvy PM not responding more to what the right-wing press want him to do?
The last nine months of the parliament witness the most critical questioning of Britain’s standing on the world stage since the 1970s. The speculation can be traced in part to a cool wind blowing across the Atlantic from Washington. The criticism finds expression, albeit in private, during Cameron’s White House visit in January 2015. On the flight home, Cameron refers to American concerns about Britain and how, unusually, the president had come back to this several times. Something of the White House’s questioning seeps into Washington’s political bloodstream. Number 10 doesn’t believe that the president is orchestrating it, though some more junior White House aides might be. In March, head of the US army General Raymond Odierno launches a public salvo. Because of cutbacks, he says, Britain will no longer be able to commit division-sized forces to future combat operations, adding that he is ‘very concerned’ about the falling proportion of defence spending in the UK.12 Throughout the spring, British ambassador Peter Westmacott reports back to Number 10 about Washington’s concerns regarding Britain’s ‘strategic drift’. There are still more damaging broadsides from nearer to home: the International Institute for Strategic Studies reports in February that the cuts have resulted in a 20–30% reduction in Britain’s defence capability.13 Then a report in March from the respected Royal United Services Institute claims that the British army could now be reduced to its smallest size since 1770, with just 50,000 troops.14 It receives widespread publicity on both sides of the Atlantic. Number 10 think the claims alarmist and absurd. But the criticism keeps rolling in.
On 5 May, just two days before the general election, Vice President Joe Biden spends an hour with the British chiefs of staff, who are making a call to their opposite numbers in Washington. He tells them: ‘We Americans have a higher bar for you Brits than for the rest. You are a pillar of NATO and we expect you to show the way. We have elections coming up next year, and middle-class America is fed up with having to cough up the money to sort out security in Europe.’ The concern is this: the US accounts for more than 70% of NATO’s military spending. Britain might have the fifth largest defence budget in the world, but Washington worries that if Britain isn’t prepared to commit to the 2% in the future, there is little hope that other nations will follow suit.15 Disillusion in Washington finds its sharpest expression in an article in the Washington Post in May which makes a powerful claim: ‘after an extraordinary 300-year run, Britain has essentially resigned as a global power’.16 The piece that most gets under the skin of Cameron, though, appears in the Financial Times in the same month arguing that ‘Britain [has] decided it’s going to turn in its deputy sheriff’s badge and let the US play the role of world policeman alone’.17 He is visibly upset and irritated, telling his team that the piece is grossly unfair.
Disillusion with the British government from within the American military, defence and security community is actively fed by their counterparts, many retired, within the United Kingdom. Richard Dannatt – former Chief of the General Staff, briefly official adviser on defence to Cameron in Opposition, and a constant critic of both Blair and Brown – is the most vocal. Dannatt constantly jabs away at Number 10. Almost equal an irritant is Richard Shirreff, the British general who served as Deputy Supreme Allied Commander in Europe until 2014. In February 2015, he says that Britain has become a mere ‘bit player’ on the world stage and in the midst of the most serious international crisis for fifty years Cameron has gone AWOL.18 One aide dismisses him as ‘totally off the wall’. Shortly after, the former Chief of the Air Staff Michael Graydon attacks the British government’s policy as ‘disappointing and, indeed, frankly shameful’.19
Criticism of Cameron for lacking a clear strategic sense of foreign policy, widely aired in David Richards’ 2014 memoir Taking Command, is becoming a common perception. Relations in Cameron’s final months before the election become strained and ragged within the Whitehall national security community. Suddenly, he is in everyone’s sights. Service chiefs and officials turn on him for preventing the National Security Council (NSC) co-ordinating foreign, defence and security policy as they would like. Some say he lacks the strategic grasp of Clegg or Osborne, and lacks a vision of Britain’s place in the world of a Thatcher or Blair. He is criticised for making hasty rather than considered judgements. He is accused of not trusting his advisers and officials at large beyond his close circle and his Number 10 team. He is said to begin NSC meetings by asserting ‘this is an important issue and you know what I think, but nevertheless let’s go through the arguments’, thereby discouraging others from speaking up. His team are nonplussed by the accusations: ‘Yes he has strong views, but if he didn’t, he would be criticised for being indecisive.’ The Foreign Office is no longer as assertive as it was in the early years of the coalition. Whereas initially Cameron’s appointment of Hague, and the latitude he gave him, restored some pride and authority to the Foreign Office lost in previous years, there is a widespread view that its influence diminishes towards the end of the Hague era. By late 2014, almost every aspect of Cameron’s effort on foreign affairs is under attack. How much justice is there in the criticisms?
His lead on Libya in 2011, lauded at the time in many quarters, is accused of failing to anticipate the destabilisation of the country by Islamic extremists. ‘We had no security presence on the ground, a huge failure, and no coherent drive from the centre to stabilise the country,’ says one retired official. Ed Miliband joins in the criticism during the election campaign, alleging that Cameron’s failures in Libya after 2011 have contributed to the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean.20 Though Miliband’s attack is criticised for its opportunistic timing, his argument strikes a chord. Cameron is accused of naivety and romanticism in his response to the Arab Spring in general, and failing to recognise fully the unsavoury elements amongst those protesting against the status quo. Libya certainly became a failed state after 2011, and it remains an open question whether his intervention in 2011 made matters worse. Would staying out, as in Syria where Assad remained, have been better? Certainly, no lasting peace has been established, but he may have prevented mass bloodshed on the streets of Benghazi in 2011. After the trauma of Iraq, however, no voice on the NSC was recommending putting British boots on the ground. Equally, any attempt to bring in UN peacekeepers would have been vetoed by Russia, given Putin’s strong antipathy to Anglo-French action in Libya. Effort was expended to try to help a transitional government take root, to no avail. If post-2011 Libya is chalked up as a failure for Cameron, it is not for want of his trying to find a humane way forward.
On Russia, Cameron is criticised for not gaining more leverage from the relationship he built up with Putin from 2011 to 2013, which might have deterred the Russian leader’s aggression in Ukraine. He is criticised for snubbing Putin at the Sochi games in February 2014, and for not being a direct part of the German-led talks on Ukraine. ‘We should be in there,’ say diplomats: ‘he took his eye off the ball.’ During the D-Day seventieth-anniversary celebrations in Normandy in June 2014, Merkel invited Hollande to join her for conversations with Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko. Obama tells Cameron: ‘I don’t think I want to be part of this,’ and Cameron agrees to stay out too. Cameron’s advisers believe they do not need to be directly involved, and have great faith in Merkel to lead the discussions and to keep them regularly informed. Criticism of torpor over Ukraine discards the strong stance that Cameron made at EU Council meetings and the NATO summit on sanctions against Russia. Cameron describes Britain’s role as being ‘the strongest pole in the tent’, pressing for sanctions in the first place, keeping the US and EU aligned over them, and ensuring they remain in place when others waver.
On China, Cameron is attacked for needlessly provoking the country at a time of leadership transition when, with hindsight, it is said that Clegg could have met the Dalai Lama. As a consequence, he ran a serious risk of damaging Britain’s relations with China, before eventually handing the Chinese a major moral victory, as incoming world leaders are now much more reticent to meet the Dalai Lama. This criticism has substance, if underplaying the importance Cameron and Osborne gave to repairing the economic relationship.
On his relationship with the US, Cameron’s desire to avoid the overfamiliarity of Blair, and the perceived neediness of Brown, produces a relationship arguably too detached, with insufficient work put in to build up links between the teams below the leaders themselves, such as those between the Defence and Foreign Secretaries and their American counterparts (with the exception of Hague’s close relationship with Hillary Clinton). But Obama nevertheless thinks Cameron his closest overseas ally during 2010–15; the relationship may not be as close as Thatcher–Reagan or Blair–Clinton/George W. Bush, but it establishes equilibrium and serves British interests well. Cameron deserves credit for establishing this bond with the president, even if Whitehall could have been more adept at building close relations with Obama’s team, for all their very different outlooks and views of Britain from their opposite numbers under Clinton and George W. Bush, particularly after the departure of the sympathetic Thomas Donilon, Obama’s National Security Advisor, in June 2013. The US certainly wanted Britain to do more in Iraq, but the two pillars on which its own policy was based proved misjudged: faith in the Baghdad government, whose leadership under prime minister Nouri al-Maliki proved unsatisfactory, and faith in the Iraqi army.
On the EU, he is criticised for being overly concerned by his own right wing, which led him in Opposition to pull out of the centre-right EPP grouping in the European Parliament, creating difficulties with Merkel. Merkel liked Cameron personally, and they reached a mutual understanding of their different approaches to the EU. But it took time after 2010 for her to see him as a serious political player. It is hard to discern a clear strategy or forethought on Europe, or to see more than a series of tactical withdrawals and pyrrhic victories, until 2013, with the EU budget cut and the announcement of the referendum. He is criticised too for not doing more to build coalitions of support, which are vital in the EU. Cameron’s freedom of manoeuvre over Europe nevertheless is severely limited by his uncompromising Eurosceptic backbenchers, who have inflicted considerable damage on the four previous Conservative leaders, and who harbour a deep hatred towards him personally. Equally, he can when the occasion demands build support in Europe, or over Libya in 2011, the European budget in 2013 and Ukraine in 2014–15. But his record on the EU at best is mixed.
While there is some justice in these criticisms, cumulatively they take little account of the difficulty that any leader would face in trying to find consistency in the anarchic world of these five years, with the rise of Islamic extremism, a prolonged economic crisis in Europe, and a reticent US president. Cameron is vulnerable to attack on his foreign and defence policy mostly from the autumn of 2014 onwards when he allows himself to be overly focused on the general election. ‘There are no votes in defence or foreign policy’ may have been an article of faith with him and his team. But he allowed himself to be too swayed by Osborne who will not commit to 2% on defence before the election, and Crosby who will not relax his tub-thumping insistence on the long-term economic plan. Game, set and match to the long-term economic plan, but it comes at a price.
Cameron’s foreign and defence policy achievements are not empty. He has partial success in achieving his three objectives in foreign policy: to safeguard the British nation; exploit opportunities for selling British products abroad; and to provide a moral lead and practical help on the world stage. He shows judgement and resolve in getting Britain out of Afghanistan in 2014, stoking up anger among elements of the military for doing so. His decision to stick by the development pledge helps save lives and gives Britain moral authority at the UN. His standing up to what he sees as the bloated defence community may, if the 2015 SDSR is well conceived, prove politically to be on a par with Thatcher confronting her antagonists who had vested interests in maintaining the status quo – the professions and trade unions. Aside from questions over Libya in 2011, and his lack of groundwork before the Syria vote, he avoids major blunders in foreign policy, keeps the country safe, and harbours hopes that his non-doctrinaire approach to the EU, coupled with his strong relationship with Merkel, might yet achieve a new settlement between Britain and Europe – something that eluded all his predecessors since the 1970s.