David Davis, and not David Cameron, would have become leader of the Conservative Party but for Michael Howard.
When Howard announced he was resigning as Tory leader after losing to Tony Blair in 2005, he said he was staying on till the autumn to give the party plenty of time to choose his successor. Had the election been held quickly, Davis, overwhelming favourite at the time, would have won. But time was what Cameron needed, and Howard gave it to him, as I will explain later. But back to earlier days.
Cameron was a regular figure on the political scene at Westminster long before any of us thought of him becoming an MP, let alone party leader. He worked for the Conservative research department for five years after graduating from Oxford, during which time he worked in Number 10 briefing John Major in advance of Prime Minister’s Questions and, later, before his press conferences in the 1992 election.
It was after he was appointed a special adviser to the chancellor, Norman Lamont, and later the home secretary, Howard, that he became a frequent visitor to the Press Gallery, and a name and number in all our contact books. He would breeze into The Times Room – we had moved by now from our office near Hansard to what looked like a Portakabin along from the Press Gallery bar – and offer us the latest press release from his boss, or background briefings on what they were doing. Cameron always came in with a smile on his face, and really did look as if he was enjoying himself. He was jaunty without being cocky.
Cameron appeared in several pictures with a beleaguered chancellor on Black Wednesday, the day Major and Lamont decided to quit the exchange rate mechanism, but he survived Lamont’s sacking and was soon appointed by Howard. His visits to the gallery, along with another adviser called Patrick Rock, became even more frequent until he went off in 1994 to become corporate affairs director at Carlton.
If you had asked anyone in the Lobby in those days if they regarded Cameron as a likely future candidate for the top, I doubt whether any would have thought it at all credible. He somehow lacked the earnestness and deep interest in policy that went with politicians destined for the Cabinet, a criticism ironically directed at him by his opponents as he effortlessly rose after entering Parliament in 2001. Cameron prospered under Howard’s leadership, helping him prepare for the Hutton Inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly, overseeing a policy review and writing the 2005 manifesto.
His ability to be and look relaxed was an undoubted asset. In the updated version of their biography of Cameron in 2012, Cameron: Practically a Conservative, Francis Elliott and James Hanning quoted an ally as saying: ‘If there was an Olympic gold medal for “chillaxing” he would win it.’ I co-wrote a newspiece on the book, saying the secrets of how Cameron switched off from the pressures of work had been revealed: karaoke, snooker, tennis against a machine nicknamed ‘The Clegger’ (after Nick Clegg) and three or four glasses of wine at Sunday lunch.
The Lobby rekindled its interest in Cameron in 2005, when we suddenly picked up that David Davis was not going to have the clear run through to an expected victory that had been anticipated.
Looking back, it is obvious that Howard, the outgoing leader, killed the chances of Davis. But it was interesting that Howard’s first choice was George Osborne, whom he made shadow chancellor in a swift reshuffle after announcing on losing the general election that he was standing down, but not until after an elongated election process ending in November.
As the Elliott–Hanning book says, Howard had initially thought of giving the shadow chancellor job to Cameron, but Cameron had fought to ward off the job, preferring instead education. The authors speculate he was anxious to avoid a confrontation with Gordon Brown, who had seen off six shadow chancellors in eight years.
Howard – quietly spoken, tough, ambitious, one of the Eurosceptic Cabinet ministers whom John Major was thought to have in mind when he lashed out at ‘the bastards’ – had taken over from Iain Duncan Smith without a contest. Elliott and Hanning say of him:
By the end of the campaign he was having serious doubts about whether Cameron was the right candidate to stop Davis. He told senior aides that he believed Osborne would be a better successor than Cameron. He had been angered by his former special adviser’s criticism of the campaign’s focus on immigration and further irritated to be told … that he didn’t want the shadow chancellorship.
Howard urged Osborne to run. Osborne considered it and discussed it with friends, and a fortnight later announced that he would not. Michael Gove is quoted in the book as saying: ‘I think there was always an understanding that if one of them stood the other one wouldn’t. And I think that George thought about it and then quickly realised that, for a variety of reasons, Dave would be better.’
It may be that Howard regarded Osborne as the stronger of the two in having a firm vision of where he wanted to take the party. But when Osborne rejected Howard’s suggestion, it is clear he switched to his former adviser, Cameron. Cameron was now to become the modernizing candidate, even though the debate over whether he really was a modernizer had still to be settled after five years as Opposition leader and five years in coalition government.
By spinning out the election till the late autumn, Howard ensured that Cameron – after Osborne said no – had time to develop his campaign and prove himself to the ultimate electorate – the party membership. Again, the top two candidates among the MPs were to go through to the membership run-off.
Howard made Cameron shadow education secretary for the few months before the party election, giving him a higher profile. The Davis camp has always believed that Howard wanted to stop him by this tactic. Tim Montgomerie, in a piece for ConservativeHome after the contest, said that a few days before the 5 May general election, Howard picked up that supporters of Davis were collecting signatures to trigger a confidence vote that he would face if he had not resigned by the weekend after poll day.
So Howard’s announcement came very quickly, but with a process that fatally damaged Davis’s hopes. At the time he was the preferred candidate of the grassroots, was believed to have some sixty MPs in the bag and would almost certainly have won an immediate election. Although the Davis camp believed it had been outfoxed by the old fox, as the party conference approached he remained the strong favourite. All was to change suddenly. I remember a pleasant evening when News International invited the candidates to a dinner at the conference with the group’s editors and political editors. It was jolly having them round the same table, but no one made a stunning impression. Andy Coulson, then editor of the News of the World and later to become Cameron’s communications director, was there, as was Rebekah Brooks.
But on the same day Ken Clarke, the veteran candidate running for the third time, roused the Tory faithful with a vintage attack on Labour. Then Cameron took the place by storm when – speaking without notes and wandering around the platform – he gave an inspirational speech about attracting a new generation of Tories. At that moment the Tory party, which knew little about him, fell in love with David Cameron. He was new, he was fresh, he was smiling, and he was young. My splash in The Times next morning said that the race for the leadership had been thrown wide open and that Davis was now under pressure to produce the speech of his life if he was to stay out in front.
It failed to materialize. I remember thinking that if the vote had been down to the people at conference, Cameron would already have walked it. And when Davis delivered a competent but less-than-inspiring address, and Liam Fox, another candidate, got a much better reception, the skids were under the long-time favourite. I can vividly recall the sheer brutality of the assessment by Tom Bradby, ITN’s political editor, that Davis ‘had bombed, and bombed badly’. If one speech ever made a leader, and another unmade one, it was those two performances at Blackpool. Cameron was to go on to win the MPs’ ballot and the membership vote by miles.
Cameron had been nervous about facing Blair – who had seen off four Tory leaders – and Osborne about facing Brown – who had seen off even more shadow chancellors – but they held their own in that first year before Blair finally succumbed to Brown’s pressure to go. Apart from the first few months of his premiership, Brown presented an easy target for Cameron as one mishap followed another and one putative plot after another failed to be followed through.
Even so, the Tory leader had his friend Osborne to thank for bursting Brown’s early bubble when the polls looked so good for Labour that there was very serious consideration of a snap election. Osborne’s promise to cut inheritance tax provoked strong public and press approval and the wind went out of Brown’s sails.
Cameron maintained his easy-going approach to high politics that we had become accustomed to. George Pascoe-Watson, of The Sun, and I were invited to go on one of the first overseas trips – to the Middle East – with Cameron and his team in early 2007. It was a very friendly jaunt which allowed us to get to know better some of his staff.
Cameron went sightseeing in Jerusalem in brown cords and fashionably untucked blue shirt, looking every bit the tourist, but as soon as the local press turned up, he swiftly reverted to politician mode, using an informal press conference to criticize Blair’s close relationship with President Bush. His own ties with Washington would be ‘solid not slavish’.
George and I travelled in Cameron’s car to Tel Aviv, where he raised the question of Israeli settlements on the West Bank with the Israeli foreign minister in what was clearly a heated exchange. In the car, my phone rang and, in front of Cameron and his chief of staff, Ed Llewellyn, I told the foreign editor what I was intending to write for that night’s paper. Cameron smiled as I told him I had just been talking to Roland Watson, who was at Eton with him, and much banter ensued.
I have often thought that coalition was the ideal government arrangement for Cameron. In the early years of his leadership, Steve Hilton, his policy guru, and Michael Gove pushed Cameron to be the great modernizer, trying to do for the Tories what Blair had done for Labour. But concepts like the Big Society came and went, the ‘hug a hoodie’ era departed, and the pledge to be the greenest government ever descended into farce when he was alleged to have told civil servants to get rid of all the ‘green crap’.
Becoming prime minister was the goal Cameron set himself. Having Nick Clegg looking over his shoulder, and being in a minority, meant that some of the more radical plans that a strong right-wing Conservative government would have pursued could be put on the shelf. Elliott and Hanning captured this superbly in their updated book when they said that Cameron ‘can appear suspiciously at ease managing the day-to-day demands of power’.
They revealed that Hilton believed Cameron had become too focused on power rather than forcing through radical change. Cameron had charged Hilton with acting as his ‘conscience’ after he became prime minister, as a guard against a tendency to coast. But, the authors said, Cameron in 2012 was finding the demands of his ‘conscience’ wearisome and preferred to listen to the cold calculation of Osborne. Gove said of the Prime Minister: ‘He is a model of how to have a clear divide between the world of work and then relaxation so that you can clear your mind. There are few people who have such a finely developed capacity to do that.’
Cameron was like several leaders who went before him, constantly having to look to his right flank. Today, as he considers what to do with the rest of his career, he must regret promising them a European referendum at a time of weakness. It finished him. But just as his predecessors were unlucky that their main foe was Blair, who had shown he could conquer Middle England, Cameron was a lucky general in having as his three leaders of the Opposition Brown, Ed Miliband and, incredibly, Jeremy Corbyn. He was also lucky that when he entered the leadership fray, most of his main rivals like Clarke and Davis had been around for a long time and had stood before. He had the advantage of freshness, and no known ideological stance on anything much, and played both to considerable advantage.
Even then he failed to beat Brown outright in 2010. Britain’s voters went for Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair in a big way because they believed they knew what they stood for. With Cameron they were not so sure what they were voting for – but neither were Tory MPs and members. His lack of a guiding ideology or set of principles may have communicated itself to voters and resulted in his less-than-enthusiastic endorsement in 2010 and 2015 (when fear of a Labour–Scottish National Party link-up was a key electoral factor rather than widespread enthusiasm for the Conservatives).
Cameron’s disclosure during the 2015 election campaign to James Landale, deputy political editor of the BBC and former member of my Westminster team, that he would go before the next election was stunning and without doubt the story of the campaign. It fitted, though, with the image of a man who clearly enjoyed being prime minister, but would not at all mind, having achieved his life’s ambition, if he was doing something else.
However, that moment arrived far earlier that he wanted. As we now know, the lucky general’s luck ran out when his gamble on a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union spectacularly blew up in his face. One of the prominent figures in the campaign that defeated him was … David Davis. What goes around comes around.