David Cameron wanted to stay on as prime minister until 2019. I was told that by one of his closest friends. But it was not to be, and on 24 June 2016, just hours after we learnt that Britain had voted herself out of the European Union, he announced he was quitting. The issue of Europe, the one he said he wanted his party to stop banging on about, finished him as it had finished Margaret Thatcher.
We had learnt not to underestimate Cameron. Until June 2016 he had been a successful and fortunate leader, taking charge of his party in 2005, becoming prime minister in 2010 and running a coalition with the Liberal Democrats for the full five-year term, stunning most people by winning the 2015 election outright, and triumphing in referendums on the voting system and Scotland. He was fortunate until it came to his most important decision of all, the EU referendum. It was then that he lost the biggest wager of his life – and to his ill fortune it will be the decision that defines his premiership.
If friends and foes of Cameron agreed about one of his characteristics, it was that he could be extremely ruthless if the conditions warranted it. Whether it be axing a recalcitrant minister or requiring a minister to change an already agreed policy, Cameron would do it if his own or his party’s position was threatened.
Cameron’s handling of the coalition, which allowed him to govern for a full parliament between 2010 and 2015, summed up his tough streak. In the words of Norman Lamb, one of the Lib Dem ministers who served in government and survived the 2015 election (along with only seven of his colleagues): ‘He hugged us for five years and then he strangled us.’
Cameron enticed Nick Clegg into the Number 10 rose garden in 2010, and then proceeded to watch as his partners took the flak on behalf of the Government for most of the unpopular policies adopted by the two parties during the Parliament. He then ordered party chiefs to spend tens of thousands killing off the Lib Dems in the territories over which they had fought at recent elections, especially the southwest.
Looking back on the 2015 election, Lamb, who held on to his North Norfolk seat, told me the Coalition was for the Lib Dems an experiment which would determine whether a minor party could, under the first-past-the-post system, take part in government and live to tell the story. ‘The conclusion obviously is no,’ he said.
Lamb said that early on in the coalition, the Lib Dems had been warned by sister parties in Europe that the golden rule in coalitions was that the minor party got the blame for unpopular moves. He said the only way for third parties like the Lib Dems to win seats was to build up a coalition of support of former voters from the two main parties to add to a core of Lib Dem voters:
But then if you go into coalition with one of the main parties, your vote fractures and also those who voted for you because they hate the Tories accuse you of betrayal. In the end it destroys you. The same would happen if you went into a coalition with Labour and you upset the people who supported you to keep them out.
Lamb told me: ‘You can justifiably say that we contributed to five years of stable and successful government but we got absolutely no credit for it.’ The party’s contribution included steering Cameron away from right-wing policies favoured by much of his party, but again earned little credit. What the Lib Dems are remembered for is putting up tuition fees after promising not to, giving the wealthy a tax cut, and keeping the Tories afloat.
Veteran Westminster observers felt there was a naivety about the Lib Dem leadership as it had its first taste of power in decades – a desire to please its coalition senior partners without any obvious reciprocation. The coalition agreement gave Clegg the option of abstaining over the rise in tuition fees, but he asked his party to support it in by far the biggest single mistake of the Parliament and one from which he, personally, never recovered. In his book In it Together, Matthew d’Ancona reveals even that George Osborne advised Clegg not to sign up to a tripling of tuition fees. But as Vince Cable, business secretary, had drawn up the policy and Clegg had come to believe in it, he made a disastrous decision.
Meanwhile, the Tories gave the Lib Dems a referendum on the alternative vote system for Westminster elections and then went out of their way, Cameron included, to kill it. In their book Cameron: Practically a Conservative, Francis Elliott and James Hanning recorded that Cameron had always told Clegg he would play no part in the ‘No’ campaign, but that he went back on that when the polls suggested the two sides were running neck-and-neck. An ally quoted him as saying: ‘Right, we are going for this and we are not going to take our foot off the gas.’
This was Cameron the ruthless. Clegg’s other big coalition demand was turning the House of Lords into a much smaller and mainly elected chamber. But when ninety-one Conservative MPs voted against the legislation it quickly fell, and there was a feeling on the Liberal Democrat side that Cameron had done little to help it through by pressurizing his party. As a result Clegg withdrew support from the measure that would have shaken up parliamentary boundaries and cut the size of the Commons by fifty MPs. His own party would have been hit by the boundaries change, but his action produced no obvious benefit when the election came. And on reform of party funding, Clegg’s other pet issue, there was no sign of the Tories giving anything. ‘We were Cameron’s shield protecting him from his right wing. But he gave us nowt,’ said Lamb. Another veteran Lib Dem told me: ‘They ate us up and spat us out.’
Cameron’s luck held up to and during the 2015 general election. Quite apart from his Labour opposite numbers, he was fortunate that the leader of the Lib Dems was Nick Clegg, someone who was not inherently averse to a deal with the Conservatives and a person with whom he got on reasonably well. And he was fortunate, ironically and counter-intuitively, that the Scottish National Party performed so strongly in the 2014 referendum despite losing in the end. It meant that Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP leader, entered the 2015 contest on a roll and it was obvious, after years of Labour decline north of the border, that the SNP would be the massive beneficiaries.
As May approached, the polls suggested that the SNP could wipe out Labour in Scotland and suddenly it seemed that the only way Labour could become the main governing party was through a deal with the SNP. Cameron and the Tories had their weapon and they exploited it to the full. Tory posters showing Ed Miliband in the pocket of Alex Salmond, the former SNP leader who was trying to return to Westminster, had a devastating impact. The lucky general had been handed a late campaigning gift.
Norman Lamb had been in the southwest, trying to help the mass of threatened Liberal Democrats there. He returned to Norfolk on the Monday night of election week, having concluded that his party might sink to under twenty seats from fifty-six. Travelling round his constituency the next day, it suddenly seemed even worse:
Everything had changed. I had always put my estimate of ‘definites’ and ‘probables’ as I went round at between fifty and sixty-five per cent. Suddenly it was down over ten per cent. I was so freaked out that I bought cigarettes for the first time in ages to calm my nerves. I went to a house in North Walsham where I had always had a good welcome. They said: ‘Norman, we love having you as our MP but we are really worried about the SNP.’ As I walked out of their drive I knew in my heart they were going to vote Tory.
Cameron’s outright victory in 2015 was a bigger surprise to him than his failure to win outright in 2010, against an unpopular leader at the end of a thirteen-year Labour spell that had finished in recession. But according to many around him, it was the failure that made Cameron. The decision to make a coalition offer to Nick Clegg the day after the election was very much his own and surprised even George Osborne. It was the move of a man who was desperate not to throw it all away after coming so close. The clinching offer of a referendum on the alternative vote was again very much Cameron’s, even though he made it on the premise – which turned out to be wrong – that Labour were touting something similar. Not long afterwards, Cameron had the bonus of Labour electing a left-leaning leader, which would enable his new Government, certain to last for five years provided the Coalition held, to make a grab for the centre ground of British politics.
Before he was leader, he laid claim to being the heir to Tony Blair at a dinner with Daily Telegraph executives during his triumphant week at the Tory conference in Blackpool in 2005. And the longer his leadership lasted, the more that comparison felt apt. Like Blair, he looked as if he belonged as prime minister. While aides sometimes despaired of his lack of attention to detail on the finer points of policy and his tendency sometimes to speak before he thought, Cameron was a consummate handler of the big occasion and looked right in the job.
Like Blair, too, he showed himself to be a foreign policy interventionist, committing British troops to military action on three separate occasions and failing on a fourth. As with Blair there have been questions in the aftermath over what seemed like successful operations at the time. Cameron boldly authorized air strikes along with the French against Muammar Gaddafi’s brutal repression of his own citizens, probably succeeding in preventing a massacre at Benghazi. But he did so despite the initial opposition of President Obama and some of his own ministers, and the early months of the offensive did not go well. But Tripoli fell in August and Gaddafi was murdered two months later. Some claimed that Cameron had got lucky over Libya, but Elliott and Hanning quote Oliver Letwin, one of the ministers closest to Cameron, as saying that the response was the product of five years of thinking on how to make liberal interventions.
It was not until 2015 that we learnt from Anthony Seldon and Peter Snowdon, in their book Cameron at 10, of how concerned the military had been about both the Libyan action and the failure to take tougher military action when the Syrian crisis erupted in 2012, which in turn assisted the rise of Islamic State. General Sir David Richards, former head of the armed forces, accused Cameron of being more interested in a ‘Notting Hill liberal agenda’ than showing ‘serious statecraft’.
On Syria, where the military had proposed an assault including ground troops and air power, he said: ‘If they had the balls they would have gone through with it … if they’d done what I argued they wouldn’t be where they are with ISIS. And the authors tell of a showdown over Libya between Cameron, Richards and John Sawers, head of MI6, at a National Security Council meeting. Told bluntly by Cameron that the action to depose Gaddafi was in the British national interest, Sawers told him it had nothing to do with the national interest and insisted that Cameron was acting for ‘humanitarian reasons’.
Another book, Call me Dave by Lord Ashcroft and Isabel Oakeshott, carried more criticism, from Richards and others, about Cameron’s military operations. Richards says he had to tell Cameron that ‘being in the Combined Cadet Force at Eton’ did not qualify him to decide the tactics of complex military operations. At times, the PM was at war with the chief of the defence staff, who disagreed with him strongly on strategy. Former Tory chairman Michael Ancram said Libya is Cameron’s ‘Iraq’ – with the country now more dangerous than when the PM decided to topple Colonel Gaddafi.
In August 2013, Cameron suffered his most wounding parliamentary defeat after recalling the Commons during the recess to approve UK military action against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s Government to deter the use of chemical weapons. This followed a suspected chemical weapons attack on the outskirts of the capital, Damascus, in which hundreds of people are reported to have died. Thirty Conservative MPs and nine Lib Dems voted against Cameron as he sustained a 285–272 reverse in a move that was to bring a new caution to the Prime Minister’s attitude to foreign ventures. According to the Daily Mail, which serialized the Ashcroft book, there was astonishment inside the White House at the Government’s ‘incompetence’ over the vote in 2013. Cameron had wrongly assumed he had Labour’s support. During repeated clashes over foreign policy, Richards had to point out that military interventions were more complicated than supporting the ‘good guys’ versus the ‘bad guys’. A former member of the National Security Council backs that assessment, saying of the PM: ‘His instinct is to support the underdog, without analysing what that really means.’ On Libya, Ancram told Ashcroft and Oakeshott that the intervention played into the hands of terrorists.
In 2014 Cameron won all-party agreement to join the US in air raids against Islamic State in Iraq. But wary of another defeat, he declined to ask MPs for similar attacks in Syria, although he believed they were necessary. After his election victory and the horrific Islamic State attacks on Paris, Cameron went back to the Commons and asked for approval to extend the strikes to Syria, but only after assuring himself that he had backing of enough Labour MPs to get it through.
In a slip that was not untypical of him, he undermined his consensual public approach to winning support with a private attack – swiftly leaked – in which he told his MPs not to vote alongside ‘Jeremy Corbyn and a bunch of terrorist sympathizers’. Labour called it a slur and it gave MPs looking for a way of avoiding backing strikes a route out of any commitments they had made.
I was among many Westminster observers who believed that the Coalition would not last the five years. I felt that the Lib Dems were being utterly blotted out by the Tories, while taking all the blame for disliked policies, and would need to reassert their identity before the end of the parliament.
But the men at the top – Cameron, Osborne, Clegg and Danny Alexander (the Treasury chief secretary and fourth member of the Quad, which ran the coalition show) – got on well and there was little thought on the Lib Dem side of breaking it all off. The first three had similar upbringings, leading Boris Johnson, in D’Ancona’s book, to call the coalition a ‘triumph for the public school system’.
Cameron had the hurdle of the Scottish referendum to clear in September 2014. The Times launched the ‘Red Box’ political bulletin, with me as its editor, in the summer of 2014 in order to be ready for the general election the following year, but before that came the Scottish campaign. On Sunday, 7 September, less than two weeks before the vote, a YouGov poll for The Sunday Times put the ‘Yes’ vote just ahead for the first time and sent the unionist ‘Better Together’ campaign – including Cameron – into panic. He cancelled PM’s Questions so that he could race north to save the Union and came up with lots of last-minute concessions. He had left it late to become fully engaged, in keeping with the Cameron his friends knew, but again he helped to pull it off. The lucky general? Maybe, maybe not.
While Cameron prospered, so – for most of the time – did his friend and right-hand man, Osborne. But he hit trouble in 2012 with what became known as the Omnishambles Budget, when what seemed like a decent package on the day turned into a nightmare, with a string of Tory revolts on a range of issues from a tax on pasties to a charities tax. It was a warning shot to the all-powerful chancellor, who vowed never to make the same mistake again. In an early ‘Red Box’ bulletin, I revealed that he no longer wanted to move to the Foreign Office – as had been suggested by a series of briefings – in the event of a Tory victory but wished to remain chancellor. A leadership bid is better launched from there. He never got the chance to launch that campaign. Theresa May, on becoming prime minister, told him he was no longer wanted, and the man who had been favourite to be the next PM just twelve months earlier returned to the back-benches.
James Landale, the BBC’s deputy political editor who cut his teeth on my Westminster team, managed to get Cameron to admit during the 2015 election that he would not fight a third, prompting a years-long contest to replace him – with Osborne, Boris Johnson and Theresa May in the box seats.
Cameron began the 2015 Parliament knowing that his biggest task in the years ahead would be to implement the promise he made early in 2013 – under pressure from the Right in his party and the resurgent United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) – to hold an ‘in/out’ referendum on British membership of the EU by the end of 2017. The momentous decision, which followed months of Tory unrest, meant that Cameron had set the terms of his legacy – he would be the Prime Minister who kept Britain in the EU or took her out – without really knowing how Europe would respond to his demand for a new deal. He now knows to his cost that Brussels did not give him enough to satisfy the British people.
As the previous Parliament wore on, the Eurosceptics continued to doubt whether Cameron was serious about a root-and-branch reform of Britain’s relationship, and certainly about his ability to deliver it, and he suffered two defections to UKIP (Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless). But just as the first-past-the-post system helped to obliterate the Lib Dems, UKIP also desperately failed to meet expectations, returning just Carswell to the Commons with even Nigel Farage defeated in May 2015. Farage was to gain massive consolation. He more than anyone else forced Cameron to concede a referendum that the PM was eventually to lose.
Cameron carried on for just one year before resigning. He became the fourth-longest-serving Tory leader in modern times. His self-confessed pragmatism, untrammelled by ideology, had served him well, even though it had left some wondering why he ever sought to lead his party and the country. He was called with justification the ‘essay-crisis PM’, only tackling the big problems at the last minute when he was forced to do so, and often rushing and fluffing them as a result. Many are the Tory Cabinet ministers and MPs who wonder privately how they came to be utterly consumed for the first year of a non-coalition Tory government with an internal row about Europe. The answer is that Cameron saw it during the previous parliament as a way to see off the Right and Farage’s party. It was the ‘essay-crisis PM’ par excellence. And for good or ill, his legacy is the unwanted one of taking Britain out of Europe. No wonder he was close to tears when he announced – wife Samantha by his side – that he was going.