The only people in the war room as I arrived at 10 a.m. on Sunday morning were Gordon’s policy advisers Gavin Kelly, Matt Cavanagh and Nick Pearce, plus Nick Pearce’s toddler son, Hal. ‘Who knows, he could be Prime Minister by this evening,’ quipped Gavin, as Hal raced around between the desks.
The four of us adults spent the next few hours delving into the policy issues for the next negotiating session with the Lib Dems. This had been tentatively scheduled for 6.30 p.m., after the Clegg–GB meeting and the second negotiating session between the Lib Dems and the Tories, due to start at 11 a.m.
Gordon had emailed overnight with a plan on how to get to the Lib Dems’ £10,000 tax threshold in stages over a parliament, starting with pensioners. We were also deciding how much ground we could give on Home Office issues in particular. Abandoning ID cards wasn’t a particular problem; they were now voluntary and Alan Johnson was not wedded to them except for foreign nationals. The scope of the DNA database and biometric passports were also negotiable, but not, we thought, renegotiation of the entire extradition treaty with the United States, which also featured in the Lib Dem ‘Freedom Bill’.
The war room filled up as the morning wore on. Peter dropped by. Together with aides who had been phoning round, he went through the stance of all members of the Cabinet in preparation for calls GB was planning to make in the afternoon. Peter then decamped through the connecting door from No. 10 to the Cabinet Office and a grand, empty suite of rooms overlooking Horse Guards Parade – soon to become Nick Clegg’s offices as Deputy Prime Minister – where he was often to be found during the next two days stretched out on a large white couch, Blackberrying away in front of Sky or BBC News 24, sometimes messaging the journalists on the TV in front of him. Alastair popped in and out too as we awaited Gordon’s return, punctuated by phone calls from Gordon in the car from the airport.
We couldn’t make up our collective mind whether the Lib Dems were talking to us for real or for show. Cameron and Clegg had held a long meeting in Admiralty House the previous evening which both sides were briefing positively. But then the Lib Dems were also briefing the second Clegg–Brown call, the previous evening, as ‘amicable’.
Paddy Ashdown’s performance on The Andrew Marr Show was especially perplexing. Paddy was the Lib Dems’ main talking head and carried weight both with Clegg and with David Laws, who seemed to us the pivotal Lib Dem figure in the negotiations. From calls to various of us, Paddy now appeared to understand ‘the numbers’ and was warming to a Lab–Lib coalition. But on Marr, he leaned decisively the other way. ‘The British electorate have invented an exquisite method of torture for the Lib Dems; our instincts go one way, the mathematics go the other,’ he said, adding: ‘I admire the way the Conservative Party has responded … I think Mr Cameron has shown a certain degree of leadership.’ He was also openly sceptical about a ‘panjandrum alliance’ against the Tories (‘Would that provide the kind of government capable of taking strong decisions? … The answer seems to me self-evident … There may be other ways round it … I don’t know.’) He was also brutally dismissive of GB:
‘Amongst his personal qualities, it seems to me, is not one that makes him an easy or a very able leader of a collegiate-style government. Now that’s a question for Gordon.’
However, barely out of the BBC studio, Paddy was phoning Labour friends to make clear that he had not meant any slight to Gordon. He had definitely not closed the door to a possible Lab–Lib deal, and could this be made clear to Gordon personally.
Gordon arrived back in No. 10 at about 1 p.m. and launched into phone calls with Cabinet colleagues and discussions on policy positions in preparation for the Clegg meeting. He also called Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, worried at reports that the Bank had been in contact with George Osborne and the Lib Dems urging the need for a bigger and faster cuts programme.
In the midst of this, the Queen’s Private Secretary, Christopher Geidt, appeared in person, as he did again on Monday, dapper and discreet, to be briefed by the Prime Minister on the state of play. The Palace was content with the inter-party negotiation process, and didn’t want anything precipitate to happen before there was a clear outcome.
The venue for the Clegg–Brown meeting was changed to the Foreign Office. There was no way that the two leaders were going to get to Regent’s Park, as previously planned, without the entire press corps and helicopters following them there and back.
Even reaching the Foreign Office unnoticed proved impossible. Slipping out of the ground-floor French windows into the Horse Guards Road rear courtyard of No. 10 shortly after 4 p.m., Gordon walked briskly the few yards across to the rear private entrance of the Foreign Office. A television producer by the side of St James’s Park spotted him and moments later was on the phone to Iain Bundred asking if GB was going to a meeting with Clegg. Iain said he couldn’t give a running commentary on GB’s movements; there were plenty of reasons he could have walked across to the Foreign Office, including its excellent Costa Coffee which was better than anything in No. 10. But mobiles promptly exploded again. Iain and Jonny Oates in Clegg’s office set to work on media lines to put out after the meeting.
The meeting was in Permanent Secretary Sir Peter Ricketts’s grand office. Sir Peter Ricketts was there to welcome the two leaders in person. ‘You want it to be known as the Ricketts accord,’ quipped a Private Secretary as Clegg and Brown went in alone for the best part of eighty minutes.
According to GB’s later account to me, Nick Clegg said he would definitely make a decision one way or another between the Tories or Labour. He would not sit on the fence, and he was determined only to support a progressive pro-European government. (Europe was a key issue in many of the Brown–Clegg discussions and often appeared to be of greatest concern to Nick personally.) He said his preference was for a coalition, not a looser arrangement, because otherwise it was bound to collapse and the Lib Dems would be wiped out in the subsequent election. But he hadn’t as yet decided which party to support. There were still ‘serious problems’ about working with the Tories. On policy, he thought he was closer to Labour, but there were ‘legitimacy’ issues about a deal with Labour and with GB personally.
Gordon wanted Nick to understand the depth of his commitment to progressive politics and to working in partnership. ‘You have got me completely wrong if you think I’m a tribal politician,’ he said. He told him about his pre-election plan for Labour to stand down unilaterally in thirty seats in favour of the Lib Dems, and that he had made his decisive moves on electoral reform in part to make a Lib–Lab arrangement possible.
They ranged across the major policy issues – political reform, the economy, civil liberties and Europe – and then onto the shape of a coalition and how its legitimacy could be underpinned. GB said he was thinking in terms of ‘five or six big jobs’ for Lib Dems in a coalition, and mentioned Cable, Laws, Ashdown and Huhne as obvious other candidates. Was Clegg interested in a major department himself? ‘I don’t want to run before I can walk,’ was his reply, adding that he would have to pay special attention to constitutional reform since this was the central issue for most Lib Dems.
On legitimacy, GB said that they needed to carry out a nationwide grassroots campaign in favour of the coalition agreement, leading up to the AV referendum which both parties would support. He was attracted to an early referendum; Clegg was too, if there was a ‘down payment’ of reform in advance of it.
Then they got on to GB’s leadership. Gordon said he was ‘relaxed’ about his own position. He recognised that ‘a fresh government needs fresh leadership’ and he said he never intended to stay long into the new parliament in any event. Getting political reform and the economic crisis sorted were his remaining tasks. But it wasn’t possible to form a coalition government without him. If he, Gordon, resigned, Cameron would be sent for by the Queen, so he had to get the government going. ‘Nick never pushed on a timetable and I never gave one,’ he recounted. But Nick clearly took this to mean an early departure.
They ended by agreeing to consider further all they had discussed, and to speak again soon, probably later in the day.
There had been one further significant exchange. As they chatted about their backgrounds and what had brought them into politics, Nick remarked: ‘I wish we’d had the chance to get to know each other better before.’
The meeting seemed to have gone well. GB’s aide Justin Forsyth was waiting outside with Tim Snowball from Clegg’s office. Towards the end they could hear a good deal of laughter from inside, ‘not nervous laughter but genuine laughter’, Justin recalled. They came out saying ‘all this needs to be sorted’, referring to their policy discussions.
There was, however, one immediate bad omen. Iain Bundred and Jonny Oates had agreed a short line for the media about the meeting. The wording was at Jonny’s suggestion:
‘Following their telephone call last night, Nick Clegg and Gordon Brown met this afternoon at the Foreign Office. Their discussion was amicable.’
Iain walked over to the Foreign Office to clear this line with GB as he left. GB was content. But Jonny rang back to say that Nick wanted it changed to:
‘Gordon Brown asked to meet Nick Clegg. Nick Clegg agreed and they had an amicable meeting.’
Jonny was insistent on the change. It was more than a minor change; it put the Clegg–Brown discussions onto a different basis to the Clegg–Cameron discussions, which were briefed as taking place by mutual desire. Back in No. 10, Gordon was irritated. ‘He’s worried about Cameron – he doesn’t want Cameron thinking he’s engaging seriously with us.’ After more to-ing and fro-ing, halfway wording was agreed:
‘Last night Gordon Brown phoned Nick Clegg. Following their discussion the two met this afternoon at the Foreign Office to update each other. They had an amicable discussion.’
Was Nick Clegg serious? If so, what were the next steps? This was the debate in the war room and in Peter’s office for the next two hours. At this point Gordon did not tell even those of us closest to him that he and Nick had discussed his own position explicitly. Since this was a – if not the – critical issue, Peter and I were sceptical there had been a breakthrough.
Furthermore, the Lib Dems were yet again delaying the next round of talks between our negotiating teams, which had been due to take place on the Sunday evening. And their talks with the Tories were still going on in the Cabinet Office. They had been in progress since 11 a.m.; they would hardly be entering their sixth hour if they weren’t getting into detail and making reasonable progress. The Tory–Lib Dem meeting did not conclude until 5.30 p.m., with William Hague and Danny Alexander both making statements outside 70 Whitehall saying that they intended to meet again ‘within the next twenty-four hours’.
On the other hand, a good deal of policy ground had been covered between GB and Clegg; there appeared to be no deal-breakers; and they had agreed to speak again soon. And the informed media was beginning to think something serious might be afoot. Nick Robinson, who had previously believed a Lib Dem deal with the Tories was a near certainty, texted in mid-afternoon:
‘The plan now, I believe, is for Gordon to negotiate deal if possible whilst making clear that he will stand aside at a future point as Tony did. Will you take the initiative or wait for Tory talks to fail?’
‘A bit of both…’ I texted back.
At around 8 p.m., Danny came back to Peter to say that they would like the next meeting between Nick and Gordon to be very soon indeed.
At 9.35 p.m., barely four hours after their Foreign Office meeting, they met for a further long conversation. This one was not so amicable. The critical issue, which Clegg had clearly been discussing with his inner team, was GB’s own position. When would he go, and how would the transition be handled?
After the media circus around the earlier meeting, preparations worthy of a Feydeau farce were made for the two leaders to get to the next meeting unobserved. The venue decided upon was the Prime Minister’s room in the heart of the House of Commons, down a short corridor from the Chamber, because it was immediately available and the Commons was bound to be empty late on a Sunday evening. But how to get there? It was decided to go through the tunnel from the Cabinet Office to the Ministry of Defence, which runs under Whitehall; and to walk from there through a back entrance to the Commons. The meeting was also kept secret from the half-dozen of GB’s closest aides who had been in No. 10 throughout the weekend. They were told that nothing more would be happening until the morning, so they decamped to the Clarence pub on Whitehall on their way home.
Whereupon the farce continued. GB was spotted walking through the House of Commons with Peter Mandelson by an ITN journalist, who phoned Iain Bundred in the Clarence to ask if another meeting with Clegg was taking place, or was it a meeting of all the party leaders to agree a statement in advance of the markets opening on Monday? Iain said he hadn’t the faintest idea why GB had gone over to the Commons, but he, Iain, would hardly be in the pub if it was a crucial meeting. ITN did not report anything.
Gordon thought the idea was for Danny and Peter to join the start of the meeting to discuss the policy agenda and next steps in the negotiations, and then to leave him and Nick alone. But the four of them ended up staying for the whole discussion, and as it moved on to the issue of Gordon’s position, Danny became the ‘tough cop’ to Nick’s ‘soft cop’.
Nick started by passing Gordon a ‘heads of agreement’ note on the possible shape of a Lab–Lib accord which his policy team had prepared for the talks intended to take place that evening, but which it was agreed would now take place the following day.
‘I have taken everything you said this afternoon to heart,’ Nick opened. ‘There is a basic affinity of purpose between us. I am excited by the proposition of our two parties being able to deliver change.’ He said he was still talking to the Conservatives. ‘They have gone far further in their policy offer than before. It doesn’t tick all the boxes, there are still some fundamental differences, but it is better than we could have imagined.’
The discussion started on electoral reform and fixed-term parliaments. GB rehearsed the argument for an early referendum. Nick asked about the possibility of immediate legislation on the Alternative Vote and said they would probably want an option or options ‘in excess of AV’ on the ballot paper.
On the economy, Nick said that deficit reduction ‘needs acceleration’ and any agreement would need to express this. Nick added that they also wanted to see about £5 billion of extra spending in some areas from 2011, including schools, and they were prepared for taxes to rise to pay for this. Gordon said he was ‘prepared to take tough decisions’ on both spending and tax.
On Europe and defence there was little disagreement. The Lib Dems wanted Trident put into the strategic defence review but remained committed to the independent nuclear deterrent.
Then the discussion moved on to GB’s position.
Gordon said the government needed to be ‘thoroughly collegiate’ and establish ‘good ways of working closely’. ‘I will not be a barrier to a change of personnel,’ he added.
Nick started as soft cop. There was ‘no animosity whatsoever’ on his part to Gordon. ‘But in our view it is not possible to secure the legitimacy of the coalition and win the referendum [on electoral reform] unless in a dignified way you move on.’
‘You have been an incredible catalyst in reshaping politics,’ he added emolliently. ‘But I simply don’t believe we can persuade the public that we are about renewal unless you go in time.’
What did Gordon think?
Gordon said his role was essential to form the government. He was also needed to ensure that the political reform programme got underway properly and to complete his work on ‘securing the economic recovery’. As to timing, ‘Once we have secured these objectives I will of course consider my position and be prepared to move on.’
That clearly wasn’t the timetable that Clegg had in mind.
‘Is it enough for you to stay on until the referendum?’ he asked tentatively, on the assumption that the referendum would be before the end of the year.
‘I am needed to get this coalition through the Labour Party,’ Gordon responded, explaining that his commitment and persuasion would be needed to mobilise party support for the coalition and its programme, not only in the Cabinet but also the unions and the PLP.
Nick countered that it would be ‘a massive political risk and gamble for the Lib Dems to legitimise a Prime Minister who was seen to have lost an election’.
‘I will announce my intention,’ said Gordon, suggesting that he would make a statement about his future when the coalition was announced. Reverting to the challenges ahead to get the coalition launched successfully, he said his approach to timing would be ‘task driven’. There would also need to be a Labour leadership election, and that would take time.
At this point Danny came in as tough cop. For the coalition to succeed, he said bluntly, ‘Gordon needs to go before the referendum.’ He needed to be frank that in his view the referendum simply could not be won under Gordon’s leadership.
Gordon responded as before. ‘Look, someone has got to get Labour to do this.’ Without him it would be hard if not impossible to get the coalition accepted by the various branches of the Labour Party and he was needed to handle the politics of the referendum.
Nick reverted to soft cop. ‘We have all got to understand the fundamental psychological desire for change,’ he said. ‘As Peter said on Friday, we have got to “turn the page”.’ While there needed to be both stability and change, ‘there has to be some sort of catharsis for people’. This could not come without a change of leadership.
Gordon came back to the referendum. The issue came down to ‘whether it was easier or harder to win the referendum with or without me’. They needed to think this through further, and he would reflect on what had been said. And reflect not just on his position but also on the wider issue of the referendum. Should it be multi-option or just a single question on AV? Should it include a question on an elected Lords? Should there be a wider question on parliamentary reform, such as banning paid second jobs for MPs, which might help to make it genuinely popular?
Nick said he and his colleagues also needed to reflect further. It was agreed that he and Gordon would meet again at 10.30 the following morning, back in the House of Commons. Lib Dem MPs were meeting in the early afternoon, and his intention was to ask them to agree to start negotiations with Labour later in the day.
On that jagged note, the meeting ended.
GB returned to No. 10 and immediately set to work on the policy note which Clegg had tabled. Reading it through, he was convinced that it was simply the note which the Lib Dems had tabled for their second round of talks with the Conservatives, but with a new heading: ‘Liberal Democrat–Labour Party discussions, 9 May 2010’.
‘Look, it’s a list of things they have been discussing with the Tories,’ he said to me, reading out items like ‘in light of market concerns further and faster action on the deficit will be taken’, ‘an Emergency Budget will be presented within fifty days … [to] set out overall spending plans to eradicate the structural deficit over an expedited but responsible timescale’, and ‘a cut in the number of government ministers and in ministerial pay [will be made]’.
‘It’s the Tory agenda, without any progressive underpinning,’ he said. ‘What we need to do is to make them see that policy needs to follow from agreement on progressive principles and values. We can do that, the Tories can’t. Without it, their coalition will be blown apart by events.’
Sitting at his PC in the now almost completely deserted war room, he started tapping out a letter to Clegg on progressive principles and values, which he intended to give him in the morning.
‘Whatever we do needs to be founded on a big vision of social justice, liberty and a fair economic plan for Britain’s future prosperity,’ was his opening line. He also started amending the Lib Dem policy note to start in this way, rather than its narrow first sentence referring only to ‘political and constitutional renewal’ as the government’s first objective.
On reading the three-page Lib Dem note, four things struck me.
First, on the economy, the pledge to eliminate the structural deficit over an ‘expedited’ timescale – which implied not just token acceleration of our already ambitious deficit reduction plans, but further very significant and early cuts – was there in black and white as a Lib Dem proposal, not a Tory proposal with which they were disagreeing. So if, as Gordon said, this is what they had been discussing with the Tories, then it looked as if it was also what they had agreed with them.
At the time, and in the negotiations on Monday and Tuesday, I thought they weren’t serious about this, or did not understand what it would mean in practice. However, the centrepiece of George Osborne’s Emergency Budget on 22 June was deficit reduction of £40 billion by 2014/15 over and above the £73 billion already set out by Alistair Darling, precisely to eliminate the structural deficit over an expedited timescale. ‘Whose judgement, or ideology, do we trust – Keynes’s or Osborne’s?’ wrote Keynes’s biographer Robert Skidelsky after the Emergency Budget. For Nick Clegg and his negotiators, within just two days of the election, the answer was clearly ‘Osborne’s’. This was to make a policy agreement between the Lib Dems and the Tories possible. On this central strategic issue, they were at one.
Second, there was a comic mixing of the general with the specific. There was to be an Emergency Budget, expedited deficit reduction, a referendum on electoral reform, sweeping devolution of power and a fixed date for the next election of ‘the first Thursday in May 2014’ (at no stage in any of our discussions with the Lib Dems was a five-year fixed parliamentary term tabled by them or discussed between us; four years was always the term envisaged, and no 55 per cent parliamentary threshold for any early dissolution was ever mentioned). But alongside these appeared ‘a commitment to reduce carbon emissions from the public sector by 10 per cent within twelve months’, ‘proposals for the roll-out of green mortgages’ and ‘implementation of an eco-cashback scheme’.
Third, the Lib Dem paper included a number of points where they couldn’t conceivably have reached agreement with the Tories, unless these points had been added just for our benefit, which appeared unlikely given the drafting.
In this category was a commitment ‘to bring forward a post-legislative referendum on alternative voting systems, to include the option of the Single Transferable Vote, no later than May 2011’, ‘a commitment to no public subsidy for nuclear power stations’, ‘a commitment not to raise the cap on tuition fees’ and ‘a new target of 40 per cent of energy to be from renewable sources by 2020’.
So it didn’t look as if they were there yet with the Tories, however many individual policy concessions they may have secured. There was still something to play for.
There was a fourth striking thing about the note. It was entirely silent on Europe. This was odd, I said to Gordon, if it was indeed the working text between the Lib Dems and the Tories. ‘That’s true. I’ll press Clegg on that tomorrow,’ Gordon said, looking at it again. ‘How is he going to handle Europe with Cameron? They’ll be plunged straight into battles over the Budget, the European recovery plan and the euro, and all the Tories will be saying is no, no, no.’
This omission was all the more notable because, as we speculated on the real political character behind the rhetorical façade, Nick Clegg’s Europeanism increasingly seemed to me the essential thing that separated him from the Cameron Conservatives.
While I was on friendly terms with most of the leading Lib Dems, I did not know Clegg well. He came to the fore after I had left the Lib Dems for Labour in 1995. But what I saw and heard reminded me to some extent of Tony Blair. The easy public-school charm, looks and manners. The instinctive anti-authoritarianism, with a ruthless streak. A bit of a rebel, at an even posher public school (Westminster plays Fettes) with wealthier parents, who liked to paint himself as an Establishment outsider despite it all. Not greatly interested in the Left–Right politics of distribution and redistribution (‘economics bores him and he doesn’t really have views on all this,’ one of his advisers said when we discussed tax-and-spend options). And another telling Blair parallel: a student actor, not a student politician, at Cambridge. Like Blair, he did not take to politics seriously until his mid-twenties, when he had to select a party, operating from the political centre with light ideological baggage.
That party might naturally have been the Tories. Whereas Blair imbibed Christian socialism and became a barrister pupil to Derry Irvine, Clegg’s first, formative political job was as adviser to a senior Tory. But it was in Brussels; it was a pro-European Tory (Leon Brittan, then trade commissioner); and his whole career and interests were European to a degree which made a Tory career in the 1990s unsustainable. His objective was to become an MEP, at a time when even Conservative Euro-pragmatists were being hounded and deselected. The Dutch mother, Russian aristocrat grandmother, Spanish wife, fluent European languages, master’s degree from the College of Europe in Bruges, CV as a fast-rising Eurocrat – everything the Lib Dems loved and Tory associations would have distrusted if not loathed.
These were principled as well as pragmatic reasons for selecting the Lib Dems. But they were distinct from the radical Left liberalism which dominated the Liberal Party and later the Liberal Democrats from Jo Grimond in the 1960s to Paddy Ashdown and Charles Kennedy in the Blair decade, via David Steel and Roy Jenkins (who brought with him a large band of Labour social democrats). None of these leaders could conceivably have supported the David Laws introduction to The Orange Book of 2004, with its subtitle ‘Reclaiming Liberalism’ and its Gladstonian cri de coeur: ‘How did it come about that over the decades up to the 1980s the Liberal belief in economic liberalism was progressively eroded by forms of soggy socialism and corporatism, which have too often been falsely perceived as a necessary corollary of social liberalism?’ Words which pointed towards the economic Right and the possibility of accord with the Conservatives, and stony ground for the progressive Left instincts to which Gordon Brown was appealing.
In any case, for Nick Clegg the issue wasn’t only policy. It was Gordon Brown personally. If this wasn’t clear enough from Peter’s report of their late-night conversation in the Commons, it was soon to be.
It was 2.11 a.m. when Paddy left a voicemail message on my Blackberry. ‘Hi Andrew, it’s Paddy here with David Laws. We’ve got a bit of a crisis and I need to speak to you urgently.’ Deep asleep, I didn’t hear the Blackberry’s vibration. Nor did I hear it again at 5.37 a.m. when a text arrived from Switch: ‘Please come in at 06.30. Gordon.’ But as I read both messages at 6 a.m., the connection wasn’t hard to fathom. Nor the likely drama of the day ahead.