‘I don’t like what is taking place at all…’
David Blunkett was speaking with fluent urgency on Radio 4’s Today programme as I walked into the war room just after 7.30 a.m. ‘What doesn’t he like?’ I asked rhetorically. ‘GB, Clegg, you…’ said a civil servant.
A few of us gathered round to listen.
‘… I don’t believe it will bring stability and I feel that the British people will feel that we have not heard what they said to us…’
This was a repeat of John Reid on the BBC the night before, but more damaging, from the heart of the PLP at the start of make-or-break day.
‘… anyway, can you trust the Liberal Democrats? They are behaving like every harlot in history. What do the British people feel as they watch? Not what a small group of people in each of the major parties negotiating feel in what is increasingly looking a bunker, but what do people out in the country feel…’
In the bunker, it was a grim feeling of the Labour Party fragmenting. ‘Are there others saying this publicly?’ I asked one of the political staff. ‘Only seven or eight backbenchers so far, but the day is yet young,’ he replied.
‘… it would be a coalition of the defeated, cobbled together, uncertain whether it can carry anything night by night, people dying – as they did when I first came into Parliament – on average about once every three months because of the nature of the sittings, and then a general election on the back of that. You don’t have to be involved in politics to see what it would do to the Labour Party and its vote…’
‘Have we got anyone going up?’ I asked, as David was delving back into the dog days of 1974, his first election –
‘… what would the nation have felt, if Jeremy Thorpe had cobbled together a coalition with Ted Heath, and the will of the nation to get rid of the Heath government and settle with the miners had been thwarted…’
‘Only Tessa Jowell,’ was the reply.
John Reid, meanwhile, was even more fiercely on the attack on GMTV. A Lab–Lib pact would be ‘mutually assured destruction for both parties’. He, David and, we presumed, others, had been speaking overnight.
The possibility of a Lab–Lib coalition was slipping away, unless we could achieve significant momentum in the morning session of the negotiations.
GB came down from the flat a few minutes later. We started going through the policy paper to be tabled at the 10 a.m. meeting of the negotiators.
‘It all comes down to the economy now,’ said GB. ‘Alistair and Vince need to agree an economic package.’
No one had much of a handle on this. No. 10 and Treasury advisers hadn’t made much progress overnight. GB called Alistair and asked him to join us. While we waited, Peter and the two Eds arrived.
From one source or another they had all heard about the previous night’s talks having gone ‘badly’ and the two Eds’ body language being ‘appalling’. All gamesmanship, we agreed; but the Eds promised GB with mock seriousness that they would be on their best behaviour at 10 a.m. and not allow so much as a grimace to cross their faces.
We also discussed overnight conversations with MPs and ministers, and how to handle the party’s National Executive meeting, fixed in parallel with the 10 a.m. meeting. GB planned to hit the phones himself.
I slipped out to catch Paddy Ashdown on the Today programme. Paddy was strongly positive about a Labour coalition, which was something. But then there was George Osborne, who dismissed the idea of a Tory minority government with great confidence in favour of an arrangement with the Lib Dems. ‘We can’t just turn up at Buckingham Palace and say we’d like to form a minority government; we would need the consent of the Liberal Democrats to form a minority government.’
Significant, I thought: ruling out going it alone. And the Tories who hadn’t spoken. While we were splintering, the Tories were the model of public unity. Not a single Tory right-winger had been on the attack. Their side was desperate for power; too many on ours were desperate to give it up.
GB and Alistair spoke much as the night before. Gordon had no doubt a deal could be done. Alistair didn’t want new commitments pushing up the deficit. If Vince was going to pay for his £10,000 tax threshold and other pledges with cuts and tax rises elsewhere, ‘he needs to be clear what he has got in mind or we will be up the proverbial without a paddle’.
‘But of course I’ll do what’s possible,’ he said. ‘Anyway, Vince is definitely coming. He’s asked for a Treasury car to fetch him. Getting used to ministerial life.’
Paddy was on the phone. Why were there no Labour voices on the media supporting a deal? ‘It’s just Blunkett, Reid and a string of your antis.’
GB said we had to get supportive ministers ‘out there’. But we didn’t want to put up any of the negotiators, who were anyway soon to leave for Portcullis House. It was a few crucial hours before Alan Johnson, Ben Bradshaw and others did supportive media rounds.
Peter, Harriet, the two Eds and I left No. 10 at 9.50 a.m. for the third and final meeting with the Lib Dems in Room 319 of Portcullis House. Ed Miliband stopped at the café in the large atrium on the ground floor of Portcullis House to buy coffee and pastries to take up for everyone, ‘so they can see I’m really, really committed to this going well’, he said with a broad grin.
At two hours twenty minutes, this was by far the longest of the three Lab–Lib Dem meetings, although far shorter than the key Lib Dem–Tory meetings, including the one which was to follow our meeting in the afternoon. In all, the Lib Dems spent four and a half hours with us, but more than three times as long with the Conservatives. We never even got to the composition of a joint working text of an agreement, let alone negotiations on detailed wording.
This time it was not a case of two meetings – one in the room and another retold afterwards. There was only one meeting. In the room and retold, it was equally scratchy, and there was little momentum towards coalition. We kept getting stuck on second-order issues. Personalities grated. Blackberrys and mobiles came into action on both sides, with messages passing not only in and out of the room, including commentary on the state of play, but also within the room as Danny and Peter sought to move discussion on and, in the end, to bring it to a close. The two Eds left the room at one point to take a call from Gordon, who wanted them to put out statements supportive of the talks, which Paddy Ashdown told him in a call were needed by the Lib Dems to demonstrate that the Labour leadership candidates were behind a coalition.
Primed by Gordon beforehand, both Eds began by saying they were put out by the overnight briefing and messages that they weren’t fully behind the talks. On the contrary, they were thoroughly supportive; they wanted to see agreement and a coalition, and they were keen to make progress. Danny responded with good grace. This might have been the prompt for a constructive meeting, but it was not to be.
Danny tabled a single-page note entitled ‘Some Areas of Concern’, which, because it was far shorter than the thirteen-page updated policy note we tabled, became the agenda for the meeting.
Danny’s note listed eighteen policies or areas which, he said, were ‘sticking points to any agreement’. It started with the economy, stating: ‘swifter action to tackle the deficit, willingness to hold an Emergency Budget’. Peter opened on this by saying that, as agreed, Vince and Alistair were meeting at 11 a.m. to discuss an economic package before it came back to the negotiators. Danny responded that there had clearly been a misunderstanding; the 11 a.m. meeting had been cancelled by them ‘because only this group is negotiating on our behalf’. (Vince and Alistair did meet in the afternoon, but it was by then too late to affect anything.) Having got off to this negative start, we agreed to discuss the economy at the end, which ensured a negative end to the discussions too.
However, moving on to constitutional reform proved equally unrewarding. Andrew Stunell began with a speech about how much the Tories were giving them, but how little we were offering; how the Tories weren’t ‘trapped’ by the mentality of government into defending their previous commitments ‘as you are’ and how we needed to ‘get real’ and ‘raise your offer considerably’ if we wanted to ‘stay in the game’. He said the Tories were now even offering more on electoral reform. When I asked for specifics, Danny and Chris Huhne rowed back on the statement that the Tories were offering more on electoral reform. This led to the first of Peter’s text exchanges with Danny, sitting opposite him across the large round conference table, asking whether Andrew might be a bit more civil so we could make progress. Danny nodded, and showed the message to Andrew sitting next to him.
Following on from the previous night’s discussion on the Alternative Vote, I said we could not agree to bring AV legislation into force before a positive referendum vote, as the Lib Dems had suggested, but we were open to there being an additional question on the ballot paper on full proportional representation if they wished. We would make the referendum and AV legislation an issue of confidence, so it would definitely be carried.
We started going down other items on the Lib Dem list of eighteen. Next was Lords reform: ‘What will be the electoral system? Will this be put in a separate bill to the AV referendum bill to prevent it being tied up in the Lords?’ Yes, I said; and we were prepared to offer proportional representation for a fully elected Lords using a regional list system, which satisfied the Lib Dems immediately. Yet again star billing was given to ‘the Wright proposals’ for reform of the timetabling of government bills in the Commons, which led Harriet to make all the same points as the previous evening.
Another of the eighteen headings was ‘Contact Point’, a data system for tracking children’s progress and any social services interventions, which the Lib Dems said they wanted to abolish but which only David Laws, Ed Balls and I knew anything about. This provoked Ed into a great defence of Contact Point and a re-run of arguments for and against it, which he and David had had previously in their education briefs. I have little doubt we could have agreed to abolish Contact Point as part of a coalition deal had we considered it with Gordon beforehand or afterwards as one of the eighteen decisive obstacles to a coalition agreement. But we didn’t and it clearly wasn’t.
Continuing down the list of eighteen, I said we would not proceed on the Heathrow third runway without Lib Dem agreement. There was then a long discussion between Chris and Ed Miliband on nuclear power and targets for renewable energy, and between Ed Balls and David Laws on the pupil premium and how the £2.5 billion cost would be paid for and whether the Tories had agreed to protect the schools baseline, as we would do, both of which turned into debating sessions without firm conclusions.
This took us into the economic discussion, which was a straight re-run of the previous evening’s debate on the case for and against further and faster deficit reduction, and how the £10,000 tax threshold would be funded. Ed Balls, David Laws and Chris Huhne went into full debating mode on this, and on public-sector pensions, and little progress was made. By now it was clear that radically accelerated deficit reduction would be a sticking point between us, and this issue would have to be resolved by the leaders together with Alistair and Vince.
As this went on, Peter passed me a note: ‘I do not believe they are serious. Laws and Stunell clearly already gone to Tories. How do we sum up? I suggest you list all areas/items we have overlap/agreement on so as to max. our offer and then we adjourn.’ Which we did at 12.30, with Peter and Danny agreeing they would discuss next steps after the next Nick–Gordon meeting, set for 1 p.m.
Before we broke, there was a telling final exchange. I suggested our respective policy staff put together a single text of a coalition deal for the next meeting, highlighting points agreed and outstanding. Danny said this would not be necessary. I suspected he didn’t intend or expect there to be another meeting.
There was little time to debrief, but none of us pretended it had gone well. On the other hand, the only obvious policy show-stopper was ‘further and faster deficit reduction’, if this meant big extra cuts; and we continued to think that Clegg and Cable would hardly want to make this the centrepiece of a progressive coalition.
Harriet left for the party headquarters at Victoria Street for a conference call of officers of the National Executive Committee. This backed talks with the Lib Dems and agreed to plans for a ‘Clause 5’ meeting on the following Sunday to ratify any coalition agreement.
If the party leadership and executive were holding firm behind the talks, the wider party was visibly splintering. David Triesman, the party’s former General Secretary, texted me at lunchtime to say that Labour would be ‘murdered’ if it went into a coalition. ‘The looming next election will send us into the wilderness. I can see no upside to this.’ Andy Burnham became the first senior minister to express overt opposition when on The World At One he said that David Blunkett had spoken earlier with ‘real authority’, adding: ‘I think we have got to respect the results of the general election and we can’t get away from the fact that Labour didn’t win.’
But Nick Clegg had still finally to make up his mind, Tory or Labour. As Peter and I briefed Gordon in his room in the Commons before his 1 p.m. meeting with Nick Clegg, he remained confident he could rally Labour behind a coalition if this was the course Nick Clegg himself finally favoured. This was the meeting to find out.
It was to be their final meeting. For an hour, alone, in armchairs in the corner of the Prime Minister’s large L-shaped room in the Commons, they went to-and-fro on the coalition options, with Nick Clegg insisting that a Labour coalition remained a real possibility for him while Gordon hammered away at the problems Nick would have, not least on Europe, if he went in with the Tories rather than Labour.
According to Gordon’s account to me later, Nick began by saying that the negotiations had gone ‘badly’ and he had been told there was a ‘lack of commitment’ on the part of some of Labour’s team. Gordon said if this was the case, why didn’t the two of them bring together their negotiating teams, also including Vince and Alistair, to go through all the outstanding issues? Nick didn’t want this. ‘There isn’t really a policy issue between us,’ he said. He repeated this line on the phone later: there wasn’t a policy obstacle to a Labour coalition, it was more about legitimacy and ‘workability’. ‘Freshness’ was a major theme. ‘It’s not just you. Lots of your people look exhausted after thirteen years in the trenches.’
Gordon moved onto the principles behind any coalition. A Lab–Lib coalition would be pro-Europe, pro-Keynesian, pro-industrial policy, pro-fairness. Where would Nick be with the Tories? On Europe, where would he be in the first crisis where possible treaty changes or joint economic action was the issue? This Europe point unsettled Nick. ‘I am worried about the Conservatives on Europe,’ he said, a point he repeated in phone calls with Gordon later in the afternoon.
On the shape of a coalition, Gordon said he wanted it to be an enduring progressive alliance. He saw it as leading naturally to an electoral pact at the next election, with the two parties standing down in favour of each other in some seats. ‘This is an historic opportunity for progressive politics which may not come back for fifty years,’ he said.
Nick said he would be ‘working out what I should do’ during the course of the afternoon before a 5 p.m. meeting with his MPs and it would be a ‘really, really difficult decision’.
Nick was worried about the Murdoch media: how they had gone on the attack simply because he was talking to Labour and what they would be like if the two of them went into coalition. (Tuesday morning’s Sun, under the headline ‘SQUAT A MESS’ had Nick Clegg’s ‘shenanigans’ provoking ‘uproar as the nation began to lose patience with the third party’s dithering backbenchers in the face of an economic crisis’. The Times deployed the rapier: ‘It is quite possible that we will look back on yesterday as the moment the Liberal Democrats demonstrated they are totally unsuited to the serious business of government … Having said repeatedly that the party with the most seats and the most votes has the right to govern, Mr Clegg’s volte-face is bordering on the dishonourable.’) There wasn’t much comfort GB could offer on that score, except to note that the Murdoch papers would ultimately turn against the Lib Dems either way because they would want the Tories to win the next election outright.
With Nick again saying he needed the afternoon to weigh up his options very carefully, they parted, agreeing to speak on the phone before the 5 p.m. meeting of the Lib Dem MPs.
As Gordon returned to No. 10 at 2 p.m., the Lib Dem negotiators were entering the Cabinet Office through 70 Whitehall to meet the Conservatives for the fourth time.
At first we thought that the Lib Dems were continuing to keep both options open. Nick Clegg had said as much to Gordon only moments earlier, and Paddy was fairly positive in an early-afternoon call with Gordon. We considered what to do in a third round of talks, and prepared a revised policy note to table, starting with the substantial areas of common ground. But as the Lib Dem–Tory meeting lengthened and the pro-Tory briefing from Lib Dems strengthened, the inevitability of a Tory-led government seemed increasingly irresistible. By late afternoon, both Sky and BBC News 24 were broadcasting from opposite walls of the No. 10 war room that a Tory–Lib Dem deal was imminent and GB’s resignation could come as early as the evening.
Inside the war room, the moment of truth came shortly after 3.30 p.m. when Alistair Darling came into the war room to report on his delayed meeting with Vince Cable, which had just finished. ‘It was all thoroughly cordial,’ said Alistair. ‘We had barely a disagreement on Budget issues, including phasing in their £10,000 tax allowance gradually – he said it would be mad to do otherwise. But he said it was all beside the point because they were set to go in with the Tories and only the details remained to be sorted. Nick simply didn’t think it could be made to work with us, and it was going so well with Cameron. It’s all over.’
I texted Paddy shortly afterwards asking if this was true. No response. But Ming Campbell, the most pro-Labour and pro-Gordon of the senior Lib Dems, erased any lingering doubts when Gordon spoke to him on the phone at about 4 p.m. Ming said that the ‘outbursts’ of Reid, Blunkett et al. had made a strong impression on Lib Dem MPs. How was a coalition without a secure majority going to survive if Labour was so split to start with? Gordon gave a set of reasons why this wasn’t the case, and why Reid and Blunkett were unrepresentative. ‘But there it is I’m afraid, Gordon,’ said Ming, clearly dejected. ‘I wish it were otherwise.’ Gordon called Vince Cable, who said much the same.
‘OK,’ said Gordon, putting the phone down. ‘I’ll do the call with Clegg at five. Get everything ready for the Palace immediately afterwards.’
Amidst all this, Gordon’s hairdresser arrived for his weekly trim. ‘It’s turning into rather a big day,’ he said to her as she dodged around the chairs and people in the inner office.
Sarah Brown had been planning the leaving of No. 10 for weeks with calm efficiency. She even hired the same removal firm used by the Blairs three years previously. They had done such a good job of loading every last personal item into the removal truck, boxed and covered to avoid embarrassing photos.
At about 3 p.m. Sarah took Sue Nye, Justin Forsyth and Jeremy Heywood into the Chancellor’s study in No. 11 to choreograph the departure. They were anxious that the departure should be in daylight. The last words to the staff would be in the war room, not the grand upstairs pillared room as for TB’s resignation. The staff would line the route from the war room to the No. 10 front door. Sarah decided to take the children with them to the Palace and include them in the photos at the front door. The Browns had completely shielded six-year-old John and three-year-old Fraser from the media, but they wanted them to have pictures with their parents as they left Downing Street for the last time.
The last scenes were to be made memorable by Martin Argles, the Guardian photographer who followed Gordon for much of the campaign, who appeared in the war room in mid-afternoon and caught the final scenes. This had not been planned. Sue instinctively felt it would be a fitting finale and just phoned him to come. It produced the remarkable portrait of Gordon’s final moments in the war room, hugging Fraser, who with John had been pulled up onto a desk to get a view of their father making his emotional farewell speech, surrounded by assorted ministers and the No. 10 team. ‘That’s Nick and David,’ Gordon joked, to a peal of laughter, as two phones rang in unison at one point. Virtually everyone was in tears or on the verge. The Sky News screen was visible on one wall, running the strapline: ‘19.12: Breaking News: Gordon Brown To Resign As Prime Minister Tonight’.
‘The picture that says it all,’ wrote Ian Jack when it was reproduced. ‘It is a record of how Labour’s thirteen years in power ended that includes three great architects of its early success: Mandelson, Campbell and a TV screen.’
Kirsty McNeill and Alastair Campbell set to work on the resignation speech and a speech to party workers at Victoria Street for after the audience with the Queen. Drafts came in and out of the inner office. The resignation speech was finalised with minutes to go before its delivery from the steps of No. 10, Kirsty in tears at the screen and Alastair dictating behind her shoulder. Two desks along, a Foreign Affairs Private Secretary was making discreet arrangements for David Cameron’s congratulatory calls from President Obama and other world leaders after he arrived in No. 10. Another civil servant had a ‘transition plan’ document up on the screen. It was 7 p.m. The transition of power was palpable.
However, until a few minutes before 7 p.m., uncertainty reigned. It looked as if the death throes of the government could extend overnight or even longer. Until the last moment, extinction itself wasn’t absolutely certain.
First, there was the audience with the Queen to be arranged. A meeting of the Privy Council, in the presence of the Queen, had been fixed for 5 p.m. With unchanging routine this had to go ahead, and there was to-ing and fro-ing about when thereafter a resignation audience could take place. So bizarrely, at 4.45, with the government on the verge of resignation, Peter Mandelson – for one of his many offices was Lord President of the Council, requiring attendance at Privy Council meetings – left for the Palace, where the Queen in Council declared a Royal Proclamation for a new 50p coin to commemorate the London 2012 Olympics, and promulgated an Order for the discontinuance of burials in Holy Trinity Old Churchyard, Buildwas, Shropshire. Such was the final official business of thirteen years of Labour government.
Nick Clegg had still not told Gordon that he intended to go in with the Conservatives. We were by now taking this decision for granted, but it proved elusive to obtain and it was never actually communicated. On the contrary, in three increasingly anguished phone calls, Nick insisted that he was still undecided between Tory and Labour and urged Gordon not to resign. But it was increasingly clear to Gordon that he was being spun along and that enough was enough.
Nick had been due to call before a 5 p.m. meeting of his MPs. As negotiations with the Tories in the Cabinet Office extended, the call did not come, so at 5.30 Sue phoned Nick’s office, who put him through.
Gordon said he was going to have to resign at once if there was now no reasonable prospect of a non-Tory government being formed. ‘Nick, I can’t cling onto power, you must appreciate that.’
‘I’m really sorry, but I still haven’t taken a decision,’ was Nick’s opener. ‘Genuinely, I mean this. I’m sitting here with Vince and the party meeting now isn’t until 8.30. The trouble is, every hour someone else on your side comes out of the woodpile to oppose a coalition, and I’m not sure that your party can deliver.’
Gordon said that the party would come behind him. ‘The issue, Nick, is – is there going to be a progressive realignment? This is the historic decision.’
Nick reverted to the negotiations not having gone well. ‘I was slightly bewildered by the report back from this morning.’ Gordon reiterated that he was sure he could deliver the party behind a coalition. ‘Look, I gave up my leadership to make this possible.’ He again suggested that they both call their two negotiating teams together to crunch through the issues, but Nick again didn’t want this and repeated that it ‘isn’t really about policy’.
Gordon reverted to Europe. What would happen if there was a deepening European crisis and the Tories refused to engage? ‘Our relationship with Europe will be damaged and if you are in with them, there’ll be another election by the end of the year.’
‘Then we’re stuffed,’ said Nick.
Gordon came back to Labour and why he was sure he could deliver.
‘The trouble is that your party is knackered after thirteen years in power,’ Nick responded. ‘Some people are up for a realignment but some people aren’t.’
They went round the houses again on the issues at stake, touching again on the Murdoch press. Nick realised that ‘the stakes could not be higher’, that he felt ‘great respect’ for Gordon. ‘If only we’d had these conversations two years ago,’ he said.
Gordon returned to the point: he had to have a decision now on whether Nick was serious about a Lab–Lib coalition or he would have to resign at once. The position had become unsustainable.
Nick said he needed to meet colleagues and his parliamentary party again before he could make his decision.
‘I can’t wait that long, Nick. I can’t wait the whole evening,’ Gordon said, urgent, insistent. ‘The country expects a decision.’
‘Just two or three hours then,’ said Nick, almost pleading. ‘I can’t be bounced into this.’
Alastair, the two Eds and I, sitting a few feet from Gordon in the inner office, started vigorously shaking our heads at the mention of ‘the whole evening’.
‘That won’t work, Nick…’ Gordon started to say as Peter and David Muir rushed in from the war room, where they had been listening in to the call. David stood directly in front of Gordon, raised a single finger and mouthed ‘one hour, one hour, that’s it’, followed by a cutting sign with his hands.
‘One hour, Nick, that’s as long as I can leave it. It really is.’
‘OK, one hour then.’
As Gordon put the phone down, Peter said: ‘He’s made up his mind. It couldn’t be clearer.’
‘I said I’ll give him another hour,’ said Gordon. ‘Look, he said he genuinely hadn’t made up his mind. I tell you, the moment Cameron is through that front door, he goes up 10 per cent in the polls. I’ve got to keep at it until it’s hopeless. Tony didn’t get the peace process done by giving up every time there was a roadblock.’
‘It’s certainly worth an hour,’ Alastair agreed. But we all thought that Clegg was trying to keep Gordon in play simply to get better terms from the Tories, and that this had probably been the case for some time, perhaps all the time.
Kirsty came in with the next draft of the resignation speech. Gordon went out to the war room to work at it himself on the PC for a few minutes, coming back with Martin Argles, who took photos of the Brown team in different combinations while people cracked jokes to relieve the tension and pass the time.
‘Well, at least you won’t have to make the same old jokes at the start of every speech,’ said Ed Balls. ‘Who’s heard them all?’
Ed led the way round the room with people retelling GB speech jokes, Gordon contributing the punch lines.
There was the one about the Chancellor and the three envelopes left by his predecessor for opening in times of trouble. The first saying, blame your predecessor. The second, blame the statistics. The third, write three letters to your successor.
And the one about General Montgomery. Asked who were the three greatest generals in history, Monty replied, ‘Well, the other two were Napoleon and Alexander the Great.’
GB sat down to write the customary welcome note to the new Prime Minister. ‘How do I start?’ he asked out loud. ‘How about, “Dear David and Nick…”’
He called Tony Blair. All warmth and passion spent on both sides. ‘I am sorry we fell out; I know it could have been better…’
Aides wandered around No. 10 for memory’s sake. TB’s old office next to the Cabinet Room was set up with new desk and chairs for David Cameron. Trophy photos were taken sitting at Cameron’s desk.
6.30 came and went. Still no Clegg call.
Would it make the slightest difference? Almost certainly not, but what was he playing at? Alastair was giving the BBC’s Nick Robinson regular text updates with ‘colour’ to keep the TV commentary going. ‘Gordon Brown and his colleagues are putting a brave face on things in No. 10; they have been telling jokes…’ Robinson said, standing outside the front door.
At 6.45, Sue put another call through to Tim Snowball in Nick Clegg’s office.
‘I’m sorry, he’s in a meeting and I can’t get him out,’ said Tim.
‘It’s really got to be now, Tim. It absolutely has to be,’ said Sue.
Thirty seconds’ silence then Nick on the line.
‘Gordon, I’ll tell you what’s happening,’ Nick began. ‘Following our conversation this afternoon’ – i.e. their 1 p.m. meeting in the Commons – ‘I’m basically finding out how far I can push the Conservatives on Europe. I genuinely take to heart what you said about that. We need some sanity on Europe. We can’t seek to renegotiate. I’m trying my best…’
Gordon interrupted. ‘I need to resign immediately, Nick. I can’t leave this hanging. I can’t be hanging on to power while we can’t get an answer.’
‘But Gordon, this isn’t over yet…’
‘Nick, you are continuing formal negotiations with the Conservatives and you have rejected a deal with us.’
‘No, Gordon. Today is Tuesday. We have only just started the talks. We have not rejected you. We are trying to play our role, to find a stable coalition.’
‘I have to do the right thing by both the Queen and the country,’ Gordon continued, coming back again to the need for a decision after five days of uncertainty. ‘You are still talking to the Conservatives so I’m assuming you will form a coalition with them.’
Nick again said he hadn’t made up his mind. ‘As you know, the working group weren’t able to answer some of our questions…’
‘Nick, it’s past that. I have to resign as people don’t understand my clinging on to power.’
‘Why? In other democracies trying to do this it takes weeks. It’s quite right for us to do it methodically.’ His big concern remained Europe, he added.
‘You and I have agreed the issue between us is not one of substance, it’s one of legitimacy and workability,’ he continued. ‘You and I are not the parties that got most votes…’
‘Nick, you’re a good man. But I have to respect the British people. They don’t want me hanging on. I wish you well in the future. I think your decisions are important. I prefer the progressive way forward…’
Nick interrupted, reverting yet again to the negotiations not having gone well, particularly on the economy.
More shaking of heads in the inner office. David Muir texted Jonny Oates: ‘He is not bluffing.’
Gordon: ‘Nick, I’ve got no choice. I have thought through the implications, I cannot go on for another day. You are negotiating with another party…’
Nick, dramatically: ‘Just five minutes, five minutes. There are two more people I have to speak to. Then let’s speak again. Please.’
Pause. Gordon: ‘Five minutes. Then I have to go to the Palace.’
A collective groan in the inner office as the line went dead.
The No. 10 staff were now crowding into the war room, along with Sir Gus O’Donnell and senior Cabinet Office officials.
Five or so minutes later, Nick Clegg again. ‘Gordon, I cannot give you assurances. That would be acting dishonourably. But please, please don’t resign…’
‘I can’t delay. I’ve got to resign now, Nick. I need to go to the Palace.’
‘You are holding me hostage. You don’t need to act unilaterally. We have only spent five days holding these important negotiations. I can’t do anything about that…’
‘No, Nick. I’ve got to go the Palace. I’ve got to resign. I haven’t got any choice now.’
‘It doesn’t need to be like this…’
‘It does, Nick, I’ve got to resign. It’s got to be now. I wish you all the best for the future. You’re a good man, Nick. I’ve got to go now.’