Energy Secretary, he recommended that Cameron become his successor as its director. Cameron was to have his hands full. A widespread perception that the Thatcher government was ‘out of touch’, open Cabinet warfare over Europe and spiralling interest rates were putting the Prime Minister under real pressure. She had won three elections, had defeated the most powerful unions including the National Union of Mineworkers and had opened up much of the state sector to market forces, but she had made a grave political mistake in introducing the poll tax. The magnitude of that error was brought violently home on 31 March 1990 when a protest by 200,000 people in Trafalgar Square turned into a riot. Electoral defeat for the Tories at the next general election looked a near certainty after a disastrous showing in local polls shortly afterwards.
In early 1990, soon after becoming head of the Political Section, Cameron was invited to a secret conference of the party’s top strategists at Hever Castle, in Kent, to discuss the worsening political climate. There, Cameron became much better acquainted with Andrew Lansley, who was the new director of CRD. Lansley had been a civil servant before entering politics via the British Board of Commerce. But as Norman Tebbit’s private secretary he had proved himself perfectly in tune with his master’s ideology and, when Harris went to Number 10, Lansley was recommended to succeed him.
Lansley was not impressed by what he found on his first day. ‘The Research Department had been gathered together,’ he remembers, ‘almost entirely men, just one woman. I walked into the room and they all stood up. I felt like I had walked into the officers’ mess, it was just bizarre. Clearly this thing worked on a completely different basis.’ He set about modernising the outfit and ordered a fundamental shift in strategy: the CRD began to behave as if the Tories were in opposition, rather than in power. By attacking Neil Kinnock, the leader of the Opposition, reasoned Lansley, the Tories would deflect attention from their own difficulties while knocking the gloss off Labour. ‘I know history moved on but we moved from 20 [percentage] points behind [in the opinion polls] and by September we were in single figures. We had a really good summer being beastly to Labour. And actually through that summer we established a proposition which was very important in the subsequent year, that even though we were eleven years on from Labour 1979, the public still believed in their negative views of Labour, they did not believe that they had changed,’ says Lansley. With Labour nowadays campaigning as if it is in opposition, anxious to prove that its opponents are still extremists, Cameron – as a leading member of Lansley’s CRD – can reasonably claim that he helped write the book on how to ‘attack from office’.
John Major, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Kenneth Baker, who had succeeded Brooke as Conservative Party Chairman, launched the offensive in May 1990 with the Tories in one poll trailing Labour by 15 percentage points. Labour’s policies on the economy, trade unions’ rights, defence and education, and its plans to replace the poll tax with a ‘roof tax’, were all to come under attack. With Cameron right at the heart of the new propaganda factory pumping out negative stories on Labour, he appeared more mature than his peers. ‘I remember when he became head of the political desk he suddenly grew up a lot. He suddenly seemed older than me. He was grown up. The political desk was right at the edge of the battle,’ says Bray. Another colleague recalls Cameron watching television some months earlier when news came in of Nigel Lawson’s resignation as Chancellor. ‘I remember him just coolly observing, “I think Margaret’s done for. I think there will be a stalking horse now” (as there was). David was always more patrician than some of the others. As that remark suggests, he was always a bit detached from the rah-rah stuff.’
Although the summer offensive demonstrated that voters were still suspicious of Labour, it could do little to stop the festering rebellion among Tory MPs, an increasing number of whom were determined to rid themselves of their leader. Change was in the air and Heseltine, the dashing ‘king over the water’ who had garnered credit with every government difficulty, was the pundits’ bet to succeed Thatcher at Number 10. Here it seems Cameron may himself have played a dangerous game. For although the CRD was generally regarded as an ultra-loyal Thatcherite outpost, he was not above pushing Heseltine’s cause on occasion. Bray recalls that when she was stuck for a frontbencher to put up for BBC1’s Question Time, the head of the Political Section casually suggested she ask Heseltine to step in. ‘I said, “Well I’m sure they [Question Time] would love it but officially we’re not supposed to be fielding Michael Heseltine.” But Dave said Michael did these things very well. Funnily enough Dave was always a great fan.’ Bray said that she was impressed that Cameron was ‘thinking outside the box’.
His defiance of orthodoxy was less favourably received in an embattled Number 10 where his insouciant recommendation of ‘Tarzan’ marked him out – to some at least – as a Heseltine supporter. It seemed that he had borne out a suspicion harboured among some of Thatcher’s most loyal aides that he was not ‘one of us’. Such apparent disloyalty could have cost the aspiring politician dear had the events of November 1990 fallen differently. Shortly after 9.30 a.m. on 22 November a messenger wordlessly placed a piece of paper on every desk in the CRD. On it was the Press Association ‘snap’ report that Margaret Thatcher had told the Cabinet she was resigning. Cameron watched the unfolding drama of her departure from the press office. Lansley sent a message of condolence from the Research Department (and remarkably received a handwritten note in reply that afternoon).
Cameron has said that he was ‘very sad’ that day. But what are we to make of his relations with the Tories’ greatest leader since Winston Churchill? Their meetings have been fleeting and mostly embarrassing. His first encounter with her was at Central Office and might have ended his political career. ‘I was the Trade researcher and she asked me what the trade deficit was. I didn’t know,’ he said. On the second occasion, at a lunch, she commiserated with him for the fact that Labour had stolen Tory language, but said that they would never understand the importance of individual liberty under the law. ‘It’s an old tune but a good one,’ Cameron wrote later. So that Lady Thatcher could give some sort of benediction to young Cameron after he became leader, a ‘casual’ meeting at a party was arranged between the two in early 2006. Cameron, dressed in a jacket and crisp white opennecked shirt, was duly brought before Baroness Thatcher, by now in her eighties and no longer at her physical and mental peak. The young man displayed appropriate deference and thoughtfulness, impressing the elderly former PM and prompting her to inquire for which seat this youthful political aspirant was hoping to stand at the next election. Lady Thatcher, when gently informed of her mistake, is said to have remarked that she could not believe that anyone not wearing a tie could possibly be a Conservative leader. Cameron’s office lost little time in briefing a rather more positive version of the meeting. Lady Thatcher, his press officer said, had told the new leader to make sure he got enough sleep.
Although it may appear trivial, Cameron’s relations with Thatcher go to the heart of the dilemma he faces in positioning at the political centre of a modernised party. He recognises that for many former Tory voters she represents almost all that they grew to dislike about the Conservatives. Yet he was, as university friends confirm, a dyed-in-the-wool Thatcherite himself, and his own parents, especially his father, idolised her. He dare not disown her completely for fear of enraging those that remain her admirers. Her good opinion – and that of those who speak for her – still matters more than Cameron and his supporters like to admit.
In the winter of 1990 it was her successor John Major’s good opinion that mattered most, however. Just as it was important to make a good impression on the new regime, Cameron earned his first press notice – for an embarrassing blunder that earned a rebuke from the Speaker himself. In truth the matter was a minor administrative cockup. Cameron had gone to sit in on a Commons debate on Labour policy one day in January 1991. But instead of taking his place in the seats set aside for party officials in an upper gallery, he had sat in the chamber itself in a box reserved for civil servants. Labour members, spotting the error, let out a howl of indignation and wrote to the then Speaker alleging a ‘potential breach of security’ and demanding that he investigate. A short article in the Guardian, Cameron’s first mention in a national newspaper, records that Speaker