agreed. And I felt we had enough agreement round the room to proceed.
But I remained dejected. Brown’s gambit had changed everything. By sacrificing himself, I felt a Lib–Lab coalition was becoming inevitable. And while I was winning round my shadow cabinet over an AV promise, I wasn’t sure I could win over the party. ‘Put the pictures back up on the wall,’ I said as I walked out of my office, where everything had been packed up in bubble wrap, ready to be taken across the road to Downing Street. ‘It’s not going to happen.’
But even when things looked as hopeless as they did then, I knew I mustn’t stop trying. I went for one final push by paying a visit to our backbenchers’ forum, the 1922 Committee.
Along with the florist, the hair salon and the shooting gallery, the 22, as it is known, is one of many surprising features of Parliament: a trade-union-style meeting comprising, of all people, Tory MPs. Rather ominously for what we were about to embark on, it was named after the year Tory backbenchers decided to end the Lloyd George-led Liberal–Conservative alliance. It can often be a leader’s toughest audience.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘Brown’s going. And they’re offering a full coalition. And they’ll go all the way on voting reform. The very least we can offer is a referendum on AV. It is the price of power. Are you willing to pay the price?’
I went home with the party’s backing for what I was contemplating, but I still felt that it wasn’t going to go our way.
‘Would you mind if I went on leading the party in opposition?’ I asked Sam. We had been talking about how a rainbow coalition would barely have a majority, and a shambolic government with a short shelf-life would need to be held to account.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘You must carry on.’
On Tuesday I woke to a text from Ed, telling me to call him. He informed me of the latest – maybe even the final – twist: the talks between Labour and the Lib Dems had broken down. We were back in the game. The negotiators got back to work, this time armed with our final big concession. My mood shifted once again, this time to anticipation. This might actually come off.
Things moved fast. That afternoon I was in my Commons office thrashing out the details with Clegg. We were still trying to establish how we’d reconcile our parties’ very different approaches to Britain’s nuclear deterrent, Trident. The word then came from the cabinet secretary that Brown wasn’t leaving No. 10 tomorrow, he was going right now.
Before the sun went down – he hadn’t wanted to leave in the dark – Brown resigned. I watched him addressing the cameras in Downing Street on the TV in my office, knowing that the time had come.
As I left Parliament for the final time as leader of the opposition, it wasn’t my car waiting outside the Commons to take me to Buckingham Palace, but the prime ministerial Jaguar. ‘You’ve worked so hard,’ Sam said as she and I got in. We were both emotional. I was trying to savour the moment when my phone rang.
It was Gwen Hoare, my childhood nanny. Now eighty-nine, Gwen remained very much part of the family. ‘How are you getting on, dear?’ she asked. ‘Well,’ I said. ‘I’m actually on my way to see the Queen.’ Sam and I burst out laughing at the wonderful timing of it all.
I’d been to the palace in the past, but its splendour seemed brighter than ever as I arrived for this moment. I had met the Queen, too, and this time I was as awestruck as ever. However, she put me at ease immediately. Then came the formalities. I said I’d like to form a government, but I wasn’t entirely sure what type of government it would be. I hoped, I added, that it would be a coalition.
She had seen it all during her fifty-eight-year reign – wars, crises, scandals, new dawns. But she had never seen the sort of five-day delay that had preceded her twelfth prime minister’s entrance to this ceremony of ‘kissing hands’ (no hands are actually kissed). I promised to report back on the true nature of the new government as soon as I could.
As our car pulled into Downing Street the sky was getting dark, but the street was lit up by camera flashes. A rainbow formed over us – welcoming not a rainbow coalition but the first Conservative-led government for thirteen years, and the first coalition government in seventy years.
There aren’t many things that make me nervous, but this bank of cameras outside No. 10, the fact that this was No. 10, the fact I was now prime minister, was suddenly overwhelming. But Sam’s presence calmed me. Also calming were the people who were on the street but out of shot: my team.
There was Ed Llewellyn and his deputy, Kate Fall, who had worked with me at the party in our twenties and joined me when I was an MP campaigning for the leadership. I valued her emotional intelligence and judgement more than anyone’s.
There was Steve Hilton and his sparring partner Andy Coulson, the former News of the World editor who I’d appointed communications chief three years earlier. A question mark remained over whether he’d join us at No. 10 or move on. I very much hoped he would come.
There were Liz Sugg and Gabby Bertin, who had got me from A to B, fended off the press and made everything happen over the past five years. Laurence Mann, Kate Marley and Tim Chatwin had served me loyally for much of my leadership, and they were there too.
I made my way to the microphone stand in front of the famous black door. As on many previous occasions, I was going to deliver my words without notes.
‘Compared with a decade ago, this country is more open at home and more compassionate abroad,’ I began, wanting to strike a different, magnanimous tone by paying tribute to the good things Labour had achieved. ‘I think the service our country needs right now is to face up to our really big challenges,’ I went on, bracing people for the measures that were urgently needed to fix the economy. ‘Real change is not what government can do on its own. Real change is when everyone pulls together.’ This was the Big Society, the idea from which all our reforms would flow, being put front and centre of our programme. And I finished with a defining principle: ‘Those who can, should, and those who can’t, we will always help.’ I had come up with this earlier, while talking with Steve. I would end up using it as a guide for much that I tried to do in that building, repeating it in my head like a mantra during those lonely moments when I was forced to make the most difficult decisions about people’s lives.
Sam and I stepped through the big black door, passing between the civil servants lining the hallway and applauding – the traditional ‘clapping in’ – as we walked through to the prime minister’s office. I felt exhausted, elated – but strangely at ease.
Not at ease in an entitled, born-to-rule sense. But because there is such a warmth from all the people in that building – and, for me, at least some familiarity. I’d been in No. 10 in my twenties as a young researcher and a special adviser. I had returned in my thirties for briefings on urgent issues as an MP and leader of the opposition. Now I was back, aged forty-three, as the youngest prime minister since Lord Liverpool in 1812.
But it was time to return to the 1922. As our backbench MPs clustered in the huge committee room, Samantha and I were led in by Patrick McLoughlin. ‘Colleagues, the prime minister,’ he said. There was an eruption of clapping, stamping and cheering.
Afterwards, I went back to my Commons office to thank the wider team.
I never did go back into the Shadow Cabinet Room.
In many ways, those five days in May were the most surreal and tense of my five years as opposition leader. But looking back, some of the things that looked as if they would hinder our path to power actually smoothed the way.
Take Nick Clegg. During the election campaign he had seemed like a big obstacle: the insurgent with a message of change. But the fact that we had similar temperaments and values, and were thinking the same way when crunch time came, meant that we were able to form this historic union when we had to.
And take Gordon Brown, with his determination to cling on in No. 10. While it seemed like another roadblock to us at the