next.
Of course we were similar in some ways: brought up only twenty miles apart, with parents who, while of slightly different ages, moved in similar social circles. But our friends on both sides couldn’t really understand what we were up to. I was the ambitious Tory apparatchik. She was the hippie-like art student. I was working in the Treasury for Norman Lamont. She was living in a Bristol flat with people who would have happily wrung his neck. I was trying to get invited to highbrow political dinner parties in Westminster. She was playing pool with the rapper Tricky in the trendiest part of Bristol.
Norman would frequently ring up early on a Saturday morning wanting to know what was in the papers. On more than one occasion Samantha, used to a student-style lie-in, would shout from under her pillow, ‘If that’s Norman asking about the newspapers, tell him to fuck off and buy them himself.’ I would call him back, cramming 20p pieces into the student payphone to avoid being cut off.
Our courtship was a long one. Our first New Year was spent driving around Morocco in a battered Renault 5. The first night in Marrakesh was so cold and damp we slept with our clothes on. While there was a bit of an age gap, as well as the contrasts in our friends and our politics, there was something that kept bringing us together and helping us get to know and love each other more.
Part of that something was food. We are both greedy and somewhat obsessive. Restaurants, cooking, shopping, growing: all are part of that obsessiveness, as long as they end in eating.
It was in those early years that I first witnessed the ‘Sam food panic’ which has since become something of a family joke. When she is hungry she has an irrational fear that the restaurant, pub or shop we are heading to is about to close or run out of food. The panic won’t end until I have called ahead to check that the kitchens are still open or the shelves aren’t empty. Now at least I have the children on my side: as Sam shouts at us to check that the ice cream shop hasn’t run out of ice cream, or the fish and chip shop hasn’t run out of chips (both genuine recent ‘food panic’ examples) we all fall about laughing.
So we fell in love – and it was the deepest love I will ever know. But the falling took months and years, not days and nights; and I suspect it was longer for Sam than it was for me. But I believe the result has been something much stronger than either of us could ever have believed when we first got together under that powerful Italian sun. And it wouldn’t just survive everything political life would throw at us, but also the worst fear of any parent, losing our beloved first-born child.
It wasn’t until 1994 that I summoned the courage to propose. While Sam said yes, we decided to keep it secret for almost a year. I think she wanted some time to get used to the idea. She was still only twenty-three, so I thought it was only fair.
As our relationship developed, I decided to leave the Home Office and to go and work for the media company Carlton Communications plc. By this point I had applied to be on the Conservative Party’s candidates’ list, and after passing the assessment weekend – of interviews, practice speeches and written tests at a rather bleak hotel in Buckinghamshire – I was able to apply for parliamentary seats. For some time I had thought that getting more experience outside politics, specifically in business, would be good for me. I also needed to make some money, so my chosen career of politics would be more manageable.
Carlton fitted the bill perfectly. It was a FTSE 100 company, with all the corporate responsibilities that involved. Michael Green, its founder and chairman, was a swashbuckling entrepreneur from whom I would learn about business. The company was a part owner of ITV, and was involved in regulated industries, where my knowledge of government and Parliament would help.
I had always been clear to Samantha that my life would involve politics. I had found my calling – it was what I wanted to do. It wasn’t just an option, or a possibility: as far as I was concerned, it was a near-certainty. She was very understanding.
Did we ever argue about politics? Yes, of course. My friends would say she helped to turn a pretty traditional Home Counties Tory boy into someone a bit more rounded, more questioning and more open-minded. But many of the arguments we had about politics were actually about logistics, rather than issues. Samantha worried hugely about how it would affect our life. Where would we live? How would we stay together? How much would we see of each other? She was right to ask all these questions: politics has been a destroyer of many strong marriages. For one person in the relationship it can become an obsession; for the other a duty, or even a burden. As much as you can try to choose your constituency, in the end it chooses you. And so much follows from that choice.
My first attempt at getting selected as a Conservative candidate was in Ashford in Kent, while I was still a special adviser at the Home Office. It was my first experience of a big selection audience of four hundred people or more. Today, nerves help me speak well. Back then, I think they didn’t. In the event I was beaten by the far more experienced Damian Green. In third place – and it was the first time I had met her – was a shy yet assertive candidate called Theresa May.
I was torn between taking the traditional route of fighting a safe Labour seat first, and trying to jump straight into a Conservative one. I pursued both strategies, even applying for Doncaster North, the rock-solid Labour seat that would later select Ed Miliband as its Member of Parliament.
In the end the choice was made for me, when in January 1996 I was called up as a reserve for the selection in Stafford, whose Conservative MP Bill Cash was moving to the newly created neighbouring constituency of Stone. It was a part of the world that I didn’t really know, but something clicked. In the second round I would give my speech and take questions last. While we were waiting Samantha and I sat in the Castle Tavern opposite the constituency HQ. I fretted – and she drank. After two pints of cider we were summoned, and Samantha tripped on the way up the steps onto the stage. There was a gasp from the audience, but far from it being a disaster, it meant that everyone remembered at least something from my performance.
I was selected to be the candidate, and over the next year we worked as hard as we could, canvassing and campaigning, including Samantha’s eccentric father, Sir Reginald Sheffield, who rather spoiled his hard work by loudly shouting into a mobile phone in a pub on polling day, ‘We’re about to lose.’ But in the face of a nationwide Labour landslide, all our efforts weren’t enough. By the end of the campaign, the result – a Labour majority of 4,314 – wasn’t a surprise. While I did not have a previous election campaign to compare it with, I knew from the unanswered doors and the looks people gave me in the streets that the British people had had enough of the Conservatives.
6
1997 was the start of the wilderness years for the Conservative Party. Just like Labour in 1979, we were set for a long period of opposition.
In the British system the blow of losing a general election is partly softened by becoming ‘Her Majesty’s Official Opposition’, with a privileged status in Parliament and ‘shadow’ jobs to be handed out to ambitious MPs. Pretty soon you learn what a false comfort this is. You’ve lost. You’re out of power. You don’t make the decisions or achieve any of the things that made you want to get into politics in the first place. It is difficult to set the agenda, and hard to regain power after just one Parliament. What matters is not how well you oppose, but what you learn – and how fast.
After the 1997 election I was outside Parliament. Eight years later I was leading my party. And five more years after that we were back in power. It was a slow and painful ascent for the party, but an incredibly rapid rise for me.
I wasn’t by any means the fastest to understand either the scale of our defeat or the profound nature of the change that was needed to our party. Michael Portillo and the group around him seemed to have thought more deeply than many others about this.
Nor was I the best parliamentary performer, speech-maker or even motivator of potential Conservative voters. William Hague was by far the most talented politician of my