unless it understood why people had turned away from it. I joined in with this group, and together with others like Michael Gove, Ed Vaizey and Nicholas Boles we began to meet, usually at Policy Exchange, the new modernising Conservative think-tank, and talk over pizzas and beer.
As a genuine, moderate and liberally minded One Nation Conservative, I was an enthusiast for change. At the time I wrote that there were three essential components for a successful modern conservatism: ‘First, we need to reclaim the full set of values that makes conservatism whole. I joined up because the Conservative Party combined a message about aspiration – that everyone should be free to do what they could and be what they could – with compassion for the weak, the vulnerable and those left behind. Second, we must look outwards and forwards, not inwards and backwards. Parties should exist to identify and address the modern challenges that our country faces. Finally … conservatism is nothing if it is not practical. We need a relentless focus on the things that people care about in their daily lives: the public services they use, the taxes they pay and their hopes and fears about the future.’
In other words, pretty much everything needed to change. Instead of tax cuts, crime and Europe, we needed to shift our focus onto the issues the Conservative Party had ignored: health, education, and tackling entrenched poverty. It simply wasn’t acceptable to have so few women MPs, so little representation from ethnic minorities, and such a poor geographical spread of Conservative seats. As I came to believe passionately, words alone do not work; you need positive action. It’s no good simply telling talented British Asians or young businesswomen just how meritocratic you are when the first meeting they attend is a sea of white male faces.
And the Conservative Party had to stop putting people off with curtain-twitching moralising. Yes, there were genuine arguments about family breakdown and behaviour that needed to be made, but we were in no position to make them. We had to earn the right to be heard on these and other subjects.
Added to this, we all agreed that it was time for the Conservative Party to make a decisive step in favour of equal treatment for gay people. In 2003, Labour had repealed the law that banned councils from ‘intentionally promoting homosexuality’. It was known as ‘Section 28’, after the clause in which it appeared in the Local Government Act 1988, passed by the Conservatives.
For me at the time, the reason this legislation had been passed was that councils were overstepping their role. What business had a local council promoting sexuality in any form? But by arguing this I was ignoring an even bigger question: what were we doing backing what looked like, and what was for many, an attack on homosexuality? As Nick Boles later put it to me, ‘It’s not about what councils should and shouldn’t do. That’s not the point. It makes gay people feel like they’re worth less.’
In all of this, there was something we agreed shouldn’t change: we were all convinced that the Conservative Party had become, and should remain, a Eurosceptic party.
While we were all at that time supporters of the UK staying in the European Union, we certainly didn’t see support for the EU, as it was currently constituted, as in any way ‘modern’. But we did believe that ‘banging on about Europe’ (a phrase I was famously to use a year later) was damaging, because while it was just about in the top ten issues for the British public, it seemed to be the only thing that the Conservative Party really cared about.
The biggest influence on me in all these discussions was George Osborne. He was the most convinced, and the most convincing, moderniser. From the very start we built a genuine partnership of a kind that I believe is very rare in modern politics. We each wanted the other to succeed. There was no senior partner and no junior partner. Above all, what mattered most was trust: we came to know that we could tell each other anything, and it would not be passed on to others, and certainly not to the press.
This relationship, and our shared view of what needed to happen, would become stronger during the general election of 2005. Michael Howard gave us both key roles and ringside seats in the last of the contests that we would fight and lose together.
7
‘You’re the first, the last, my everything …’ The lyrics of the Barry White song boomed across the operating theatre from a radio. I’d always been a fan of his music, but I was concerned that it was too loud, and the team of doctors and nurses hovering over Samantha wouldn’t be able to concentrate.
I needn’t have worried. Everything went smoothly. And within minutes I was holding our first-born son, Ivan.
It was 8 April 2002, and we were in Queen Charlotte’s Hospital in Hammersmith. Samantha was having an emergency caesarean, because when her contractions started it turned out that Ivan was ‘feet first’. In other words he was the wrong way round in the womb, or what they call an ‘undiagnosed breech’.
Sam and I had been married for five years, and had built our life together in our house in North Kensington. Neither of us had any regrets about waiting before having children. Sam had the job she had worked so hard for, as creative director at the Bond Street store Smythson. I had been elected to Parliament, representing a seat that suited me down to the ground. We had taken the risk of borrowing a lot of money to buy a small house in the constituency, in the hamlet of Dean, near Chipping Norton. There didn’t seem to be a cloud on the horizon. But our life was about to change in a way we never expected.
When Ivan first arrived, there didn’t seem to be anything wrong. With caesarean births, the dad is the first person to hold the baby. Bursting with pride, I squeezed him tight as we crossed the room to check his weight and carry out the initial tests. Ivan was a small baby, just over six pounds, but he passed all of them with high scores.
We were the typical proud parents. Grandmothers and grandfathers, sisters and brothers all came to visit the new arrival in a room that rather eerily overlooked the exercise yard of next-door Wormwood Scrubs prison. One of the first to come was my godfather Tim Rathbone, who was suffering from terminal cancer and was being treated at the next-door Hammersmith Hospital. I could see that he was dying, and it felt so poignant that he was there.
Once Samantha was well enough, we headed off to her mother and stepfather’s house in Oxfordshire, where we were going to spend those supposedly idyllic first few days together. But then we noticed that something was wrong. Ivan was sleepy, like many premature babies. And, again like many others, he would sometimes wake with a start, hands outstretched. But we noticed that these sudden and jerky movements were happening more and more.
The worries mounted. He wasn’t feeding properly. He was losing weight. And the movements got worse. He was tiny, but these looked like full-grown seizures. So, after a friendly but inconclusive visit from the local GP, we jumped in the car and headed for the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford.
And so the litany of specialists, children’s wards, tests and treatments began. The staff at the hospital did all they could to reassure us. But when you watch your tiny baby undergoing multiple blood tests, your heart aches. When they bend him back into the foetal position to remove fluid from the base of his spine with a long, threatening-looking needle, it almost breaks.
The meeting with the consultant, Dr Mike Pike, for the initial verdict on all these tests is etched forever in my mind. As we sat down, a box of tissues was placed on the table by our side. ‘Severely delayed development,’ he said. These words were carefully chosen, and there is a whole industry of literature and thought behind them. But they don’t mean much to the uninitiated new parent. I asked whether this meant he would struggle at sport, or spend his life in a wheelchair. ‘I’m afraid it’s more likely to be the latter,’ was the reply.
It turned out that Ivan had ‘Ohtahara Syndrome’, named after the Japanese physician who first observed it. Like many of these diagnoses, it is more a description of a set of symptoms than an explanation of how it happened or what can be done about it. Put bluntly, the cause was unknown. The treatment options were uncertain. And there was no