be staying at home. I was leader of the opposition at this point and, as it was a Wednesday morning, I was meant to be at Prime Minister’s Questions. What happened later, when Gordon Brown led tributes and the House adjourned for the day, meant a lot to us. It was much more than I had expected, and it showed the real warmth and humanity of Gordon Brown, who had of course suffered in a similar way with his daughter Jennifer Jane, who died shortly after she was born.
The next few days before the funeral were a blur. At least we had to focus on the songs and poems we wanted to remember him by. A friend of Sam’s called Damian Katkhuda, who had a band called Obi, sang and played his guitar in St Nicholas church, Chadlington. It was a beautiful service, with our closest friends and family around us. But there was nothing but darkness for us.
You never fully recover from the loss of a child. But you can steadily learn to cope. I threw myself back into my work as a way of trying to manage. When I look back, I realise that I started working again too quickly. For a while I was too fragile and not in the right state of mind to make decisions. Nothing else seemed to matter alongside what we had lost.
But what is often said about grief I found to be true. While at first you think the gloom will never lift, there comes a time – and for me it was many months later – when some of the happy memories start to break through and you remember what you had, not only what you have lost.
And having Ivan taught us so much. About unconditional love. About our total devotion to each other. About the extraordinary compassion in our health service and the lengths that people go to in order to help. We learned about our strengths, but also our limitations.
Ivan lies buried opposite the church in Chadlington. We take the children there, and tell him how things are going and how much we still miss him. Sam found an inscription from Wordsworth for the headstone that sums up so much of what we feel.
I loved the Boy with the utmost love of which my soul is capable, and he is taken from me – yet in the agony of my spirit in surrendering such a treasure I feel a thousand times richer than if I had never possessed it.
8
At the time, Michael Howard’s 2005 general election campaign was seen as slick and professional. But it was also too right-wing and rather mean-spirited, putting people off rather than turning them towards us. It resulted in another disastrous defeat for the Tories.
I had been responsible for policy coordination, writing the manifesto and acting as one of the party’s principal spokesmen around the country. I saw the campaign close-up. Yet just a few weeks after it was over, I was planning an aggressive leadership campaign in favour of a more modern and liberal Conservative message.
How does all that make sense?
The short answer is that in modern politics the tone and content of a manifesto and a campaign are predominantly set by the party leader. Michael Howard was sure that if we were robust and effective, we could make a fairly traditional Conservative message work. He also felt he had to be true to himself. I was already convinced that we had to change, but I understood Michael’s position. I owed a lot to him, and wanted to help him make his chosen strategy as successful as possible.
The manifesto itself was short and focused, but it was lacking in policy detail. With Michael’s permission I drafted in Michael Gove – who I had helped to persuade out of journalism and into politics, and who was standing in the super-safe Conservative seat of Surrey Heath. We sat in my pokey House of Commons office for several days, dividing the chapters up between us and writing one each before passing what we had done to the other for polishing and improving. We were already friends, and this work brought us closer.
The policies may have been rather workmanlike, but they did actually work. We know this because, while Labour derided our manifesto at the time, they copied and implemented many of its most significant proposals straight after the election. The points system for immigration; the proposals on school discipline. Tony Blair pursued his usual tactic of trashing his opposition, and then coopting any idea that was halfway sensible.
But in modern elections the campaign itself is what matters, and the tone of ours was set not only by Michael Howard, but also by someone I’ve come to admire as one of the great political campaigners: the Australian Lynton Crosby.
Lynton’s hard work is combined with great leadership skills. Twice – in 2005 and 2015 – I’ve seen him build the happiest, most cohesive, most hard-working teams in Conservative Central Office that I have ever known. His strongest weapon is plain common sense. What’s the target? What are your strengths and weaknesses? What are those of your opponents? What, given those things, is the best route to victory? Above all, what’s the plan?
In 2005, Lynton came in at a relatively late stage. His view was that the best chance Michael had to win the election, or at least to deprive Tony Blair of another massive victory, was to focus on some straightforward issues that people cared about, while encouraging them to take out their frustrations with the government by voting for the Conservatives.
The famous poster slogan ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’ fitted with this strategy. It was punchy, and it channelled frustration with Labour. It focused minds on down-to-earth-issues: clean hospitals, more police, ‘It’s time to put a limit on immigration,’ and so on. But the tone reinforced the problem with the Conservative image. It was mean-spirited. Too many people answered the question ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’ with ‘Well, even if I am, I’m not voting for you lot.’
Added to that, in my view the campaigning on immigration went too far. The message wasn’t an unreasonable one. Indeed, I was a strong supporter of immigration control, and had been closely involved in drafting the proposals we put forward. And you could argue that, in the light of what subsequently happened, the decision to make this issue a central one was prescient. But its domination of the early part of our campaign was too much. It felt wrong. It appealed to voters we already had, but made some of those we needed to attract feel uncomfortable – even those who agreed with the policy itself.
The result was the fourth-worst Conservative performance for a hundred years. While we gained thirty-three seats, we only increased our share of the vote by 0.7 per cent, a smaller increase than William Hague had achieved in 2001. Overall, we got fewer votes in 2005 than we did in 1997 – 8.8 million versus 9.6. We won some of our target seats, but even then more than half of those only came to us because of Labour voters switching to the Liberal Democrats, rather than directly from Labour to us.
One other polling figure tells the true story. When people were asked whether a party ‘shares your values’, the Conservatives came off worst, at around 36 per cent, while Labour and the Lib Dems were at around 50 per cent. Maurice Saatchi put it crisply when he said: ‘More anger at the problems of the world we live in is not enough to convince voters that the Conservative Party is fit to solve them.’ The problem went much deeper. We needed to change.
Michael announced that he wouldn’t stand down until there had been a review of the leadership rules. He favoured a system where if more than half of the parliamentary party settled on one candidate, there would not be a vote of the party membership. In the event this proposal went down badly with both the membership and a significant number of MPs, and wasn’t adopted. But the delay in the leadership election that it caused would make all the difference.
If it had taken place sooner after the general election, there can be little doubt that the favourite, David Davis, would have been elected. He had a machine in the parliamentary party, and something of a public profile. There wasn’t an obvious challenger. Before one arose, the contest would have been over.
Instead, the party would wait until just before the party conference in the autumn before candidates’ declarations were made. A formal campaign would then be held during and after the conference, with the results in December.
But before any of this got under way,