more women and ethnic minority MPs (of whom we had, shamefully, just two). It was imperative that we started to look more like the country we hoped to govern.
The candidates’ list was immediately frozen. A new Priority List of 150 candidates, people we thought the cream of the crop, and better reflecting the make-up of modern Britain, was drawn up from the larger main list. All associations in winnable seats would have to choose from this so-called ‘A-List’.
It caused uproar. Uproar so furious and so persistent that a year later I ended up agreeing that associations could pick their candidates from the full list, but half of the interviewees had to be women, thereby superseding the A-List.
But the ambition never wavered. We carried on exerting pressure more informally, promoting the candidates we wanted. I knew this required action at every level. More women applying to be candidates. More women getting interviews in safe seats. More procedures during the selection process that emphasised the full set of skills required to be an MP, not just the big speech in front of the full membership. All this was very much driven from the centre.
One of the greatest things about our election victory in 2015 was the seventeen non-white and sixty-eight women MPs elected to our benches, quadrupling the intake of a decade earlier. Indeed, as I write, there are six women MPs in the cabinet, four of whom were on that original A-List.
It was worth the row.
I was learning a great deal on the job. But as I cleared each hurdle – the hiring and firing of shadow ministers, the weekly bout of PMQs, the response to the Queen’s Speech – there was one that loomed larger than all the others: party funding.
Long before we inherited a country in debt, we inherited a party in debt by £30 million, largely as a result of the 2005 general election campaign. The funding crisis had a wider significance. Before they let you run the country, people want to see that you are able to run your party.
While donations to political parties had to be declared publicly, loans did not. So wealthy individuals preferred to make loans, and both the Labour and the Conservative parties succumbed to the temptation of this route. This led to the so-called cash-for-honours scandal, and Tony Blair being interviewed by police. Those responsible for Conservative fundraising were called in too. The case for the defence was clear: taking loans was within the rules, and there was a proper vetting process for awarding life peerages. Contributors to party funds shouldn’t be excluded, but it should never be the reason for their appointment. The problem was that while the vetting body – the House of Lords Appointments Commission – was told the details of the loans, the public and the media had not known about them.
I resolved that we should stop taking these loans, and should pay off, or convert to genuine declarable donations, those we already had. I also decided that we needed to stop being so reliant on a small number of wealthy individuals. Even if they didn’t exercise undue influence over the party – and as far as I was concerned they didn’t – it would always look as if they could. For a time I even flirted with the idea of increased state funding for political parties, in some form or other. While I instinctively disliked the idea of taking more taxpayers’ money, there seemed to be a recurring problem with our system.
Apart from big individual donors, of course, the whole system of trade union funding of the Labour Party was antiquated and wrong. Whatever people might say about the closeness of business or wealthy individuals to the Conservatives, the unions’ funding of Labour gave them votes at the party conference, votes to choose candidates and the leader, and votes to determine policy. They owned Labour lock, stock and block vote.
Throughout the time I was party leader and prime minister there were talks between the parties to try to find a solution. I was prepared to go along with a cap of £50,000, or possibly less, on donations from individuals, as long as it was accompanied by a cap on union donations and the reform of Labour’s union links. I supported the idea of tax relief on donations, to ensure that parties had to fundraise properly and listen to their members, not just wait for the next dollop of taxpayer cash to arrive. But the talks always broke down. The caps we were prepared to accept were seen by the other parties as too high, and Labour was never truly prepared to break the union link.
In any event, we were proving, step by step, that party funding through donor clubs, big one-off events and the party conference was possible. We established the ‘Leader’s Group’ of large donors, each committed to giving the party £50,000 a year. While this is a huge amount by any normal measure, it was a great improvement on passing the hat around to a very small number of multi-millionaires for a few massive, often multi-million-pound, donations. At its peak, the Leader’s Group grew to over two hundred people, and became the mainstay of our funding.
While the press was determined to paint it as a ‘cash for access’ organisation, I was very proud of what we had built. We had shown that, even without extra state funding, our party could be properly funded. There were enough members for it to be clear that no individual would have undue influence. The dinners we had were informal and fun. And while there was no improper influence, as the financial and economic crisis hit, we had instant access to some of the best financial brains in the country.
With Andrew Feldman as chief executive and then chairman, we bridged the gap between the person who raised the money and the person who decided how it should be spent, ensuring real commercial control; and from 2006 onwards the party never ran a deficit, and even had a surplus after both the 2010 and 2015 election campaigns, something which is unprecedented in modern party history. We sold our historic headquarters in Smith Square, and even the loss-making annual party conference started to make money: by the time I left office it was making close to £2 million a year. The party was debt-free, and there was around £2 million cash in the bank.
Of course, the most important question in terms of preparing for power was what to do about our policies. A new focus on the environment was one important element. Mending our broken society would be another. On my first full day of leadership I launched one of our new policy review teams alongside Iain Duncan Smith, whose Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) think-tank was pioneering a radical approach towards tackling the cycle of social deprivation. IDS’s review, and a speech I delivered on it a few months later, would prove the most controversial of the period. I wanted us to admit that although we had talked about aspiration a good deal, Conservatives had not done enough thinking about those for whom the bottom rungs of the ladder of opportunity just weren’t there, or had been smashed before they’d had a chance to climb them.
The speech I made at the CSJ reasserted the Conservative mantra, which I fully subscribed to, that poverty or deprivation were never an excuse for crime. But, I added, there was a context, a background, that we needed to understand better. So, as I put it, when people crossed the line and committed a crime, the response needed to be rapid and tough. But to help more of them stay inside that line, we needed more understanding, more help – even more love. I homed in on ‘hoodies’, the name for both the hooded sweatshirts teens wore and the teens themselves: ‘When you see a child walking down the road, hoodie up, head down, moody, swaggering, dominating the pavement – think what has brought that child to that moment,’ I said.
We needed to deal with the background issues that led some towards a life of crime, like family breakdown, unemployment, drug addiction, children growing up in care, and educational underachievement. It was a classic compassionate Conservative speech and series of remedies. But the combination of hoodies and love outraged some in the press: ‘Hug a Hoodie’ was the News of the World’s take on the intervention.
I don’t regret the speech. It set the context for a new approach: committed to backing the police and supporting tough penalties in our courts, but tackling the failures of the care system, reforming adoption, targeting family breakdown and chaotic families, and beginning the long process of reforming our prisons. These were to be some of our most important achievements in government, and their genesis was in a speech that many at the time said would herald our defeat.
As part of the same train of thought, even before I became party leader I had been developing the idea of a school-age programme that would help our children – all children,