David Cameron

For the Record


Скачать книгу

by Russia on behalf of two Russian-backed but unrecognised statelets, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. It was a clear case of illegal aggression and occupation, and I believed the world’s oldest democracy had a duty to stand with one of the youngest and say so. I went to see President Mikheil Saakashvili, who I had met before and who I admired for his efforts to eradicate corruption, attract investment and get people to pay their taxes, a problem many leaders fail to crack.

      He was under huge pressure, but was just about coping. There was tension in the air. Russian tanks were just twenty-five miles from the capital, Tbilisi. No one was quite certain if the ceasefire would hold, or the Russian tanks would start moving again.

      ‘History has shown that if you leave aggression to go unchecked, greater crises will only emerge in the future,’ I wrote in one article. ‘Today, Russia says it is defending its citizens in South Ossetia. Where tomorrow? In Ukraine? In central Asia? In Latvia?’

      They say you shouldn’t make predictions in politics, but sometimes you do without realising it.

      While modernisation was still being criticised by some in the press and the party, the public gave its verdict at the ballot box.

      In the 2007 local elections we gained nearly a thousand new councillors and thirty-nine new councils. That represented 40 per cent of the vote, with Labour and the Lib Dems on 26 and 24 respectively. We were on track, edging closer to power. But there were rows ahead that threatened to throw us off course.

      Cue unprecedented uproar when the Today programme covered the speech. Shadow Europe minister Graham Brady was enraged. The Telegraph was incensed. The 1922 Committee was in revolt. Meanwhile, I was in Hull, spending three days at a school as a teaching assistant, and hearing all this down the phone from Ed.

      On the subject of grammar schools, I reached for a new medium to set the record straight. I wasn’t just a blogger, I was a vlogger, recording a series of ‘WebCameron’ videos that were uploaded online.

      I felt that the call to ‘bring back grammars’ was an anti-modernisation proxy, and I wasn’t going to stand for it. I looked down the lens and said: ‘It is a classic example of fighting a battle of the past rather than meeting the challenges of the future … The way to win the fight for aspiration is to put those things that worked in grammars – aggressive setting to stretch bright pupils, whole-class teaching, strong discipline, to name but three – in all schools.’ In fact my position was more nuanced than I made it sound. I still believed existing grammars should be able to expand, and in the same vein, that new ones could be built in areas where they were already established and population growth required it. I clarified this, but it looked like a climbdown.

      And it came at a bad moment. We were just about to have a change of prime minister. Within a few days of the grammar school row it was Tony Blair’s final PMQs.

      After he had spoken his final words from the despatch box, the Labour benches stood and applauded. I too stood up, and gestured to my own side to join in. They did.

      Cherie Blair came and thanked me afterwards. She is another person who is quite unlike her public caricature. I’ll never forget, when I took Ivan to the premiere of the children’s film Ben 10, Cherie bending down to his wheelchair, looking him in the eye and speaking to him with great kindness and compassion.

      But of course, it wasn’t to prove that simple.

       Cliff Edge, Collapse and Scandal

      It’s June 2007, Gordon Brown is prime minister, and it does not stop raining.

      There was something apt about the ex-chancellor’s premiership beginning with the wettest weather in decades.

      I had – and still have – huge respect for Brown’s intellect and his appetite for hard work. And mutual friends have told me how charming and entertaining he can be in private. But in public he seemed to have only one character setting: dour.

      And when it came to Parliament, he had only one political setting: everything was about killing the Tories. While other Labour frontbenchers would build relationships with their opposite numbers, Brown would have absolutely nothing to do with his. The one time he did reach out to his shadow George Osborne, George and I were having dinner in Pizza Express in Notting Hill Gate. Brown wanted to ‘pair’ – i.e. agree that neither of them would vote in an important forthcoming debate. When George very politely explained that he couldn’t do this without consulting our chief whip, Brown simply shouted and swore at him, before slamming down the phone.

      So when he succeeded Tony Blair, I was rejoicing. We were ahead in the polls. And I was up against someone who hadn’t been elected, who had some real flaws – and who I thought it was possible to beat.

      But initially things didn’t work out that way. As ever, ‘events’ intervened.

      On Brown’s second full day in the job, there was an attempted bomb attack in London’s Haymarket, and then, the day after, terrorists drove a jeep laden with gas cylinders into Glasgow Airport. Brown reacted swiftly and effectively – and struck exactly the right tone about the threat we faced and how we should meet it.

      Then, after plagues of fire and rain, came disease. Foot-and-mouth was discovered on several Surrey farms. Having spent little more than a day on holiday, the new prime minister darted back.

      And as his side of the political seesaw rose, mine began to sink.

      First, Quentin Davies, a pinstripe-suited Tory MP, defected to Labour with a resignation letter of pure vitriol. His criticism of the modern­isation project was very personal.

      Then came a by-election in Ealing Southall. Our candidate was a successful and engaging British Sikh called Tony Lit, and although we were never going to win in the London borough, we wanted to put up a good fight. But in doing so we ended up setting expectations in the wrong place. I had also agreed to the idea of the candidate running on the ballot paper under the description ‘David Cameron’s Conservatives’. This looked arrogant and hubristic. I campaigned hard, visiting the seat five times – and we came a dismal third.

      I had a chance to seize back the initiative. Social action – our policy of backing volunteering at home and abroad – was a strand of modern, compassionate conservatism we were determined to demonstrate. Project Umubano, led by the MP Andrew Mitchell, was to bring together forty enthusiastic party volunteers in Rwanda that summer, and I was to join them for a night.

      The problem was that parts of Witney were still flooded. But I had visited the flood victims, and I was absolutely determined that the Conservative Party would not be a follower on overseas aid, but a leader.

      Nevertheless, the visit was dogged by questions about why I was in Africa when my own constituency was under water. That night I looked