had been a mistake to come. But sometimes there are mistakes in politics you’re glad to have made, and this was one of them.
When Brown overtook us in the polls, rumours began swirling around about an impending vote of no confidence in my leadership. It really was personal.
Brown summed up the mood at PMQs with a rare quip (that’s how bad things were – Gordon Brown was making effective jokes): ‘The wheels are falling off the Tory bicycle, and it is just as well that he has got a car following him when he goes out on his rounds.’
William Hague was emphatic that if Brown was thinking straight, he would call an immediate general election, before the party conference season even began. That way, he would give us no chance to make up the ground we’d lost. I knew that we had just one chance: we had to deliver a Conservative Party conference in October that would metaphorically blow the doors off.
Though our policy-review teams hadn’t even reported back yet, we cobbled together a bumper series of announcements for each day of conference, from cutting stamp duty to introducing new cancer treatments. The Friday before conference, the whole lot – every single policy – was emailed to George’s chief of staff, Matt Hancock.
But Matt’s email address included his middle initial. We had inadvertently sent the full Tory plans to eccentric Lib Dem MP Mike Hancock.
The sender was mortified. The press officers were up in arms. I, however, was sanguine. ‘They’re great policies,’ I said. ‘If they leak, they leak. I’m off home.’ So many things in politics are seen as a calamity. Very few actually are.
However, we would spend the whole conference somewhat on tenterhooks, wondering on which day our precious policies were going to be published before we announced them. To this day I still don’t know why they weren’t.
Labour had a successful conference in Bournemouth, where Brown’s chief bruiser Ed Balls was briefing that there would be an election.
Then came our turn in Blackpool. A cliff-edge moment for our party – and for me.
William opened with a cracker of a speech, chastising Brown for hosting Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street the previous month (a move he must have hated but which made him look both magnanimous and bold).
George then unveiled what I termed his ‘hammock idea’, the conference announcement he’d always dream up while reclining somewhere hot over the summer. This year was the biggest yet: raising the inheritance tax threshold to £1 million. It was deeply Conservative, rewarding people who worked hard, saved and wanted to pass something on.
The finale of the conference, as always, was the leader’s speech. It would be back in the Empress Ballroom in Blackpool’s Winter Gardens where I’d delivered that leadership-winning, no-notes speech two years earlier. I had been pondering whether I could repeat the feat, not as a stunt, but because I was genuinely frustrated by my seeming inability to get across who I was, what I thought and what I wanted to do for Britain.
The lecterns I spoke behind felt like a barrier between me and the audience, distorting what I was saying and what people were hearing. Steve Hilton agreed. Sam told me to go for it. But last time was just ten minutes, I said. This is an hour. I have to cover everything. And it’s my political life on the line now.
But I knew what I wanted to say. It would be me up there, no artifice, no barrier. So in the run-up to the conference I was not just working on my speech with Ameet Gill, but secretly learning its structure, key points and key phrases as we went along.
Come the morning of the speech, I had rehearsed sections but never practised the whole thing in one go. Sam and I snuck out early for a walk on Blackpool beach. I bounded back, full of vim.
As I walked out onto the stage, I knew it was do or die. ‘It might be messy, but it will be me,’ I told the packed hall. As well as being ‘me’, it was terrifying, exhilarating – and knackering. After an hour, I reached the peroration. ‘So, Mr Brown, what’s it going to be? Why don’t you go ahead and call that election? … Let people decide who can make the changes that we really need in our country. Call that election. We will fight. Britain will win.’
I wish I could say I owed it to Cicero. In fact, it was inspired by the moment that David Niven loses his temper with Gregory Peck at the end of one of my favourite films, The Guns of Navarone. All that classical education gone to waste.
Before the conference began we had commissioned a ‘tracker’ or daily poll to see if anything we were doing was shifting the dial in terms of what the public thought. And we decided to continue the poll as the conference came to an end. It was money well spent. Our poll ratings ticked up daily through the conference – and then shot up at the end. I watched the news that evening and thought that I could see – for once – that I had really made that vital connection: from the hall, through the television, to the viewer at home.
But the country’s cameras were now trained once again on Gordon Brown: will he or won’t he?
The next day we were straight back into election planning meetings, as the tracker revealed we were neck and neck with Labour.
Then on Friday, as I drove to Dean, Andy phoned to tell me about a significant opinion poll which would be in that Sunday’s News of the World. It had been carried out only in marginal seats, and it showed, pretty comprehensively, that Labour would not win an election. Far from extending their majority, they would be losing seats to us. It was the final – and in my view, the key – factor that caused Gordon Brown to decide not to hold an election.
Brown argued that his decision had nothing to do with the polls. This enabled us to get the narrative going that as well as being indecisive and temperamental, he was taking people for fools. Andy came up with the refrain ‘Brown’s bottled it’, and we even had bottles of Brown ale made.
A word on being indecisive. The previous year, February 2006 had brought Elwen into our lives. Like Nancy, he was born under C-section at St Mary’s, Paddington.
Normally, parents can discuss baby names at their leisure. But we didn’t have that luxury. Gabby burst in soon after the birth telling us we had to come up with a name now, otherwise I’d look indecisive. I liked Arthur. Boring, said Sam. She sent me out to buy a book of names, and decided on Elwen – not the Welsh Elwyn, but the J.R.R. Tolkien version, meaning ‘friend of the elves’. So Elwen he became (but Arthur Elwen on his birth certificate).
Everyone who was there during the summer and autumn of 2007 remarked on how calm I was. Calm on the eve of the make-or-break conference. Calm when I was told about the accidental email leak. Ed found it infuriating that, just as I didn’t overreact to bad news, I was often disappointingly unimpressed when he brought me good news – treating triumph and disaster just the same.
People may interpret that as being indifferent, or ‘chillaxed’. It’s not. It’s because I know that bollocking people, blowing your top, throwing tantrums, doesn’t get you anywhere. It didn’t help Gordon Brown.
But Brown had helped us. By flirting with an election, then pulling out, then denying his reasons for doing so, he exposed his weaknesses. At the same time, he had brought out our strengths – our ability to refuel, to recalibrate, to come together as a team when we were under assault, to stick to the course even when events were trying to divert us. And the fact that our modernisation was working.
Brown continued to demonstrate his tin ear when he stuck with his plans to abolish the 10p rate of income tax for some of the lowest earners in Britain, in order to reduce the overall rate from 22p to 20p. Labour MPs were in full cry on behalf of all those who were going to lose out. There didn’t seem to be any way of compensating them without either reversing the policy in its entirety or spending a vast sum of money. It was to have a big impact on the electoral battles ahead.
Conventional wisdom holds – and my experience so far had proved – that there are two days that matter more to an opposition than all the others: local election day and party conference speech day.