debated on TV during the party leadership campaign it hadn’t gone well. Anyway, I always felt that TV debates were coming. The UK’s first general election leaders’ debates would take place in 2010 because, for the first time, the front-runner was calling for them.
Bill Knapp and Anita Dunn, the US experts I had hired to help me prepare for the coming ordeal, were brutally frank about the reality I was about to encounter: to my disappointment they told me that these wouldn’t really be debates at all. You don’t want to engage with your opponents’ argument, you just want to put your own point across. You should focus your efforts on delivering your pre-prepared soundbite down the camera lens. Avoid too much spontaneity in taking apart opponents’ arguments; it’s far too risky. Just get your ‘zinger’ – a one-liner destined for the headlines on the news programmes after the show – ready beforehand, and deploy it as soon as you can.
My disappointment quickly turned to worry. We did some practices in Millbank, with Damian Green (and sometimes Olive Dowden) playing Gordon Brown, and Jeremy Hunt as Nick Clegg. Halfway through, I threw down my notes. ‘It’s hopeless. Clegg will win hands-down. It’s easy. He can just say “A plague on both your houses.”’ Even if I’d been Demosthenes or Cicero, he was going to win.
Before that first debate, history in the making, I’d never been so nervous in my life. The news channels covered the build-up as if it was England in the World Cup final. Brown, Clegg and I stood on a primary-coloured set like gameshow contestants. As predicted, Clegg was painting the blue and red parties as the old guard, and himself as the new kid on the block. It seemed a breeze for him. He was even using the same phrases that Jeremy Hunt had as his stand-in during our mock debates – ‘two old parties’, ‘more of the same’, ‘there is an alternative’. Nick had prepared well – and he was good.
I was bad. Not switch-off-the-telly, hide-behind-the-sofa bad. But aloof and stiff. Lacking passion. Anecdotes that were too contrived. And one bit of absolutely essential preparation that I failed to put into practice was properly looking down the camera when I spoke. Colleagues and friends were polite afterwards, because while Clegg had undoubtedly won, at least I hadn’t lost (that honour went to Brown).
But Samantha was brutal. ‘You were hopeless – and you’ve got to watch the whole thing through all over again to see just how bad it was.’ She was right – and I did.
The Lib Dems surged ahead in the polls – into the lead in some. There was even a poll that said their leader was nearly as popular as Winston Churchill. Britain was in the grip of a new phenomenon: Cleggmania.
And I took it hard. I was the one who had wanted to do these debates. I hadn’t prepared properly for them. I’d let everyone down. I lay in bed, running through a list of people in my head, friends who I thought were going to lose their seats because I’d screwed up. The feeling was worse than fear or disappointment. It was guilt.
The second debate, in Bristol, went much better. It was on foreign affairs, and Clegg was vulnerable here. His party manifesto rejected ‘like-for-like replacement of the Trident nuclear weapons system’, thus putting our deterrent at risk. It didn’t do him too much damage though – the two of us drew in the opinion poll afterwards.
Arriving in Birmingham for the third and final debate, my anxieties reached a new high. So much was riding on my performance. The future of the country. The future of my party, my team, my friends and family. My future.
What happened next wasn’t planned or predicted, but I suppose it was inevitable. Brown and I had clearly both gone away and done the same thinking about Clegg. This guy was – according to the polls – running away with the election. Yet he was inconsistent. His policies had never really been subjected to proper scrutiny. The numbers didn’t add up. His manifesto included some seriously odd ideas.
We took him to bits, starting with his pledge of an amnesty for illegal immigrants. Months afterwards Nick told me that if he’d known this policy would be so contentious he never would have let it into the manifesto.
Afterwards, I bounded back into the hotel room. A poll there and then showed that I had won the debate. The relief was enormous. Finally I could get back to the real campaign, which culminated a few days later in a twenty-four-hour sprint to the finish.
My top-to-toe tour of Britain began in a hi-fi factory in East Renfrewshire in the evening. By 10 p.m. I was in a Carlisle fire station, with officers clocking on for the night shift. At 1 a.m. I was wandering around a factory in Darwen, Lancashire, before crossing the Pennines for a 3 a.m. tour of a Morrison’s depot in Wakefield. Next was the Grimsby fish market at 5 a.m. as trawlermen delivered their morning catch, followed by the first lesson of the day at a school in Nottingham, and then an ambulance station in Dudley.
Life on the campaign bus (which is rather like a band’s tour bus, but with less booze and more journalists) tests your senses as well as your stamina. After we had boarded with wet shoes from the Grimsby fish market, Sky’s Joey Jones decided to put some roast beef in the oven that was on the bus. As we wended our way round the windy Welsh roads towards a school in Powys, surrounded by the inescapable smell of fish and beef, everyone began feeling sicker and sicker.
At long last we reached our final stop, Bristol, where supporters including Sam had gathered. I was wrung out, but I had to give a rallying cry with what felt like the last breath I had in me: ‘I want a government that makes us feel good about Britain again – all that we are, all that we’ve done, all that we can do in the future … a government that’s about hope, and optimism and change in our country, not the doom and the gloom and the depression of the Brown years, which we can, tomorrow, put behind us – forever.’
But the news bulletins were focused on something else. Athens was ablaze, and several people had been killed after protesters reacted to planned austerity measures. Economic volatility and the vulnerability of countries like Britain returned to the foreground. The world was in turmoil. Who were the public going to ask to run Britain in these uncertain times? A Conservative government? A Labour government? Or something else?
As on every previous polling day in my adult life, I got up early on 6 May to go to cast my ballot. Sadly, my early voting was delayed by four whole hours, as two jokers had scaled the roof of my local polling station, Spelsbury Memorial Hall, to erect ‘Vote for Eton’ signs and swig champagne.
It is strange voting for yourself to become an MP. It is even stranger voting for yourself to become prime minister. And whereas at previous elections I would have visited polling stations and committee rooms in my own constituency, this time I had sent all my party workers to neighbouring marginal seats. So I spent the hours that followed fiddling around in my vegetable garden and chopping logs for our fire – two of my favourite ways of dealing with stress.
Later that night, Sam, my close team and I gathered in the sitting room at Dean to watch the exit poll. I felt a mixture of fear and hope – fear that we’d fail totally, and hope that we might be about to defy expectations. But I was left with a strange, in-between feeling when at the stroke of 10 p.m. David Dimbleby announced the result of the exit poll: ‘It’s going to be a hung Parliament with the Conservatives as the largest party.’
Some of the results that followed started to point towards a majority – the swings in Sunderland, the seats we picked up in the south, our better-than-expected performance in the south-east. At 1 a.m. we won Kingswood near Bristol – and that was 135 on our target list. But the north of England and London weren’t going as we needed them to.
As the voters’ verdicts unfolded across the country, I went to Windrush Leisure Centre in Witney for my own count. Though my eyes were also on the 649 other contests taking place, I was still eager to succeed in the patch I loved so much.
I was also reminded why it’s so important that our prime ministers are also MPs. Only in Britain would the person bidding for the highest office be sitting on a plastic chair watching his party’s fate unfold on a crackly TV. It is humbling and grounding to be accountable to your own constituency. And it was with genuine pride that I increased my majority.
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