I delivered it without notes, having memorised it as we drafted it. Watching it now I find it rather wooden, but it worked.
Within a single day, the polls were transformed: support for me surged from 16 to 39 per cent, while for Davis it collapsed from 30 to 14. Between the conference in October and the ballot in December there appeared to be nothing that might shift the dial back in Davis’s favour. And I was going to make sure of it. I resolved to go to as many places as I could, and speak to as many members as possible. For five weeks, life for Liz Sugg and me was spent on the road. Speaking at members’ meetings, sometimes with only a dozen people in the room. McDonald’s drive-throughs for lunch, a cigarette and a glass of wine for dinner at whichever Travelodge we were staying in.
Politically the only events that came near to attaining significance were television encounters. There were my first two TV debates, one on ITV, the other on the BBC. And I think it is fair to say that I lost both of them.
The face-off with Jeremy Paxman was, by contrast, something of a triumph. I enjoyed his books, his humour, and watching the spectator sport of his political interviews. But as an interviewer I thought that most of the time he was a self-indulgent monster. He wasn’t trying to get answers or inform viewers, he was just trying to make his victim look like a crook while he looked like a hero. To reverse Noël Coward’s dictum about television, I thought that Newsnight was a programme for politicians to watch rather than to appear on. Not least because hardly anyone actually watched it. I could see absolutely no point in doing an interview with Paxman: it would never be an attempt to examine policies or priorities, just an opportunity for him to show off and try to take me down at the same time.
This infuriated my team. There is nothing a press officer hates more than their boss refusing to do an interview. Eventually they wore me down, and I relented. But I was prepared to turn the tables on Paxman.
In spite of endless promises by the BBC about a neutral venue, the interview was staged at some lush wine emporium. And it soon became clear that the whole thing had been set up to try to make me look like a rich, spoilt child of Bacchus. I was a non-executive director of a company, Urbium, that owned and ran bars and nightclubs. And I should have predicted what was coming.
The first question was, ‘Who or what is a Pink Pussy?’
I paused and gulped. The only ‘Pink Pussy’ I had heard of was the notorious nightclub in Ibiza. In a split second I decided – thank God – that no answer was best.
‘What about a Slippery Nipple?’
Now I knew where he was going: Pink Pussies and Slippery Nipples were both cocktails. He wanted to get stuck into outside interests and the responsibility of drinks companies. But before he had the chance to get going, I decided to unleash my own Paxman-like rant.
‘This is the trouble with these interviews, Jeremy. You come in, sit someone down and treat them like they are some cross between a fake or a hypocrite. You give no time to anyone to answer any of your questions. It does your profession no favours at all, and it’s no good for political discourse.’
That, combined with teasing him about interrupting himself, put Paxman off his stride. He got nothing out of me, and I avoided interviews with him for the next five years. I was happy to leave it at played 1, won 1.
And then the campaign was over.
On 6 December 2005 I made my way to the Royal Academy of Arts on Piccadilly for the announcement of the count. The results were read out at 3 p.m. – and the victory was comprehensive. I had won over twice as many votes as my opponent. I had the mandate. I could get down to work.
I went straight from a celebration party for MPs at the ICA on The Mall to the rather grim green office occupied by the leader of the opposition. By the desk at one end of the room is a pair of double doors leading out to a small balcony. I sat down on the ledge and smoked a cigarette as I thought about the day ahead, which would, dauntingly, feature my first Prime Minister’s Questions.
The team met to discuss the task. We had talked a lot about supporting the government when it did the right thing, so I was fairly sure that I should make a start on education, promising to support Tony Blair in his desire to give schools more independence, particularly if he faced down the union-inspired opposition on his own benches.
I suggested that if he brought up our approach in the past, I would say, ‘Never mind the past, I want to talk about the future. He was the future once.’ George said, ‘Never mind what he says, just say that line – it’s brilliant.’ I did. I had only ever spoken from the despatch box three times in my life. The backbenchers cheered behind me.
First hurdle jumped. Many more hurdles to come.
9
It was minus 20 degrees. All I could see for miles was snow. Standing on a sled, I clung to the reins of several barking huskies. ‘Mush!’ I shouted, and we hurtled across the glacier.
It had been four months since I’d taken the reins of a rather different beast. And I had decided to make Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, the destination for one of my first foreign trips as Conservative Party leader. It was dismissed by many as style over substance. But, like all the significant decisions during those early days of my leadership, it was part of a serious, thought-through political strategy.
We wanted to demonstrate in the clearest possible way that this was a new leader, a changed political party, and – above all – that the environment and climate change were issues we were determined to lead on. They were personally important to me, but they also helped to define my sort of conservatism. Concerned about preserving our heritage, aware of the responsibilities (not just the limits) of the state, able to talk confidently about new issues that might not have arisen in earlier general elections, and respectful of scientific evidence.
Yet in opposition it is hard to get across who you are, and to talk about the things you want to talk about. The government can just waltz onto the 10 o’clock news and talk about its latest plan of action, while you have to work relentlessly to try to set the agenda – but with what? Something you might do, if there is an election, if you win it and if the issue is still relevant in n years’ time.
So we were prepared to take risks. And Svalbard really was a risk. For a start, it nearly resulted in images very different from the photos of me gliding along behind the huskies. I was given a whole load of instructions about how to operate the sled. I ignored all of them, and disaster nearly struck. The cameras were set up for a dynamic, fast-moving shot of me steering the sled. I managed to turn the whole thing over at high speed, and collapsed in a ball of snow, ice and, from everyone around me, hysterical laughter.
These weren’t quite the pictures we wanted – I kept thinking of another opposition leader, Neil Kinnock, falling over on Brighton beach. Mercifully, these career-maiming shots never made it onto viewers’ screens.
Later, as we clambered into a cave, everyone was asked to wear protective helmets. I resisted, remembering William Hague’s baseball cap embarrassment as leader of the opposition. As a politician, you’re haunted by the ghosts of gaffes past.
It wasn’t long before I patented my own.
A leader of the opposition has a car from the Government Car Service to ferry them around, at least partly because they have a number of official responsibilities, and a big case of confidential papers to carry with them. I was allotted Terry Burton, who had driven some of my predecessors.
For years as an MP I had cycled to Parliament, often with George. I didn’t want to stop now that I was party leader, and very occasionally Terry would bring this case, and sometimes my work clothes, including my shoes, in to the office for me. Soon the Daily Mirror was onto me, exposing the eco-mad Tory leader’s ‘flunky following behind in a gas-guzzling motor’. The Guardian dubbed