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. These are the moments – sometimes the only moments – when the searchlight beam catches you, and people focus briefly on politics and consider whether your party is up or down, and whether you look like a prime minister or a duffer.
I became increasingly obsessed with this theory, and knew that the London mayoral election in May 2008 was another such moment. We would only win in London if we could find a candidate who could reach out beyond our Conservative-voting base.
Boris Johnson likes to say he was my last choice, but it’s not true. George and I were keen to persuade him, and we worked hard to do so. One of the promises we made was that we would do everything to help him run the best-financed and organised campaign that money could buy. We made good on this promise by delivering to him the best campaigner on the planet: Lynton Crosby.
On election night, when it became clear the Conservatives were going to have their first London mayor, Boris arrived at the party at Millbank. As we walked in together, we joined hands and raised them in the air. A great pic. But Boris didn’t let go. So, rather strangely, we walked into Millbank Tower hand in hand. ‘I told you: hold, lift, drop,’ Andy chastised us. ‘Where was the drop?’ Of course, the drop came much later.
A fortnight afterwards we faced a by-election in Crewe and Nantwich, following the death of Labour stalwart Gwyneth Dunwoody. I threw myself into the campaign, visiting the constituency several times. Standing on a bench in the high street, giving an impromptu speech, I looked around at all the support – sometimes you don’t need tracker polls, you can just sense it – and I thought: we’re going to win this.
We did – the first by-election win from Labour since 1982. Ed Timpson became the first Tory in Crewe since the 1930s. The tide was turning.
But despite being on a roll, news of another by-election was much less welcome.
The shadow home secretary David Davis had decided, bizarrely, to force a contest in his Yorkshire constituency in protest at Labour’s increase of the maximum period of detention without trial from twenty-eight days to forty-two. This was a policy our party was vigorously opposing in Parliament, so the only conclusion I could reach was that the whole thing was a vain – and potentially damaging – ego trip.
William – yet more William wisdom – made me promise that I would not guarantee David his job back once the by-election was over. ‘It’s a team game, and he’s decided to leave the team,’ was his blunt assessment.
I called David and explained that if he insisted on the by-election, we would support him in the campaign. But I needed a full-time shadow home secretary, and could not guarantee him a return to the role. The truth was that I was delighted to have this unexpected opportunity to dispense with him, without anyone being able to say I was to blame.
I played it safe with his replacement as shadow home secretary, appointing Dominic Grieve, the shadow attorney general and a top Commons performer. While his views on combatting terror were similar to David’s, they were a little more nuanced, and I felt he would give more priority to concerns about national security.
In the end,