‘closing down’ or ‘country’ (there’s always the danger of blocking out the ‘o’ with your head …).
But what was the message we should take to the country? We didn’t have just one answer – we had several. One focused on fixing our broken economy. Another on mending our broken society. A third was to re-emphasise how much the Conservative Party had changed. And on which of those answers should be given priority, the team was split.
George, de facto campaign chief, and I had been making a series of speeches on the dangers of debt and the need for a new economic policy. The theme was clear: the principal task of our government would be an economic rescue mission.
Combining this with our strong attack on Labour was a single, clear message: only by removing a failing Labour government could we restore Britain’s economic fortunes. This was what Andy, running the all-important communications operation, wanted front and centre.
But it was all a bit black-skies. I had been working since 2005 with the famously blue-skies Steve on a sunnier, more optimistic focus – on how we could deliver stronger public services and a fairer, more equal society. We called the organising idea ‘the Big Society’.
I loved it. Conservatism for me is as much about delivering a good society as a strong economy. And building that good society is the responsibility of everyone – government, businesses, communities and individuals – rather than the state alone.
This philosophy – Social Responsibility rather than Labour’s approach of State Control – was summed up by Samantha when we were mulling over these concepts one evening in the garden in Dean. ‘What you’re saying is there is such a thing as society,’ she said, referencing Thatcher’s famous (but often misinterpreted) quote. ‘It’s just not the same thing as the state.’ That summed up the theory perfectly. And in practice it fell into three broad categories.
First: reforming public services. We were absolutely not, whatever our critics alleged, going to dismantle taxpayer-funded public services. But to improve those services we wanted to empower the people who delivered them – trusting teachers to run schools, doctors to run GP surgeries, new elected police and crime commissioners to run police forces, and so on. Bureaucracy and centralised control would be out, local, professional delivery would be in.
This would only deliver better results if at the same time we empowered the people who used those public services, and gave patients, passengers and parents real and meaningful choices, including the ability to take their custom elsewhere. Otherwise we would simply be swapping one monopoly for another.
Just as the Thatcher governments transformed failing state industries into successful private-sector industries, we wanted to bring the same reforming vigour to enable not just the private sector but also charities, social enterprises, individuals, and even cooperatives, or mutuals, to deliver public services. That went right down to local people being able to take over community assets like post offices and pubs.
The second element was about finding new ways to increase opportunity, tackle inequality and reduce poverty.
Since the 1960s, and particularly after 1997, the size of the state had ballooned, spending had surged, more and more power had been centralised, yet the gap between the richest and the poorest had actually increased.
In a number of important ways, the Big State was sapping social responsibility, and as a result exacerbating the very problems it set out to solve. The development of the welfare system was the classic example. Some of the interventions to tackle poverty had had the opposite effect. There were perverse incentives that deterred people from finding work or from bringing children up with two parents.
It took away people’s agency. Drug-addiction programmes, for instance, focused on replacing one addictive substance – heroin – with another – methadone – rather than encouraging addicts to go clean.
We wanted to unleash the power of what we called ‘social entrepreneurs’, usually charities and social enterprises, to tackle some of our deepest problems, from drug addiction to worklessness, from poor housing to run-down communities.
I was inspired by people like Debbie Stedman-Scott. Debbie had come from a tough background, and went to work for the Salvation Army across Britain before setting up an amazing employment charity, Tomorrow’s People, which helped people in the most deprived communities to find and keep a job. I visited it several times.
I was also inspired by Nat Wei, who helped create the Future Leaders programme, which sought the best teachers to lead inner-city schools.
And there was also Helen Newlove, who had campaigned tirelessly for the victims of crime since the murder of her husband Garry in 2007. They were amazing people. The Big Society was about empowering them.
The third element was about a step change in voluntary activity and philanthropy.
We proposed that the state should act as a catalyst, boosting philanthropy and volunteering and, for example, encouraging successful social enterprises to replicate their work across the country. That is where programmes like National Citizen Service (NCS) and training a network of community organisers came in.
In the past, we claimed over and over that Labour was the big-state party and we were the free-enterprise party. But we didn’t have enough to say about how free enterprise, or indeed any of our other values – responsibility, aspiration and opportunity – could deliver the non-economic things people needed. About how we could provide better schools. Or help people off drugs. Or transform their neighbourhoods. About how Conservative means could achieve progressive ends. The radical reforms that came under this Big Society umbrella had the potential to change all that.
Like all radical proposals, it came in for criticism.
Andy feared that the combined austerity/Big Society message sounded as if we were saying to people both ‘Let us cut your public services’ and ‘Get off your arses to deliver those services yourself’ – a miser’s mixture of ‘Ask what you can do for your country’ and ‘On yer bike.’
Other critics said I was drawing too much on my rural, upper-middle-class upbringing by advocating the Big Society. Well-off people have the time, money and inclination to dedicate themselves to local causes. Those on minimum wage who are juggling two jobs and several children do not. Yet, as I had seen, some of the most deprived neighbourhoods had remarkable social entrepreneurs and community spirit, from volunteers cleaning parks in Balsall Heath in Birmingham to mothers combatting gang culture in Moss Side in Manchester.
I thought the Big Society became more, not less, necessary in a debt-ridden world. Every government in the developed world was having to learn to do more for less – and fast. We could lead the way, and by reducing the long-term cost of social failure, we could drive down the deficit in the process.
Our failure to choose between this theme and the others could be seen in our advertising, specifically our posters. ‘We can’t go on like this,’ the billboards across a thousand different marginal seats said, next to a giant headshot of me, wearing an open collar and a serious expression. ‘I’ll cut the deficit, not the NHS.’ The message didn’t land well, because it was a sort of two-in-one. Even worse, my photo had been altered so much that I ended up looking like a waxwork.
It provided an ideal canvas for idle hands. On one Herefordshire hoarding I was spray-painted with an Elvis-style quiff, and ‘We can’t go on like this’ was followed by ‘with suspicious minds’. A website was set up for people to produce their own spoof versions. Thank God my children weren’t very old at the time. They love teasing me, and they’d have made one for every day of the week.
Yet for all the derision, it was, unlike most election posters, true. In government, we did cut the deficit. We didn’t cut the NHS.
The disagreements between the team – particularly between Steve and Andy – were never fully solved. By this point the fire-and-ice pair were deliberately assigned a shared office in the middle of the open-plan Conservative HQ, dubbed ‘the