On that first night in Downing Street I also confirmed to Patrick McLoughlin that he would be the chief whip, and could work with the team at No. 10 to plan the cabinet and government formation that would happen the next day.
I wanted it to be straightforward. I had long believed that secretaries of state were shunted from job to job too often. Labour’s ministerial musical chairs had become increasingly absurd – they had a new home secretary every two or three years.
Most members of my shadow cabinet knew what jobs they would be doing in government because they had been shadowing them for much of the past five years. Andrew Lansley went to Health, Liam Fox to Defence, Eric Pickles to Local Government, Owen Paterson to Northern Ireland, and Andrew Mitchell to International Development.
But after the shoo-ins there were some surprises.
Theresa May stepped into the Cabinet Room and sat opposite me across the green table. She had huge experience in shadowing government departments, having covered the Education, Transport, Culture and Families portfolios over the years, as well as being the Conservatives’ first female chairman. Most recently I had appointed her to shadow Work and Pensions – and I am sure that’s what she expected to be offered.
‘I want you to be home secretary,’ I said to her. Theresa is not always the most expressive person, but she looked genuinely surprised and delighted. This may have been one of the least expected appointments – but it would turn out to be one of the best.
Another surprise was my choice for Work and Pensions. George – ironically, given their later battles – persuaded me that right-winger Iain Duncan Smith would provide balance in our cabinet.
Then there was the choice of party chairman. I wanted someone who was a loyalist and who would continue the work of delivering a modern, compassionate Conservative Party that reflected and represented all of Britain.
Sayeeda Warsi had joined the party as an adviser to Michael Howard after setting up a legal practice in her native West Yorkshire. She had been by my side through my leadership (halfway through I’d appointed her to the Lords), speaking with a no-nonsense conviction on issues domestic and foreign that I found refreshing and impressive. I told her I wanted her to be joint chairman with Andrew Feldman, who I hoped would continue his great work. She couldn’t believe it. The daughter of a textile worker from Pakistan had taken her place in a Conservative British cabinet, the first Muslim woman to do so. The partnership was a statement about how far we had come, in that we had a Muslim and a Jew jointly chairing our party.
The cabinet jobs lost to Lib Dems would upset some, but there were fortunate solutions for most of them. Ken Clarke, for example, had been shadowing Business, but Justice was a good alternative, given his legal background. Francis Maude and Oliver Letwin were happy – and extremely effective – in the Cabinet Office, which would become an engine room for both delivering savings in government spending and making the coalition work.
Of course there were some people who were disappointed. Chris Grayling and Theresa Villiers had been in the shadow cabinet. Neither made it into the cabinet at the start of the government, but both took their lesser appointments with good grace and worked to prove themselves in their new roles. Theresa later made an excellent Northern Ireland secretary, and Chris served as lord chancellor.
But there were those who were more openly upset that their shadow portfolios were taken by Liberal Democrats. There were some awkward conversations, and in one or two cases it created simmering resentments. I understood how frustrated some colleagues were. Some had shadowed a government department for years on end, asking questions in Parliament and building up their expertise, only to have their dreams of office snatched away by the arrival of an unexpected coalition.
Appointing 118 ministers across just two days, there are bound to be some slip-ups – and I made a couple of errors.
The number of full cabinet members is strictly limited – to twenty-three – and, as other PMs have done before me, I tried to make the numbers add up by having some ministers ‘attending cabinet’ but not paid the full salary. Foolishly, I included Tom Strathclyde, leader of the House of Lords, in this category.
Tom explained – rather forcefully – that it wasn’t about the money, it was that their lordships simply wouldn’t stand for their champion in cabinet having ‘lesser status’. He was right. The problem was that when he told me this I had already filled all the other posts.
Most secretaries of state have to be in the cabinet, so the only solution was to pick on the most agreeable Member of Parliament that I had already appointed and ask them to accept a downgrade. There was one outstanding candidate for this honour: my leader of the House of Commons, Sir George Young, a veteran of the Thatcher and Major governments and known as ‘Gentleman George’. He lived up to his name, and couldn’t have been nicer about the whole thing, pay cut included. All too often in politics the stubborn get rewarded and the good guys get shafted. On the other hand, George’s grace is among the reasons he has had one of the longest, most extraordinary ministerial careers of modern times.
We agreed that the Lib Dems would have five cabinet positions and a number of ministers that corresponded to their proportion of MPs. And that led to the question of what job Nick Clegg should do. I was keen that he consider holding a major office of state, such as the Home Office or Environment. But he wanted instead to be deputy prime minister.
I didn’t feel strongly about it. My priority was making the government stable at a time of such uncertainty, and I was perfectly happy with any solution that did that.
As for his choice of ministers, I insisted on formally appointing each of them as I did those from my own party. Again, I wanted to emphasise that this was one team under one prime minister.
Some of the Lib Dems on the left were sceptical but willing to make it work, like Vince Cable. Others towards the right of the party were enthusiastic, like David Laws. Another even said to me: ‘You don’t have to worry about me, I’m basically a Tory anyway.’
A few were quite emotional, even tearful, like Tom McNally. He had been elected a Labour MP in 1979, having previously worked in Jim Callaghan’s No. 10. Now a Liberal Democrat, he was the party’s leader in the Lords in a Conservative-led government. Although a left-leaning Liberal, he was determined to make it work, and did a great deal to ensure it did.
To begin with George and I were highly sceptical about whether the Lib Dems should get two big economic portfolios: chief secretary to the Treasury and business secretary. But in the end we agreed that it would be helpful to make sure there was a Lib Dem in the Treasury, and seen to be as responsible for the cuts programme as we were.
With a ministerial team in place and the mechanics whirring away, it was time to answer the most important question: why. Why was I in government, taking this approach, joining forces with a rival party? This was the most straightforward question of all to answer: we were engaged in a full-scale economic recovery job, to turn around the British economy and deal with what had become one of the largest budget deficits in the world, forecast to be over 11 per cent of our GDP.
And we were going to do it in a way that was true to the modern, compassionate Conservative message we had developed.
On our first full day, the stage was set to deliver the message. The chairs were laid out in rows on the Downing Street lawn, with an aisle down the middle. Cameras clicked, there was an expectant air, as Nick and I emerged from the Cabinet Room to stand before the gathered crowd.
The marriage metaphors used to describe the ‘Rose Garden’ press conference weren’t that far-fetched. It did look and feel a bit like a wedding. And, like a groom, I was nervous, aware of the immensity of the occasion and the need to rise to it. ‘We mustn’t come up short here,’ I said to Clegg in the Cabinet Room before we stepped outside. ‘It is one of those times when we need to give it 20 per cent more than feels appropriate.’ And that’s what we both did.
‘Today we are not just announcing a new government and new ministers,’ I said. ‘We are announcing