size – ‘our Brazil’, I called it. But above all, it is one of the world’s most prosperous Muslim countries, proof that Muslim democracies and Muslim market economies can work.
For these reasons I believed that, in the long term, Turkey ought to be in the European Union. As I had said in my G8 speech – which apparently drove Sarkozy almost mad – I wanted to ‘pave the road from Ankara to Brussels’. I wasn’t saying that millions of Turks should automatically be allowed free movement across Europe (a stick I was to be thoroughly beaten with later). I was saying that in a flexible, multi-speed Europe, where membership meant different things for different countries – the Europe we wanted and would argue for – Turkey should be inside the wider tent. The EU should not be reserved for Western Christendom alone. (Incidentally, Boris Johnson thought this too.)
I spent a lot of time with prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He was canny and easy to get along with, and I was as frank as I could be. I told him I thought the Turks were in danger of going in the wrong direction. That there was a growth of Islamist sentiment which his party seemed to promote and appease, rather than challenge. If we genuinely wanted to move Turkey closer to Europe, he needed to help his friends by demonstrating the extent of reform and concern for democratic and human rights. And while Turkey had been one of the few Muslim countries to have a good dialogue with Israel, it was now leading the verbal onslaught against it.
Enhancing the British–Turkish relationship was an example of an agenda that ran into the ground. The trade issues progressed well, but the fact was that the mood in Europe was turning against any form of Turkish membership – and Erdoğan’s real ambitions were heading in a different direction.
From Ankara I flew to India to lead my first-ever trade delegation. I loaded up a plane with CEOs, cabinet ministers, top officials, heads of museums and galleries, even Olympians Kelly Holmes and Steve Redgrave.
This was commercial diplomacy in practice – and it was an agenda that yielded enormous results. We more than doubled exports to China and South Korea, and became the foreign investment capital of Europe, something that would be a key driver of the explosion in private sector jobs in the years that followed.
When it came to India, I argued that we needed a modern partnership – not one tinged with colonial guilt, but alive to the possibilities of the world’s oldest democracy and the world’s largest democracy. Many of Britain’s most successful business leaders and cultural figures are from the Indian diaspora community and would be our greatest weapons in that endeavour. I was proud to have many of them, like Priti Patel, Shailesh Vara, Alok Shama and Paul Uppal, on the Conservative benches in the House of Commons.
I got on well with prime minister Manmohan Singh. He was a saintly man, but he was robust on the threats India faced. On a later visit he told me that another terrorist attack like that in Mumbai in July 2011, and India would have to take military action against Pakistan.
Then came my curveball: Italy.
‘What’s the dress code for dinner?’ I asked one of my team before we set off for Rome. ‘A thong,’ he replied.
What a dinner it was. Everything was tricolour – mozzarella, avocado and tomato for the first course, then white, green and red pasta to follow. And so it went on. As did Berlusconi. Outrageous joke after outrageous joke – none of them funny.
Italian politics was a riddle to me. What did they see in a billionaire playboy with apparently no filter on what he said – or did? He once interrupted a long night at an EU Council by pushing the button on his microphone and announcing to the other twenty-six leaders that if the meetings were going to run on like this, ‘you should all do the same as me – and take a mistress in Brussels’.
On another occasion he walked into the room where we held the interminable meetings to find me chatting with the prime minister of one of the smaller countries whom he clearly didn’t know. When I introduced them he said, ‘You must come to Rome and meet my wife – you look just like her lover.’ That one, I confess, did make me laugh.
Over time I came to realise that, far from putting people off, Berlusconi’s unscripted brashness was part of the attraction. Italy had suffered so much from corruption in its political system that his eccentricities were a permanent reminder that he was different.
For all his loucheness, Berlusconi shared some values with me: he was pro-free market, pro-enterprise and anti-regulation. We tried to unblock a lot of foreign investments, including a BP gas terminal in Italy that had been in limbo for twenty years.
Italy was the fourth-largest European economy, a net contributor to the EU budget and a major player when it came to security. Yet it was often left out of discussions between the ‘big three’ – Germany, France and the UK. I thought we could rectify that, making Italy a big ally on NATO and on building a more flexible Europe.
There were four Italian PMs while I was in office, and I was much closer to Enrico Letta and Matteo Renzi, who followed Berlusconi and Mario Monti. But I have to accept that, while Italy was a strong NATO ally and helpful during the Libya intervention, my attempt to put rocket boosters under the Anglo–Italian relationship was an example of an agenda that didn’t get very far.
Another agenda I hoped would produce real and lasting results was China.
The country had gone from the world’s eleventh-biggest economy to the second-biggest in just twenty-one years. Eight hundred million people had been lifted out of poverty – all because this communist country had embraced the capitalist principle of liberal economics.
Not that ours was a likely alliance. For them, we were still their oppressors from the nineteenth-century Opium Wars, and awkward neighbours during the years when Hong Kong was a British territory. For us, no matter how liberal China’s economics, it was still a one-party, authoritarian, communist state, with a woeful record on human rights and a tendency to rip off intellectual property, keep its markets closed where we opened ours, censor the internet and spy on just about everyone.
Yet the advantages of a deeper connection were undeniable. Thousands of Chinese students and tourists flocked to Britain each year. Chinese people loved our history and culture. With a burgeoning Chinese middle class, there was a massive potential market there, and although Labour had made some inroads, it remained largely untapped.
So, China: opportunity or risk? The coalition was split. Nick had been campaigning on the human-rights issues for years. And William was sceptical about the Communist Party’s intentions. He wrote me a letter during our first month in office with a stark warning about China ‘free-riding on wider global public goods’ – obstructing international action if it conflicted with its own domestic imperatives.
My stance – and George’s – was more pragmatic. It wasn’t, of course, that I didn’t care about human rights, or that I trusted a party which appointed one ‘paramount leader’ every five years. It was just that I thought there was a longer game to play, and a better way of getting what we wanted.
Yes, our ambition was largely economic, but an essential outcome of that economic partnership would be the greater political leverage it would give us. In other words, the trust that we could build from doing business together could lead to trust across a whole range of areas.
Naturally, we would always be vigilant when it came to China. We were hard-headed about the threat it posed, instructing our security services to map and counter the Chinese threat. Only by understanding and guarding against that could we trade with the country.
This would be the best, the safest, way to bring China into the rules-based international system – through rules on trade, but also rules on climate change, terrorism and human rights. The more it was part of the UN, the WTO, the G20, the more cooperative our relationship would be. We could influence its views on everything from climate change to Burma to North Korea. Which was vital – China would be a linchpin in all these matters.
On my first visit to China as prime minister in November 2010, with four cabinet ministers and forty-three business leaders, I knew I’d have to