me on my win. But Arnie, I said, it wasn’t a win. In what was the most surreal moment of the whole election, there I was, in a leisure centre, in the middle of the night, explaining the first-past-the-post electoral system to the Terminator.
When I got back to London I had to go to the CCHQ party in Millbank. The atmosphere was jubilant, but I was cautious – I could see from what was on the boards of ‘results in’ and ‘results to come’ that we were unlikely to make it.
Over at the Park Plaza Hotel I attempted to grab an hour’s sleep. As I closed my eyes, I lay there pondering it all. It was looking like being the most successful Tory result in eighteen years. But I was surprised and confused about the Lib Dems. Cleggmania had well and truly faded. They had lost seats. Yet – another odd feature of our politics – he might now be kingmaker.
I steeled myself. This had been the hardest slog of my life. But what was to come might be even harder.
I am clear what it was that produced the great swing in our favour. We had changed the Conservative Party, making it appeal once more to Middle England and making people in urban, liberal Britain feel that they could vote for us.
I am also fairly sure why we didn’t win outright. There was too much ‘and’ in our campaign – the Big Society and austerity; cutting some public services and increasing others; continuing to modernise and hammering Brown and Labour.
As for the debates, they didn’t have a dramatic impact on the outcome. The Conservative share of the vote was close to where the polls were at the start of the formal campaign. The Lib Dems also ended the campaign close to where they began, though Nick Clegg gave his party a tremendous boost where otherwise it may well have been squeezed by the two bigger parties and lost even more seats.
The truth is the real benefit of the debates to the Conservatives was elsewhere, and is often overlooked. By sucking the life out of the campaign, the debates meant Labour was never able to get its powerful anti-Tory cuts campaign off the ground.
Looking back, my view is simple: in those desperate economic times, even after the changes we’d made, the Conservative Party hadn’t quite sealed the deal with the electorate. People were still uncertain about the Conservatives.
This was even more true at a moment when budget cuts were needed. As I’ve said, we’d intended to respond to voters’ concerns by matching Labour’s spending in the first two years, and by promising to share the proceeds of growth between more spending and tax cuts. This formula was easy to understand, and allowed us to reduce the relative size of the state while still increasing the amount spent on essential services.
Then came the financial crash, and these reassurances weren’t possible any more. So people were uncertain. And we had been reflecting their uncertainty rather than allaying it.
Remember also that it was Everest we were trying to climb. We were trying to win a historic number of seats, while the electoral geography massively favoured Labour.
The data shows why. In 2005, a 35 per cent share of the vote had given Labour a majority. With our 36 per cent share in 2010 – and two million more votes than Labour – we didn’t clinch it.
So how did we measure against those great landslides of political history in the end?
The swing from government to opposition was less than Attlee had managed in 1945 or Blair in 1997, but it was on a par with Margaret Thatcher in 1979. And we had gained more seats – ninety-seven – for the Conservatives than at any election since 1931.
Yet it was what would happen next, the relationships I would forge and the decisions I would take, that was to make more significant political history.
12
‘David, congratulations!’ came the voice down the phone. It was President Barack Obama, and this was my first evening as prime minister after five tumultuous days of negotiations in May 2010. ‘Enjoy every moment,’ he said, ‘because it’s all downhill from here.’
I would often tell the story – and would use the same line when ringing other presidents and prime ministers after their election victories. But it wasn’t entirely true. The early days and weeks in government went extremely well, in a way that confounded many people’s expectations. Some thought a coalition would be unstable and prone to early collapse. In fact, at a time of great difficulty, when markets were fragile and protests were breaking out across Western capitals, the administration that I put together with Nick Clegg was to prove one of the most stable governments in Europe.
I believe the coalition succeeded in those first few weeks and months in part because our party had spent five years in opposition preparing for power. I had thought a lot about how to do the job of prime minister. I knew that the ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘where’ and ‘why’ questions would hit me the moment I walked through that big black door. And I understood that the mechanics mattered. Because of all that preparation, as well as feeling daunted, honoured and excited by the prospect of being PM, I felt ready.
In opposition we had developed a good system of short and focused daily meetings to bring the top team together and despatch the business of the day, chaired by George in my absence. The civil servants were doubtful that the routine would last, but six years later we were still assembling – PM and chancellor – for the daily ‘8.30’ and ‘4 o’clock’, as we called them.
I’ve always believed that ministers who automatically purge their predecessors’ staff are cutting off their noses to spite their faces. So I decided to keep the private secretaries I had inherited from Brown, including the smart and sardonic James Bowler as my principal private secretary, as well as cabinet secretary Gus O’Donnell and No. 10 permanent secretary Jeremy Heywood – both former colleagues from my Lamont days. Their expertise would be invaluable. ‘Your job is not to tell me when I get it right, but to tell me when I get it wrong,’ I told them.
The integration between my staff and George’s was to continue in government. We were one team, and I believe that became one of the secrets to our success, particularly as our driving mission was economic rescue.
The ‘one team’ spirit also applied to the No. 10 operation, where I wanted the political appointees and the civil servants to work together. And I wanted that open, trusting, collegiate atmosphere to flow through the coalition too. That meant, rather controversially, that our spads would work side by side, sharing offices. Sometimes people would walk into a room and find it difficult to tell who was the Tory, who was the Lib Dem and who was the civil servant.
We didn’t get it all right. The Conservative Party in opposition had tended to criticise the growth of No. 10 as making the PM’s office too ‘presidential’, and, in line with that thinking, I scrapped the PM’s ‘delivery unit’. This was a mistake – and we reversed it over time, building a similar team focused on the implementation of government policy.
Another early error was running a joint Conservative–Lib Dem Policy Unit. It soon became clear that this would be very difficult when everyone involved had loyalty to different leaders and their eye on the next party conference or general election, at which point we would be competing, not collaborating. The Policy Unit was split in April 2013.
The next question was where would I base myself in Downing Street. Margaret Thatcher had what was called her study on the first floor, by the stairs that led to her No. 10 flat. Tony Blair had his ‘den’ at the bottom of the main staircase, whose yellow walls are tiled with pictures of his – our – predecessors. Gordon Brown opted for something different – something that resembled a trading floor or newsroom.
In the end I chose the room that had been Blair’s. It was close to everyone else on the ground floor – the private secretaries, the duty clerks who staff the place night and day, the ‘garden rooms’ teams who support the PM wherever he