Worryingly for Cameron’s team, the Tories’ poll ratings had started to dip by Christmas, despite Osborne’s economic strategy receiving continuing support in large parts of the press. Cameron’s camp was divided. On one side stood Osborne and Coulson, and on the other, Hilton. Letwin, along with Llewellyn and Fall, was trying desperately to bridge both camps. It was a hopeless position.
January 2010 started badly. Cameron wanted to set the tone for the New Year with his appearance on BBC’s The Andrew Marr Show on Sunday 10 January. Hilton wanted Cameron to apologise for the uninspiring start to the campaign made by all the parties, with poster launches, attack dossiers and an obsessive focus on the cuts and say, ‘This is the electorate’s campaign. Tell us what you want to talk about and we will do so.’ Coulson exploded when he heard, and heated discussions followed. A torn Cameron did not follow Hilton’s advice. Embarrassingly, Cameron then became embroiled in a media furore over whether photographs of him on billboards, put up across the country, had been digitally enhanced.28 At the end of the month, at the World Economic Forum at Davos, he tried pulling back from an overly harsh economic message by saying that any first-year cuts in spending would not be particularly ‘extensive’. A few days later, on the BBC Politics Show, he said that cuts would definitely not be ‘swingeing’; rather, the government would simply want to take a nibble out of the deficit to make ‘a start’.29 Private polling had been showing the Conservatives that their advocacy of deep cuts early on was politically highly risky.30 The impression of dissonance appeared all the greater when a defiant Osborne said on The Andrew Marr Show that ‘early action’ was required to avoid a ‘Greek-style budget crisis’.31 Cameron was uncomfortable and worried. Osborne punched back strongly in February in the annual Mais lecture, an important fixture among economic policymakers. Entitled ‘A New Economic Framework’, drafted by Harrison, it laid out more clearly than ever the entire Conservative vision of a tight fiscal policy on tax and spending, an active monetary policy to assist borrowing and investment, supply-side reform to bolster economic activity, and a rebalancing of the economy from consumption towards exports. Osborne argued ‘we have to deal with our debts to get our economy back on its feet’.32
Dissonance in Cameron’s camp continued all the way up to the general election. The Conservative manifesto title, Invitation to Join the Government of Britain, echoed Hilton’s mass participation idealism, and contained many ‘Big Society’ modernising ideas. But it equally spoke of the need to ‘deal with Labour’s debt crisis’ and said that savings of £12 billion could be made without impacting front-line services. The dual message was confusing, epitomised by an election poster that said they would ‘cut the deficit but not the NHS’.33
Cameron wasn’t sure which way to turn. The campaign was a mess, with Osborne’s and Coulson’s voices being heard on some days, and Hilton’s on others. Cameron’s heart inclined him towards Hilton, whose passion and message chimed deeply with his own, but his head drew him towards Coulson and Osborne, because he knew instinctively that the public finances required stern measures. The memory of Margaret Thatcher’s fiscal rectitude weighed heavily with Cameron and Osborne, as it did with the right-of-centre press whose support they wanted to maintain. Cameron couldn’t find his mojo or any passion during the election campaign, epitomised by his lacklustre performance in the TV debates against Brown and Clegg. He knew he had squandered the first debate, the only one he felt that really mattered. He felt terrible, that he’d let everybody down. He only found his stride again when he woke up on 7 May, the day after the general election, with one idea in his mind: a ‘big, open and comprehensive offer’ to the Lib Dems.
THREE
6–12 May 2010
Cameron may not have won the election on Thursday 6 May. But he has not lost either. Yet. A ‘big, open and comprehensive offer’ to the Lib Dems is the thought in his mind when he awakes on the Friday morning, in his suite at the Park Plaza Westminster Bridge Hotel, where he has been camping out through some of the campaign. The words are Steve Hilton’s but the seminal decision to deploy them is Cameron’s. He may have had only two or three hours’ sleep after going to bed at 6.30 a.m., but he awakes refreshed with the clear determination that he will make the Liberal Democrats an irresistible offer to form a coalition. His team arrive at 10 a.m. When he tells them, they are not surprised: ‘I’d have been flabbergasted if he’d come up with any other way forward,’ says a close aide. ‘My definite instinct was that it was the right thing to do given the circumstances,’ says Cameron.1 When Liz Sugg expresses surprise at why he intends to embrace a party they have been fighting so hard for weeks, he replies, ‘It is the right thing for the country.’2 Nick Clegg himself offers a less rose-tinted interpretation: ‘I don’t want to sound ungenerous, but it was the only way they were going to get into power.’3
Cameron’s team meet on election day at Hilton’s country house in Oxfordshire. They finalise details for the ‘If we win’ file, running over ministerial appointments one last time and reconfirming the grid of action for the vital first few weeks. They hold a sweepstake on how many seats they will take. ‘We’re going to win,’ Andrew Feldman, one of Cameron’s closest friends from Oxford and, in early 2010, chief executive of Conservative campaign headquarters, says emphatically. ‘We’re not going to win,’ Osborne replies curtly. Two weeks before, Osborne had reached the conclusion that the party was unlikely to win outright and the only way to power would be via a coalition government which it would dominate. Without it, any hopes of seeing Plan A and their domestic agenda enacted will be dead in the water. Too risky to be seen to have his own fingerprints anywhere near ‘defeatist’ talk of coalitions, Cameron continues to rail against the iniquities of any form of coalition after the election. It is Osborne therefore who asks Oliver Letwin, the supreme fixer, to analyse exactly what a deal with the Liberal Democrats might look like. The brain of the team locks himself away for a week at Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) exploring which policies the Conservatives might jettison, and what they might demand from the Lib Dems. ‘For weeks before I had been analysing every single statement that the Lib Dems had been putting out, so I was up to speed when I began this exercise. I knew their weaknesses and our strengths intimately.’4 The weekend before the general election, 1 and 2 May, Letwin meets William Hague, Llewellyn and Osborne at the latter’s London house to brief them on his conclusions.5 ‘We then secreted away the fruits of his detailed analysis, while we went flat out in the final last few days to do everything humanly possible to get us over the line.’
Osborne leaves Hilton’s home in the afternoon of polling day to travel up to his Tatton constituency in Cheshire. Cameron, Andy Coulson and Llewellyn, joined by Kate Fall and Gabby Bertin, who had been a press aide since the leadership campaign, go for dinner at Cameron’s home in Dean, several miles away.6 They are under no illusions. As they gather around the television screen, the results are greeted with a deadpan silence. The exit poll at 10 p.m. confirms what was expected: a hung parliament with the Conservatives as the largest party. There will be no election miracle. The Conservatives emerge after the final count with 307 to Labour’s 258 and fifty-seven for the Lib Dems out of 650 parliamentary seats. The Conservatives may be the largest party, and gain the largest number of seats (net ninety-seven) in a general election since 1931, but it is little consolation.