At 12.30 p.m. on Wednesday 20 October, Osborne rises for the Spending Review, billed as ‘the biggest UK spending cuts for decades’.17 ‘Today is the day when Britain steps back from the brink, when we confront the bills from a decade of debt … it is a hard road, but it leads to a better future,’ says Osborne in his opening remarks.18 The key elements are the likely 490,000 public sector job cuts, the average cuts of 19% in departmental budgets over four years, and the intention to eliminate the structural deficit by 2015. A further £7 billion of savings are to come from the welfare budget in addition to £11 billion announced at the Budget, the retirement age is to rise from sixty-five to sixty-six by 2020, police funding is to be cut by 4% a year and council spending by 7.1% every year for four years.19 Osborne’s hand is seen in most of these decisions, including details such as his determination that the science budget is spared and the Francis Crick Institute, a research centre planned to be opened in 2015, should not be axed. Equally, he gives his assent for the Crossrail project in London, which was nearly cancelled.
Alan Johnson, Labour’s shadow chancellor, describes the Tories as ‘deficit deceivers’ and defends Labour’s record of bequeathing a debt interest level 15% lower than that inherited in 1997 despite a world recession.20 But while Osborne and his team are confident that the cuts are deep enough to reassure the bond markets, they are less certain about the social impact of their measures. To Lena Pietsch, Clegg’s press secretary, the Spending Review is the moment when the five-month honeymoon for the coalition government comes to an end: ‘To begin with, there was huge excitement and relief that the long election campaign was over. All of a sudden, the narrative became about cuts, anger, demonstrations. The atmosphere became very different by the autumn.’21 She is thinking in particular of the large and angry student demonstrations against the rise in university tuition fees on 10, 24 and 30 November. These are followed by a further protest when the reform passes through the House of Lords on 9 December.22 Although the Lib Dems feel the full brunt of the ire over tuition fees, the coalition’s long honeymoon is not yet at an end. Were the cuts too great? Will the apprehensions of Treasury officials come true? Or did Osborne miss the opportunity to cut still more deeply when he had the political capital and support to do so? The new government has passed its initial tests; the heat will come later.
FIVE
15 June 2010
Tuesday 15 June, just five weeks into the premiership, sees Cameron’s first major test of his statesmanship, and of his oratory. It comes on unfamiliar territory. The premierships of his three predecessors, John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, had been deeply embroiled in the affairs of Northern Ireland. While welcoming the progress that had been made, and taking a great interest in Northern Irish affairs, Cameron is keen to avoid the Province dominating his premiership, preferring to let his Secretary of State take the lead. He is anxious to see politics in Northern Ireland move on, beyond the Blair/Brown era when prime ministers had ‘to spend hours in crisis talks with Northern Ireland politicians, making endless visits, or staying up all night in country house retreats hammering out the latest deals’.1 Besides, relations with Northern Ireland had been changing. From 1972 to 2007, the Northern Ireland Secretary effectively acted as the prime minister of Northern Ireland. But in 2007, thanks to the work principally of Blair, devolution to Stormont was restored. The Northern Ireland Office (NIO) retained oversight of national security, policing and justice. The latter two areas were ceded in April 2010, in the dying days of Brown’s premiership. A devolved assembly in Belfast, with local ministers running affairs, meant Cameron’s wish was likely to come true – assuming the Stormont institutions remained stable and there were no further terrorist outrages. He had mentioned Northern Ireland in just one of his five annual party conference speeches as Opposition leader, in 2008, and then only in passing.
‘When it comes to the union with Northern Ireland, I am very much a traditional Conservative,’ he remarked during those years. He has little interest, still less patience, in the antics of those who emphasise sectarian divisions. What he wants ideally is for Northern Ireland politics to be reintegrated into mainland Britain, believing that a continuation of their own party system in Northern Ireland has disenfranchised voters in the province from full participation in British political life. In an effort to normalise politics in the province, Cameron agreed an electoral pact between the Conservatives and the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) ahead of the 2010 general election. The pact failed to deliver any seats, not least because of the Democratic Unionist Party’s (DUP) success in replacing the UUP as the major unionist force in Northern Ireland.
One major piece of unfinished business remains in Northern Ireland. In 1998, Tony Blair had announced an inquiry into the still controversial events of Bloody Sunday which had occurred on 30 January 1972, when twenty-six protestors and bystanders were shot by British Army soldiers, half of them fatally. The inquiry was under the chairmanship of Lord Saville: a tribunal at the time of the shooting had been discredited as a whitewash. Publication was delayed until after the 2010 general election. Officials in the NIO are now concerned that the new government will bin the report because Labour set up Saville, and Conservatives have been critical of its length and cost. ‘What are you going to do with Saville?’ officials ask nervously of Owen Paterson on his first day as Secretary of State. ‘We will publish it in good order, as rapidly as we possibly can,’ Paterson replies.2 Cameron had been impressed with how Paterson, who was on the right of the party, forged good relationships on all sides in the Province as shadow Secretary. Nevertheless, the republican community in Northern Ireland have a wealth of negative impressions about the Conservatives, and dread their return to power. They believe it will be hard for a Conservative government to admit that the republican community had been wronged.
Cameron knows how much hangs on his response. He discusses Saville’s inquiry with his foreign affairs private secretary Tom Fletcher on 20 May on his first trip to Northern Ireland to see the party leaders. The visit is uncontroversial. ‘Belfast pretty solid,’ records Fletcher in his diary.3 A week later, Cameron hosts a garden party in Downing Street to thank CCHQ staff who had helped on the general election. The imminent Saville Report is much in the air. Cameron walks over to Jonathan Caine, a trusted special adviser whom he and Llewellyn had embedded in the NIO. ‘I think I’ll have to make an apology, don’t you?’ Cameron confides to Caine. ‘I think you will. What is important is how you frame that apology,’ the adviser replies.4 There is another potential problem. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) are wary that the Defence Secretary, Liam Fox, no friend or ally of Cameron’s, might seek to appease the right wing of the party. Fletcher requests guidance from the MoD on their likely response to Saville. They indicate that they will not brook anything that sounds like an apology. Fox is emphatic on this point at a meeting with officials two weeks before publication. Number 10 signals back to the MoD that the prime minister will be standing his ground.
Three weeks pass, during much of which Cameron