Cameron’s Bloody Sunday response remains his defining moment concerning Northern Ireland. It sees him at his best, instinctive, courageous, fired with moral zeal. Here, his pugnacity does not land him in trouble, as it would later do periodically. The tone of the speech and the words, unusually for a prime minister, are almost entirely his own. ‘It wasn’t my first opportunity to speak on Northern Ireland. It was my first opportunity to be prime minister,’ he said shortly afterwards. He might have favoured similar openness on Iraq, but he deemed it inappropriate to intervene while the long-awaited Chilcot Inquiry was still deliberating. But he could press ahead on Britain’s other twenty-first-century war: Afghanistan.
SIX
Chequers Summit on Afghanistan
June 2010
Tuesday 15 May, one week in, sees Cameron’s first visit to Chequers as prime minister. His convoy slows down as it approaches the house so he can savour the full impact of the sixteenth-century mansion in Buckinghamshire, given to the prime minister in 1921 as the official country residence. Staff and the trustees present themselves formally to their new master. He is typically at ease with them. He had visited once when much younger; it is bigger than he remembered. Hamid Karzai, Afghan president since 2004, is his guest. Cameron wants to show him that he means business in Afghanistan, and is focusing his attention on it. Hence the honour, not missed on Karzai, of being his first overseas visitor to Chequers. Invited too that day are Britain’s most senior military figures, including Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS) Jock Stirrup, Vice Chief of the Defence Staff Nicholas Houghton, Chief of the General Staff (CGS) David Richards, Commander-in-Chief of Land Forces Peter Wall and First Sea Lord Mark Stanhope. Here is the cream of the British armed forces. Differences though there are between them, they are united today wanting to make a positive impression on the new prime minister, not least with the Spending Review in the offing. On the horizon too is the imminent appointment of Stirrup’s successor as CDS, with Houghton and Richards the frontrunners.
Cameron has no illusions about his own lack of experience in military and defence matters. In Opposition, he announced at the 2009 party conference that he would be taking advice from Richard Dannatt, Richards’ forceful predecessor as CGS, who had spoken out strongly in favour of more support for the British war mission in Afghanistan. The idea proved unpopular, and Cameron tried to drop it quietly. Similarly he brought into his circle Pauline Neville-Jones, a retired diplomat and past chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), whom he appointed shadow Security Minister in July 2007. She was important in giving him gravitas in this area until the authority of the PM’s office obviated the need. Cameron is now bolstered by the constant presence of Ed Llewellyn, who has worked closely with Paddy Ashdown in Bosnia and with Chris Patten when governor of Hong Kong. Cameron does not take decisions in this realm without aligning first with Llewellyn.
Cameron has never served in the armed forces, nor spent any time shadowing foreign or defence departments. The responsibility on his shoulders as prime minister to protect British lives, servicemen and women in the field and civilians on the streets of Britain weighs heavily. He is an avid imbiber of military and diplomatic history, and a serious patriot. He would have loved to have been Foreign Secretary, and he revels in broad strategic discussions about Britain’s place in the world. He enjoys talking to soldiers in the field and to his Foreign Office staff, chatting to them late into the evening after his domestic officials have gone home.
But Cameron is no romantic. Friends from Eton, Oxford and elsewhere are now in middle-ranking positions in the services. He listens carefully to what they have to tell him about the top brass. He watched with growing alarm as he saw army chiefs run circles around Brown at Number 10, colluding, as some saw it, with the Sun to whip up support for the boys at the front to gain financial leverage for more equipment and more men. His most pressing concern is the scale of the black hole in the MoD’s budget, which runs to tens of billions. Cameron is clear that civilians are going to regain control of British defence policy and its finances and that he, not the army chiefs, will decide what will happen over the biggest military decision he is likely to take as prime minister, the future of the British commitment to Afghanistan. So he is on his guard as the top brass arrive kitted out in their pristine uniforms at Chequers. They chance their luck with a couple of requests which he firmly declines with a respectful smile. An aide records that Cameron is ‘charmingly steely and quite effectively sees them off’. He knows that Afghanistan has the potential to tear his premiership apart, as it almost did Brown’s. He is painfully aware of a complete lack of consensus in Britain, and abroad, on the best way forward. Britain’s allies in Afghanistan are going in different directions. While the US commits to a surge in troops from 30,000 in mid-2009 to 90,000 in 2011, France announces in January 2010 it will send no more forces to Afghanistan, and the following month the government in the Netherlands collapses after trying to extend the mission of the Dutch forces. Simon McDonald, the senior foreign policy adviser in the Cabinet Office under Gordon Brown, writes a minute soon after the election to say that the war in Afghanistan is not being won and will never be won. Britain needs to get out.
Cameron suspects that the service chiefs are trapped into conventional ways of thinking on Afghanistan, so he decides to return to Chequers for a ‘summit’ on Tuesday 1 June where he will deliberately confront his senior military figures with some left-field thinkers to shake up their thinking. The seminar will be in two halves. The ‘wild men’, as he dubs them, will be present at the first session in the library upstairs from 9 a.m. in the morning to act as the grit in the oyster. A lunchtime session will then be held in the dining room after the outsiders have left.
Few areas have exercised his mind when Opposition leader more than Afghanistan, and he has spent many hours pondering the problem and talking to those with unorthodox outlooks. Prime among them is Sherard Cowper-Coles, the Foreign Secretary’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan who had become highly sceptical of the prospects of success of continued military engagement. Cameron talks to him on his visits to Afghanistan, where the seasoned diplomat is brutally clear that the war cannot be won.1 Rory Stewart, the intellectually brilliant former diplomat, author and now Tory MP, who had walked across Afghanistan and served as a senior official in Iraq, is another invited, as is James Fergusson, an Old Etonian and Oxford friend of Cameron’s and author of three books on Afghanistan, the third of which advocated talking to the Taliban.
The meeting begins. ‘It is pointless to put in more troops,’ Fergusson says, feeling self-conscious at finding himself placed between the head of MI6 and the chair of the JIC. ‘We have to speak to the Taliban,’ he says. ‘Oh it’s very difficult to talk to the Taliban,’ interjects Foreign Secretary William Hague. Fergusson believes that Mullah Zaeef will be an excellent intermediary: he has spent five years as a prisoner in Guantanamo, but is not bitter. Fergusson describes him as a ‘nice man’. ‘This is a unique opportunity,’ he says, ‘as the Taliban respect the British and really quite like us, as opposed to the Americans, who they regard, above all due to Guantanamo, as beyond the pale.’2 Fergusson is listened to by the great and good in respectful silence. ‘You’re not exactly on the same page as most of us,’ confides Pauline Neville-Jones to him at the coffee break.3
Graeme Lamb, who has been commander of British Special Forces and has aggressively pursued al-Qaeda operatives in Iraq, presents a sharply different view. Lamb is a no-nonsense kind of soldier who talks and looks like a battle-hardened warrior. He exudes charisma and authority. ‘Prime Minister, you have nothing to worry about with the Taliban in Kunar Province because we’ve killed them all,’ he starts. Fergusson, at the other end of the table, disagrees because he’s recently been talking to Taliban who are still ubiquitous in Kunar Province. Cameron and Clegg,