David and Samantha are bundled into a car to Buckingham Palace for the Queen to invite him to become prime minister, Britain’s youngest for nearly 200 years. Their hands touch in the back of the car. Their lives are about to change forever, but the short journey gives them final moments of peace. The car sweeps through the open gates. Cameron, still calm, ascends the wide stairs to where Her Majesty awaits him. He listens with barely concealed pride as she invites him to form a government. Audience over, and now in the official prime minister’s car under police escort, they are driven the half-mile to Downing Street.
His team have been advised by Heywood to enter Number 10 by the Cabinet Office entrance on Whitehall. Most of them have never been inside Downing Street. They walk down its long central corridor from the Cabinet Room to the front lobby in awe, before heading outside. Standing in front of the door to Number 11, they observe the lectern that Brown has just spoken from still standing on solitary duty outside the black front door of Number 10. Liz Sugg, who organises Cameron’s trips, wants to tell him not to use the lectern and where to stand for his first speech as prime minister. She knows he is on his way back from the Palace, but is unable to get through. ‘So this is what it’s going to be like now he is prime minister,’ she thinks to herself, ‘he won’t be able to take my calls.’ Then her mobile rings. It is Cameron. ‘Sorry, I was ringing my mum,’ he tells her as if they are old friends sharing a latte at Starbucks. She tells him – she is nothing if not emphatic – exactly where his car is to stop, and where he is to speak.5
At 8.42 p.m., the prime minister’s small convoy drives into Downing Street. He steps out beside a visibly pregnant Samantha, and delivers the statement he has put the finishing touches to just moments before:
Her Majesty the Queen has asked me to form a new government and I have accepted … our country has a hung Parliament where no party has an overall majority and we have some deep and pressing problems – a huge deficit, deep social problems, and a political system in need of reform. For those reasons I aim to form a proper and full coalition between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats … I believe that is the best way to get the strong government that we need … This is going to be hard and difficult work.
Huddled on the pavement in front of Number 11, his aides watch anxiously. ‘I’ll never forget that evening. The sun was setting. It was twilight, adding to the magic. While he was speaking, crowds in Whitehall were shouting. Helicopters were hovering overhead. It all seemed surreal,’ recalls Cameron’s political private secretary, Laurence Mann.6 The new prime minister and Samantha walk to the front door. An official removes the microphone. Cameron poses with Samantha on the front steps, hugging her awkwardly. As the door is opened, he gives a final wave. A few chants float in from the streets: ‘Gordon out!’ vies with ‘Tories out!’ before the sounds of the outside world fall away with the closing of the door. He has arrived.
Staff line up along the long corridor from front door to Cabinet Room, clapping him and Samantha. His small team follow on behind. One looks down at his shoes in embarrassment, overcome by the occasion. Another notices the smell of newly cleaned carpet. Cameron turns round at the end of the line and says a few words to his new staff who less than forty-five minutes before had been tearfully clapping out Gordon and Sarah. Samantha is peeled away. Kate Fall goes with her, dividing her time that first evening between looking after both of the principals.
Inside the Cabinet Room, Cameron greets Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell and Heywood. Britain’s two top officials brief him about his most pressing tasks – some, such as procedures in the event of nuclear threats, are held over to the following morning.7 His staff are shown to their offices. They are amazed to be presented with appointment cards showing the PM’s diary neatly typed up. ‘I realised then that this is the Rolls-Royce state in action,’ recalls one.8 Cameron is escorted through the double doors at the end of the Cabinet Room into his office, which Blair used and called his ‘den’, at almost the furthest possible point in the Downing Street warren from Brown’s office in Number 12. He looks around, disconcerted to see doors on each side, the other leading on to the long room where his aides and officials will work. He wonders about having people constantly entering his office from both sides.9 Number 10 has no ideal room for a prime minister; nothing like the Oval Office. Unlike the White House, it was not purpose-built, but evolved from history. Discussions have taken place in the preceding weeks whether, should Cameron win, he would occupy the space Brown had chosen in Number 12, move upstairs in Number 10 to the office Thatcher had worked from, or use the den.10 Cameron briefly flirts with the idea of using the White Room, one of the state rooms on the first floor, with views across to St James’s Park and Horse Guards Parade. Heywood, Fall and Llewellyn later persuade him to use the den, for practical and security reasons.
Discussions had taken place also about Heywood in the preceding weeks. Should he stay? He had been very close – perhaps too close – to Labour’s operation under both Blair and Brown. Was he a Labour man? He had been intimately involved in all Labour’s decisions for the previous few years, bar a period (2004–7) when he left the Civil Service for the private sector. Some of these decisions under Labour Cameron and George Osborne thought were disastrous. They knew Heywood believed passionately in capitalism, but was he enough of a free marketeer, enough of an enthusiast for competition and the small-enterprise initiatives they wanted to see? But it was decided before the election that Heywood, one of the most omni-competent officials since 1945, was too important to lose.
Present in the den at nine o’clock that first evening are Llewellyn, Cameron’s chief of staff since 2005; Osborne, his master strategist; Steve Hilton, his exuberant and intellectually brilliant thinker; and Andy Coulson, his worldly-wise head of communications. It had been felt by some observers that tension between them had seriously hampered Cameron’s election campaign, but tonight their feelings are temporarily put aside.
The den clears suddenly at 9.10 p.m. when Fletcher enters to announce the Obama call is coming through. ‘Here I am, just us in the room, less than half an hour after he’s entered the building, with the American president waiting to speak,’ Fletcher thinks to himself.11 The two national leaders barely know each other. The White House are aware they mucked up the relationship in the president’s first year by being brusque to Brown, who they found needy. Obama thus wants to get off on the right foot with the new prime minister. ‘Congratulations,’ he booms down the secure line. Cameron has not used the apparatus before and has just been briefed that officials will be listening to his every word, taking careful notes. The prime minister is businesslike, savouring the moment when he says ‘I’m speaking from Number 10’ for the first time. When he does so, he winks to his aide. ‘Come over and see me in the White House,’ Obama says. This is a big deal, and very welcome news to the team. They are delighted to hear him utter the totemic words ‘special relationship’ between the US and Britain. The call is short and to the point. As the line goes dead, Coulson is agreeing the lines to brief about it with Robert Gibbs, White House press secretary. Coulson is anxious to get it right, and not hype it beyond what the White House wants. Cameron’s team are now playing in an altogether new league.
Llewellyn and Fletcher decide which foreign leader talks to the PM and when. Next on his list is the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. ‘Your job is to defend UK interests and my job is to defend German interests,’ she tells a dazed Cameron, who has just been given a briefing on hedge funds, an issue between both nations at the time. Her tone is polite but formal. The chancellor is still cross that he withdrew the Conservative Party from the European People’s Party