Kitabı oku: «For the Record», sayfa 4

Hong Kong in 1985 was a pretty nervous place. The joint declaration with China securing the end of British rule in 1997 had recently been signed, and Jardine Matheson had announced the transfer of its headquarters from Hong Kong to Bermuda. I was sent to the Jardine Shipping Agency, where I found myself the only Westerner in an office of over a hundred Hong Kong Chinese. Our job was to book cargo onto container and other ships, and to look after the ships and their captains as they came into the harbour. My role was that of ‘ship jumper’, sent out in a small boat, or ‘lighter’, to board the big liners, meet the captain and ensure that everything went smoothly. It was an interesting job for someone who was only eighteen, and I learned a lot.

From Hong Kong I travelled to Japan, and then to the Soviet Union. Ever since hearing the Russian Nobel Prize-winning author and dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn speak, I had wanted to visit the country. I had read about the Trans-Siberian Railway, and thought that would be a good way of doing so. The trip had a profound effect on me.

The train did not set off from its traditional starting point, the historic port of Vladivostok, which back then was a military base and closed to tourists. Instead we began our journey in a dreary grey town called Nakhodka, and joined the traditional route at Khabarovsk. I spent the next six days in ‘hard class’, sharing a compartment with two male students from East Germany and Russia, and a female student from Japan.

It’s hard to convey now just how grim the Soviet Union looked and felt in the mid-1980s. I boarded the train full of excitement about this epic journey, but at the first stop most of the food disappeared as local people rushed on board and bought or bartered everything they possibly could. I had brought some oranges from Japan, as I’d been warned about the shortage of fruit and vegetables. I remember people on the train watching me with fascination as I peeled and ate them, as if they’d never seen these things before.

The well-worn clichés that young Russians and East Europeans were desperate for Western music and jeans turned out to be absolutely true, and these were the first subject of conversation with my two east European travelling companions. But the thing I will never forget is the stories they told me about just how grey and oppressive life was in East Germany and Russia, and how jealous they were of the West. How they knew that their leaders were lying to them, and that the propaganda about their countries’ success was nonsense. My new East German friend flicked through my cassette collection and announced that, ‘While you have great music records we just have tractor-production records, and they’re all lies.’

I was a George Orwell junky, having read Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Homage to Catalonia several times over. I knew the history and the theory, and here was the living proof of communism’s total failure. When, a couple of years earlier, Ronald Reagan had called the Soviet Union an ‘evil empire’, many people in the West had thought he was guilty of crass overstatement. I came firmly to the conclusion that he was totally right. From that train ride onwards I was never in any doubt that in the battle between the democratic, capitalist West and the communist, state-controlled East, we were on the right side. For my political generation the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was a seminal moment, and for those of us who distrusted socialism, and hated what communism had done to eastern and central Europe, it was a moment of great ideological confirmation.

At the end of the epic railway journey – day upon day of mountains, rivers and never-ending silver birches – I met my friend Anthony Griffith in Moscow, and we travelled together around the Soviet Union. Most visitors at that time would be part of an official Intourist-organised group, and because we were travelling on our own we attracted quite a lot of interest from the authorities. We hadn’t booked transfers from trains to hotels or anything like that, yet we tended to be met at every station or airport by a man in a long dark overcoat who already seemed to know where we were going.

Our itinerary caused me to make a diplomatic gaffe many years later. I was making small talk with Vladimir Putin at the G8, and told him about my extensive travels around his country. As I reeled off the list of cities I had visited – Moscow, Leningrad, Yalta, Kiev … – he stopped me to say, ‘Yalta and Kiev are no longer part of my country.’ In that moment I glimpsed the intense personal pain that the break-up of the Soviet Union had caused this old-fashioned Russian nationalist.

And it was in what is now Ukraine, on the beach at the Black Sea resort of Yalta, that Anthony and I were approached by two young men. One of them spoke perfect English, the other spoke French and some English. We never discovered what they were doing on a beach that was reserved for foreigners, but we didn’t see any harm in accepting their invitation to have lunch and then dinner with them. They lavished vodka, sturgeon and caviar on us. We weren’t naïve, and our suspicions increased when they started trying to goad us into criticising Britain and the British government. We made our excuses and left.

Later, when I arrived at university, I asked my politics tutor and mentor Vernon Bogdanor whether I had been right to be suspicious, and he was pretty convinced it was an attempt to recruit us.

As we crossed into a bleak and depressed Romania, most of my books about politics were confiscated by a bad-tempered border guard as ‘inappropriate’. We then meandered our way through Transylvania to Hungary, and on to Vienna and Salzburg, where I was finally able to meet the Austrian woman, Marie Helene Schlumberger, who had run off with my now long-dead grandfather. She regaled us with stories of Austria before the war, the Russian occupation (which was only lifted in 1955) and my grandfather – ‘my darling Donald’ – while plying us with schnapps.

I was happy to be back in the West. It was time to go home, and then to university.

Although I went to Oxford frequently as a child, and although it is the capital of the county I represented in Parliament for fifteen years, I still feel a huge buzz every time I set foot back in the university part of the city.

I felt a great sense of privilege at being able to walk Oxford’s streets, study in the university’s great libraries and live in a magnificent and historic college. The college system brings people together in a way some other universities fail to do. The tutorial system means you have direct access, either on your own or in a very small group, to some of the finest minds in the world.

When people ask me what I most loved about being at Oxford, it wasn’t the politics. I hardly took part. My fascination with politics was developing, but for some reason I didn’t want to play at it. I visited the Oxford Union a few times, and saw stars like Boris Johnson, already a very funny speaker, and masters of debate like Nick Robinson, who would later become political editor of the BBC.

It wasn’t the sport that made Oxford special either. I briefly captained the Brasenose tennis team, and we reached the university finals. But the truth is that my teammates were so much better than me that I often had to drop myself from the squad.

My partner as third pair was a law student, Andrew Feldman, who became a lifelong friend. Andrew would raise the money for my 2005 leadership bid, and became chief fundraiser for the party, then its chief executive and finally party chairman. I would argue that he is the best chairman the Conservative Party has had in its entire history. The figures certainly back that up: we took over a party with £30 million of debt and handed it over eleven years later debt-free and with cash in the bank.

In Downing Street I kept reading that I was ‘the essay-crisis prime minister’, leaving vital work until the very last minute. I will come to how I made decisions as PM a bit later, but that certainly wasn’t how I worked at Oxford. While most of my friends had late-night essay crises fuelled with black coffee and cigarettes, I hardly ever worked in the evening, and almost never at night. But I loved the life. I was fascinated by my studies. I made friends. I had fun. I argued. I gossiped. And I fell in love. Lots of times.

I can’t, of course, write about Oxford without three dreaded words that haunted me for most of my political life: the Bullingdon Club.

When I look now at the much-reproduced photograph taken of our group of appallingly over-self-confident ‘sons of privilege’, I cringe. If I had known at the time the grief I would get for that picture, of course I would never have joined. But life isn’t like that.

At the time I took the opposite view to Groucho Marx, and wanted to join pretty much any club that would have me. And this one was raffish and notorious. These were also the years after the ITV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, when quite a few of us were carried away by the fantasy of an Evelyn Waugh-like Oxford existence.

The stories of excessive drunkenness, restaurant trashing … all these things are exaggerated. I was never arrested. I was never completely insensible from drink. However, it is true that the election ritual was being woken up in the middle of the night by a group of extremely rowdy men turning your rooms upside down. In my case this was made worse by the fact that I had had a party the night before, and there were dozens of empty wine bottles just outside my door. I have a pretty clear memory of walking from my bedroom into my sitting room to find a group of people making a terrible racket, with one of them standing on the legs of an upended table, using a golf club to smash bottles as they were thrown at him.

I can’t swear that one of these people was Boris Johnson, but he was certainly a member at the time. Boris has claimed subsequently that he was unable to climb over the wall into my college. I’m not sure I believe his story. But I’m not totally certain of my own, either. So perhaps I should leave it there.

What did I love most about Oxford? I did love the work.

Vernon Bogdanor was, and still is, one of the leading experts on the UK constitution, electoral systems and – interestingly – referendums. The opposite of the fusty don in an ivory tower separated from the real world, he was always making us relate political history and constitutional theory to present-day politics.

I was taught economics by the brilliant Peter Sinclair, who could write simultaneous equations on a blackboard using both hands at the same time. His lectures were always packed, as he knew better than anyone how to bring the subject to life. Years later he surprised me by turning up unannounced to help me canvass when I first stood for Parliament, in Stafford in 1997. Peter bounded up to the first door, and told the unsuspecting inhabitant, ‘I was your candidate’s tutor at Oxford and he really is very clever.’ Needless to say, the voter was both baffled and unmoved. I, on the other hand, was very touched.

One of the many things Oxford taught me was how to handle stress. Looking back, it seems unfair that we had just eight three-hour exams, squeezed into little more than a week, to justify our entire three years’ work as an undergraduate. In my case there was no dissertation, no coursework, no pre-marking – nothing except for those exams. The stress was quite extraordinary.

Talking about getting a first at Oxford is probably almost as annoying as talking about going to the university in the first place. But psycho­logically it was an important moment for me.

I had absolutely no idea of what I wanted to do once I left. I certainly hadn’t fixed on a political career. Like many others I did the so-called ‘milk round’, and was interviewed by management consultants, accountancy practices and a few City firms, although as this was the year after the great stock-market crash of 1987, most of them had pretty much stopped recruiting. One interview was with a young management consultant working for McKinsey called William Hague. He didn’t offer me a job – and neither did any of the other leading companies.

Jardines in Hong Kong were keen to have me back, but while I was considering this I saw an advertisement for the Conservative Research Department (CRD), and remembered coming across it when I was working with Tim Rathbone. There is no doubt that the interview that followed, and taking the job that was offered, changed my life even more than going to Oxford. It set me on the path of the political career that the rest of this book describes.

I only really knew I wanted to dedicate myself to politics and pursue a political career once I started working in it. But after that I was in absolutely no doubt. It was a vocation, the only thing I really wanted to do. I wanted to serve. I cared deeply about my country. I believed in public service. And I came to see – and to believe profoundly – that it is through political service that you can make the greatest difference.

4

Getting Started

It is one of the most famous moments in modern British politics. The chancellor of the exchequer is standing outside the Treasury, in front of the cameras, explaining that despite all his efforts and all his promises, Britain is suspending its membership of the Exchange Rate Mechanism of the European Monetary System.

It was a full-scale political disaster. And behind Norman Lamont’s right shoulder, there I am.

So how did I come to be there?

If you want to learn about Conservative politics at the national level, there is no better place to be than the CRD. Neville Chamberlain founded it in 1929, and put it under the directorship of a most unusual man: Joseph Ball, half politician, half secret agent. Ever since, it has been a strange mixture of political intelligence service, policy workshop and finishing school for future politicians. Iain Macleod, Reginald Maudling, Enoch Powell, Douglas Hurd, then later Chris Patten and Michael Portillo, were all graduates of this academy. So were three members of my first cabinet: Andrew Lansley, George Osborne and me.

I was hired in the autumn of 1988 to cover trade, industry and energy, which meant following two government departments: the DTI, which was led by David Young, and the Department of Energy, where Cecil Parkinson was making a comeback after resigning over his affair with Sara Keays in 1983.

I liked Cecil enormously. He was a true believer in what Margaret Thatcher was doing, but he also believed politics should be engaging and fun. He asked me to help with his speeches, including the 1988 conference speech that pledged the privatisation of the coal industry.

David Young invited me to his weekly ‘ministerial prayers’ meeting, where his team gathered without civil servants present to talk about the challenges ahead. This was a great introduction to the many faces of the Tory party. The aggressively Thatcherite (Eric Forth), the ambitious and mainstream (Francis Maude), as well as the unassuming (Tony Newton), the affable (Robert Atkins) and the downright eccentric (Alan Clark). The meetings were a riot of argument and entertainment. When anyone reported back on bad news from the part of the country they represented, Alan Clark would tell them it was their fault for visiting their constituencies and listening to ‘real people’ in the first place.

It was a great pleasure – and a good decision, given his extraordinary dynamism – to welcome David to No. 10 as an adviser on business and enterprise twenty-two years later when I became prime minister. He was instrumental in delivering the ‘Start-Up Loans’ proposal that has created thousands of successful new businesses.

While a CRD desk officer learns a great deal about specialised areas of policy, one of the advantages, and challenges, of working there is that before long you have to be an expert on everything the government is doing. And in the process you become professional. Indeed, the things I learned in those years are, I think, part of the answer to the charge that we have too many ‘professional politicians’ in British politics.

Yes, we need people in Parliament from all walks of life, and with many different life experiences. And the Conservative parliamentary party is far broader in its make-up today than it was ten or twenty years ago. And yes, I gained hugely from the seven years I spent in business, outside the political world. But while politics is a vocation, it is also a profession. There are tools and skills that you need to master. Not just the speech-making, press handling or campaigning, but how you get things done in a political system, how you make change happen.

In my case, it wasn’t long before I was briefing ministers for vital media appearances. It staggers me today to think of the access to senior cabinet ministers that I had when I was still in my twenties.

Most of the ‘big beasts’ lived up to their public images. Ken Clarke would spend most of the meeting telling you why the specific government policy you were pleading with him to defend was ‘absolutely bonkers’. He would challenge the entire concept of a government ‘line to take’, and say pretty much what he liked. Twenty years later, when I asked him to join the shadow cabinet, not much had changed.

Michael Portillo – something of a hero to many of us in the CRD, as an alumnus with an apparently glittering future ahead of him – was both ferociously bright and warmly encouraging, as he had done the same briefing job himself. He once told me his key to success on BBC radio’s Any Questions. Instead of being polite to your fellow guests at the dinner beforehand, and then fighting with them on the airwaves, do it the other way round. Be argumentative and objectionable in private, and then as soon as the microphones are switched on, be the voice of reason and consensus. Meanwhile, your fellow panellists are so steamed up and angry they come across on air as partisan and divisive.

I arrived at the CRD at the high-water mark of Thatcherism. The Conservative Party had won its third consecutive general election victory under her leadership, and she seemed to be at the height of her powers.

We viewed her with a mixture of admiration and terror. The first time I met her was at the CRD Christmas party, when she fixed me with a laser-like stare and asked what I did. After I had answered, she asked about the trade-deficit figures, which had come out that day. I hadn’t seen them. At that moment, instant death – or even a lingering painful one – would have been a merciful release.

At around this time Robin Harris, CRD’s staunchly Thatcherite director, told us that as there was so little effective opposition from Labour, we would have to provide it ourselves. He meant critique our own work, but it was a moment of supreme hubris. The party did provide opposition to itself, but not in quite the way Robin had envisaged. Within two years Margaret Thatcher was gone.

The history of this period has been written about extensively. An apparently cloudless sky in 1988 soon turned dark. It was the result of an overheated economy and the return of inflation, courtesy of shadowing the deutschmark, keeping interest rates too low for too long, and the encouragement of an unsustainable boom in house prices, partly through Nigel Lawson’s 1988 Budget.

Then followed rows over Europe, with Thatcher’s Bruges speech – which we in the CRD all applauded – the resignation of Lawson and the fateful decision to join the Exchange Rate Mechanism.

Then the dénouement. The resignation of Geoffrey Howe and the fall of Thatcher. In the middle of all this, there was the Poll Tax. And believe me, I was right in the middle of it all. Europe was the occasion of the Lady’s fall, but the Poll Tax was the reason she couldn’t get up again.

So many of the team that worked together at the CRD all those years ago ended up, twenty years later, in prominent positions in my government, including Ed Llewellyn, Kate Fall, Steve Hilton, Ed Vaizey and Jonathan Caine. All of us worked for Thatcher and then John Major. The late 1980s and early 1990s shaped us and our thinking. First we were labelled ‘the brat pack’, because of our age. Later ‘the Notting Hill set’, even though most of us didn’t live there. Inasmuch as there was a clique – and I would argue that every successful politician needs a team – it was a CRD clique.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 confirmed us in the view that, with our beliefs in democratic politics and market economics, we were on the right side of history. The fall of Thatcher showed us that even the most successful authors of that history were mortal. It was an early experience of profound political trauma. She was the reason most of us were there in the first place.

My own view of her and the situation was nuanced. I was a supporter, but I did feel that ‘late Thatcher’ began to believe her own propaganda and somewhat lost touch with reality. I was a tremendous admirer of Nigel Lawson, and wanted those two titans to get over their differences.

Most supporters of Thatcher couldn’t abide Michael Heseltine. Again, I took a different view. I didn’t agree with his views on Europe, but I admired the muscular action he took to back British industry and to transform Liverpool and the inner cities. I liked the One Nation approach on poverty. And frankly, it looked as if he was being proved right on local government and the hated Poll Tax. If we were going to lose the Great One, wouldn’t it be better if her replacement was someone with a plan, with passion and with election-winning charisma?

When I became prime minister twenty years later, few people were more helpful to me than Michael Heseltine. He backed the coalition. He gave strength to our regional policy, particularly through his unstinting support for elected mayors and the real devolution to our cities of both money and powers. He rolled up his sleeves, occupied an office in the Business Department, and, in his inimitable way, he got things done.

But back then, when Mrs Thatcher was on the brink, I felt that one of the reasons he didn’t make it was a peculiar lack of charm. Not that he doesn’t have any – he certainly does – but that he didn’t always take the trouble to show it.

When the leadership challenge began, we at party headquarters were all supposed to be neutral. This order was not taken very seriously: most were passionate supporters of Mrs T. But by the end, while I was still loyal, I was unenthusiastic. I could see that her position was becoming untenable. When the new leadership campaign began after her fall, I was content to stay out of it altogether. What mattered, I thought a little piously, was continuing to implement Conservative ideas.

Despite my view that the end would come, when it did, the fall of Mrs Thatcher was still a political tragedy, one that affected all of us. More profound than personal feelings was the political impact: the leader of our country had been treated in a shabby and disloyal way by the very people she had helped to get elected in the first place. The resentments and divisions that this act of regicide created would affect Conservative politics for the next two decades. In fact, they still resonate.

Some of the lessons we learned from her fall were obvious: the im­portance of loyalty and teamwork; that leaders – particularly in our party – can never take their positions for granted. But there was something more subtle. We revered the reality of Thatcher, not the mythology.

The reality was a brilliantly effective prime minister who changed her country for the better, but who lost touch towards the end and was, in part, the author of her own downfall.

The mythology that grew and grew, particularly after her fall, was that she alone was ideologically pure; that she was always right and everyone else wrong; that she never compromised or backed down; and that she only ever did what was right, and never calculated what was politically deliverable.

This, of course, was nonsense. She backed down over many issues, like university tuition fees. She knew when to back off, as when giving in to the miners’ demands in the early 1980s. She was a master of political calculation.

The subsequent problem for the Conservative Party in general, and for future Conservative leaders in particular, is simply put. Not only were we following a hugely successful, epoch-defining leader. Not only did we need to heal the divide between those who supported her to the end and those who brought about her fall. We were also being compared to the mythical Thatcher, rather than the real one.

At about this time, the ageing doyen of Fleet Street, Sir John Junor, asked me to supply him with political gossip for his Mail on Sunday column, and I duly obliged, seeing it as part of my efforts to expose splits in the Labour Party. He frequently took me to lunch, at which the exchange of information would all be in the other direction. I would sit back and listen to his stories of Beaverbrook, Churchill and Fleet Street before Murdoch, together with his personal obsessions with Princess Diana and Selina Scott.

The journalist Bruce Anderson would fill in for Sir John when he was away, and I continued the service for him, starting what would become a lifelong friendship. Bruce was close to John Major, and recommended to him that he bring me into No. 10 to help sharpen up his performances at Prime Minister’s Questions.

This was the big call I had been waiting for, and I can still remember the thrill of walking through the famous black door to join the team that briefed the prime minister for what was then a twice-weekly encounter.

My partner in this endeavour was a rising star in the whips’ office, the Boothferry MP David Davis. Fifteen years later we would become rivals for the leadership, but in 1990 he would come to my office very early on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, and we would discuss what bullets we could put into John Major’s gun. We worked together well.

Some people look at Prime Minister’s Questions, with all its noise, poor behaviour and often heavy-handed prepared jokes, and think it is somewhere between a national embarrassment and a complete waste of time. They miss the point. In our system, prime ministers have to be on top of their game and across every subject. PMQs exposes them if they are not. Weaknesses, failings, uncertainties, lack of knowledge – all these things and more are found out.

Not only does it help hold prime ministers to account; it gives them more power and control by enabling them to hold Whitehall to account. While serving in No. 10, I saw policy being either determined in double-quick time, or fundamentally changed, on many occasions because the spotlight was suddenly shining brightly on a particular area, and credible answers were urgently required. It is one of the mechanisms that makes our system so responsive. You can use it to change policy and override other ministers and departments. I did this a number of times when I became prime minister.

I got to know and like, and admire enormously, John Major. He was a passionate Conservative, but a practical one, not an ideologue. If he was unsure about how he should act on a particular issue, he seemed almost always to default to the decent thing. He had a temper, to be sure – and I was on the rough end of it once or twice – and parts of the job clearly weighed heavily on him. But he was a fundamentally good man.

He was also a very tactile one. I used to arrive early for the briefing sessions and sit at the bottom of the narrow flight of stairs that led to his No. 10 flat, just outside the door to the study where we held the briefing meeting. John had a habit of bounding down the stairs and, with a cheery hello, ruffling my hair.

My main job as leader of the political section of the CRD was taking apart the Labour opposition and preparing for the 1992 general election.

The tale of that election is extraordinary. The Conservative Party had ditched its most successful ever leader, caused inflation to rise, put up interest rates, seen the property market crash and the country tip headlong into recession. Meanwhile, the Labour Party under Neil Kinnock had scrapped some of its most unpopular policies, such as unilateral nuclear disarmament, and seemed hungry for, and perhaps even ready for, power.

Yet we won. And the scale of the victory should not be measured by the small parliamentary majority – twenty-one seats – that John Major achieved. The true scale of his victory was the fact that we were almost eight percentage points ahead of Labour, and he had attracted more votes than any other prime minister in British political history.

To be sure, we didn’t expect it. I had a strong sense then that the only person who really thought we would win was John Major himself. He seemed to have an innate confidence that when given the choice, the British people would stick with him.

No one should underestimate the personal triumph for John Major. In the head-to-head with Neil Kinnock, people knew who they wanted as prime minister. But allied to this was the most systematic destruction of opposition policy that I have ever seen in a campaign. The mantra that ‘Oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them’ was turned on its head. The hubris of Labour’s pre-polling day Sheffield rally, and the self-inflicted wound of its shadow Budget, in which Labour promised to raise taxes on people who saw themselves as middle-earners, are well documented. But those of us who were in the campaign team would argue that the costing of Labour’s spending pledges, together with the blunderbuss of our advertising campaign, were what made the biggest difference. By polling day everyone knew that a Labour government meant higher taxes.