For the Record. David Cameron

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ