For the Record. David Cameron

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ better. So, as I put it, when people crossed the line and committed a crime, the response needed to be rapid and tough. But to help more of them stay inside that line, we needed more understanding, more help – even more love. I homed in on ‘hoodies’, the name for both the hooded sweatshirts teens wore and the teens themselves: ‘When you see a child walking down the road, hoodie up, head down, moody, swaggering, dominating the pavement – think what has brought that child to that moment,’ I said.

      We needed to deal with the background issues that led some towards a life of crime, like family breakdown, unemployment, drug addiction, children growing up in care, and educational underachievement. It was a classic compassionate Conservative speech and series of remedies. But the combination of hoodies and love outraged some in the press: ‘Hug a Hoodie’ was the News of the World’s take on the intervention.

      I don’t regret the speech. It set the context for a new approach: committed to backing the police and supporting tough penalties in our courts, but tackling the failures of the care system, reforming adoption, targeting family breakdown and chaotic families, and beginning the long process of reforming our prisons. These were to be some of our most important achievements in government, and their genesis was in a speech that many at the time said would herald our defeat.

      As part of the same train of thought, even before I became party leader I had been developing the idea of a school-age programme that would help our children – all children, not just a privileged few – gain the skills they would need for adulthood, such as resilience, confidence, teamwork, respect and responsibility.

      I came up with the idea after talking to those who had taken part in National Service, the period of compulsory post-war service in the forces which ended in the 1960s. The main thing that came across from those conversations was that everyone had been in it together. It didn’t matter who you were, rich or poor, white or from an ethnic minority, academic or not – you forged a common identity. That’s why I wanted there to be a residential element in this new programme, to take teenagers out of their comfort zones and put them into groups with others of different backgrounds, and also a volunteering element, teaching them the value of putting something back into their community.

National Citizen Service was, I believed, the answer to many questions of our age. The education system was failing to equip children with the skills for adulthood; NCS could help fill in the gaps. Our society was broken; NCS could teach the respect that was so lacking. Integration hadn’t worked – we were still too segregated, too suspicious of each other; NCS would bring people together, and prove that ultimately we had so much in common. Although it was never made compulsory, NCS would end up as a rite of passage for every teenager who wanted to take part. Today, more than 500,000 have done so, and it is the largest and fastest-growing youth volunteering project of its kind in Europe.

      As we developed individual policies, a theme was emerging. This was helped along by another moment that would have a profound impact on me, and as a result, on the future direction of the party.

      Balsall Heath was a neighbourhood in Birmingham that had been blighted by crime, prostitution and antisocial behaviour. House prices fell. The middle classes moved out. But a group of people who remained had got together and taken matters into their own hands. They tore down the escorts’ fliers, harassed kerb crawlers and reported the drug dealers to the police. They started taking better care of the parks and public spaces, planting shrubs and trees.

      I was so taken by this story that I went to stay with one of the residents, Abdullah Rehman, and his family. I ate with them, slept in their spare room, and walked their children to school with them. Interestingly for a British Muslim family, they had chosen the King David Jewish faith school, on the basis that it had a good ethos and understood the importance of faith. ‘We all believe in Abraham,’ Abdullah told me as we dropped the children off, before showing me around the community he had helped to transform.

      Here, in this Midlands suburb, society was proving more effective than the state. Bit by bit, the idea of government nurturing a stronger, better, bigger society was forming in my mind.

      So in those first few months there was a lot to sort out: the political strategy, the governing philosophy, the personnel, the purse strings and the policies. But those aren’t the only demands on a new opposition leader.

If you have any hope of being an effective prime minister, and of looking like a credible candidate for the job, you need a crash course in diplomacy, and foreign and security policy. My early overseas trips did a lot to shape my world view.

      The first was to Paris to see Nicolas Sarkozy, before his run for the French presidency. He was the interior minister at the time, and famous for his fiery personality. My first taste of this was waiting outside his office door with Ed as he shouted at someone. ‘Imbécile! Imbécile!’ was all we could hear.

      Sarkozy was captivating – small, wiry and full of energy. He was always accompanied by an equally energetic translator, who spoke at a hundred miles an hour. He told me how he admired the British economic reforms, and wanted to be the Thatcher of France. He clearly believed in the ‘great man’ theory of history – muscular leaders making bold decisions and changing the world – and wanted to be one of them. I later came to feel that Sarko, as he was known, was less radical in reality. But an incredible act of kindness towards me in later years would make me grateful to him for the rest of my life.

      I first saw Angela Merkel at an election rally in Stuttgart, when she walked on to the stage to the Rolling Stones song ‘Angie’. In her speech she complained about the interference of the European Commission, which had told barmaids in Bavarian beer cellars what they could and couldn’t wear. I would use this for years afterwards to persuade her that there was a Eurosceptic lurking inside her too.

      My decision to leave the EPP rankled with her, but it didn’t affect the close partnership we went on to form. While she profoundly disagreed with the move, she could see that I was a conservative who took a different view to her on the vital issue of European integration.

When we met I could see that she was, as Margaret Thatcher had been, the best-briefed person in the room, able to work out in advance other people’s negotiating needs and strategies. I immediately saw that she was someone I could work well with. She has a sense of humour, and is an anglophile. From behind the Berlin Wall she had admired British science and British democracy. She saw us as natural allies when it came to vital issues such as support for NATO, backing fiscal prudence and a belief in free trade. Above all, I liked her down-to-earth, straight­forward manner. There was no flummery or flattery – she liked to get on and talk about the things that mattered. And, again like Thatcher, she used her charm to get her own way. But Merkel is not a Thatcher. Her favourite expression is ‘step by step’. This was to be disastrous for the Eurozone, which needed bold reform but got incrementalism.

      It was in America that I met the forty-third president, George W. Bush. He was charming, intelligent and conviction-driven, quite unlike his caricature, and I admired what he was doing in the fight to combat AIDS and malaria. Yet I had tried to set myself apart from his neo-conservatism in a way that maintained Britain’s strong bonds with the United States. On the fifth anniversary of 9/11 I made a speech whose most reported line was that liberty couldn’t be dropped from the air by an unmanned drone. This was a criticism of unbridled neo-con interventionism, not a call for the unbridled American isolationism we are seeing a decade on. I didn’t believe you could have global US and UK leadership if you point-blank refused to intervene anywhere.

      While these were all standard stop-offs, I also strayed dramatically from the path usually trodden by party leaders: India.

      As I said in a blog I wrote at the time, we couldn’t afford to carry on obsessing about Europe and America while ignoring the fresh new forces that were shaping СКАЧАТЬ