For the Record. David Cameron

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СКАЧАТЬ walked through the Mumbai slums in the pouring rain to visit a community project, shocked at how starkly poverty and wealth sat side by side. While Tony Blair was fending off an attempted coup at home, I looked as if I was on a prime-ministerial visit. The contrast was helpful.

      Sudan was a trickier visit, for here was the humanitarian crisis of our time. In Khartoum we met President Omar al-Bashir, a pariah who was later indicted by the ICC. When I mentioned an attack on a town in Darfur, in western Sudan, he claimed that it had actually taken place in the neighbouring country of Chad. Infuriated, I told him to look at a map. It was my first experience of how some of these leaders brazenly just lie.

      The refugee camp itself was unforgettable. The sight of tents and huts stretching for miles, a city in the desert. The families who had lost everything, and had seen loved ones mown down by the Janjaweed militia as Sudanese soldiers looked on. The women, many of whom had been raped, telling me their harrowing stories. The only light relief came when we were sitting around talking through a translator, me bouncing one of the babies on my knee, and the baby decided to wee on me. Everyone laughed. Some things are universal.

In the middle of this hell was a literal oasis – a fifty-foot corrugated-iron tank, providing clean water for thousands of refugees. British aid sustaining and saving people’s lives.

      Much of my approach towards development in later years could be traced back to that time, and to the pride I felt in the aid workers from the charity Oxfam – based just down the road from my constituency – who we stayed with during that visit.

      While some of these visits broke with tradition, my next, the following year, broke with much of the international community.

      In August 2008, Georgia, a sovereign country that had every right to regard its borders as inviolable, had been invaded by Russia on behalf of two Russian-backed but unrecognised statelets, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. It was a clear case of illegal aggression and occupation, and I believed the world’s oldest democracy had a duty to stand with one of the youngest and say so. I went to see President Mikheil Saakashvili, who I had met before and who I admired for his efforts to eradicate corruption, attract investment and get people to pay their taxes, a problem many leaders fail to crack.

      He was under huge pressure, but was just about coping. There was tension in the air. Russian tanks were just twenty-five miles from the capital, Tbilisi. No one was quite certain if the ceasefire would hold, or the Russian tanks would start moving again.

      ‘History has shown that if you leave aggression to go unchecked, greater crises will only emerge in the future,’ I wrote in one article. ‘Today, Russia says it is defending its citizens in South Ossetia. Where tomorrow? In Ukraine? In central Asia? In Latvia?’

      They say you shouldn’t make predictions in politics, but sometimes you do without realising it.

      While modernisation was still being criticised by some in the press and the party, the public gave its verdict at the ballot box.

      In the 2007 local elections we gained nearly a thousand new councillors and thirty-nine new councils. That represented 40 per cent of the vote, with Labour and the Lib Dems on 26 and 24 respectively. We were on track, edging closer to power. But there were rows ahead that threatened to throw us off course.

David Willetts, my shadow education secretary, whose vast intellect led to his nickname ‘Two Brains’, had given a speech on freeing schools from local authority control. In an aside, he talked about the evidence against grammar schools aiding social mobility, and said that a Conservative government wouldn’t open any more of them. Fine – that was our stated policy. I had said from the outset that there would be no going back to the 11-plus on a national basis. I was happy for the 164 existing grammar schools to continue, and to be allowed to expand, as we wanted other good schools to be able to do; but our focus was on improving standards for all 3,000 state schools.

      Cue unprecedented uproar when the Today programme covered the speech. Shadow Europe minister Graham Brady was enraged. The Telegraph was incensed. The 1922 Committee was in revolt. Meanwhile, I was in Hull, spending three days at a school as a teaching assistant, and hearing all this down the phone from Ed.

      On the subject of grammar schools, I reached for a new medium to set the record straight. I wasn’t just a blogger, I was a vlogger, recording a series of ‘WebCameron’ videos that were uploaded online.

      I felt that the call to ‘bring back grammars’ was an anti-modernisation proxy, and I wasn’t going to stand for it. I looked down the lens and said: ‘It is a classic example of fighting a battle of the past rather than meeting the challenges of the future … The way to win the fight for aspiration is to put those things that worked in grammars – aggressive setting to stretch bright pupils, whole-class teaching, strong discipline, to name but three – in all schools.’ In fact my position was more nuanced than I made it sound. I still believed existing grammars should be able to expand, and in the same vein, that new ones could be built in areas where they were already established and population growth required it. I clarified this, but it looked like a climbdown.

      And it came at a bad moment. We were just about to have a change of prime minister. Within a few days of the grammar school row it was Tony Blair’s final PMQs.

      After he had spoken his final words from the despatch box, the Labour benches stood and applauded. I too stood up, and gestured to my own side to join in. They did.

      Cherie Blair came and thanked me afterwards. She is another person who is quite unlike her public caricature. I’ll never forget, when I took Ivan to the premiere of the children’s film Ben 10, Cherie bending down to his wheelchair, looking him in the eye and speaking to him with great kindness and compassion.

I thought it was important to pay tribute to her husband in his last Commons appearance. For good and ill, he had changed British politics forever. And as I applauded, I felt a small inner thrill at the knowledge that a big obstacle on our path to victory had toppled. We were on our way.

      But of course, it wasn’t to prove that simple.

10

       Cliff Edge, Collapse and Scandal

      It’s June 2007, Gordon Brown is prime minister, and it does not stop raining.

      There was something apt about the ex-chancellor’s premiership beginning with the wettest weather in decades.

      I had – and still have – huge respect for Brown’s intellect and his appetite for hard work. And mutual friends have told me how charming and entertaining he can be in private. But in public he seemed to have only one character setting: dour.

      And when it came to Parliament, he had only one political setting: everything was about killing the Tories. While other Labour frontbenchers would build relationships with their opposite numbers, Brown would have absolutely nothing to do with his. The one time he did reach out to his shadow George Osborne, George and I were having dinner in Pizza Express in Notting Hill Gate. Brown wanted to ‘pair’ – i.e. agree that neither of them would vote in an important forthcoming debate. When George very politely explained that he couldn’t do this without consulting our chief whip, Brown simply shouted and swore at him, before slamming down the phone.

      So when he succeeded Tony Blair, I was rejoicing. We were ahead in the polls. And I was up against someone who hadn’t been elected, who had some real flaws – and who I thought it was possible to beat.

      But СКАЧАТЬ