For the Record. David Cameron

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СКАЧАТЬ Brown’s second full day in the job, there was an attempted bomb attack in London’s Haymarket, and then, the day after, terrorists drove a jeep laden with gas cylinders into Glasgow Airport. Brown reacted swiftly and effectively – and struck exactly the right tone about the threat we faced and how we should meet it.

The non-stop rain led to non-stop floods, affecting first one part of the country and then another. Brown immediately toured the affected areas, pledging money to flooded-out communities and families.

      Then, after plagues of fire and rain, came disease. Foot-and-mouth was discovered on several Surrey farms. Having spent little more than a day on holiday, the new prime minister darted back.

      And as his side of the political seesaw rose, mine began to sink.

      First, Quentin Davies, a pinstripe-suited Tory MP, defected to Labour with a resignation letter of pure vitriol. His criticism of the modern­isation project was very personal.

      Then came a by-election in Ealing Southall. Our candidate was a successful and engaging British Sikh called Tony Lit, and although we were never going to win in the London borough, we wanted to put up a good fight. But in doing so we ended up setting expectations in the wrong place. I had also agreed to the idea of the candidate running on the ballot paper under the description ‘David Cameron’s Conservatives’. This looked arrogant and hubristic. I campaigned hard, visiting the seat five times – and we came a dismal third.

      I had a chance to seize back the initiative. Social action – our policy of backing volunteering at home and abroad – was a strand of modern, compassionate conservatism we were determined to demonstrate. Project Umubano, led by the MP Andrew Mitchell, was to bring together forty enthusiastic party volunteers in Rwanda that summer, and I was to join them for a night.

      The problem was that parts of Witney were still flooded. But I had visited the flood victims, and I was absolutely determined that the Conservative Party would not be a follower on overseas aid, but a leader.

      Nevertheless, the visit was dogged by questions about why I was in Africa when my own constituency was under water. That night I looked out from the Christian mission where we were staying, gazing over the lights of Kigali, reflecting on the critical coverage. I knew that it had been a mistake to come. But sometimes there are mistakes in politics you’re glad to have made, and this was one of them.

      When Brown overtook us in the polls, rumours began swirling around about an impending vote of no confidence in my leadership. It really was personal.

Brown summed up the mood at PMQs with a rare quip (that’s how bad things were – Gordon Brown was making effective jokes): ‘The wheels are falling off the Tory bicycle, and it is just as well that he has got a car following him when he goes out on his rounds.’

      William Hague was emphatic that if Brown was thinking straight, he would call an immediate general election, before the party conference season even began. That way, he would give us no chance to make up the ground we’d lost. I knew that we had just one chance: we had to deliver a Conservative Party conference in October that would metaphorically blow the doors off.

      Though our policy-review teams hadn’t even reported back yet, we cobbled together a bumper series of announcements for each day of conference, from cutting stamp duty to introducing new cancer treatments. The Friday before conference, the whole lot – every single policy – was emailed to George’s chief of staff, Matt Hancock.

      But Matt’s email address included his middle initial. We had inadvertently sent the full Tory plans to eccentric Lib Dem MP Mike Hancock.

      The sender was mortified. The press officers were up in arms. I, however, was sanguine. ‘They’re great policies,’ I said. ‘If they leak, they leak. I’m off home.’ So many things in politics are seen as a calamity. Very few actually are.

      However, we would spend the whole conference somewhat on tenterhooks, wondering on which day our precious policies were going to be published before we announced them. To this day I still don’t know why they weren’t.

      Labour had a successful conference in Bournemouth, where Brown’s chief bruiser Ed Balls was briefing that there would be an election.

      Then came our turn in Blackpool. A cliff-edge moment for our party – and for me.

      William opened with a cracker of a speech, chastising Brown for hosting Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street the previous month (a move he must have hated but which made him look both magnanimous and bold).

      George then unveiled what I termed his ‘hammock idea’, the conference announcement he’d always dream up while reclining somewhere hot over the summer. This year was the biggest yet: raising the inheritance tax threshold to £1 million. It was deeply Conservative, rewarding people who worked hard, saved and wanted to pass something on.

The finale of the conference, as always, was the leader’s speech. It would be back in the Empress Ballroom in Blackpool’s Winter Gardens where I’d delivered that leadership-winning, no-notes speech two years earlier. I had been pondering whether I could repeat the feat, not as a stunt, but because I was genuinely frustrated by my seeming inability to get across who I was, what I thought and what I wanted to do for Britain.

      The lecterns I spoke behind felt like a barrier between me and the audience, distorting what I was saying and what people were hearing. Steve Hilton agreed. Sam told me to go for it. But last time was just ten minutes, I said. This is an hour. I have to cover everything. And it’s my political life on the line now.

      But I knew what I wanted to say. It would be me up there, no artifice, no barrier. So in the run-up to the conference I was not just working on my speech with Ameet Gill, but secretly learning its structure, key points and key phrases as we went along.

      Come the morning of the speech, I had rehearsed sections but never practised the whole thing in one go. Sam and I snuck out early for a walk on Blackpool beach. I bounded back, full of vim.

      As I walked out onto the stage, I knew it was do or die. ‘It might be messy, but it will be me,’ I told the packed hall. As well as being ‘me’, it was terrifying, exhilarating – and knackering. After an hour, I reached the peroration. ‘So, Mr Brown, what’s it going to be? Why don’t you go ahead and call that election? … Let people decide who can make the changes that we really need in our country. Call that election. We will fight. Britain will win.’

      I wish I could say I owed it to Cicero. In fact, it was inspired by the moment that David Niven loses his temper with Gregory Peck at the end of one of my favourite films, The Guns of Navarone. All that classical education gone to waste.

      Before the conference began we had commissioned a ‘tracker’ or daily poll to see if anything we were doing was shifting the dial in terms of what the public thought. And we decided to continue the poll as the conference came to an end. It was money well spent. Our poll ratings ticked up daily through the conference – and then shot up at the end. I watched the news that evening and thought that I could see – for once – that I had really made that vital connection: from the hall, through the television, to the viewer at home.

      But the country’s cameras were now trained once again on Gordon Brown: will he or won’t he?

The next day we were straight back into election planning meetings, as the tracker revealed we were neck and neck with Labour.

      Then on Friday, as I drove to Dean, Andy phoned to tell me about a significant opinion poll which would СКАЧАТЬ