For the Record. David Cameron

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СКАЧАТЬ I confessed to Prince William that I was nervous. He told me not to be – and just to imagine Chuck Blazer naked.

      The three of us stood up and gave our pitch. We were followed by a video accompanied by Elbow’s ‘One Day Like This’. It was stirring stuff, and we got a strong ovation.

      Our confidence grew. Six nations promised that they would vote for us in the first round: South Korea, Trinidad and Tobago, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, USA and England.

      How many votes did we end up with? Two.

      Russia, whose bid was fraught with problems including racism, won the chance to host the 2018 World Cup. Forty-degree Qatar, hardly a footballing hub, got 2022. Putin didn’t need to come. The fish had been bought and sold before we’d even got to the marketplace.

      David Beckham was upset and angry. ‘I don’t mind people lying to me, but not to my prime minister and future king,’ he said. Blatter said we were just ‘bad losers’.

      In the years that followed, a criminal investigation into the way the hosts of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups were chosen took place. Nine of the twenty-two members of the FIFA Executive Committee who awarded them have been punished, indicted or died before facing charges, including Chuck Blazer, who admitted fraud, money laundering and taking bribes on the 1998 and 2010 World Cups. For seventeen years Sepp Blatter presided over an organisation riddled with corruption. He has been banned from football for six years, and his plaque removed from FIFA headquarters.

      One issue that proved to be more prevalent than I had expected before I became prime minister was corruption. I kept on seeing it for myself: from Omar al-Bashir’s refugee camps in Sudan to Blatter’s boardroom in Zürich. Those same forces that had denied Britain the World Cup – bribery, lack of transparency, collusion, fraud – were depriving people around the world of safer, healthier, wealthier lives.

      At international summits we focused on everything – security, poverty, growth, aid, the environment. But we seldom said a word about one of the biggest drivers of these things: corruption. I resolved to spend my time in government – and after it – trying to change that.

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       Afghanistan and the Armed Forces

      When I took office there were more than 10,000 British troops in Afghanistan, engaged in a conflict that had lasted nearly a decade. That made me the first prime minister to come to power from a different party when the country was at war since 1951 – the year Churchill replaced Attlee while British troops were fighting in Korea.

      I spent more time on Afghanistan – visiting, reading, discussing, deliberating, and yes, worrying – than on any other issue. The burden weighed heavily upon me every single day until the final British combat soldier left Camp Bastion in 2014. I still care deeply about Afghanistan’s future today. And I will always remember the families of the fallen, and those living with life-changing injuries because of their service.

      Many leaders have written about what it’s like to send brave men and women into battle. My reflections are about inheriting that responsibility and handling a conflict whose aim had become ambiguous and whose unpopularity was growing.

      I supported the decision to send troops to help rebels overturn the Taliban government in 2001. The ‘invasion’ of Afghanistan was justified. The brutal Taliban regime, which controlled 90 per cent of the country, was harbouring al-Qaeda, the perpetrators of 9/11. It was continuing to train jihadists and plot attacks against the West. When asked to expel Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, it had refused. The US had no sensible choice but to act. And we were right to support it. As a young backbencher, on the day after the invasion I said in the House of Commons that our actions were ‘every bit as justified as the fight against Nazism in the 1940s’.

By 2005, when I became Conservative leader, there was a growing sense that while Iraq might be the ‘wrong war’, as it had little to do with tackling Islamist extremism and might in fact be encouraging it, Afghanistan was the ‘right war’. We were at least trying to deal with one of the principal sources of the problem, and responding to a direct attack.

      Come 2010, my message matched what I had said in the House of Commons almost a decade before. Our troops were combatting terrorism, with the Taliban beaten back. They were defending our security, with plots no longer coming directly out of Afghanistan (although there was still more to be done to address the threat from ungoverned parts of neighbouring Pakistan).

      Sadly, like whack-a-mole, the scourge of Islamist extremism and its promotion of terror would rear its head elsewhere. Every broken or fragile state was a potential incubator, and the Afghanistan–Pakistan border was the most virulent region of all. But in tackling it there, we were tackling the motherlode.

      In any case, it is true to say that Britain is safer as a result of the hard work and bloody sacrifice of our troops in Afghanistan.

      That’s why the view of our intelligence experts in 2010 was clear: what we were doing remained justified. The most significant security threat to the United Kingdom remained al-Qaeda. If we left Afghanistan precipitately, it – and its training camps – could return.

      But our action came at a grave cost. We were taking casualties almost every day. And, like the vast, sandy plains we were fighting over, the war seemed to have no end in sight.

      What helped me now I was PM was that I’d visited Afghanistan more than any other country. I knew the drill: picking up a Hercules turboprop plane or a C17 transport jet in the Gulf to take us to Camp Bastion or the capital, Kabul. Then travelling onwards in the Americans’ Black Hawk helicopters or our own Chinooks, where I would sit upfront in the ‘jump seat’ just behind the pilots; landing to see the small fortified Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) our troops were defending, often against ferocious attack.

      I knew the landscape: the way the totally dry desert merged into the lush green Helmand River valley, the beautiful blue-green water fertilising the land; the mud-brick houses that told of a deeply conservative society that hadn’t really changed for decades, even centuries.

I had seen some of the worst trouble spots, visiting the Helmandi town of Sangin in 2008 with William Hague. As we sat being briefed on the roof of the district centre under the fierce sun we could hear the crackle of small-arms fire. A local checkpoint was under attack. There was the quietest rush of air as a stray bullet passed overhead. The commanding officer gently ushered us under cover, muttering about the dangers of sunburn. Wonderfully British.

      I had got to know a lot of the personnel, too. Hugh Powell, a top-rate civil servant, had served as the head of the Provincial Reconstruction Team in the capital of Helmand, Lashkar Gah, as well as being the senior Brit coordinating the UK counter-insurgency in the south of the country. One time we had breakfast together wearing our helmets because of an imminent security threat. Another, we tried on the full kit, body armour and radio of a lance corporal, jogging with a rifle around the yard of an FOB in the forty-degree heat.

      When I first visited Bastion I climbed the air-traffic control tower and looked over a small camp of tents. Since then it had grown to an area the size of Reading, complete with a runway, a water-bottling plant, a medical facility as sophisticated as any district general hospital – and a KFC. Many of the pilots were from RAF Brize Norton in my constituency, and would talk candidly to me about life at the base. I heard about the problems first hand, from frustration at the lack of contact time with home to the potentially fatal shortage of helicopters and delays in getting new body armour.

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